Tag Archive - cruciformity

Theology as a Way of Life?

March 14, 2012 in Bible Thoughts with 7 Comments

I hate to get too predictable, but you can imagine how I responded when I saw the following in a recent advert from Paternoster Press:

James McClendon is right to assert that Theology is ‘not merely a reading strategy by which the church can understand Scripture; it is a way—for us, it is the way—of Christian existence itself’.

Disclaimers: (1) I do not know where James McClendon says this, therefore I do not have a larger context for interpreting what “theology” means here. (2) I do not know who this “us” is of whom he speaks.

Image: dan / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Let me also say, first and foremost, that there are some ways that I can see myself affirming this sentence. If by “theology” you mean, “Jesus, the crucified Messiah, is resurrected Lord,” then I agree that this mini-narrative of Christian theology provides both the hermeneutical lens for making sense of scripture and provides us with the way of Christian existence itself.

If this is the life of Christ, after all, then we who are dubbed “little Christs” are called to renarrate this life in our own.

But of course, my concern is that this is not what the phrase means at all.

My concern is that it has taken a typical Evangelical mistake (relying on the Bible as though the Bible is THE thing, rather than Christ being THE thing) and pushed it back one further level from the appropriate target, landing on Christian theological articulations as THE things that determine faithful Christian faith and practice.

“The way,” of course, is Jesus.

The Bible testifies to Jesus as the way God has provided for the life of God’s creatures. It is one step removed from the person and his narrative, but is the access we have and the God-given interpretation of the saving story.

Theology in the traditional sense is a second step removed, as it reflects on what the Bible has said about Jesus who is the way and the God who provided Him.

If I’m reading the paragraph fairly, the claim that theology is the way of Christian existence is a door to a world in which theology forms the hermeneutic, identity, and praxis of a community. In such a world, articulating the correct theology becomes its own good–the very faithful practice God hopes for from Christians.

If theology is the way of Christian life itself, then mental constructions and statements of right belief become the markers of Christian life. And in so doing, following Christ along the way of the cross, being ambassadors of the message of reconciliation, feeding the hungry, caring for the parentless, embracing the outsider–all of these become second-order responses, and lie far from the center of faithful Christian practice.

But perhaps we can just agree (hard as it is for my inner 8 to say such a thing):

The theology by which we understand scripture is that Jesus is God’s messiah, given up on the cross and then raised and enthroned at God’s right hand.

This theology of the Christ is our way of life, because it means that all of our life should be a giving up of ourselves in order that all creation might live under the freedom of the risen Christ’s lordship.

Now that’s a “theology as the way of Christian existence” I can get behind–a theology in which theology itself is eclipsed by the Christ of whom it speaks.

Reimagining Faith: Faithfulness

March 12, 2012 in Bible Thoughts with 15 Comments

One of the most important debates in NT scholarship for the past 30 years or so has been the interpretation of the Greek phrase πίστις Χριστοῦ (pistis christou; “the faith of Christ”).

Basically, it comes down to this: is Paul talking about “faith in Christ” (objective genitive) or “the faithfulness of Christ” (subjective genitive) when he uses this phrase?

In this case, “faithfulness of Christ” would mean Jesus’ faithfulness in going to the cross.

Can pistis mean “faithfulness”?

The answer is decidedly, “Yes.”

In fact, the most unequivocal use of pistis in the book of Romans is one in which it clearly means “faithfulness” rather than faith, and is used in a “subjective genitive” construction.

In Rom 3:3, Paul is reflecting on the “faithlessness” of some who did not believe the gospel. He contrasts this with the faithfulness of God. “Their faithlessness cannot nullify the faithfulness of God, can it?”

Faithfulness of God is the English rendering of τὴν πίστιν τοῦ θεοῦ (ten pistin tou theou; “the faith of God”).

Might this help with the conversation we’ve been having here since the end of last week?

The starting question was what we do with final judgment based on works within a system of theology that strongly emphasizes justification (initial judgment?) based on faith.

On Saturday I suggested that we rethink “faith in Christ” as “faithing into Christ,” or “believing unto union with Christ.”

Today I want to raise the question of whether thinking in terms of “faithfulness” might better capture what Paul is after than our normal idea of “belief”?

In order for this to work, we’ll have to rethink the faith versus works contrast. In Romans and Galatians, there are particular works that Paul is eager to deny are at the heart of justification–those that define Jewish people as a particular set-apart people; works that indicate conversion to Judaism as such.

