Just the Right Word
Insights The Faculty Journal of Austin Seminary
FALL 2021
Green • Dickerson • Barreto Hernandez Garcia • Lee-Cornell • McNeill Pilarski • Corbitt • Dean • Wardlaw
Insights
The Faculty Journal of Austin Seminary Fall 2021
Volume 137
Number 1
Editor: William Greenway Editorial Board: Carolyn Helsel, Eric Wall and Randal Whittington The Faculty of Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary Margaret Aymer Gregory L. Cuéllar Bridgett Green William Greenway David H. Jensen David W. Johnson Bobbi Kaye Jones Carolyn B. Helsel Philip Browning Helsel Paul K. Hooker
Timothy D. Lincoln Jennifer L. Lord Suzie Park Cynthia L. Rigby Asante U. Todd Eric Wall Theodore J. Wardlaw David F. White Melissa Wiginton
Insights: The Faculty Journal of Austin Seminary
is published two times each year by Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary, 100 East 27th Street, Austin, TX 78705-5797. e-mail: wgreenway@austinseminary.edu Web site: austinseminary.edu Entered as non-profit class bulk mail at Austin, Texas, under Permit No. 2473. POSTMASTER: Address service requested. Send to Insights, 100 East 27th Street, Austin, TX 78705-5797. © Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary Printing runs are limited. Permission to copy articles from Insights: The Faculty Journal of Austin Seminary for educational purposes may be given by the editor upon receipt of a written request. The past six issues of Insights: The Faculty Journal of Austin Seminary are available on our website: AustinSeminary.edu/Insights. Some previous issues are available on microfilm through University Microfilms International, 300 North Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, MI 48106 (16 mm microfilm, 105 mm microfiche, and article copies are available). Insights is indexed in Religion Index One: Periodicals, Index to Book Reviews in Religion, Religion Indexes: RIO/RIT/IBRR 1975- on CD-ROM, Religious & Theological Abstracts, url:www.rtabstracts.org & email:admin@rtabstracts.org, and the ATA Religion Database on CD-ROM, published by the American Theological Library Association, 300 S. Wacker Dr., Suite 2100, Chicago, IL 60606-6701; telephone: 312-454-5100; e-mail: atla@atla.com; web site: www.atla.com; ISSN 10560548.
COVER: “If Words were Keys” by Laurie Barmore; ©2017, acrylic on gallery-wrapped canvas, 36” x 36”; courtesy of the artist. A detail of the painting can be found on page 3. See more of the artist's work at www.lauriebarmore.com
Contents 2 Introduction
Theodore J. Wardlaw
Just the Right Word 3
On "Kingdom" and "Kindom" The Promise and the Peril by Bridgett Green
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The Power of Words An Interview with Bridgett Green
17
Reflections Empty-Talk Masquerading as God Talk by Febbie C. Dickerson Bearing Witness by Eric D. Barreto
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Pastors’ Panel Jasiel Hernandez Garcia, Kathy Lee-Cornell, Alex Patchin McNeill
29 Faculty Books 2 Kings by Song-Mi Suzie Park, reviewed by Ahida Calderón Pilarski; Reasonable Faith for a Post-Secular Age: Open Christian Spirituality and Ethics by William Greenway, reviewed by Jeannie Corbitt; Joy: A Guide for Youth Ministry edited by David Franklin White and Sarah F. Farmer, reviewed by Kenda Creasy Dean
33 Christianity & Culture
Moving Forward and Stepping Through by Theodore J. Wardlaw
Introduction
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n this issue of Insights, our principal contributors are, in different ways, reflecting on the voices we hear in various theological and biblical themes. Professor Bridgett Green, assistant professor in New Testament here at Austin Seminary, has written a provocative article in which she reflects on two often-contested theological terms in our time. She explores from various angles the language of “kingdom” and the language of “kin-dom.” She appreciates traditional “kingdom” language, but also critiques its moral failures, the inherent patriarchy of real-world kingdoms, past and present, and the distortions that it can evoke. With respect to “kin-dom” language and its evocation of horizontal and familial ideals of inclusion and mutuality, Dr. Green draws appreciative links from the language of mujerista theology and the centrality of family and solidarity in Latinx cultures. She also acknowledges that both “kin-doms” and “kingdoms” were alive in the ears of Jesus’s first-century listeners. Both theological spaces offer promise and peril, she concludes, and each metaphor is used rightly only “if it is aligned with Jesus’s justiceoriented, equitable, and inclusive message.” Dr. Febbie C. Dickerson, associate professor of New Testament at American Baptist College, focuses on our “God-talk”—the language we use to present God and God’s work. Often such God-talk, she says, “is centered upon personal piety, but it may be even more helpful if it points toward the spirit of God that rests in communal spaces.” Think about that when next you encounter someone on the sidewalk begging for food and are simply tempted to utter