Confronting Life After Doom with Resilience

Those of you who are regular readers of this blog are likely aware that I am a big “fan” of Brian McLaren. In a March 2017 blog post, I placed him on my list of “Ten Most Admired Contemporary Christians,” and he is on my list of “Top Ten” theologians and/or philosophers by whom I have been influenced.*¹

Beginning with McLaren’s book A New Kind of Christian (2002), the first of a trilogy that was significant theology written as novels, I have read many of McLaren’s fifteen sole-authored books and learned much from them.

In a March 2018 blog post, I made extensive reference to his 2006 book, The Secret Message of Jesus, in which he emphasized that the Kingdom of God is more about society than about individuals.*²

That emphasis on the Kingdom of God being primarily about human society in the present world rather than the heavenly realm where individuals are transported upon death is a major reason many contemporary conservative Christians do not regard McLaren highly.

Brian (b. 1956) first wrote about the growing global ecological crisis in Everything Must Change, his 2007 book which I finished reading in June 2008. I thought it was so significant that in 2020 I placed it on the list of my favorite non-fiction 21st-century books.*³

Since I don’t include more than one book by the same author in my list of favorite books, I have replaced McLaren’s previous books in the list just mentioned with Life After Doom: Wisdom and Courage for a World Falling Apart, which was published the middle of last month.

McLaren’s Life After Doom is essential reading for all of us who know about and care about the future of life on planet Earth. On the dust jacket, environmentalist Bill McKibben says this book is as “rich and thoughtful as all of Brian McLaren's work, but with a particular urgency!” I fully agree.

Early in “Welcome to Reality,” the second chapter, McLaren succinctly sets forth the diagnosis of the predicament he examines throughout the book: “Our global civilization as currently structured is unstable and unsustainable” (p. 23).

Some scientists and eco-theologians, especially William Catton, Jr., and Michael Dowd, have made this same diagnosis.*⁴ But this is the first time a major Christian writer has analyzed that predicament so thoroughly and so clearly—and with a pastor’s heart.

Throughout this challenging book, McLaren explores four possible scenarios for the years ahead. In the second chapter, he calls those scenarios 1) “Collapse Avoidance,” 2) “Collapse/Rebirth,” 3) “Collapse/Survival,” and 4) “Collapse/Extinction.”

Since it is clear that he thinks only the last three are feasible, at the end of the first chapter he warned his readers that the following chapter would be “rough sledding.” Then chapters three and four are “pastoral” in nature: he helps his readers face the fearful future in ways that are not debilitating.

How can/should we live life after doom? In the fourth/last part of his book, McLaren elucidates what he calls “a path of agile engagement.” Michael Dowd’s emphasis on “post doom, no gloom” provided helpful light for these dark times. McLaren’s last chapters are even more beneficial and encouraging.

In chapter 17, Brian repeatedly stresses that despite all the ugliness, “beauty abounds.” In the next chapter, he cites and heartily agrees with the words, “It is a magnificent thing to be alive in a moment that matters so much” (p. 224).

Chapter 19 emphasizes the need to live with the dream of the kingdom of God which is “not a destination after death: it is the higher, bigger, vaster, deeper way of life here and now” (p. 236).

The following chapter is “Find Your Light and Shine It.” If we do that, even in this time of doom, we can have “an abundant life, a meaningful life, abounding with beauty … whatever the future may hold” (p. 249).

“Whatever you do, it matters.” Those words (on p. 253) are the crux of McLaren's final chapter, which closes with 15 numbered paragraphs expounding that basic assertion.

So, even if we are—or because we are(!)—living life after doom, let’s live resiliently, not giving up, giving in, or giving out. Paraphrasing Maya Angelou, let’s do the best we can until we know better—and then, let’s do better!

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*¹ I first published that list in my book subtitled The Story of My Life from Birth until My 82^nd Birthday (2020).

*² That emphasis was also the title of  #7 in my book Thirty True Things Everyone Needs to Know Now (2019).

*³ In the 2023 updated version of my life story book, I replaced McLaren’s 2007 book with Do I Stay Christian? which was published in 2022.

*⁴ In Appendix 1, McLaren lists what he considers the five best books dealing with “our predicament.” The first is William Catton’s Overshoot (1982)—and “The Most Important Book You’ve Never Read,” my 2/23/23 blog post, is about Catton’s book. Then McLaren gives Michael Dowd’s videos as the first of the five best video/audio resources. Many of you will remember that I have written about Dowd several times, the first being in my 1/25/22 blog post. McLaren mentions that Dowd was his friend who died while he (Brian) was writing this book.

