Tag Archive - justice

Safe? Politic? Popular?

January 16, 2012 in Culture, History with 4 Comments

This quote from Martin Luther King, Jr. is my favorite of the many that have been floating around the interwebs today:

On some positions, Cowardice asks the question, “Is it safe?” Expediency asks the question, “Is it politic?” And Vanity comes along and asks the question, “Is it popular?” But Conscience asks the question “Is it right?” And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but he must do it because Conscience tells him it is right. I believe today that there is a need for all people of good will to come together with a massive act of conscience and say in the words of the old Negro spiritual, “We ain’t goin’ study war no more.” This is the challenge facing modern man. (“Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution,” 31 March 1968)

Today, I am thankful that MLKJ was an 8.

Eschatology is Everything

August 5, 2011 in Bible Thoughts with 16 Comments

Eschatology. “The study of the end.” Or, “What we believe about The End.”

In Christian circles, eschatology is drawn to the fore when people are predicting that the world will end on a particular date. Or when we are trying to convince someone to accept Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior before it’s too late.

But all of this puts the accent on the wrong syllable (as Mrs. Heavener used to say in Spanish class, giving due stress to the second syllable of the word “syllable” for good measure: syl-LA-ble).

And this month’s Christianity Today has an outstanding, short essay by David Neff putting things back in order.

Neff makes six points about Christian eschatology:

  1. Biblical eschatology is about justice
  2. Biblical justice is about eschatology
  3. Biblical eschatology is about the world’s divine destiny
  4. Justice announces the kingdom’s arrival
  5. Sacrificing for justice is an act of faith that God will make good our sacrifices
  6. Jesus’ parables of judgment are often about justice

When you survey this list, one thing that sticks out is that eschatology is very much this-worldly. It is one of the ironies of traditional evangelical (Dispensational) eschatology that its focus on “the end” has made it other-worldly, so concerned about the coming of Jesus that it has taken all attention away from the world in which we live.

Why ironic? Because Jesus’ proclamation of the end served notice that the days were numbered for the powers that were disordering his world: hunger was disappearing with the advent of a kingdom of abundance. Sickness was being undone with the advent of the kingdom of healing. Exclusion was disappearing with the advent of the kingdom of transforming embrace.

The end means that God is bringing justice.

For the end to have drawn near means that the justice for which we wait in the days ahead is reaching backward and invading the days in which we live.

It is in the face of this, the advent of the justice of God, that Jesus proclaims, “Repent, for the reign of God has drawn near!”

Evil and Love

June 23, 2011 in Bible Thoughts, Book Reviews with 5 Comments

One of the perpetual challenges that modern, western theologians and Bible readers face is the way that scripture assumes a world where not only injustice but true evil is active. We probably wrestle with the wrong issues, for example, when talking about justification, because we don’t experience the need to be vindicated by God in the face of perpetual persecution for doing what is right.

Ours is a world where we can claim that people are inherently good–and actually believe ourselves.

But Miroslav Volf does not sugar coat the world and he perpetually summons us back to reality. Having experienced a measure of persecution during his years in Serbia and Croatia, he demands of Christians that we recognize a moral duty to call evil evil–even while summoning us to the sacred duty of loving all our neighbors (even the evil ones).

His book Against the Tide is a series of short reflections on what it means to love in the world that we actually inhabit.

The book is a collection of articles that range widely while pushing us to have our imaginations transformed afresh by the Christian story of a God who loves us and calls us to be agents of God’s love in the world.

Volf is bold. He wrestles with the story of the flood. He demands that we learn from it that God will not rest content with a world full of evil. And, he draws on the flood imagery from 1 Peter and suggests that we can read the washing of the flood as a symbol not of God washing away the evil doers, but washing us up so as to stand pure before our God.

He also insists that we call evil when talking about the actions of people. The alternatives are to deny the evil that destroys the world or to demonize perpetrators. Demonizing the evil doer makes the person an object to be exorcised, expelled, destroyed. Calling a person evil maintains their humanity: yes, he is evil, an evil neighbor I am called to love so that I might overcome evil with good.

For short daily devotional reading, you could do no better than Against the Tide.