No, says Paul, Gentiles don’t have to become Jewish. Faithing into Christ is enough.

Within this framework, Paul’s claim in Romans 1 makes much more sense. The goal of his ministry is to bring about “the obedience of faith” or, “faithful obedience” among the Gentiles.

Not faith alone, but an obedient faithfulness to the gospel of Jesus Christ.

If we are saved by Christ’s faithfulness in going to death on the cross for us, perhaps our part in continuing the story is to respond with a Christ-shaped faithfulness of our own.

Believing into Christ means faithfulness to the Christian story, a lived faithfulness that puts that story on display in our own communities, our own lives.

Reimagining Faith: Into Christ

March 10, 2012 in Bible Thoughts with 4 Comments

Yesterday we did a bit of thinking about the apparently strange juxtaposition of justification by faith and final judgment based on works.

I’ve been wondering if there are a couple of roads we might run down to reconceive what saving faith looks like.

The first facet worth exploring is the conjunction of faith with our union with Christ. Put simply: what if we started thinking less of “believing in Jesus” and more of “believing that brings us into Christ”?

How would this help? A couple of thoughts come to mind.

First, being “in Christ” is in part about occupying a certain kind of space. It is not simply the space in which we are united with others in the body of Christ–though that is true as well.

It is also about occupying the cosmic space that has been freed from the rule of sin and law and death (Rom 5-8). This means that faithing into Christ means being part of the new creation in which faithfulness to God is the only possible way of life.

Second, being “in Christ” here on earth entails not simply occupying space, but occupying a defining narrative. To be in Christ is to be united with Christ in his death and his resurrection.

To be united with Christ in his death entails a calling, a core identity, that demands a certain way of life: laying down our own lives so that others might live. Faithing into Christ means entering a story of salvific self-giving.

But it also means being part of a story that resolves in salvific resurrection life. If “occupying cosmic space” is part of the “already” aspect of being united with the resurrected Christ, what I’m talking about here is the “not yet” aspect. We will one day be united with Christ in full and final resurrection life.

But you see–this is the reward, extended at the final judgement, for those who have been faithful to God. Faithing into Christ means that the story we enter and live out in our communal and personal narratives will meet the same climactic conclusion as Christ’s own self-giving story of love.

When we think of “belief resulting in union with Christ,” we are speaking of a narrative of salvation rather than a one-off moment in the past that can be dissociated from what comes next.

There is a necessary way of life that results in a final judgment that affirms the cruciform story of the faithful.

Faithfulness Beyond Instruction

March 6, 2012 in Barth Dogmatics Reading with 13 Comments

Yesterday’s post contrasted narrative theology with the “owners manual” view of the Bible. I know that once this conversation wanders too far people will lose patience. But here’s why I think it’s important to have at least a basic idea of what the Bible is:

What we think the Bible is will deeply impact how we read it and what we try to do with it.

To be clear: even if you don’t have a clear answer to the question, “What is the Bible?” there are Christian-cultural markers that have created assumptions for you (either by acceptance of them or rejection of them) concerning what the Bible is and, therefore, what we should do with it.

What I want to make clear today, if it wasn’t clear yesterday, is that narrative theology can carry a strong imperatival force–it can issue a summons to act in certain ways. But it does so by a different route than the instruction manual approach.

Narrative theology takes the overarching story as the key to what the Bible is. Not key in the sense that it opens some other door, but key in the sense that even the parts of scripture that are not, themselves, stories nonetheless find their coherence and interpretive framework from the larger story in which they are embedded.

More than that, narrative theology recognizes the inherently storied nature of all human life.

“Story is a basic principle of mind. Most of our experience, our knowledge, and our thinking is organized as stories… narrative imagining is our fundamental form of predicting [and our] fundamental cognitive instrument for explanation.” (Mark Turner, The Literary Mind [v, 20])

So here’s where narrative theology strikes pay dirt: it provides a way of thinking and talking about the Bible and the Christian story using the category by which we are making sense of all reality.

We tell stories about our Christian communities: where we came from, what we believe, what we do. Narrative theology says: the Story of your community is the story of the crucified and risen Christ–how does your story retell the Story that defines it?