such empty God-talk as “I’m praying for you.” Dr. Eric Barreto, the Weyerhaeuser Associate Professor of New Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary, dwells brilliantly upon the complexity of “bearing witness.” It, too, is more than “God-talk,” for it is not just an announcing of how we have come to understand God but also “a form of listening to the ways God has moved in, and acted among, and shaped communities prior to our witness.” He goes on to say that such witness “never precedes God’s activity or calling. Witness always means swimming in the wake of God’s expansive, always surprising grace.” It is, in the end, not an announcement of God’s activity, but rather a response to it. I am pleased to have been invited to write the culture column for this issue, and I reflect on a recent essay by New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, offering appreciation for his take on approaching religious belief as a leap of faith. Please join me in diving deeply into this issue of Insights! Theodore J. Wardlaw, President, Austin Seminary
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On "Kingdom" and "Kindom" The Promise and the Peril Bridgett Green
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any Christians, having prayed “thy kingdom come, thy will be done” for their entire lives, treasure “kingdom” language. Other Christians strongly shy away from language heavily associated with imperialism, colonialism, oppression, and dominance—all antithetical to the liberating message of the gospel. In the 1990s, Cuban-American theologian Ada María Isasi-Díaz responded to these concerns by authoring a ground-breaking essay, “Kin-dom of God: A Mujerista Proposal.”1 Kindom is intended to reflect a modern understanding of God’s activity in and through Christian communities, connoting inclusion, care, mutual support, solidarity, and unity in an ethic that calls us to treat one another as family. By the turn of the millennium, finding that Isasi-Díaz’s neologism best expressed their understanding of Jesus’s preaching and call to discipleship, many Christians began to speak of the “kindom of God.” In this essay I will make clear why “kingdom” is problematic, and I will com-
Bridgett Green is assistant professor of New Testament at Austin
Seminary where she has served on the faculty since 2019. Educated at Davidson College, Princeton Theological Seminary, and Vanderbilt University (MA and PhD), Green will begin a new role as vice president of publishing for Presbyterian Publishing Corporation and editorial director for Westminster John Knox Press in January 2022. 3
Just the Right Word mend “kindom.” However, I will also suggest “kindom” is not without its challenges, and I will argue that “kingdom” can also call Christians to participate in God’s transformative work of love and justice. I will explain how both metaphors contain promise and peril theologically and ecclesiastically.
The Peril of “Kingdom” and the Promise of “Kindom” As noted, Ada María Isasi-Díaz introduced “kin-dom” into the ecclesial lexicon through her work “Kin-dom of God: A Mujerista Proposal.” Her thinking about this concept began when Georgenne Wilson, a Franciscan nun, introduced her to the neologism in the 1970s.2 During this time, feminist movements were beginning to influence scholars, ministers, and practitioners. They all began to wrestle, IsasiDiaz says, “with the patriarchal and elitist implications of ‘kingdom of God.’”3 While the metaphor “kingdom of God” is familiar and comforting to many Christian communities, kingdom language can seem discordant with a gospel that brings “down the powerful from their thrones and lifts up the lowly” (Luke 1:52). A kingdom is a sociopolitical, hierarchal system where one individual or family is supreme ruler over a collective. In stark contrast, Jesus’s preaching is about healing and restoration of all aspects of life for humanity. His teaching and ministry were so disruptive that the State had him publicly executed (cf. Mark 15; Matthew 27; Luke 23; John 18-19). Despite Jesus’s disruptive preaching and ministry, “kingdom” still names an oppressive form of polity. Samuel’s warning to Israel about kings (and “strong man” equivalents in diverse polities) remains prescient: they will take your sons as soldiers, make your daughters into perfumers and domestic staff, seize the best lands for their own courtiers (cf. 1 Samuel 8:10–18). As a New Testament scholar, I join those who think that since the biblical Greek says “kingdom of God,” we should analyze, critique, and assess what impact the writers intended with their use of that term. Still, I think Isasi-Diaz makes a strong point when she asserts that the metaphor has been used widely primarily because it bolsters institutions’ work to preserve and exercise patriarchal power. She writes, “The fact that ‘kingdom of God’ has remained the governing metaphor for Jesus’s vision of a world order centered on justice and peace, speaks more to the interests of those who exercise power in the churches—institutionalized Christianity—than