At a meeting affiliated with the Society of Biblical Literature in New Orleans, I sat listening as a man at a podium spoke most earnestly about the importance of the Genesis creation narratives in establishing the importance of creation-care as a Christian mandate. And he was right.
And, twenty years earlier this would have been prophetic; fifty years earlier it would have been revolutionary.
But in 2009, listening to someone proclaim that Christians should care about the environment, I thought, “Here we go again: Christians finally realizing 20 years after the rest of the world that something is important.” The recent posts here about women have a similar feel: a century behind, but the church will eventually come up with as good reasons as the rest of the world for ceasing its diminutive treatment of women.
This lagging behind has me wondering at times whether Christianity is really any good for the world? Is the world a better place because of our allegiance to Christ? Or are all the moves toward making the world a better place done by others and baptized by us?
There are, it seems to me, three areas where Christians have been, and are acting as, leading voices in changing the world for the better right now–areas where other non-Christian organizations are starting to invest more energy as well, but where we are doing something other than following everybody else’s wisdom.
One is adoption. There is a fantastic article about adoption in this month’s Christianity Today. Most important in the article is the realization that what we say about our relationship with God is supposed to transform how we act in the world. This does not mean, “God forgives me, so in thankfulness I live a moral life by keeping the Ten Commandments.” 
It means that the very dynamics of the story are to become the dynamics of the stories that we live our in our Christian communities and individual lives. We realize that God’s love for us is a self-giving love, so we love one another with self-giving. We realize that we are justified by being united with the crucified Christ, and so we accept everyone into our communities who has been so united by faith, Spirit, and baptism. We realize that God’s intention for family is realized when God turns to adopt us into His, and we, in turn, look to the world to adopt its orphans into ours.
A second area is that championed by
International Justice Mission as it has sought to free people enslaved in the sex industry. They were well ahead of the bell curve on this, drawing attention of churches to the issues of modern-day slavery and teaching us how to do something about it. Go give them a buck or two.
The third area is peace. This is still not popular, though a vocal minority of New Testament scholars and ethicists are drawing our attention to the fact that God’s gift of peace should be realized in the world in which we live and we should be agents of it. The gospel of Jesus came as a direct rebuttal of
Israel’s hopes for a military deliverance. We all know this. And yet, while we are all-too-willing to deride the first-century Jews for not realizing that their salvation would come by military-denying means, too few of us have been willing to believe that God would continue to bring his reign about on the earth by the means of peace.
Those who, like Glen Stassen, are arguing for a Christian vision of just peacemaking are poised to lead into a future in which our heroes will no longer be those whose names are on the victory plaques of the battle field.
Theologically, Protestants have been hindered from changing the world for the better because we have been so focused on an inward piety that we don’t see any connection between that world out there and the new life God is given us. We need to cultivate our theological imaginations with the realization that salvation is not merely about new creatures, but about new creation.
It’s only when we realize that God’s saving hand extends to the whole earth, and is not simply a set of metaphors for our “spiritual” state, that we will begin to realize the gospel-imperative to extend the saving, redeeming hand of God to every sphere of human life.
Schaeffer’s _Pollution and the Death of Man_ was 1970, 40 years ago.
Awesome. Seems like most of us were slow to come around.
That was one of Schaeffer’s last books before his son Franky pushed him toward the Christian Right.
Ron Sider’s RICH CHRISTIANS IN AN AGE OF HUNGER was hot in the 70′s. Kinda makes Brisn McClaren’s EVERYTHING MUST CHANGE seem sort of deja vu and probably as ineffective as Sider’s book.
It does seem to be a living type scene. The recurring motif of Caleb, the Ninevites, the unjust steward, or the Roman centurion, or some other outsider getting it right in a way that is held to be an example for the faithful community.
And peace is low hanging fruit. Surely we should be the people who champion peace over war, the plow over the sword.
I’ve been freely educating myself at the expense of the UC Berkeley history podcast on European history. I recently listened to the lecture on the run-up to WW II. And like many cases in history. it was those waving the pieces of peace paper, and meeting minds in Munich who, it could be argued, were responsible for millions of deaths. Sometimes force is the right, courageous, and I argue, the Christian action.There comes a time when peace is depravity. Is it the proper Christian response to dissuade the state from taking up the sword to liberate people from a maniacal dictator? If the N. Koreans could be liberated with a military action, is this always wrong? By analogy, how much peace do you extend to an evil person harming a loved one?
I know this argument is tired, but claiming peace is easy. Man-up and address some concrete situations. Holocaust anyone?
My thoughts on the point you are making is that we as Christians have tended to focus on having the “last word” in society because we have equated cultural change with political power (James Hunter’s new book addresses this specific issue). We have exchanged our long-range calling to be the salt and light of a new kind of kingdom for the preservation of the mythological narrative that America reflects Christian values.