Narrative theology draws in our sacramental practices. What are we doing when we take the bread and cup? We are enacting the story that not only founds us, but that we are called to be living illustrations of in our life together. It is not some “other” thing we tack on, the sacrament is the thing that we are, in a different mode.

As individuals we have stories, too. Often these are stories shaped by loss, by shame, by guilt, by pain. And I wonder if having those stories both embraced within and at the same time relativized by a greater defining story of a crucified and risen Christ isn’t part of the narrative reframing that God intends for God’s people when we are joined to the story of Israel that has its climax in the story of the crucified and risen Christ.

Narrative theology is about (to borrow a phrase from Richard Hays) “conversion of the imagination,” or, to take the language of Rom 12, being transformed by the renewing of our minds. This is a much harder business than turning to the Bible as a reference manual for correct behavior. It involves a lifetime’s depth of familiarity with the story and a commitment to make that story not only our own as persons but also our own as a people.

The story defines who we are. And as we learn that identity, we acquire the wisdom of knowing what we should do so as to be living enactments of that story in the corners of the world to which God has called us.

Narrative Theology and Instruction Manuals

March 5, 2012 in Bible Thoughts with 28 Comments

Did you ever have one of those experiences in youth group?

You go to camp. It’s awesome. The speaker brings serious A game. He stands in front, holds open the Bible, and proclaims the importance of reading this book:

This is the maker’s instruction manual for your life! If you want to know how your life is supposed to work, what you’re supposed to be doing with yourself to make things work correctly, read this!

Think about your car. You don’t put antifreeze in the gas tank or gas in the radiator. The owner’s manual tells you what to put where so that the vehicle will run appropriately.

That’s what God has given us in the Bible!

How many of us have celebrated that Bible? I know I did. And, I went home and did as I was told. I began to read.

It’s an old joke that many a well-intentioned reader of the Bible has run aground on the rocks of Leviticus. Indeed, before that there is quite a stack of tabernacle-building instruction that is not for the faint of heart.

And, frankly, there’s very little to that point that has anything to do with how I’m supposed to live my life.

Does the Bible show us God’s intentions for humanity? Undoubtedly. Is it the maker’s owner manual for living life on earth? The metaphor is hard to sustain (to say the least).

Narrative theology attempts to articulate an ethic that does justice to the diachronic (across time) nature of the biblical texts, the developing nature of theology across time, and the storied nature of our faith.

In other words, it calls us to a way of life that is not an add-on, but integral to the defining Christian story.

One of the perpetual conundrums of the Christian story is the question of (dis)continuity between OT and NT. Across Scripture, however, there is a relatively constant movement: the imperative (what we’re supposed to do) flow from the indicatives (what God has already done for us).

In narrative theology, recognize that the great saving act of God that defines us as a people is now no longer what it once was. No longer do we swear, “As the Lord lives who brought us up out the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.” As Jeremiah anticipated, the people of God now look to a greater deliverance as the defining marker of the identity of God (Jer 16:14; 23:7).

The defining moment of our narrative is the climactic story of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Our God is now quintessentially the God and Father of Jesus Christ, the God who raised Jesus from the dead, the God who justifies the ungodly, the King whose kingdom has come near.

To treat the whole Bible as an owner’s manual is sort of like trying to run your 2010 Camry by the Model T owner’s manual. Yes, you’re dealing with cars. Yes, there are some basic similarities across time. But there is a new moment that demands a new set of instructions.

In Christian terms, the Christ story transforms human vocation, or crystalizes human vocation, with Jesus cross-centered call to self-giving love so that the other might live.

While both OT and NT summon us to “love our neighbor as ourselves,” it is only with the cross that we learn what divine love fully looks like, and what the great call of neighbor-love fully entails.

Believable

February 16, 2012 in Bible Thoughts with 14 Comments

Communities make things believable.

They are the “plausibility structures” that provide us with the scaffolding we need to integrate what we experience with what we believe.

Given the right plausibility structure, the belief that the earth is under 10,000 years old becomes largely self-evident, the clear grid for assessing every piece of scientific data. Given the right plausibility structure, and the belief that the earth is 4.5 billion years old plays this same role.

Once we become aware of this, we are confronted by the question: what do the communities I am a part of make believable?