to the relevance it has in the lives of the common people, of the people of God.”4 Insofar as patriarchal talk of “God’s kingdom” has lent an aura of divine sanction to sexist and oppressive family, social, and political dynamics, it must be explicitly criticized in the name of the gospel. Such conviction led to widespread use of “kindom.” Because it is rooted in the spirit of Jesus’s teaching and his identification of his disciples as members of his family, “kindom of God” resonated with feminist interpreters in their analyses of Jesus’s struggle against all oppression, including misogyny and androcentricism. Isasi-Díaz also observes that Jesus lived and proclaimed the gospel in the context of a brutal and oppressive kingdom which was itself but a cog in a colonial empire. In Jesus’s context everyone had to relate and cope with kingdoms. In the modern context of the United States and other societies governed by democratic 4
Green practices, however, kingdom is an unrelatable and potentially misleading image to use when trying to share Jesus’s proclamation of God’s beloved community. As a result, while Isasi-Díaz acknowledges that “kingdom” was used by the Gospel writers and Jesus, and while she affirms its relevance for first-century Palestine, she still concludes that the “analogical thinking that guides the use of the gospels in our daily life is impeded or made less rich by the use of the ‘kingdom of God,’ a metaphor that, at best, has little relevancy in our twenty-first century lives.”5 For Isasi-Diaz, “kindom” better reflects Jesus’s familial understandings of the community of disciples.6 Jesus envisioned an extended family with God as father. He announces that all who hear the word of God and do it are his family (Luke 8:21; cf. Mark 3:31-35 and Matthew 12:46-50). Further, Jesus links discipleship to membership in the family of God, saying that any who have left their blood relatives for the sake of the good news will receive back hundredfold in relationships and resources now and in the coming age (Mark 10:29-30, Luke 18:29-30, and Matthew 19:29). Jesus creates and grounds his community of disciples in the principles of kinship—and kinship with God comes not through blood relations but through participation in the duties and responsibilities proclaimed in the Torah and by the Prophets. “Kindom” evokes these values in horizontal relationships among all God’s beloved children, calling disciple communities to live into familial ideals of inclusion, mutual support, and sharing of resources. Isasi-Díaz celebrates the “kindom” especially because it resonates with the centrality of family in Latinx cultures. She explains that the familial bond in Latinx cultures extends far beyond the nuclear family. “Hardly any Latina/o family,” explains Isasi-Díaz, “is without non-blood relatives who have the same duties and privileges as blood relatives.”7 For this reason, within Latinx cultures, extended kinship ties ground clarion calls for solidarity. Isasi-Díaz notes how communities would evoke being of the same blood to protest for peace among opposing parties in political and military struggles, for kinship trumps orders for violence or injustice.8 This is the expansive sense of family to which Bishop Oscar Romero appealed when he exhorted the soldiers in El Salvador in 1980 before his assassination. He reminded them of Jesus’s vision of kinship, reminded them that we are all children of God, that we are connected through an honor code that values all, that provides security and a foundation for each person to be able to extend themselves into the community without losing their identity and sense of self.9 Isasi-Díaz also lifts up the importance of compadrazgo and commadrazgo—of godparents, godchildren, and the parents of godchildren—as part of the process of extending kinship bonds. All these relationships are rooted in love and fidelity, and insofar as they are understood in terms of kinship, talk of the “kinship of God” is profoundly moving and faithful to the gospel of Jesus Christ. Mujerista theology is also careful to critique ideals of family rooted in sexism and homophobia. Isasi-Díaz defines "mujerista" as a self-identifying term among Latinas in the United States, “who are keenly aware of how sexism, ethnic prejudice, and economic oppression subjugate” them and “use mujerista theology to refer to the explanations of our faith and its role in our struggle for liberation.”10 5