Disclaimer: I don’t need to provide a disclaimer because I actually paid $10 for my copy of the book. So the Fed won’t come after me for this one. But on the other hand, Volf and I are Facebook friends, which, of course, makes him my BFF. I was even in the same room with him once at a reception!

Forgiveness and Resurrection

May 25, 2011 in Bible Thoughts, Church with 4 Comments

Yesterday I did a little co-conspiring with Mark Scandrette and the guys from ikon here in San Francisco. We recorded a podcast about forgiveness (stay tuned for download details).

The conversation generated a number of thoughts and questions, not all of them worked out in our short time recording. Perhaps one of the most important has to do with entrusting judgment to God. At some level, especially for people who have been badly wounded, abused, left behind after a loved one has been killed, forgiveness will be tied to a conviction that the God of all the earth will do what is right.

Is that really the God who composes the Christian story? Is that really the God who beckons us to forgive and even to bless those who persecute us?

In my estimation, we have too often surrendered a major resource for answering this question because we have built our theology of forgiveness so much around the cross that we have neglected the crucial place of the resurrection.

Resurrection means not only that God has accepted and forgiven us in Christ. This much is true. But it also means, more generally, that the economy of this world is not equipped to bring about the just judgment of God.

The God of all the earth will do what is right, but this mortal life and its systems of power and even of justice are not the heavenly court.

Resurrection promises that there will be reversal. Injustice cannot escape the righteous judgment of God.

Prayers of Privilege

March 20, 2011 in Spirituality & Prayer with 13 Comments

One of my pet-peeves is the sort of piety that strives to remove our worship of and prayers to God from our everyday life. The “prayer Olympics” that many practice sometimes makes it seem as though the greatest height to which we can attain is when we praise God “just for who you are,” “for who you are in yourself”–as though this is more lofty than praise and thanks for the manifestations of God’s presence here on earth or in our own lives.

It struck me recently that the very idea that such a prayer is the most pious of all is a theology of power and privilege.

It is Sadducee piety. The Sadducees were of the priestly families. Those families had gradually come to power, and under various Greek and Roman regimes had found themselves the indigenous leaders given charge (and the wealth that comes with it) under various “temple constitutions.”

Is it any wonder they didn’t believe in resurrection? Resurrection means vindicated the oppressed, rewarding the unpaid righteous. And it means repaying the powerful tyrants as well.

Those in power don’t want a piety that will turn the world on its head.

Similarly our theologically luxurious insistence that true worship, true prayer, has nothing to do with us. This is a mistake that can only be made by people who do not have eyes to see that for God to be “who God is” the world has to be changed. The redemption begun must be brought to completion. The righteous who cry must be answered.

And when God so acts, God must be praised.

If there is one thing that I hope we will learn more and more as we who are white, western, and thus worldly privileged listen to our African, Latino/a, and Asian neighbors it is that our culture of power has distorted our understanding of theological normalcy and theological virtue.

It is only people who know that the world suffers under the hand of the unrighteous who will know that God must make justice flow like a river and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream–if, in fact, God is to be God; if, in fact, God will be “who God is” and thus worthy of thanks and praise for it.

And only they will know how to write the songs and pray the prayers that properly praise the God who, in the Gospel of the dead and risen Christ, has revealed God’s righteousness to the world.

Sure Deliverance

February 27, 2011 in Bible Thoughts with 6 Comments

I’m not sure why, but the kids and I keep reading the Psalms.

I know, it sounds like a really great idea. But in the words of a friend who attempted the same and ultimately was punished by God for it with a PhD in Old Testament, “There’s some really strange stuff in there.”

Ok, so maybe “strange” isn’t the word for the dissonance I’m experiencing. But what I’m finding in the first dozen or so Psalms is that the core of Israel’s religious worship consists of an expectation that for the God of all the earth to what is right, Israel’s enemies must be sent running before her swords.

This, of course, is not everything. And perhaps it’s too much to call military victory the core. It closely resides next to the idea that the unjust will not escape the sight, or vengeance, of God.

As I read these poems, I am constantly moving among several thoughts in my mind. One is that the expectation of military victory as the means of YHWH’s engagement with the world is so deeply rooted that (a) I have constantly refreshed sympathy for the disappointed disciples of Jesus; and (b) I consciously wrestle out Christologically revisionist interpretations of the psalms in order to mesh them with a transformed understanding of the victory God has won, and is winning, through His King on behalf of the people of the earth.