 

The Biggest Theological Changes I’ve Seen in My Lifetime

Perhaps this needs to be seven posts rather than one, but at this point I am just listing and briefly describing what I consider to be the biggest theological changes I have seen in my lifetime—and these are not my personal shifts but what I’ve observed in the broad spectrum of Christianity. 

#1 – Widespread rejection of Hell. I list this first because of its impact on the following changes. Emphasis on Hell was not only long the emphasis of Protestantism but of Roman Catholicism as well.

One of the most well-known Protestant sermons was Jonathan Edwards’s 1741 sermon “Sinners in the Hand of an Angry God.” And early in the 19^th century, revivalist preachers in the U.S. became known for their “fire and brimstone” sermons. That was still quite common when I was a boy/youth.

The Roman Catholic Church also taught for centuries that everyone who was not baptized as a Catholic was bound to go to Hell when they died. That position was drastically changed by the Second Vatican Council (1962~65).

And while emphasis on Hell is still much a part of conservative evangelicalism, in Protestant Christianity at large that emphasis has been quite widely rejected, or at least conspicuously ignored.

#2 – Growing de-emphasis on Heaven. For far different reasons, but related to the above, is what seems to me to be a significant decrease in the emphasis on Heaven in 21^st century Christianity. Heaven isn’t particularly denied, it just isn’t talked about nearly as much as it used to be.

The Great Awakenings and evangelical preaching of the 18^th~20^th centuries was about being “saved” from Hell in order to go to Heaven after death. In the early decades of my life the “afterlife” was of primary concern in most of Christianity, but that no longer seems to be the case.  

#3 – Drastic decrease in world mission activity. Although it was never just for that purpose, the desire to save people from Hell in order that they could go to Heaven was long a major motivation for world mission activity of most Christian denominations.

When I went to Japan as a Baptist missionary in 1966, there were not only conservative missionaries of various denominations, many of which were more conservative than Southern Baptists then, but also many from the more “liberal” Protestant denominations as well as Roman Catholics.

Some of the most prominent Christian schools in Japan were founded by Catholic, Anglican, and “mainstream” Protestant missionaries. But by the time I left Japan in 2004, there were hardly any Christian missionaries left other than Southern Baptists and other conservative evangelicals.

#4 – Emphasis on life in the here and now. Closely related to #2 above is the growing emphasis on the importance of life in this world now. Even the understanding of the Kingdom of God has broadly changed from being focused upon the world to come to a feature of the world we live in now.

Contemporary Christianity seems to have increasingly embraced the traditional Jewish position of “salvation” not being “about going to heaven after death but about the flourishing of life in the present.”*

For example, emphasis on flourishing in the present has for many years now been a part of the reflections of two popular theological thinkers I greatly respect, “emergent” Protestant public theologian and author Brian McLaren and Catholic (Franciscan) priest Richard Rohr.

5) De-emphasis and even rejection of substitutionary atonement. Since the blog post I made six years ago today was about that doctrinal belief (see here), I won’t elaborate on this point more now.

6) Change in views related to sexual ethics. Because of the perceived clear positions of the Bible and the teachings of the Church, both Protestant and Catholic Christianity long-held negative judgments against divorce, cohabitation, and homosexuality.

While there were always many “deviations,” Christianity long held to a strong belief in the sanctity of marriage, which meant lifetime monogamous marriage of a man and a woman with no intimate sexual relations condoned outside of such a marriage.

In spite of strong emphasis on the traditional position by some Christians, broadly speaking, to a large extent Christianity now seems no longer to speak out against divorce or pre-marital sexual relations, and there continues to be greater acceptance of the rights of LGBTQ people.

  7) Growth in ecumenical relations, including deep ecumenism. There is a long history of Christian ecumenism—but an even longer history of Christian denominational “tribalism,” which is what I mostly saw in my younger years.

But during my lifetime there has been not only an ever-increasing move toward Christian denominations working together, a movement from exclusivity to inclusivity, but also an increase in what is sometimes called “deep ecumenism,” Christianity working with other religious traditions.**

What would you readers add or subtract from this list? And which of these do I need to write more about?

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* These words are from Jeorg Rieger in his book Theology in the Capitalocene (2022), which I plan to introduce more fully in the last blog post planned for this month.

** According to Chat GPT, “deep ecumenism” is a term coined by Wayne Teasdale (1945~2004), a Catholic lay monk. His book The Mystic Heart: Discovering a Universal Spirituality in the World’s Religions (1999) “is considered a seminal work in the field of deep ecumenism.” (I think I heard that term before 1999, though.)

Matthew Fox, former Catholic and now Episcopal priest, posted a “daily meditation” entitled “What Is Deep Ecumenism? Why Now?” on Oct. 18, 2021. 

