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Gandhi Was Wrong

Written by Brandon.D.Rhodes : July 28, 2008

During his long resistance to the British empire, Mohandas Gandhi gave the world one of the most widely known quotes of twentieth-century politics: “Be the change you want to see in the world.”  If you want a world without war, stop fighting wars.  It is, to be highfalutin about it, something of a teleological moral argument: Imagine a world set aright, and stubbornly live that. And from where else is that moral vision projected, according to this sagely adage, but from each of our hearts.  We craft and project the image of the moral vision that we then hold ourselves to embody.  More on that later.

Gandhi’s elegant wisdom has been cherished by millions the world over for its austere capacity to summarize their own moral vision.  Radicals and anti-statists from all over the political spectrum have cherished Gandhi’s pithy commendation that the best kind of politic is an embodied politic.  “Don’t just vote for change: be the change” is how many hear it.  I imagine that many in the community here at Jesus Manifesto, not least myself, takes considerable encouragement from that kind of moral vision.

How apt, though, that in the highly fragmented culture of the West we should so love this quote — it piously endorses my moral vision — “Be the change you want to see in the world.”  The locus of the vision for this embodied politic is me.  It fits part-and-parcel into the most dangerous elements of western individualism, those which say, “Each of us must chart out our own ethical destiny, and so long as you are being real and true and authentic to that, then it’s all good.  Find your own path and be true to it.  Just don’t be a hypocrite.”

The moral vision of the New Testament, and indeed the entire Bible, is very close to that of India’s Bapu, but also crucially different.  The church’s moral vision is, most properly, to “Be the change God will eventually make in the world.“  God, not any one of us, is the projector of the moral vision of a world set aright that we are called move toward and to embody.  In the parlance of the Lord, “Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness”.  The church is the community whose life of love, holiness, and justice is a foretaste of God’s future for the world.  Paul uses a word for the Holy Spirit in His church that in modern Greek means engagement ring, the guaranteeing bond of the matrimonial bliss that is to come.

On what grounds does the New Testament make such audacious claims?  First-century Judaism was a diverse thing, but a common element of its narrative and worldview for most Jews was the dividing of history between the present evil age and the Age to Come.  As things stood, Israel and the whole world were in a sort of exile: stuck under the powers, sin, and death, estranged from God.  Pagans ran things and the world was dark indeed.  Yet they endured, holding out in faith that the the Creator God would be just in the end, and somehow deal with all this.  So their hopes were a loosely tangled mesh of ideas:

  • forgiveness of Israel’s sins, leading to
  • the end of Israel’s exile, which might somehow eventually lead to
  • the end of the world’s exile from God;
  • the end of the present evil age and the arrival of the Age to Come.
  • death will be swallowed up and the dead raised,
  • the rebuilding of the Temple,
  • the sending of the Messiah to overcome the enemies of God,
  • a Davidic king,
  • the kingdom of God himself,
  • a new covenant,
  • the Holy Spirit being poured out,
  • giving of hearts of flesh instead of hearts of stone,
  • a new heavens and new earth (new creation),
  • the justice and righteousness and peace of God being established worldwide.

This list is not comprehensive, nor are its entries discrete from one another.  Some held on to a few of these, but not all.  But when the New Testament invokes one of them, it assumes this wider net of hopes that God is accomplishing in Jesus for Israel and the world.  They didn’t know if it would all happen at once, or if it would happen in stages.  Near as we can tell, there just weren’t too many dispensationalism-style charts for their hoped-for “end times.”  Should such a chart have existed, we might diagram it like this:

The turn of the ages, in the worldview of Jesus’ contemporaries, will be a largely discrete event: the old things will pass away and new creation will begin.  There’s no hard and fast science to this, but roughly, when someone talks about “the kingdom of God”, it would have been assumed by most Jews that they are talking about life on the other side of this epic shift, about life in God’s new age.

When Jesus arrives on the scene, he does just this.  He announces the kingdom of God arriving at last, that sins are being forgiven and the exile is ending.  He’s invoking this huge net of hopes, and spinning them into some unexpected ways.  Jesus talks about what we translate as “eternal life”, which literally is “the life of the age of ages.”  Biblical scholars agree that a fair, and indeed probably better, translation for this Greek is not “eternal life” but “the life of the Age to Come.”  In its last line the Nicene Creed calls it “the life of the world to come.”  It is the life of the change that God will one day make in the world.  Or, more properly, that He is already making in the world among those who know him!