I return regularly here to the Story of Jesus as the defining marker of Christian faith and Christian community. The story of Christ crucified and raised is what makes Christians Christian. It is the unbelievable claim that God so loved the world that He gave His Son; that the Son so loved the world that he gave himself; that the self-giving Son was the self-raising son; that the son-giving Father is the Son-Raising God.

My concern is this: it is all too rare that we as Christian communities sustain this narrative as credible by our lives together.

We create communities that grow under the guidance of dynamic leadership and sharp speakers. I did not need the death of Jesus to make plausible that good leadership will grow an organization.

We create communities that thrive under the rubric of a common theological system. I did not need the resurrection of Jesus to make plausible that shared belief, differentiating one political party… er… system of doctrine from another creates cohesion and attracts adherents.

Christian community is supposed to create a plausibility structure, one that makes credible the self-giving love of Christ: “By this all people will know you are my disciples–if you love one another.”

This love is the storied love of our gospel narrative: “Love one another as I have loved you–greater love has no one than this, that one lay down his life for his friends.”

We are called to renarrate the story in our life together, so that our story will be believable.

And, of course, the converse side of this call is that we are just as capable of making our story unbelievable when our communities thrive on something other than our story or become playgrounds for dissension and arguments, self-serving protection and consumption of our neighbor.

Power-Inverting Kingdom, take 2

February 6, 2012 in Bible Thoughts with 15 Comments

On Friday I said a few words about the twelve disciples. How normative is Jesus’ selection of twelve men to be his ministry-extenders while on earth? This is a question that cannot be answered in a way that is abstracted from the narrative. The story of their failure, of their rejection of the gospel of the crucified messiah, undermines the claims to their normativity.

We have to remember that we’re reading stories. In stories, characters develop. Events in the narrative shape them. They respond. We all know that the twelve includes the betrayer Judas, but we also need to look closely at the other eleven and their betrayal of Jesus.

As I mentioned Friday, the turning point in the story is a turning point for the twelve: Yes, Jesus is the Christ (Peter’s confession in ch. 8), but this Christ is a suffering Christ–a claim for which Peter rebukes Jesus in a Satanic denial of the road ahead.

From this point on, the disciples lose their kingdom-extending role. Their failure plays out in several subsequent scenes.

After the second passion prediction, Jesus confronts the disciples about what they were arguing about on the road. They are shamed. They had been arguing about which is greatest.

Jesus inverts their assessment of the world: to be great is to be least and servant of all.

Then, Jesus takes hold of one of the least, the most powerless members of society, and shows the disciples what it means to be agents of the kingdom: “Welcome the child in my name.”

Of course, this has nothing whatsoever to do with who can minister in Christ’s name, right? I mean, this is just about patting little kids on the head, right?

Well, that’s what John thought: “Teacher, we saw someone throwing demons out in your name, and we tried to stop him because he wasn’t following us.”

Clearly, welcoming kids is one thing, taking up the master’s name and performing unauthorized ministry, ministry not delineated by the Twelve is something else!

Or maybe not.

Jesus said, “Don’t stop him. No one who does powerful acts in my name can quickly turn around and curse me. Whoever isn’t against us is for us” (Mark 9:39-40, CEB).

So I ask again: does the narrative of Mark uphold the idea that the twelve delineate the parameters for faithful ministry in the church?

And again the unfolding story itself pushes me in a different direction.

To the extent that we use the disciples as paradigmatic figures for excluding people from ministry we are embodying their own failed understanding of ministry in and for and under the Reign of God in Christ.

The gospel of the cross overturns such understandings of insider standing, power, and status. It rebukes our natural tendency to affirm as eligible leaders only those who are like the original insiders.

When we use the Twelve as a weapon for fending off women from church leadership we align ourselves with the misapprehending disciples rather than the gospel proclaiming Christ.

On Jesus’ Choosing Twelve Males

February 3, 2012 in Bible Thoughts with 33 Comments

I know that many of you wake up on Fridays eager for the weekly Karl Barth post. I hate to put you off another day, but today I have something a bit more pressing to take care of.

Yesterday, I posted the first of two responses I wanted to make to John Piper’s description of Christianity as a “masculine” religion. Rachel Held Evans has issued the summons for replies, and I think this is an important moment to inject a more biblically sound reading of gender issues in the church. Thanks, Rachel, for stirring us to positive response.

Today’s issue has to do with the significance of Jesus’ choosing of twelve men to be his disciples. This is one of several issues I take up in Jesus Have I Loved, but Paul?.