In Praise of Koinonia Farm

On the day after his 100^th birthday anniversary, on 7/30/12 I posted a blog article titled "In Praise of Clarence Jordan.” This article is about Jordan’s Koinonia Farm which is celebrating its 80^th anniversary tomorrow (on 11/26), and I am posting it in deep appreciation for their decades of faithful work. 

Clarence Jordan was a farmer with a Ph.D. in theology. Born in 1912 in the small town of Talbotton, Georgia, about 90 miles south of Atlanta, Jordan graduated with a degree in agriculture at the University of Georgia in 1933. The following year, he was ordained as a Southern Baptist minister.

Then, in 1938 Jordan earned a Ph.D. in Greek New Testament from The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Kentucky, and four years later he started Koinonia Farm near Americus, Georgia, about 65 miles south of where he was born.

Clarence Jordan sought to be a “demonstration plot” farmer. An article in the December Sojourners magazine is titled “The Radical Southern Farmer White Christians Should Know About.” In that piece, Jordan is cited as saying,

While I love books and have a passion for knowledge, I have thought the real laboratory for learning was not the classroom but in the fields, by farming, and in interaction with human need.

So, the 440-acre Koinonia Farm, named after the Greek word for fellowship and joint participation, was designed to be a “demonstration plot” of the Kingdom of God in the here and now of southern Georgia.

According to the Sojourners article, Jordan conceived of the farm as being

cooperative and communal ... interracial, controlled by investment of time (life), rather than capital; based on the principle of distribution according to need; [and] motivated by Christian love as the most powerful instrument known to [people] for solving [their] problems.

Clarence Jordan has recently been hailed as the preacher of “the inconvenient Gospel.” Just last month a book containing some of Jordan’s writings and sermons was published under the title The Inconvenient Gospel: A Southern Prophet Tackles War, Wealth, Race, and Religion. 

Issued by Plough Publishing House on October 25, I bought a Kindle copy that day and read it before attending (on Zoom) the book launch event sponsored by Plough on Oct. 28.

One of the three panelists on that webinar was Starlette Thomas, a young Black pastor and journalist. Her opening remarks were largely the same as the Introduction that she authored for the book. Starlette’s explanation and praise of Koinonia is also printed in the Autumn 2022 issue of Plough.**

Koinonia Farm has had influence far beyond southern Georgia. In the 1970s not long after Jordan’s death in 1969, Koinonia Farm began to market some of his sermons on long-play vinyl records—and I listened to some of those, with considerable delight, in Japan.

I had heard of Jordan and Koinonia Farm while a seminary student (at Jordan’s alma mater) in the 1960s, but it was after hearing his sermons preached with a captivating southern drawl, that I became a big admirer of Jordan and what he had done in Georgia.

The influence of Jordan and Koinonia Farm expanded beyond Georgia in other, more important ways. Millard Fuller (1935~2009) was a self-made millionaire by age 29, but he gave up his wealth and moved to Koinonia Farm in 1968, where he and his family lived for five years.

Under the name Koinonia Partners, Fuller started Habitat for Humanity in 1976, and in 1984 he enlisted Jimmy Carter as a hands-on supporter—and Jimmy and Rosalynn continued to do volunteer work with Habitat into their 90s. (The Carter home in Plains was about ten miles from Koinonia Farm.)

The number of people currently living at Koinonia Farm (see their website here) is small, but they are valiantly working to keep alive Clarence Jordan’s vision of maintaining a demonstration plot for the Kingdom of God. For that, I remain deeply grateful.

And in reflecting upon Koinonia Farm’s existence for 80 years now, I am challenged to think about how June and I, and our church, can be more intentionally a part of a demonstration plot for God’s Kin-dom.

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** Starlette’s article is titled “The Raceless Gospel,” a concept she constantly emphasizes. She is director of The Raceless Gospel Initiative at Good Faith Ministries and host of the Raceless Gospel podcasts.

Note: In addition to the new book about Jordan issued last month, I highly recommend Dallas M. Lee’s excellent book, The Cotton Patch Evidence: The Story of Clarence Jordan and the Koinonia Farm Experiment (1942–1970), first published in 1971 (3^rd ed., 2011).

Affirming the Social Gospel: In Appreciation of Walter Rauschenbusch

He was born 160 years ago on October 4, 1861, the first year of the Civil War, and died in 1918, a few months before the end of World War I, but Walter Rauschenbusch hated militarism and other societal problems that cause human suffering and the degradation of human life.

Acknowledgment of Rauschenbusch’s Social Gospel

In all three of my “theological” books, I wrote about Rauschenbusch. In Fed Up with Fundamentalism (2007, 2020) I wrote that the Social Gospel was “the third factor [after Darwinism and biblical criticism] which helped instigate the fundamentalist movement.”

