“Theological reflection without political consequences was tantamount to blasphemy… Every theological statement has to be at the same time a political one.” (Soelle, Against the Wind)

All theology is, by its very nature, contextual. By that I mean it emerges out of a particular time and place by real people responding to the challenges and questions that matter to them and their communities. This is what makes it political. It's theology that matters.

Soelle is working in a very particular time, the aftermath of WWII in Germany. She develops much of her theological awareness during a period when the church seemed at its weakest, having aligned itself with fascism—and all its brutality. If theological reflection at its core might be considered our attempts to 'follow the tracks' of whatever we might think of God at work in our world, Soelle joined the Liberation theologians in identifying God as on the side of the poor and oppressed. What makes this a political statement is that it has tangible implications for the rest of us. As Soelle reflected,

"What I suffer from, and what I need and seek forgiveness for, are all the disastrous things that we, as a society, inflict today on the poorest of the poor and on our mother, the earth."

Good theology—real theology—changes us. Not just how we think, or what we believe, but in how we live in the world and what we do in it. If it doesn't, Soelle would say it doesn't matter, and that's what makes it blasphemous. What good is a theology that has no consequences?

"Demythologizing is often a means of telling the truth about the bosses of this world."

In her memoir, Soelle talks about how Rudolf Bultmann's theology more or less saved her faith, being an example of someone who was both deeply religious and intellectually curious. Bultmann's theology was one that sought to rescue Christianity from myth; not eliminating it, but interpreting it.

I like this line of hers, sharing the way a theology like this can help us make sense of the world—specifically when thinking about power.

On the weekend I began reading Dorothee Soelle's memoir, Against the Wind. Soelle is one of my favourite theologians but I've never really read about her life.

Something that jumped out in the early parts of the book was her talking about a teacher she had, saying, "her thinking takes sides."

She goes on to note that a good teacher needs more than knowledge, they must stand for something. Interestingly, Kingsnorth had similar things to say around the value of having a stance if we wish to be able to resist the Machine.

I think this is really important and something that is missing for a lot of people, having something to stand for. So much of who we are tends to be defined by what we're not or what we're against, but not enough of us are doing the hard work of asking ourselves, but what are we for?

“The point, I think, is to be found beneath the surface layer of politics, and beneath the lower layers of nationhood, ethnicity, and culture too. The point, as ever, is spiritual. If our nations seem hollowed-out, if our countries seem to be prey for the Machine, surely it is because they have no soul. If people, place, prayer, and the past are the group upon which real culture is built, many of us today would have to look at our own countries and conclude that they have no real connection to any of these. Blame the immigrants if you like—it’s always the easiest option—but they didn’t strip the soul out of the West. We did. Do you think you can build your country around nothing but money and then complain when people want to come in and earn some of it themselves?” (Kingsnorth, Against the Machine)

I got thinking today about garbage trucks. More specifically, I got thinking about the workers on those garbage trucks. Even more specifically, I got thinking about how it seems there are less workers on garbage trucks these days than there used to be.

For most of my life, a garbage truck had two workers on it. Someone who drove and someone who would jump off and empty the bins into the truck. My town, like many others, has adopted the trucks with the big mechanical claw on the side of it that lifts the garbage can from the curb and dumps its contents into the truck. It now only takes one worker to both drive and operate the claw.

It reminds me of grocery stores. When I was a kid, every cash register had two workers: a cashier and someone to bag the groceries. I remember when they got rid of the bagger job, all of a sudden you were expected to bag your own (or the cashier might do it for you). Today, in many grocery stores, a single worker can oversee a dozen different self-checkouts.

My grandfather worked his whole life in a GM plant. The threat of automation to jobs is nothing new. I think what is important to keep in mind is that it's not often an abrupt replacement. It's usually many small, different changes—often presented as opportunity for efficiency or skill learning—each one making human work slightly more redundant. Death by a thousand paper cuts.

In 1958, Hannah Arendt pondered what happens to a society of labourers that becomes "liberated" from the bonds of labour when labour is all this society knows. Of that, she wrote, "surely nothing could be worse."