Those who know and follow and pledge allegiance to Jesus, then have the life of the Age to Come.  By grace we have and are God’s firstfruits of what is coming.  We are gifted with it and tasked with this life of the new age, of God’s future and dream for his world.  The Age to Come has begun in the person of Jesus, and continues in the life of his church.  Hence Paul can say that “If anyone is in Christ, new creation!”  When we confess to having eternal life, as in John 3:16 for example, we don’t just mean “a personal relationship with Jesus” or that we will live forever in the resurrection, true though both of those are!  No: our hope is as deep as the first and long as the second, but as wide as the moral vision of a world set aright: the Age to Come, New Creation, the Kingdom of God!

Though many of these hopes have been launched in a kind of mustard-seed way, the world is still full of injustice and death and sin and sorrow.  Sometimes it can feel pretty damn hard to believe that the world is a different place, that the Age to Come is anywhere near!  We are stuck in the overlap of the ages.  Thus many diagram the Christian understanding of the ages as:

This is the moral vision of the New Testament: we are called to, as N.T. Wright says, implement God’s accomplishment in Jesus and thereby anticipate new creation.  In his Simply Christian, Wright says that:

The Spirit is given to begin the work of making God’s future real in the present.  That is the first, and perhaps the most important, point to grasp about the work of this strange prsonal power for which so many images are used.  Just as the resurrection of Jesus opened up the unexpected world of God’s new creation, so the Spirit comes to us from that new world, the world waiting to be born, the world in which, according to the old prophets, peace and justice will flourish and the wolf and the lamb will lie down side by side.  One key element of living as a Christian is learning to live with the life, and by the rules, of God’s future world, even as we are continuing to live within the present one” (p. 124).

We are no longer slaves of the old world, but citizens of God’s new world.  This is the ancient inner logic behind that oft-bandied adage “already/not-yet” for understanding passages about the kingdom of God.  It’s been inaugurated, and new creation is on the loose, but its fullness and consummation are yet to come.

Our moral life and vision, then, is as Wright said, to live according to the rules of that inbreaking world.  That world is, plainly enough, a world of peace, where swords are beat into plowshares and war isn’t studied.  It’s a world of forgiveness and full of the just love and loving justice of YHWH.  Now, most Christians will go this far, and agree that we live by the power of that age, and enjoy many of the gifts and beauties of it.  But to leap from those warm-fuzzy existential splendors, to what kind of shape those splendors are meant to take, is a challenging leap indeed.  So often we only want to receive the change God is making in the world, but not embody it.

Such a logic of being the change God will make in the world, though, was just beneath the surface of Paul’s moral imagination.  He saw dimly through the glass of prophetic promises about the Age to Come (Isaiah 2, 40, 66, etc.) and let the light of that day project through the prism of the risen Jesus, the image and the form for his own moral vision of a world and a humanity set aright.  He knew that he was in the overlap of the ages, and therefore, in a sense, “what time it was”.  He spells it out that explicitly in Romans 13:11-14:

Besides this you know the time, that the hour has come for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed.  The night is far gone; the day is at hand. So then let us cast off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light.  Let us walk properly as in the daytime, not in orgies and drunkenness, not in sexual immorality and sensuality, not in quarreling and jealousy.  But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.

He is calling us to live in God’s daylight, as children of the inbreaking world of shalom.  The old age, the nighttime, is on its way out, and all of its “exquisite shit of glory” (hat tip, Gabriel García Márquez) is no longer the stuff of the kingdom-pledging community.  Feel the freedom and the warmth and the beautiful tasks of this situation: we are all richly renewed by the dawn of God’s peaceable new age!

This provides a massive, and massively underused, narrative apologetic for Christian nonviolence.  We are to be nonviolent because the truly human being, Jesus our King, was — yes, true enough. And we are to be nonviolent because it doesn’t get the world much of anywhere — sure.  Oh, and yes, we should be nonviolent because God loves his enemies — Jesus used that one! But all of these can and should snap nicely into place within this bigger framework of the passing darkness of the evil age, and the inbreaking light of the Age to Come given us by Jesus.  We are peaceful because the age of shalom is here.  The dread weapon of the old age, Death, is beat.  Why live on its terms any longer?  The day is here.  “Come, O House of Israel, let us walk in the light of the Lord.”