And I explained, “The most significant leader of the Social Gospel was the prominent Baptist historian Walter Rauschenbusch” (p. 30).

In The Limits of Liberalism (2010, 2020), one sub-section is “The Liberalism of Rauschenbusch” (pp. 31~35), and later I wrote that for many “the main religious appeal of liberalism is found in its ethical stance, which has often been shaped by the emphasis of Walter Rauschenbusch and the Social Gospel” (p. 109).

Then in #5 of Thirty True Things Everyone Needs to Know Now (2018), I wrote about Rauschenbusch’s “strong emphasis on the idea that the kingdom of God is both here now and also coming in the future” (p. 36).

In his book Christianizing the Social Order (1912), Rauschenbusch used the phrase “the kingdom is always but coming,” and that became the title of the superb 2004 biography of Rauschenbusch by Christopher H. Evans.

Formation of Rauschenbusch’s Social Gospel

Walter Rauschenbusch was the son of German parents who had immigrated to New York. After graduating from Rochester Theological Seminary, from 1886 to 1897 he served as the pastor of the Second German Baptist Church, located in the slum section of New York City known as Hell’s Kitchen.

That was at the apex of the Gilded Age when there was great and growing inequality between the upper and lower classes. For example, at the time when so many lived in crowded, vermin-infested tenements in Hell’s Kitchen, rich industrialists lived in luxury on 5^th Avenue and Madison Avenue.

John D. Rockefeller’s NYC home was less than a mile from Second German Baptist Church, and J.P. Morgan as well as William K. Vanderbilt and his flamboyant wife Alva lived only 1.2 miles from Rauschenbusch’s church. Here is a picture of the Vanderbilt mansion, completed in 1882. 

Rauschenbusch said that he went to his new pastorate “to save souls in the ordinarily accepted religious sense.” But in the area where his church was located, unemployment, poverty, malnutrition, disease, and crime were rampant.

He came to understand that Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount spoke more about how to live in the present rather than how to prepare for life after death. Further, he came to realize that Jesus’ key teaching about the Kingdom of God was also for the here and now, not just about the “sweet by and by.”

Affirmation of Rauschenbusch’s Social Gospel

Even though I have remained critical of some aspects of Rauschenbusch’s “liberal” theology, such as his being overly optimistic about the possibility of establishing the Kingdom of God on earth by human effort, through the years I have increasingly come to affirm his basic theological ideas.

Here are some of the most important emphases in Rauschenbusch’s Social Gospel.

    * Jesus’ core teachings are found in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5~7) and in his parable of the sheep and the goats (Matthew 25:31-46).

    * The basis of Jesus’ teachings was his understanding of the Kingdom of God, which Rauschenbusch rightly understood as “always but coming.”

    * In addition to the reality and seriousness of “personal” sins, the pervasiveness and destructiveness of social sin and sinful social structures must be recognized and adamantly opposed.

The crux of Rauschenbusch’s Social Gospel is still sorely needed now as it was in the 1890s and in 1917 when he published his last book, A Theology for the Social Gospel.

Can we and will we affirm, accept, and implement that Gospel? It is truly good news for the multitude of people who are suffering deprivation, discrimination, and destructive social structures right now.

TTT #7 The Kingdom of God is More about Society than about Individuals

Consider with me one more article concerning the Kingdom of God before we move to a different topic in the next/eighth chapter of Thirty True Things Everyone Needs to Know Now (TTT).

Who Is “You”?

Unlike many (most?) languages of the world, in English there is no difference between the singular and plural second person pronoun. That is, you can refer to one person or to two—or many more—people.

Partly for that reason, there has been some misunderstanding of the Bible for those who read it exclusively (or even primarily) in English. Despite being able after seminary to read the New Testament in Greek, to a degree, I usually just read the English translation for devotional use and even for sermon preparation before going to Japan.

As I began to prepare sermons in Japanese, however, over and over again I noticed that passages I had always thought of as speaking to individuals were, indeed, speaking to multiple people, to a community, for you was plural in Japanese just as it is in Greek.

“You” in the KoG

Western Christianity has usually placed far more emphasis on individuals than on society. Accordingly, individualistic interpretation of the Bible emphasizes that God loves me, Jesus died for me, I can be saved through faith in Jesus, and when I die I will go to Heaven.

To be sure, that is an important part of the Gospel message—but it is certainly not the only, or maybe in the larger scheme of things, the most important.

Emergent church leader Brian D. McLaren has importantly emphasized this point in recent years—but, unfortunately, many Christians don’t seem to have gotten the point yet.

One of McLaren’s books is The Secret Message of Jesus (2006). That “secret message” he elucidated shouldn’t have been so secret, for it was, after all, a central teaching of Jesus.