Just the Right Word Therefore, she pointedly writes, Mujeristas do not endorse the patriarchal family with its authoritarian and hierarchal structures. Neither does it endorse understanding family as being only those constituted by heterosexual couples. As a matter of fact, familias not centered in a heterosexual couple are plentiful in our communities: familias headed by single mothers, by the mother and the grandmother or aunt, by a mother and a neighbor, and more recently by fathers and the grandmothers, aunts, or sister.11 Mujerista theology expands the paradigm of kinship so that it is an inclusive term that forgoes narrow blood-line or patriarchal definitions. In that way, it aligns with Jesus’s proclamation, for Jesus’s vision of his and our relationship to God as “father” is different from the hierarchical structure of paterfamilias, which sustained the imperial world order, oppression, and injustice, and created systems of exclusion to the benefit of elite families. While not explicitly designated as a metaphor for God’s activity in the scriptures, then, “kindom of God” language expresses “kingdom of God” values as established in the messages of the gospel. As Isasi-Díaz says, “Kin-dom of God as a metaphor includes the meaning that ‘kingdom’ had for Jesus and his community while neither endorsing nor sustaining the oppressive understandings that have been added to it throughout history.”12
The Peril of “Kindom” and the Promise of “Kingdom” It is telling, of course, that we need to caution against patriarchal understandings of kinship. Notably, in Greco-Roman society, extended household systems were integral to survival and success. Unlike the modern US construct of the ideal nuclear family, ancient domestic units included cousins, aunts, uncles, and grandparents as part of the family unit. The “family” may have extended beyond blood relatives to include multiple families, all united through a fictive kinship rooted in socioeconomic patron-client relationships which sometimes brought entire communities together under the protection and leadership of a patron. This patron system has features perilously inconsistent with Jesus’s vision. A patron system involves a transactional relationship between a patron and client. K.C. Hanson and Douglas Oakman explain, “Patrons are elite persons (male or female) who can provide benefits to others on a personal basis because of a combination of superior power, influence, reputation, position, and wealth.”13 Clients receive economic and social support: employment, loans, education, training, housing, and references. In exchange, clients gave support, votes, and the appearance of importance through tributes and entourages; additionally, they owed labor, debts, and taxes to their patron or familial lord. These familial as well as fictive kinships were bound into political hierarchies wherein some families dominated other families.14 In ancient Roman society, one’s survival depended upon maintaining strong relationships in the patronage system. At the pinnacle of all other families reigned the family of the Caesar, upon whom the Roman Senate regularly conferred the title pater patriae, father of the country.15 In this way kinship structures, both an6
Green cient and modern, are frequently patriarchal. Kindom language may also be interpreted as exclusionary. Many Christian believers associate being siblings in Christ or part of God’s family as a closed society that only includes other believers. The New Testament provides justification for this insular orientation. The Gospels note that Jesus claims as siblings those who hear and do the word of God and follow him. Paul’s epistles greet members of the house churches as siblings. The commandment to love one another as siblings who are children of God in 1 John refers only to other believers. This insular view of kindom also allows for abdication of commitment to people outside our Christian communities. An additional peril is the challenge of having and maintaining accountability within kinships. Loyalty, responsibility, mutual care, and support are voluntary actions within a family that are at times sustained by rigid bonds of legacy, culture, taboo, shame, and indebtedness; written rules do not prescribe proper conduct for life together. However, besides trust and faith, nothing guarantees unconditional respect, justice, equity, shared responsibility, or inclusion within the family unit. The lack of accountability increases when communities try to apply kinship language to not only non-blood relatives, but to those who seem different, unfamiliar, and even foreign. The ties that are supposed to bind—even the gospel message and Jesus’s teachings—sometimes are not strong enough to overcome prejudice, selfinterest, and self-preservation. Finally, many families do not resemble Jesus’s ideal for kinship. From the beginning, the scriptures are brutally realistic about families (the story of the very first family includes jealousy, lies, and murder of one brother by another). For many in our own contexts, family dynamics include disrespect, disloyalty, manipulation, and abuse. For some, the first thoughts that “kin” or “family” provoke are traumatic. Those are the perils of “kindom” language, but they are clearly contrary to what Jesus envisions when he uses the model of a loving, mutually supportive family as one of the manifestations of God’s kingdom. His ideal family is bound together by shared interests and value and not by blood. Headed by God as loving parent, this kinship participates in the covenantal love of God and of neighbor as taught by the Torah and the Prophets. This kinship values and cares for the most vulnerable in