I like Jewish political philosopher, Michael Walzer’s reflections. He writes about the significant influence the Reformed tradition had in the formation of democracy, but how it lost its influence over time to a more Lockean and optimistic democratic tradition. “In this world, the last word always belongs to the worldlings and not to the saints. It is a complacent word and it comes when salvation, in all its meanings, is no longer a problem. But the saints have what is more interesting: the first word. They set the stage of history for the new order.” (Revolution of the Saints, 319) As a church, we need more first-word initiatives like you have listed above, and less focus on preservation (which always leads to conservatism). That may be a little strong, but I’ll stick by it.
I posted about this subject on the 24th June, only I tied it into the subject of true love must send us into every level of society to bring about change and peace.
http://craigbenno1.wordpress.com/2010/06/24/society-needs-the-foundation-of-love/
Thats a good set of points you have brought into the equation there. I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts about how it seems to me”piety” has been replaced by “personal blessing” in contempory christendom and if that has been a hinderance to the churches mandate to care for the environment?
This is so true: “It means that the very dynamics of the story are to become the dynamics of the stories that we live our in our Christian communities and individual lives. We realize that God’s love for us is a self-giving love, so we love one another with self-giving.”
Coming from a non-Western culture, and having read the Bible many times from a non-doctrinal view point, I find the idea of “story” most appealing. Let us enter into the stories in the Bible (above all, the stories of the Messiah), and allow them to create and transform our own life stories and those of the world.
So, Scott, what you are saying is that “War = Peace.” Or “Work is Liberty.” I think you are on to something, those are powerful concepts.
The problem isn’t that force is sometimes justified, it is that “christians” in practice tend to be in favor of force practically all the time. Worse, they assign their bloodlust to God and Jesus, which adds an element of dehumanizing the opposition into the mix. It also prevents them from looking at the world rationally. If God is on your side, then the other person has to be completely wrong and no compromise is possible.
The other problem with force is whether what is justified from a national point of view (opposing Hitler was no doubt good for allied countries) can be justified from a “christian” point of view. I doubt Jesus would have cared about the fate of individual nations. But there is little overlap between what Jesus would have seen as proper and what people who allegedly worship in his name see as proper.
In other words, following Jesus would truly be bad policy for most nations. And my point is not that nations should follow the non-violent policy of Jesus, but that people should be honest about the fact that Jesus and national welfare have nothing to do with each other. And therefore stop trying to justify whatever notions they have as the will of God.
Hi Paul,
My point is simply that there is a line to peace. Bonhoeffer and Lewis found themselves on the far side of this line during WWII, as did many other Christians. When a nation decides, as policy, to kill each Jew, gypsy, and pole, the Christian response is not to give a lesson on peace. First deliver the helpless from the adversary, then wax eloquent. Uncompromising pacifism is misguided piety. I believe that armies of militant pacifist have much blood on their hands.
My brother plays volleyball at a level where the ball gets driven very hard. His advice to me on how to position myself on the court was, “you’ll know you’re in the right place if you’re scared.” Doubtless the men who rose and offered their lives during the invasion of Normandy did something noble. I imagine they were scared. I’m not similarly stirred by the actions of the pacifist in that situation, but maybe my affections are far from redeemed. If the decision for war or pacifism is not entered with fear when seriously confronted with the alternatives, then perhaps there was a wrong decision.
Another way of stating my point is that the minimization of violence, a Christian desire, is sometimes achieved through violence. Is that Orwellian? Matthew and Luke 12:48 and many many old testament episodes suggest otherwise. (Acknowledged that this is opening a big can or worms!) Like I opened, Bonhoeffer and Lewis came to this conclusion as well.
Scott, you don’t address a single thing I said.
Whether or not peace is the right policy for nations, I can’t imagine under any circumstances that the man Jesus who lived in Palestine in the first century would have been in favor of war. He didn’t give a damn about the fate of nations because he thought God was going to overthrow them all.
The Bible’s general attitude towards war is that Israel would prevail if God was on their side, and they would not if he was not. Jesus was opposed to war, IMO, because he expected God to implement the final solution in his lifetime, which made national conflicts meaningless.
In the kingdom set up by God through Israel, there would be no war, no conflict, so Jesus was advocating that people start acting that way in preparation.
I’m not discussing whether there are times when war is necessary. I’m saying:
1) Jesus would not have seen any war as necessary. I
2) Christians by-and-large have the opposite opinion as Jesus on the use of force, which makes it kind of ridiculous that we have a religion in which people allegedly worship Jesus but have an ethical code that is a polar opposite of his.
I think that this post is a little too narrowly focused on the present. Even if Christians today aren’t on the frontlines of as many positive things as we would like, there are positive things we can see looking back in history. For a time Christians really cared about literacy, for example, and many Christians WERE on the frontlines of fighting racism and sexism in the United States. Many evangelicals, in fact–it just is a story that is not often told these days.
Corruption and nominalism are not new, and neither are misplaced priorities and confused notions of what God wants from us… but there’s a lot of good Christians have done in the past (along with the bad), which I think can be an inspiration for our future.