What was that teaching? It was primarily not about isolated individuals but about the kingdom of God, a new society populated by people who form a community of faith.  

“You” and the KoG Here and Now

Not only has the Western understanding of the kingdom of God often been individualistic, it has also often been other-worldly. By “other-worldly” I mean, of course, that it has been more about life after death rather than about life now on earth.

The “pie in the sky by and by” sort of thinking was used by some, and perhaps many, slaveholders in the nineteenth century to mollify their slaves. And to some degree, the same kind of thinking was utilized by white Christians to keep African Americans satisfied with their inferior status for a century, and more, following the end of the Civil War.

Martin Luther King, Jr., alludes to that sad situation in his powerful book Why We Can’t Wait (1963). He writes, “To the ministers I stressed the need for a social gospel to supplement the gospel of individual salvation.”

King says that he also rejected religion which “prompts a minister to extol the glories of Heaven while ignoring the social conditions that cause men an earthly hell.”

Throughout his book introduced above, McLaren emphasizes that "the secret message of Jesus isn’t primarily about ‘heaven after you die.’ It doesn’t give us an exit ramp or escape hatch from this world; rather it thrusts us back into the here and now so we can be part of God’s dreams for planet Earth coming true" (p. 183).

So surely, one of the true things that everyone needs to know now is that the kingdom of God is more about society than about individuals and is about now as well as the future.

TTT #6 The Main Characteristic of the Kingdom of God is Shalom

If God’s desire is the realization of the kingdom of God, as I contended in the fifth chapter of Thirty True Things Everyone Needs to Know Now (TTT), there are ample grounds for claiming that the main characteristic of that kingdom is shalom.

What is Shalom?

The Hebrew word shalom, as seen below (and read from right to left), is popularly used as a greeting meaning hello or goodbye—as is the similar term salaam in Arabic. This is an excellent greeting when it includes the desire for all that is encompassed in the original concept of shalom.  

Shalom is generally translated peace, and it certainly means that—but it also includes the idea of harmony, justice, and well-being for all.

The harmony of shalom is all-embracing: it means the harmony of human beings with God (what has popularly been called peace with God), harmony of all individuals and all groups (communities, ethnic groups, and nations) with each other (what is usually referred to as world peace), and harmony among all parts of creation (which we might call ecological peace).

Two of the greatest twentieth-century advocates of shalom were Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. It is noteworthy that they were both assassinated; Jesus, the Prince of Peace, was also executed. Peacemakers are not always popular.

Seekers of shalom often are not appreciated by those who profit from an inequitable status quo; there are always some who enjoy the fruits of injustice. But shalom always requires justice and is possible only where justice is a present reality.

Shalom and Justice

Shalom means societal harmony, and such harmony is possible only where there is social justice, which is quite different from the common idea of punitive justice.

Social justice envisions a society where all the hungry are fed, all the sick are cared for, and everyone is treated with respect. Further, social justice requires that exploitation and all forms of prejudice and discrimination based on race, gender, ethnicity, class, religion, or sexual orientation be eradicated.

Social justice recognizes the inherent equality and worth of all persons. If everyone really has equal value, then there is insufficient justice if some people have too much food to eat while others are starving.

There is also inadequate justice if some people have luxurious houses or multiple dwellings while many people are homeless and living on the streets, sleeping under cardboard boxes.

The lack of justice often leads to violence and at times even to war. For that reason, one of the most important statements of a Pope in the twentieth century was made by Pope Paul VI on New Year’s Day in 1972: “If you want peace, work for justice.”

Probably everyone who hears those words wants peace. But here’s the rub: do we want peace bad enough to work actively for justice?

Waging Peace / Working for Shalom

In the previous chapter, I emphasized that people are called on to work for and also to wait for the coming of the kingdom of God. The same can be said about shalom, the chief characteristic of that kingdom.

Just as the kingdom of God is never going to be completely realized on this earth, at least not by human efforts, neither are we humans ever going to be able to create a world completely characterized by shalom. But that shouldn’t keep us from working earnestly to that end.

In Chapter Six of TTT (see here), I give examples of people/groups who are seeking to wage peace and who are working for shalom—and some examples of how some real progress has been made. 

TTT #5 God’s Main Desire for the World is the Realization of the Kingdom of God

Assuming that God created the world in which we live (but certainly not assuming that such creation was accomplished in six days some six thousand years ago), what was God’s reason for creating this world and what is God’s main desire for us humans who inhabit it?

God’s Purpose

In keeping with what we know of God through Jesus Christ and the witness of the Holy Spirit, we can say that God created the world because of love and only because of love. 