the community and also for strangers; it seeks justice, refuge, and healing for all and provides mutual support for living and enjoying life. In contrast to the concerns of the paterfamilias, Jesus’s family focuses upon those without power, privilege, and prestige. But when dealing with real people who know only hurtful family dynamics, we must remember that there is peril in using “kindom.” Close attention to context also alerts us to the promise of “kingdom.” The people of Israel suffered over the centuries from repeated defeat before imperial powers. By Jesus’s time, Israel had endured over 700 years of colonial subjugation—centuries of violence, turmoil, exile, and generational traumas. Colonization in the Hellenistic period under Greek and then Roman rule was exceptionally cruel and devastating. Almost all Galileans and Judeans were economically and politi7
Just the Right Word cally deprived through land confiscations and debilitating taxation. By Jesus’s day, 90 percent of the population lived at or below subsistence levels with even higher poverty rates in rural regions. In this context, Jesus’s message of an alternative kingdom, where the poor would receive good news and salvation from their current social death and where the rich would be sent away empty and the powerful dethroned (cf. Luke 1:52-53), brought hope and renewed faith. In this oppressive context, talk of a new kind of just kingdom would have been as perilous to proclaim as it was promising for first-century audiences to hear. Indeed, in Mark’s introduction of Jesus’s preaching ministry, the Gospel writer quotes him saying “the time has been fulfilled; the kingdom of God (basileia tou theou) is near” (1:14). A review of Jesus’s teaching, preaching, and work in the four Gospels reveals that the kingdom of God is a multifaceted space of God’s saving activity in and through Jesus that is continued in the life of discipleship. It is a spiritual, theological, political, economic, and social reality that brings good news to the poor, release to the captives, sight to the blind, and freedom to the oppressed (cf. Luke 4:18). It stands in contrast to a world order that dehumanizes, demoralizes, and denigrates people. In the particular context of the Gospels, the kingdom of God is an alternative to the oppression of the Roman Empire, which colonized, subjugated, and stripped nations of their resources, autonomy, and identities. As a theological space, the kingdom is for individual, moral transformation through encounters with Jesus that allow one to live in right relationships with God and creation. As sociopolitical space, God’s reign creates a society of liberation and dignity for all, facilitating an alternative to evil and oppressive political realms. Furthermore, God’s work through the kingdom affects the daily existence of personal lives, enabling and empowering economic, political, communal, and physical health and wellbeing. The kingdom of God affects personal lives as well through healing the sick, casting out demons, feeding the hungry, forgiving sins, and preaching the good news. Jesus preached the good news of the kingdom of God as God’s activity in the world and God’s call for humanity to participate in bringing the kingdom into fruition on earth as well as anticipation of it in the end times. Appropriating the term that described political life in the kingdoms of the empire, Jesus offers alternative meanings for what a kingdom can and should be. The “kingdom of God” sayings of Jesus construct a radically different reality from the kingdoms and empires of the first century.16 As Isasi-Díaz notes, “‘Kingdom of God’” refers to a world order that can be cogently understood by studying the parables, other forms of preaching Jesus used, and the miracles he worked, rather than by thinking of different actual kingdoms that Jesus and his followers knew from their history (that is, Egypt, Babylon, Persia, their own kingdom of Israel as an independent political unit, or the one they experienced daily, the Roman Empire).”17 “This alternative world order,” says Isasi-Díaz, “is imaged as human kinship with God, thus introducing the family unit as the frame of reference for understanding what ‘kingdom of God’ refers to or connotes.”18 On the one hand, then, the kingdom of God is an interplay of God’s activity and human participation to manifest a gospel of love, justice, reconciliation, and 8
Green healing. On the other hand, kingdom language includes the specter of humiliation, subordination, punishment, exile, colonialization, sickness, poverty, as well as social, political, economic, and spiritual death. From the teachings, preaching, and actions of Jesus and later his disciples and then the church, the kingdom of God represents a promise of transformation in relationships among humanity, throughout creation, and with God. Yet, two millennia later, real-world kingdoms overwhelmingly represent peril, pain, hurt, and destruction. Add to that the inherent patriarchy of “kingdom,” and the peril associated with “kingdom” language remains clear.