The other is that the expectation that injustice will not succeed is weird. It seems off. It seems overly optimistic. It seems just plain wrong.

And here is where I get caught.

I suspect that for the singers of these songs, the tangible reality of injustice was much more acutely felt on a day-to-day basis than it has ever been in my own life. I bet that for them, there were particular faces of injustice to put to these general hopes.

And these songs were sung in faith.

The songs of deliverance are not, for the most part, triumphant proclamations of how God has socked it to the bad guys, but songs of invocation–celebrations beforehand of the just and powerful God that would not believe that evil will be allowed the last word here on earth, as it is not allowed it in heaven above.

The more that the songs strike me as wrong, as wishful, as overly optimistic, the more I am reminded that I need to be transformed by the renewing of my mind.

I need to be reminded that the God of all the earth will not allow the unjust to escape his due recompense, that God will not turn a blind eye to the cheat and the swindler–that God will not allow the cry of the righteous to go unheeded.

And we have the resurrection to prove it.

Clawson on Mission & Worship

November 23, 2010 in Bible Thoughts, Spirituality & Prayer with 0 Comments

Ok, so maybe feeding hungry people doesn’t stir your soul. Might it be the worship God desires?

Julie Clawson has a fabulous, provocative, challenging–and short!–article on justice and worship over at The Next Wave.

Go check it out.

You Are What You Eat?

November 10, 2010 in Culture, Food with 4 Comments

This month’s Christianity Today leads with an excellent article on food. Leslie Leyland Fields writes “A Feast Fit for The King,” which is a balanced assessment of the sustainable food movement.

Fields does a nice job of setting up the issues that confront us when we take something off the shelf in the supermarket: Is the purchase of this product propagating the poverty of someone in this country or on the other side of the world? Does the fact that the meat we raise requires enough grain to feed all the impoverished people of the world make carnivorous activities morally culpable? Is there a moral obligation to treat raised animals humanely before we kill them for our food?

So the essay highlights a number of questions that we need to be wrestling with as those entrusted to steward creation.

But Fields is also all-too-aware of the problems besetting the sustainable eating movement. Not only is there the red flag of “legalism” that some Christians are surely going to be quick to raise. There is the more insidious problem of idolatry.

The sustainable food movement offers life for us and salvation for the world. It offers purification of our bodies en route to purification of our souls. It creates a system of morality and righteousness designed to lead toward the eschatological salvation its system envisions.

As for me, I think that the questions raised in the sustainable food world are crucial questions for us to ask and to take sacrificial steps in answering as those who claim to represent God in the world.

First, there are important questions of justice toward our “neighbors” who enable us to eat, do the harvest work we don’t want to do, provide our cheap food at their own expense. I continue to commend Julie Clawson’s Everyday Justice as a good start to thinking through these issues. After reading this, our family made the decision to only buy fairly traded coffee, chocolate, and bananas. It was a small first step, but an important one for us.

Then, there are the issues of environmental stewardship, and using the world with which we have been entrusted to see that holistic thriving is possible as broadly as possible. This means using our resources to feed people, it means using the land to produce abundance, it means using the land in such a way that we preserve the water, land, and animals. It means tending the animals with wisdom.

Or, if you prefer hymnody, it means to participate in the work of the resurrected Christ who “comes to make his blessings known far as the curse is found.”

Evangelical Manifesto

October 3, 2010 in Bible Thoughts, Church, Culture with 43 Comments

I don’t know why, but for now I’ve decided to care about the word “evangelical.” “Evangelical” can be a slippery word. Lots of people want to claim it. Lots of people want to disclaim it. I wouldn’t mind leaving it, really, except that right now those to my right are insisting that you have to agree with them about a whole host of things in order to claim that label for yourself.

I posted recently about Al Mohler, who insists that you have to be a complementarian on the gender issue so as to believe in inerrancy so as to be a good evangelical. Recently the Reformed world has distanced itself from the service of Pete Enns, Tremper Longman, and Bruce Waltke because they opened the door to a reading of Genesis 1-3 that was something other than literal. Most recently, a rumor has reached my ears that a certain evangelical college (I won’t mention its name because it’s only a rumor), under the lead of its complementarian president is beginning to institute a commitment to complementarianism by only allowing, for example, men to speak in chapel. May be true, may not, but the verisimilitude is enough to make my sectarian radar go up.