And God lovingly created this world with the purpose of there being a realm of existence filled with persons who would love God and each other. That realm is known as the Kingdom of God.

Yes, there are problems with the use of the word “kingdom.” It can be criticized for being “sexist” or archaic. Perhaps some other term would be better—such as “realm” or the creative word “kindom.”

But since “kingdom” has been used for so long and is still used even in most newer translations of the Bible, I have decided to stay with it—and to focus on what it means as an expression of God’s purpose for creation.

God’s Kingdom

In many Christian circles, there has been a widespread belief that the kingdom of God is mainly something coming in the future.

But I have long liked the both/and approach of Georgia Harkness in her book Understanding the Kingdom of God, published in 1974, the year of her death:

The Kingdom of God is both present and future; both a growth and a final consummation by God. It is our task and our hope—our task which we face with the power of Christ; our hope that the last word will be spoken by God and that that last word will be victory. The Kingdom means both acceptance and action, a gift and a task. We work for it and we wait for it (pp. 61-62).

This is consistent with the emphasis of Walter Rauschenbusch (1861-1918), who placed strong emphasis on the idea that the kingdom of God is both here now and also coming in the future. “The kingdom is always but coming” is a (somewhat awkward) phrase he often used. 

Words of Walter Rauschenbusch

God’s Desire

If God’s main desire for creation is the realization of the kingdom of God, beginning now, it should be evident that God’s primary desire for us humans is not just the happiness of individuals (although that may be an important spinoff).

Much of Christianity over the centuries, perhaps especially in the United States, has been much too other-worldly and much too individualistic.

Other-worldly views of the Kingdom of God have not placed enough emphasis on life in this world and the responsibility of Christians to wrestle against sinful societal structures that harm so many people now.

Similarly, individualistic views of the kingdom of God means focusing on one’s “soul” being saved for eternal life in Heaven after death, with little concern for life in a community of love in the “here and now.”

If we understand, though, that God’s main desire is the realization of the kingdom of God, beginning now and culminating in the realm beyond earthly history, then we are freed from the errors of excessive other-worldliness and of individualism.

Thus, one thing that everyone needs to know, and act upon, now is that God’s main desire for the world is the realization of the kingdom of God—beginning in this world now.

Next, we need to consider the primary characteristic of the kingdom of God, which is shalom (peace), the main topic of the next chapter.

[Click here to read the entire fifth chapter of Thirty Things Everyone Needs to Know Now.]

Is Wright Right?

N.T. Wright is an eminent British New Testament scholar whom I have respected for many years. How God Became King: The Forgotten Story of the Gospels (2012) is one his many books. It is mainly about the central message of the four gospels in the New Testament.

What Are the Gospels About?

As Wright (b. 12/1/1948) explains in the Preface, “the story that the four evangelists tell is the story, as in my title, of ‘how God became king’.”

Early in the book, he notes that Protestant Christianity has assumed atonement and justification “to be at the heart of ‘the gospel.’ But,” he insists, the gospels—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—“appear to have almost nothing to say about those subjects” (p. 6).

Further, the classic Christian creeds say little about the bulk of the four gospels: They “were all about God becoming king, but the creeds are focused on Jesus being God” (p. 20).

So, again, Wright clearly asserts that “the whole point of the gospels is to tell the story of how God became king, on earth as in heaven” (p. 34).

I think that basically Wright is right in what he writes here. 

Where is the Kingdom of God?

Conservative/evangelical Christians have long emphasized that the Kingdom of God (KoG) will come into fruition at the end of the present world. It is seen primarily as being in Heaven following the end times.

Partly because the KoG is always called “kingdom of heaven” in Matthew’s gospel (beginning with Mt. 3:2), it has commonly been viewed as “other-worldly” and primarily about the future rather than the present.

However, there has been a growing recognition among liberal, moderate, and even left-wing evangelical Christians that the KoG is about the here and now as well as about “the sweet by and by.” This new understanding is based partly on the Lord’s Prayer for God’s will to be done “on earth as it is in heaven.”

As I wrote in my Feb. 28 blog article, through the years I have come to understand that the KoG is as much about, or even more about, God’s reign on earth now than after the “end of the world.”

Indeed, if God became King in and through Jesus’ death and resurrection, as Wright writes, then the KoG is here and the KoG is now.

This basic understanding is also found in the recent writings of popular Christian authors such as Brian McLaren as well as in the books of Brian Zahnd, such as Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God (2017), which I wrote about on Sept. 5 (see here). (Both McLaren and Zahnd hold Wright in high regard.)

Why Doesn’t It Look Like God is King?

The perplexing question, of course, is why, if God is King, doesn’t the world look more like what we would expect God’s Kingdom to look like? Please consider these brief suggestions:

1) There was no promise that the full realization of the KoG would come quickly—and considering the age of the universe or the history of Homo sapiens, what is a mere 2,000 years?