Gandhi’s adage is meant to hold us fast to pacifism.  Our modification of it provides a far richer, God-projected, less individualistic, and more exciting story to likewise bind us close to the peaceful heart and world of God.  May that peace enrich and energize us all to a more radical faith.

Further reading: G.E. Ladd, The Presence of the Future; N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope, Simply Christian, The Resurrection of the Son of God; A.M. Wakabayashi, Kingdom Come.

Brandon Rhodes lives, works, writes, and worships in Portland, Oregon. He enjoys long conversations over coffee, yerba maté, and beer. He is also one of the co-editors at Jesus Manifesto.


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Comments

Viewing 35 Comments

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    I knew this sounded Brandon-ish when I hit the 'highfalutin'...
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    Great summary Brandon, and a nice combination of the eschatological and -- with the Márquez quote -- scatological.
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    Great thoughts, Brandon. I came over on the link from iMonk and enjoyed your post. I've been reading N.T. Wright and definitely agree with where you ended up. However, I would ask a question about your analysis of Ghandi. When Ghandi calls the Dalits and the masses of British colonial India to be the change that they want to see, he was speaking to a terribly oppressed and dehumanized people. He was not speaking in a Western individualistic context. Because of this, he called them to be human. They were not victims of an oppressor, but rather, they could enact change by living it out, not by grasping power.

    Of course, the Christians of India believe that Ghandi was not true to his own ideals because he never left Hinduism. Hinduism continued to dehumanize according to caste making Ghandi's ultimate desires impossible. This is where it would have been much better to work from a Kingdom perspective provided by Christianity. So, I agree with what you are saying but just look at Ghandi's call a little differently based on his context.
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    G'day Brandon, good job mate, like the provocative title. I’ve reposted your article here:
    http://paceebene.org/blog/jarrod-mckenna/gandhi...

    I’ve got a workshop that is really close to what you’ve been writing!! Spooky! (Not that spooky considering the shared influences.) The way we put it is “equipping a generation to ‘walk-out’ now what God wills the world to be”. :)

    Hey if you’re interested here is my series on Gandhi that I did last year:
    http://paceebene.org/blog/jarrod-mckenna/gandhi...

    grace and peace for the journey of walking the world to come out now,
    jarrod
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    Hmm...yes, AND...

    Gandhi's nonviolence (satyagraha, or holding onto truth) was based in the idea that ultimately love and truth IS God. I think to wedge him as being individualistic or having "his own" moral vision is therefore unfair. That's part of why nonviolence was so important - because it is a way of arriving at truth (or closer to it), and potentially discovering that the truth to which you hold/grasp is actually untruth and needs to be let go of. Truth (God) was therefore seen as something outside of himself (AND inside himself) which he arrived at through nonviolence because it's always possible that your opponent has the truth and you have the untruth ("everyone has a piece of the truth and the untruth...") Hence "be the change _you_ wish to see" - because if you go about it nonviolently you'll eventually arrive discover whether "the change you wish to see" is the truth (ie. God) or not.

    It was therefore not merely "his" moral vision at all, but the vision of truth and love, which Gandhi would call God, that Gandhi sought - hence the subtitle of his autobiography "the stories of my experiments with truth".

    That activists and others have twisted it to their own devices is, I think, not to be attributed to Gandhi, nor is it surprising.

    So my sense (I could be wrong - is this my piece of the truth or the untruth? ;)) is that Gandhi wouldn't be particularly bothered by your modification of it, as it's using different language to describe the same thing...and that to wedge him towards an individualistic interpretation of that particular statement and away from God's-vision is to take the rest of his work out of context.
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    I don't take Brandon to mean that Gandhi's own moral vision was individualistic. Rather, our western filter renders it so.
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    I sincerely hope you're right there, MarkVanS. If he is indeed saying that Gandhi was wrong (as this article's title suggests) then I would posit that Brandon has misread Gandhi in a similar way to the misreadings of Jesus effected by Western Christianity over the centuries - by decontextualising him.

    A contextual Gandhi is, as Simon says, trying to counterbalance a lowest-common-denominator passivity that waits for god/God/YHWH to effect 'the change' rather than going ahead and participating the change. I recently heard a discussion on the UK's BBC Radio 4 programme 'Beyond Belief' suggesting just that - in precis, the Church's duty was not to be just another NGO but was to pray for divine mercy, which is true but mere prayer is not much use to the malnourished and diseased, who rather need those who will instantiate divine mercy with food, medicines, aid, (fair) trade, policy, diplomacy, peacemaking, etc., etc.