I am concerned about these developments. In particular, I’m concerned because those of us who aren’t interested in helping veer the ship to the right haven’t been as interested in carving out a broad definition of evangelicalism. (Though there are some exceptions.) In our silence, the ship is listing right, and I think that many of the developments, because of that, are or will be tragic for evangelicalism in America.

In pointed (and point-by-point) response to this listing right, I offer an alternative articulation of evangelical theology in some attempt to hold onto a word whose value seems to decline with each passing headline.

Evangelicalism for the 21st Century

Evangelical is an adjective that can describe Christians of various denominations and other substantives. There are evangelical Protestants, evangelical Catholics, and evangelical orthodox. There are evangelical Pentecostals, evangelical Anabaptists, and evangelical mainliners.

To be an evangelical is to be committed to the notion that the message of Jesus is good news about a God who desires all of humanity, each group within humanity, and every individual to be in relationship with God as the God of all.

To be an evangelical is to be committed to scripture as the word of God, a word that always has the power to prophetically confront and challenge what we take for granted–both within the church and as people in diverse cultures.

To be an evangelical is to be committed to telling the gospel story such that it will sound as good news in the ears of those who hear it, even as it summons us to repentance and faith.

In light of these three commitments: that the gospel be genuinely good news, that it comes as an invitation to be received into the family of God, and that we know of the good news as we learn it from scripture, here is an evangelical affirmation for the twenty-first century:

1. You can be an evangelical and not believe in inerrancy.

We believe this because of our commitment to scripture itself. Investigation of scripture will often, to many of us, provide indications that an “inerrant” Bible is not the way that God has chosen to speak to humanity.

This is part of the good news because it means that we do not have to set aside the labors of critical scholarship to affirm that the Bible is the word of God in which the good news is articulated.

Evangelicals embrace many of those who do affirm inerrancy. Many who embrace inerrancy are able to separate issues of inerrancy from issues of hermeneutics. This enables them to free the doctrine of what the Bible is from what the Bible must teach on any given subject. Many who embrace inerrancy do so with a revisionist definition of inerrancy that only intends to signal that the Bible is our ultimate authority. This, too, is an indication that the faithfulness to scripture as the word of God can go in numerous directions of faithful handling.

To be an evangelical who does not embrace inerrancy is to be a Christian who sets aside inerrancy because of what we find in scripture itself. This is not an application of anti-supernatural bias. This is not a presupposition against miracles or historical accuracy. It is a response to the Bible that has shown itself to be something other than inerrant–with a faithful confession that God has chosen just this sort of book through which to reveal himself.

2. Evangelicals can affirm the full inclusion of women in the life of the church.

To be an evangelical affirming women’s ordination is to be someone who is convinced that scripture itself leads the way toward their full inclusion in the body.

God the Father creates humanity male and female to rule the world on God’s behalf. To be an evangelical egalitarian is to confess that shared rule in the church is faithful telling of God’s purpose in creation.

Jesus the Son receives us all into himself, baptized as one into his name, where there is no longer male and female as a primary distinguishing marker. To be an evangelical egalitarian is to confess that shared ministry in the body is faithful living out of our common possession of the identity of the crucified Son.

The Holy Spirit fills all equally so that both sons and daughters will prophesy. To be an evangelical egalitarian is to confess that shared teaching in the church is a faithful expression of the egalitarian distribution of the Spirit.

I am an egalitarian because I believe what the Bible tells me about the Triune God in redemptive relationship to the humanity restored and renewed in Christ by the Spirit.

As an evangelical, I also acknowledge that others committed to scripture might demand a complementarian assessment of humanity’s standing before God. To be an evangelical complementarian is to acknowledge that this is an issue of hermeneutics, of finding primacy in some passages while relegating others to secondary positions. This differs from fundamentalist complementarianism which sees hierarchy in the church as essential to receiving the Bible as the word of God and to our confession of the good news of Jesus Christ.

Evangelical egalitarianism is good news to the world around us because it declares that the restored world into which God is inviting it does not demand subjugation of the weak to the strong, but upends the world’s hierarchical system.