Kindom and Kingdom: Concluding Thoughts Despite their perils in conceptualizing God’s activity, “kindom” and “kingdom” both offer promise and responsibility in understanding, living, and proclaiming the gospel. The church benefits from mujerista theology’s academic scholarship, ethical orientation, and pastoral considerations. Ada María Isasi-Díaz was wise, in the face of near-exclusive use of “kingdom” with its piercing patriarchal overtones, to have retrieved the more naturally inclusive “kindom” metaphor, with its emphasis upon us all as equally valued members, beloved children, in the family of God. As we have seen, Jesus’s first-century listeners understood that both the “kindoms” and the “kingdoms” they knew were patriarchal and oppressive. They would have recognized Jesus’s clarion call to realize radically new visions of each: to struggle toward a new social order of inclusion, respect, mutual consideration, shared resources, love, and justice for all. As presented in the proclamation of Jesus, kindom and kingdom language give us an expansive view of who we are and how we are to live as believers in Christ. The perils and promise of both metaphors reflect both the sin and grace through which God calls us God’s own. Whichever metaphor we use, it is only used rightly if it is aligned with Jesus’s justice-oriented, equitable, and inclusive message; a gospel that frees the oppressed, provides good news to the poor, and releases the captive; that heals, feeds, clothes, and even resurrects; that holds us accountable to the functioning of society as citizens of our communities and citizens of heaven (Ephesians 2:19-22; Philippians 3:20). Regardless of word choice, we are called to pray, practice, and preach God’s kin(g)dom come and God’s will be done. v NOTES 1. Ada María Isasi-Díaz, “Kin-dom of God: A Mujerista Proposal,” in In Our Own Voices: Latino/a Renditions of Theology (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2010) Compare Ada María Isasi-Díaz, Mujerista Theology: A Theology for the Twentieth Century (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1996. 2. Isasi-Díaz, 179, fn. 32. 3. Isasi-Díaz, 179. 4. Isasi-Díaz, 182. 5. Isasi-Díaz, 172. 6. Since Isasí-Diaz’s essay, "kindom" has become the preferred spelling of the neologism. 7. Isasi-Díaz, 180. 8. Isasi-Díaz, 180.
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Just the Right Word 9. Isasi-Díaz, 181. 10. Ada María Isasi-Díaz, Mujerista Theology (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Press, 1996), 60. 11. Isasi-Díaz, 181-182. 12. Isasi-Díaz, 182-183. 13. Hanson and Oakman, Palestine in the Time of Jesus, (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2nd edition; 2008), 65. 14. Hanson and Oakman, 75. 15. Hanson and Oakman, 65. 16. Isasi-Díaz, 183. 17. Isasi-Díaz, 174-175. 18. Isasi-Díaz, 183-184.
Study Guide Questions 1. How would you describe God’s will for our societies using “kingdom” language? What are societies supposed to look like here on earth? What does Jesus teach about how Christians should participate in society? 2. Have you heard “kindom of God” used prior to reading this essay? In what ways does this descriptor of ideal Christian communities resonate with you theologically? In what ways does “kindom” not resonate? 3. Reflect on the Lord’s Prayer. As you consider God’s kingdom on earth as a spiritual space, how might its political connotations affect our understanding of the Lord’s prayer? What may Jesus be asking us to pray for when we say “thy kingdom come, thy will be done”? If we replace “kingdom” with “kindom,” how might that change the meaning of the prayer? 4. What does Christian discipleship look like when “kindom” is the primary metaphor for our participation in the proclamation of the gospel and in the mission of Jesus Christ? What does it look like when “kingdom” is the main metaphor? 5. What are ways in which Christians are called to live, in our daily lives and in participation through our churches, as the “kindom of God” and as the “kingdom of God”? 6. What do you think are the greatest perils of “kindom” language? Of “kingdom” language? How might we mitigate against these perils? 7. What do you think are the greatest strengths of “kingdom” language? Of “kindom” language? 10
Interview Insights Editor William Greenway Interviews
Bridgett Green
The Power of Words What made you choose “kingdom” and “kindom” as your topic for this essay? When you teach Greek New Testament, like I do, you see that fluidity comes with interpretation. Language shifts. Words mean one thing today, something different tomorrow, and they have different connotations for different communities. Many of us are familiar with “kingdom” from the Lord’s Prayer and scripture. But most of us have no experience of a tyrannical king or queen, so important elements of “kingdom” escape our notice. And then we have Ada María Isasi-Díaz’s “kindom.” For many in theology, biblical studies, and the church, “kindom” is preferred because it helps us see one another as sisters and brothers in Christ. But not all “kindoms” or families are ideal. Moreover, Jesus