2) The KoG is being established, slowly, only by peaceful means and without coercion. Every use of coercion by Christians, and there have been a multitude of attempts to expand the KoG by force—has caused a setback.

3) There has been progress—although the struggle continues. As Wright acknowledges, “the story of Jesus” is seen in the New Testament “as the clash between the kingdom of God and the kingdoms of the world” (p. 138).

So we continue to pray, “Your Kingdom come”—while both working and waiting for that to happen.

Growing in the Faith

Is your religious faith, or lack thereof, the same now as it was, say, when you were twenty years old, or (for you mature adults) when you were forty years old? If not, how would you explain the difference? Is the difference due to growth or stagnation?

CONSIDERING A QUESTION

One of my church friends, who fairly recently became a Thinking Friend, is a young woman who had strong ties to Southern Baptists while growing up. Her family still has close ties with the Southern Baptist Convention: her sister, for example, is currently a student at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary here in Kansas City.

My friend, who is an activist and quite “liberal” in her social views, knows that I was a Southern Baptist for most of my life but that I now largely agree with her and share most of her “liberal” social views.

A few weeks ago my friend asked, “What caused you to change?”

My answer: “I would like to think it has been the result of growing in the faith.”

Indeed, I do think that—but I realize that there are others who knew me “back then” who would have a different assessment. They would likely explain my change as being due to abandoning the faith—at least the faith as was known and practiced by most Southern Baptists in the 1950s and by many SBs still.

CONSIDERING AREAS OF CHANGE/GROWTH

Two of the main areas in which I believe I have experienced change/growth in faith are (1) change from an exclusivistic view of God and God’s relationship to the people of the world to much more inclusivistic view, and (2) change from a predominantly other-worldly view of life to an equally dominant, if even not more prominent, this-worldly emphasis .

Perhaps reading J.B. Phillips’s Your God Is Too Small (1953), during my first year of college started me growing toward a view of God that was broader, more inclusive than what I had grown up thinking/believing.

Back in 2015, I ended my Oct. 15 blog article with these words:

Without question, Christianity has often held to an exclusivism that has been divisive and restrictive. But a deeper understanding moves one from exclusion to inclusion and from restriction to expansion. – Maturing in faith impels a person to move from the us/them mentality of childhood to including “others” as a part of an inclusive circle of “we.”

Then, consistent with the evangelicalism/revivalism that I was nurtured in and embraced well into my 30s, the overwhelmingly important mission of the Christian faith, I thought, was “saving souls” for life after death, for Heaven. That is an “other-worldly” emphasis that many of you readily recognize.

But gradually I came to understand that human life and well-being in this world is of great importance--and, in fact, the Kingdom of God is as much about, or even more about, God’s desired reign now rather than after the “end of the world.” 

CONSIDERING EXAMPLES

Some of the contemporary Christians I admire the most, and by whom I have been influenced, have a story similar to mine. They also moved from a narrow, fundamentalistic type of Christianity toward a broader, socially “liberal” position on many issues.

Three good examples are Jim Wallis, Philip Yancey, and Brian McLaren—three “mature adults” in their 60s. I must write more about these three: to this point in my blog articles, I have “labeled” Wallis twice, Yancey once (here on 10/5/16), and McLaren not even once.

First, though, I plan to write about the ten Christian speakers/writers whom I admire most—and who have helped nurture my growth in the faith.

What About Christian Radicalism?

In 1970 a young man, Arthur G. Gish (b. 1939), published a book titled The New Left and Christian Radicalism. It was a slim, but powerful, book.

A couple of years later, another young man (me, b. 1938) read and was greatly influenced by Gish’s book. I have written about it before: the “Amish beard” I have worn since 1972 was partly due to my reading it (see this 2010 blog article.)

ART GISH’S VIEW OF CHRISTIAN RADICALISM

Just this past November, I again made reference to Gish’s book (see here), saying that it was “one of the most influential books I read in the 1970s—or maybe have read in my lifetime.”

The first comment I received on the latter article was from Thinking Friend Phil Rhoads. He wrote, “I wish you could give us a synopsis of Gish's 1970 book referred to.”

Well, I can’t give a full synopsis in this brief article, but I have elsewhere posted a brief summary which you can open with this link. In this article, though, I wish to think more about the meaning and feasibility of “Christian Radicalism.”

Gish’s book has two parts: The first has two chapters: an analysis of the New Left that was active in the U.S. in the 1960s and an explanation of 16^th century Anabaptism.

The second part of Gish’s book has three chapters, each of which begins with a striking statement:

                To be a Christian is to be a radical (p. 79).