    I would argue what is needed is a zen-like balance between competing perspectives on the same question …

    One direction of view is that we must understand the change god/God would make (has already made in Jesus' life-death-and-resurrection). In other words, we must inhabit the missio Dei.

    A second perspective is that, as people blown by the spirit/Spirit, I must be the change I want to see. Importantly, the parameters of that change are utterly contingent on the spiritual life.

    And the third perspective is that we must live a communal life - _we_ must be the change _we_ want to see. Brandon's argument may not necessarily be liberated from the western filter you identify, Mark, I fear. If there are just two poles - individual <=> God - then that is still the same trapdoor opening beneath our argumentation. The three lines of sight are needed for a full view of the necessary change.

    I would argue that Gandhi was indeed holding this tension correctly, though this is hard to see when he is decontextualised. As Simon says, satyagraha is a divinely mediated modus operandum - even a modicum of reading on Gandhi's arguments would see that. Nonetheless, Gandhi's aphorism is a challenge to perceive the role of (the) individual(s) in divine change - if we leave it up to god/God, how will it ever get done? But, and this is the vital context, he says it in the midst of mid-Twentieth Century India, a society which was corporately and communally framed, a society whose natural reflex would tend to read you as second person plural - you people, rather than you person.

    I believe you're right about Gandhi, Mark. I hope you're right about Brandon's argument as well.
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    Even Christians have to admit that being doers of the Word (James 1:22) is in order to help extinguish our plentiful pride. We can talk about the finer points of anyone's advice. But if that advice can help inspire us to go out and DO the things God commands of us and not getting wrapped up in our own pieties, then I applaud Ghandi.

    At least a few claps for Ghandi's statement. Infinite claps for Jesus' works!
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    excellenct stuff brandon, this vision of the move of God is crucial to understanding our calling as a church. Lee Camp in Mere discipleship does a great job of combining this understanding with the ethics of the kingdom(yoder). This eschatological vision is missing among many mennonites and anabaptist but it is clearly the basis for living the kingdom ethic now(incl. non-violence) - Not merely some humanistic approach - we can all just get along.
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    This is one of the best posts I've read. Your explanation of inaugerated eschatology is excellent. Furthermore, your observation regarding Ghandi's egocentric worldview is noteworthy. Most people (unfortunately, including most Christians) are totally unaware of the ecclesial nature of Paul's letters. That was particularly the problem of the Corinthian Church. Good job! I love N.T. Wright. As far as I'm concerned, he is the master theologian of the age.
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    Loved this man. We've been exploring Revelation 21 together this week as a community, and I find that that vision of the New Jerusalem (which is a symbol of the Church) calls us to something now. We can be that glimmering Bride who stands firm in contrast to the Whore NOW. Let us be, together, that change that reflects God's kingdom reality.
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    Brandon, I like the thrust of your thoughts, but think you have rather unnecessarily twisted Gandhi's words. Could it not be said that Gandhi has it exactly right and that each disciple should be so thoroughly immersed and melded with their teacher's desires and character that the change they want would, by definition, be the change that God would make in the world? That is a truer picture of what you've envisioned as I understood you.
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    Mark said it -- I'm not attacking Gandhi's vision as much as how we have individualized it.
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    ah, ok, appreciate that...with a provocative title like 'Gandhi was wrong', I trust you can understand how I could make that mistake...I'd be interested in a Christian critique though...where _do_ you think his vision differs from Christianity (if at all)?
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    I wrote and essay on that, Simon …

    "Nonviolence is a power that can be wielded equally by all - children, young men and women or grown up people - provided they have a living faith in the God of Love and have therefore equal love for all mankind. When nonviolence is accepted as the law of life it must pervade the whole being and not be applied to isolated acts."
Mohandas K Ghandi (cited in Harijan, September 5, 1936; from A Peace Reader: Essential Readings on War, Justice, Non-Violence and World Order [J. J. Fahet and R. Armstrong (eds); New York: Paulist, 1992], 174).

    Critically evaluate this view and those of Christians who embrace non-violence.
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    you gonna share your essay or are you setting me one? ;)
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    "Be the change God will eventually make in the