The story within which this selection of the twelve is embedded leads us to draw a very different point from Piper’s.

Jesus chooses twelve men. These twelve Jesus specially commissions. Jesus came preaching, casting out demons, and healing. The disciples are sent to preach and heal and cast out demons.

Jesus comes proclaiming and inaugurating the reign of God, and these men are sent out to participate in that coming. When Jesus feeds the 5,000, he hands the bread to them. They are the chosen. They are the insiders.

In contrast (let’s stick to Mark’s Gospel here), the women in the story are marginal. There are small handfuls of nameless women. They touch Jesus’ robe, they ask for healing for their daughters, they throw a few coins in a box in the temple, they anoint Jesus’ head with oil.

So while the women are coming in and going out, acting on faith and finding praise for their faith, it’s the boys who are getting it done!

Getting it done, that is, right up until the great, transitional moment in the story.

“Who do you say that I am?” “You are the Christ.” Ok, so far so good. Then, Jesus begins to tell them what this title entails: “The Messiah must be rejected, suffer, and die. Then he’ll be raised.”

Peter rebukes Jesus. Jesus rebukes him back: “Get behind me Satan.”

What happens then?

Move on to ch. 9, and the disciples who had been empowered to exorcise are unable to cast out a demon. The disciples who had been given the charge to proclaim cannot overcome the mute-making spirit.

Later that same chapter Jesus again predicts his death. The disciples’ reaction? They walk along debating with each other about who is going to be greatest in God’s coming kingdom.

We begin to see what they don’t get about Jesus’ ministry: the cross turns the economy of the world on its head. They have a standard of greatness that entails a certain kind of leadership and power, but Jesus wants to transform their ideas. He wants them to see greatness in the cross and the child.

As if Mark, or Jesus, thought we might miss the point, we get the whole thing a third time.

Jesus predicts his death, and this time the subsequent response of the disciples is James’ and John’s request to sit at Jesus’ right and left hand. Again, Jesus has to combat not merely the request, but the wrongheaded assumption about what greatness in the kingdom of God looks like:

Jesus called them over and said, “ You know that the ones who are considered the rulers by the Gentiles show off their authority over them and their high-ranking officials order them around. But that’s not the way it will be with you. Whoever wants to be great among you will be your servant. Whoever wants to be first among you will be the slave of all, for the Human One didn’t come to be served but rather to serve and to give his life to liberate many people.” (Mark 10:42-44, CEB)

In the story, the disciples do not understand what is entailed in leading the people of God. They think it is about greatness and power rather than service and death.

And so, we have the group represented by Peter. The rock. Is being “the rock” a good thing? In Mark, the rocky soil indicates plants that spring up well, but fall away when danger or persecution arise on account of the word. Mark repeats the language of “falling away” when the disciples scatter, leaving Jesus to die alone.

The Twelve were committed to Jesus, and happy with him–but only as one who came with power. They had no faith in their calling to participate in his way of death. They did not have eyes to see that the ministry of Jesus turned the economy of the world on its head.

Shall we return to the women now?

How are we to assess these women who, in the narrative world, are outsiders, on the margins?

Unlike the disciples who are rebuked for being of little faith, Jesus commends these women as having great faith: “Daughter, go in peace, your faith has made you well.”

Moreover, there is one episode where Jesus ties a human inseparably to the gospel story. It is the episode of the woman who pours out oil over Jesus’ head. This looks to be a royal anointing! But when Jesus defends her he says, “Leave her alone, she has prepared my body beforehand for burial.”

The act of anointing prepares Jesus for burial: Messiahship and death are held together, and here is the only person in the whole story to get it. This is why “wherever the gospel is preached what she has done will also be told in memory of her.”

What does it mean to live at the margins, to be unnamed? How does this compare with being the twelve, the dudes, the insiders?

According to the economy of the world, with its measures of greatness, to be the twelve is to be exemplary, in the place to lead, to exclude others from leadership, to stand close to Jesus and guard the gates of who else can draw near.

And to the extent that we look to Jesus’ selection of them, and the apparent marginalization of the women, as paradigmatic for male leadership in the church, we show ourselves to be people whose minds have not yet been transformed by the very story to which we are appealing.

It is only by agreeing with the disciples’ way of assessing the world that we can see their “insider status” as a true insider status, to be replicated by other men in church history.