                To be a Christian is to be an extremist (p. 94).

                To be a Christian is to be a subversive (p. 113).

Radicalism is closely linked to seeking revolution. Thus, Gish’s fifth and last chapter is “A Theology for Revolution”—but it is quite clear that he advocates only non-violent revolution. He is a thoroughgoing pacifist.

I have often quoted Gish’s assertion that “violent revolution is occurring because nonviolent revolution is not occurring” (p. 139). 

REFLECTING ON GISH’S VIEW

But is revolution along the lines Gish envisions possible in the contemporary world? It certainly didn’t happen in the 1960s or 1970s. And while it was somewhat a different kind of revolution Bernie Sanders and his followers sought last year, the result of the presidential election was just the opposite.

Here are some conclusions I have come to in reflecting upon Gish’s book about Christian radicalism:

(1) It is much easier to have a vision of radical (revolutionary) social change when 30 years old than 40 or more years later (notwithstanding Bernie). Most revolutionaries (peaceful or violent) and radicals (whether Christian or not) have been relatively young.

Jesus began his ministry when 30. Che Guevara’s revolutionary activity started when he was 28. Martin Luther King, Jr., who was born 88 years ago today, first became actively involved in the civil rights movement when he was 26. And so it goes.

(2) The type of revolution brought about by radical Christians, as envisioned by Gish, will be long in coming. It is not going to be a matter of a few years; it will take decades or even centuries. Kent Annan is the author of a new book titled Slow Kingdom Coming, and he makes a valid point: God’s Kingdom is coming, but it is coming very slowly. 

(3) The vision of radical Christianity that Gish set forth is an ongoing challenge for all of us who seek to be genuine Christians. It is easy to be drawn into conforming to the surrounding culture. It is easy to grow complacent, lazy, and/or tired. Serious consideration of Gish’s book helps us, still, to see visions and dream dreams (cf. Joel 2:28).

2013—The Best Year in Human History!?

So, what do you think? Could it be that this year, which ends tomorrow, has been the best year in human history? That is what some are saying. Do you agree? Why or why not?

Earlier this month, Zack Beauchamp, a reporter/blogger for ThinkProgress.org, posted an engaging article on its website. The title of his thought-provoking piece is “5 Reasons Why 2013 Was the Best Year in Human History.”

Some of you may have seen Beauchamp’s article, for it has been shared on Facebook more than 20,000 times and referred to in numerous other places.

(A similar article was posted on the website of “The Spectator,” the British weekly conservative magazine that was first published in 1828—in print, not online! It is titled, “Why 2013 has been the best year in human history: The world’s still getting better – here’s the proof.”)

As I write about in my book “The Limits of Liberalism,” many liberals tend to be overly optimistic, and this may be true for Beauchamp. But he also makes some good points.

Briefly, these are the five reasons he gives for contending that this year has been the best in human history:

1)   Fewer people are dying young, and more are living longer.

2)   Fewer people suffer from extreme poverty, and the world is getting happier.

3)   War is becoming rarer and less deadly.

4)   Rates of murder and other violent crimes are in free-fall.

5)   There’s less racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination in the world.

While some of Beauchamp’s assertions may seem questionable at first blush, he gives considerable supporting evidence. Some of that support is subjective, but longevity rates and murder/violent crime statistics and the like are quite objective—and quite impressive.

Dr. Steven Pinker, a psychology professor at Harvard University, is one of the scholars Beauchamp cites in his article. Canadian Pinker (b. 1954), whom I was first introduced to by an atheist friend, is the author of the captivating book “The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined” (2011).

In May of this year, Pinker delivered a speech as one of the prestigious Gifford lectures at Edinburgh University. That talk had the same title as his book, but with a different subtitle: “A History of Violence and Humanity.”

Although Pinker’s lecture is over an hour long, it is well worth listening to—in spite of some questionable assumptions and conclusions.

Of course, there are those who disagree with Beauchamp (and Pinker). Just five days after posting Beauchamp’s article, ThinkProgress.org posted “9 Reasons Why 2013 Was Not the Best Year in Human History.”

Those nine reasons are all related to problems concerning climate change and environmental destruction—but they are primarily problems looming in the future, not ones experienced so much in 2013.

If Beauchamp, Pinker and those who agree with them are right, does that mean that the words quoted by MLK, Jr., and President Obama, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” are becoming more evident? Maybe.

Or could it mean that the seeds of the Kingdom of God sown by the followers of Jesus are growing and bearing visible fruit? Perhaps.

If you disagree with the main contention of Beauchamp’s article, let me then ask you this question, If 2013 wasn’t the best year in human history, what year would you suggest as being the best year for the people of the whole world?