wasn’t just talking about familial relationships, he was talking about socio-political realities, and “kingdom” far more obviously than “kindom” is political language. So, while I applaud the use of “kindom,” I think “kingdom” is still relevant. For the reasons I unfold in the essay, I think it is vital that we think in terms of both “kindom” and “kingdom” if we are to meet the social and political challenges of our day wisely and effectively. What would have been the dominant understanding of “kindom” in Jesus’s time? Matthew and Luke incorporate genealogies, so bloodlines are important in Jesus’s day. But for Jesus, family extends beyond blood relations and includes shared values—this is the sense in which he asks rhetorically, Who are my brothers and sisters? Remember that Paul in Romans speaks of ways in which other peoples have been grafted into the family of Abraham, and in this sense, kinship was understood in relation to religion. In Jesus’s day, then, understanding of kinship is expansive. I should note that Jesus mainly speaks in terms of siblings, brothers and sisters, with God as our Father. What was new to me in reading your essay were the political connotations of “kindom” in Jesus’s day, so that when he’s speaking of God as Abba, Father, he’s speaking of family in ways that are radically different from what people were used to. Yes, the dominant understanding in the Roman period is of paterfamilias, the title 11
Just the Right Word the Roman senate gave to Caesars, which Augustus Caesar played up as part of his propaganda machine, portraying himself as the idealized father of all Roman subjects, including the colonized peoples of Palestine. There were layers of sub-paterfamlilias under him, from kings like Herod on down through a hierarchy of wealthy to poor families. Every family is economically dependent upon and indebted to the family above it for their very survival, and as you can imagine this often played out in highly abusive ways. One’s place in the world was really precarious, especially if you were poor—and in Jesus’s day 90% of the population lived at subsistence level or below. Jesus and his audience would have been quite aware of all this. So Jesus is really turning it on its head by calling us all together siblings, not under Caesar, but under God—this would have been clearly heard as a rhetoric of resistance. So Jesus’s “kindom” talk has radical political implications for the Roman empire and the kingdom of Herod. Today we tend to think “kindom” is private, about family, while “kingdom” refers to the political realm, but you explain that that’s a modern dichotomy that does not apply to Jesus, for in the first century “kingdom” and “kindom” are overlapping modalities, so Jesus’s “kindom” talk is not just transforming what people understood about families, it is simultaneously transforming what they think about “kingdoms.” Yes. The celebrated reigns of David and Solomon were a millennium before Jesus’s day. Most of the kingdoms the Jewish people had known since were the empires that conquered and exploited them over the intervening centuries—Babylon, Persia, Syria, Greece, Rome. They’re very aware of the dangers of kingdoms. If you look at I and II Kings, and I and II Chronicles, even Jewish kings more often than not did not obey God. In I Samuel, the people say, “We want a king,” and Samuel says, Are you sure about that? Because then your sons and daughters are no longer yours, your land and livestock will be confiscated, you will lose your independence and agency. And sure enough, by Jesus’s day, as I said, 90% of the people in Palestine are living at or below subsistence level. Even people’s bodies are not their own, for Rome could draft people into forced labor. Jesus’s good news is the proclamation of the kingdom of God. It is the antithesis of the oppressive kingdoms which are simultaneously hierarchical “kindom” systems that the people knew under Roman rule. In the kingdom of God, Jesus proclaims, it would be different. We would bring together our resources and uplift one another. And Jesus isn’t just preaching this message to the poor. Jesus’s crowd also includes rulers, religious leaders, and tax collectors. And he is saying to everyone that in the right kind of kingdom, in a godly kingdom, no one has to beg. And all this is in stark contrast to what is actually happening in Jesus’s day. The prophetic message that Jesus is offering is powerful. We tend to think about resistance to oppression in terms of armed resistance, but the power of rhetoric is deeper, and folks understood that what Jesus was preaching was deeper and longer lasting than what could be achieved by force—and that is part of the reason the violence of the cross did not obliterate the gospel. 12
Interview
We tend to think about resistance to oppression in terms of armed resistance, but the power of rhetoric is deeper, and folks understood that what Jesus was preaching was deeper and longer lasting than what could be achieved by force—and that is part of the reason the violence of the cross did not obliterate the gospel.