Jesus offers another way: You guys don’t get it! It’s the rulers of the Gentiles who lord authority over people. It shall not be so among you.

There is another way. It is the way of the cross.

There is another way. It is the way of the “marginalized” in the worlds eyes lying closest to Jesus in faith and understanding.

Are we really supposed to hold up as our model the “Satan” who denied the gospel of the crucified Christ, and claim that Peter is paradigmatic of the place of men as insiders and faithful leaders in the church?

Or should we not seek out the one who did the good deed for Jesus, holding together Messiah and death from her place at the margins? Should we not seek out the one who sought out Jesus merely to touch the fringe of his garment and learn from her what it means to walk in faith?

The irony of appealing to the boys as insiders is that in so doing we show ourselves to be adopting the boys’ understanding of power, privilege, and leadership in the kingdom.

And this view is roundly rebuked by Jesus in words of dissuasion and the work of the cross.

Pastoring the Cross; or, The Epic Fail Pastors Conference

January 23, 2012 in Bible Thoughts, Conferences with 4 Comments

One of the most powerful gifts that the gospel has to offer the church is the reality of power in weakness. This is not only the texture of our cross-shaped gospel, it is also the means of effective ministry that integrates itself with the message of the cross that we proclaim.

In real life, this is hit home almost every time I, someone I’m listening to, or someone I hear of, is willing to admit of particular weaknesses and struggles to other folks in the body–or when we confess our actual, particular sins to one another.

Unfortunately, many of us are driven either by the internal voice of self-protection or the external calls for perfection, and live and minister in hope of attaining to, or at least seeming to attain to, a level of perfection that is truly impossible.

Many of the conferences that we attend that are directed at our growth actually feed this vain striving after perfection. They offer us better ways to get where we will never arrive, and hinder our embrace of the weakness that is our reality.

Enter, the Epic Fail Pastors Conference.

From all accounts, last year’s gathering was a singular opportunity for pastors to gather and embrace a transparency that fed both their own hearts and the lives of their congregations.

So get thee to Mansfield, OH, March 22-24. This one is worth getting out for.

The organizer, J. R. Briggs, has more thoughts here.

Missional Institutions?

January 13, 2012 in Bible Thoughts with 6 Comments

An idea has been rumbling around, if ill-formed, in my mind for the past couple of months.

There we were, seminary professors, church pastors, and Christian leader types, having some pretty awesome and fun and challenging conversation about the missional calling of the church. And something about the setting, the gathering of folks I was truly honored to be on stage with, made me wonder if we were the group of people whom folks should be listening to about the church in mission.

Hold that thought. We’ll come back to it.

Yesterday’s stop on the blog tour raised questions about how definitive cruciformity is of our Christian calling. The fact of the matter is (moving on from yesterday’s conversations) that my attempts at fidelity to Jesus very rarely, if ever, look like the cross. Many folks have influential positions and large followings–they have power. Well… I guess I might say, we have power, to a certain extent.

And as I reflected on this yesterday, I wrestled with the impossible possibility of cruciformity being institutionalized. Self-giving, self-sacrifice, death–these are not the principles of faithful administration of a large organization.

Let’s see if we can put these things together.

During the Newbigin conversation, N. T. Wright brought up the need for the church to speak truth to power, to which Pamela Wilhelms replied, “We can’t do that because we are power–or at least, dependent on it.” Our churches, our denominations, our seminaries are funded by the very power dollars that everyone complains about getting the free ride during the financial crisis; the 1% underwrite the very possibility of our having such a meeting, of churches sustained to the extent that we can have large buildings, multiple persons on staff, heavy educational requirements, and the like.

So here’s where I was sitting somewhat uncomfortably, and would love some discussion with you: to what extent can those of us who work within, depend upon, and serve through large Christian organizations speak meaningfully about “the mission of God”?

Are we free enough from the needs of self-preservation to tell the church that the mission of God is a holistic, cosmic mission of reconciliation that the church is too small to contain?

Are we free enough from the power of wealth to speak the prophetic word that, at times, needs to be spoken when an economic system becomes a source of injustice? or a hindrance to justice more generally?

Does the fact that are already filled, already rich, already kings (to paraphrase Paul’s mockery of the non-cruciform Corinthians in 1 Cor 4) render our voice mute when it comes to awakening people to the call of the mission of God?

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