3. Evangelicals can praise the God who created a 4.5 billion year old earth.

To be an evangelical old-earther, to be an evangelical who reads Genesis 1-3 as something other than literal history, is to be a student of scripture attentive to its own indications of genre.

To be an evangelical old-earther is not to reject the stories of Gen 1-3 as out-dated, but listen to them as the Ancient Near Eastern stories of ancient origins that they are. It is to listen to them and attend to the cues that they are not meant to stand as all-encompassing narratives about the beginning of all humanity.

They speak to us truly about the condition of the earth, about God’s intentions for humanity to stand one day over an ordered cosmos, and of a particular people as the means for that glorious future. We are old-earthers because we are attentive to scripture, not because we carry in presuppositions against it.

To be an evangelical is to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with other Christians who, studying Genesis 1-3 and submitting to it as the word of God, cannot but confess that the world is 6,000 years old. To be an evangelical young earther, rather than a fundamentalist young earther, is to recognize that this is a hermeneutical decision that has an important voice in the church’s story, but one that has had a counter-voice to answer to since long before the days of Charles Darwin. It is to affirm that others may make a different hermeneutical decision about Genesis 1-3 without giving up their commitment to either scripture or the God of the Bible.

Evangelical old-earth creationism is good news because it means that students of the natural world do not have to abandon their scientific knowledge to participate in the story of God. It means that they might, in fact, have something to teach the church about what the book of nature is teaching us all about the way in which God created.

4. Evangelicals robustly affirm the social ramifications of the gospel.

To be an evangelical advocate of the social gospel is to affirm the biblical story that the disintegration of the cosmos extends beyond the relationship of God with humanity to encompass also the relationship of people with each other, the created order with systemic powers, and people with the sub-human creation.

To affirm such a robust set of problems is to demand an equally robust set of solutions. If the good news is to be genuinely good news, it must proclaim that God’s anointed king comes to make his blessings flow far as the curse is found.

To be an evangelical advocate of the social gospel is to submit to the stories of the Gospels themselves, in which restored bodies, restored communities, subjection of demonic powers, and forgiveness of sins were all part of the ministry of Jesus.

To be an evangelical is to insist that to reject the social ramifications of the Gospel is to dishonor the extent of God’s care for God’s world, and the sweep of Jesus’ ministry on earth.

UPDATE:

5. Conviction without Sectarianism. (click link for a fifth point added the next day)

Conclusion

To be an evangelical, one does not need to follow the lead of so many in power who are retrenching this movement to the right. As those who are committed to scripture, to its invitation to enter into a rich, life-giving relationship with God, and to its proclamation of a message that is actually good news, we can stand together and proclaim a story that is, in fact, beautiful to those with eyes to see.

Which Reality Will You Believe?

September 3, 2010 in Bible Thoughts with 2 Comments

Ched Myers, Binding the Strong Man, comments on the withered fig tree incident like this:

The curse/exorcism of the fig tree/temple is more than a political protest; Mark means for it to be a “proleptic” sign within his own narrative. When Jesus later speaks of the end of the temple state in his second sermon, Mark will point us back to this action, through the use of the expression “Look!” (ide):

11:21: Rabbi, Look! The fig tree you cursed has withered!”
13:3: “Teacher, Look! What wonderful stones and buildings!”

The direct narrative connection between the disciples’ encounter with the tree and the temple is a kind of inverse discourse… The reader must choose which reality to believe in: the temple-as-withered-to-the-root (sign of a system that is coming to an end) or the temple-as-bigger-than-life (sign of a system that will never end…)…. This is the reason why in 11:21 Peter “remembers”… the symbolic action; Mark hopes his readers will also “remember” it in their historical discernment. (304)

The contrast between the two realities in which you might choose to believe is what strikes me. So much of the biblical narrative is an invitation to see the world differently, to recognize that the world as we can see it with our eyes is often not reflecting the story (especially the eschatology) that God has in store.

Our calling is to be transformed by the renewing of our minds; or, as Richard B. Hays says, to undergo a conversion of the imagination so that we can see that the glory of God is not always reflected in the glorious works of people. This is especially true, as Myers highlights, when that worldly glory is built on systems of injustice and oppression.

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