That means that when Jesus prayed “thy kingdom come, thy will be done” after seven hundred years of oppression, he is praying for a major disruption of the existing socio-political order, so his message is clearly anti-Caesar, antiHerod. This is what gets Jesus crucified. Thanks to you, I’m now going to hear the radicality of that “thy” in “thy kingdom come,” much more clearly. You also talk about the peril of “kindom.” I tried to talk about “kindom,” that is, about families, with sensitivity, because for a number of people there is trauma attached to family. In seminary we talk about how constantly referring to God as Father can be a problem because for some the experience of fathers has not been good, and that’s something we should be careful always to bear in mind. The same is true with “family” or “kin” or “kindom,” for some family dynamics are dysfunctional and hurtful. In addition, kinship language can be “inner circle” language, including only other Christians—and as I point out in the essay, there is some biblical precedence for that interpretation. But that gives us too narrow a view of who are our kin, who are our brothers and sisters, and that plays into why today people can get a bad taste in their mouths about Christians. Also, we can use kinship language as an excuse not to be political. Today, kinship language is often focused upon what happens in my family, but not what goes on in the world, and that’s why I’m also a huge proponent of “kingship” language, because you cannot deny its political dimension. So when we say the Lord’s Prayer and “thy kingdom come” we have to ask, What does that mean socially and politi13
Just the Right Word cally in our context right now? Are we envisioning how praying that prayer calls for disrupting elements of our society that are oppressive? We have to ask ourselves, if we strove to align our society with the teaching of Jesus and the Prophets, what would that really look like? I do not want to conflate being partisan and being political, we should not align God’s will with the politics of one party or another. But kingdom language is about being involved on a societal and political level and not just on an ecclesial level; it calls us to see all people as beloved children of God and to be sure that informs how we organize ourselves socially and politically. I’ve heard “kindom” versus “kingdom” argued stridently from both sides— sometimes people get really enraged about one term or the other. I was wondering if you were making a move here that is not just about this debate, but about all sorts of debates that end up focusing upon one term or another. When you unfold the full meaning of these terms you unveil an understanding whereby people who disagree may find a large area of shared concern. That has implications not just for this issue, but for how we engage in these sorts of debates generally. I am aware of the strident viewpoints on either side. The reason I am a proponent of both terms is because I do think they both have their strengths. “Kingdom” language is understood to be sexist and hierarchical. Well, that is certainly true, it is sexist and hierarchical, and those problems must be frankly and explicitly named, especially as they had, have, and will continue to manifest in the life of the church. But “kingdom” is also helpful because it compels us to think about our call to help transform society in a way “kinship” does not. My family isn’t necessarily called to be this huge force in transforming society, so kinship can be insufficient in this regard, and kingdom better makes us think about what the kingdom of God proclaimed by Jesus calls us to do at a societal and even global level. What we lose if we do not use “kingdom” language at all is this sense of responsibility to transform society. In general, I think that we do a disservice when we think that one word or phrase best describes what God is doing. And as long as we explicitly keep track of both strengths and weaknesses, I think that there is definitely space for both kindom and kingdom language. You speak of Ada María Isasi-Díaz, a Cuban American theologian who to a large degree is the mother of mujerista theology and did a lot to popularize “kindom.” But it is not clear precisely how her identity plays out in a pivotal way that makes a difference for this discussion. And today, when there’s so much emphasis on the role identity plays in our scholarship and preaching, it’s impossible not to notice that you, a Black woman New Testament scholar dealing with language, do not address these issues in a way that is specifically informed by your identity. I’m wondering if that is intentional, and if we are meant to make something of that? I did not write this from a womanist perspective, or use a particular African Ameri14
Interview can hermeneutic. The issues of class, politics, economics, family, and their relation to “kindom” and “kingdom” are not rooted in my gender or ethnicity in any particular way that would not also be true for other people. People can lose track of the argument because they’re so focused on the personal, identifying elements. With regard to the issues in this essay, I try to be attentive to how the key dynamics play out in all the communities of which I’m a part. This definitely includes the Black community, it definitely includes communities of women, and it includes being part of a city that is slightly below 50% white. Carl Rogers said that what is most personal is most universal. So my personal story still speaks to a more universal conversation, and this universal conversation speaks to my personal story—all without me explicitly saying that I speak as a Black woman. I hope what people see is a budding scholar who is deeply interested in the message of the biblical texts, who is shaped and formed by the life of all the churches that she has been a part of, and who recognizes that her discipleship is not just one that happens within the context of a congregation, but in my lived experiences outside the walls of the church. This is what I think some of the conversation needs to attend to. And so it’s from that perspective that I write. I’m very grateful for the particularity through which Isasi-Díaz articulates her mujerista theology, but I also know that her description of family isn’t exclusively Latinx. Now, let me say that to be a Black American in the United States today is political in and of itself in so many ways, and in many ways I am compelled to engage society as a Black woman, but at the same time that burden shouldn’t be exclusively mine. Wanting to have justice for everyone should not just be a burden for those denied justice and privileges, rather it should also be a burden for those who are privileged and have the freedom and power to engage in the struggle for justice. I don’t feel like I have to write explicitly as an African American woman when dealing with a topic like “kindom and kingdom” because the issues and most especially the responsibilities at hand in this discussion are not specifically indexed to my identity. In this discussion we are speaking to problems we all have a responsibility to engage, to issues the prophets and the gospel of Jesus Christ call upon all of us to engage. Bridgett, thank you for a wonderful essay. You’ve taken a debate which can be fraught in the church, and through good and patient and passionate scholarship and reading of the New Testament, you have found a way to let us see a place for common ground which is profoundly prophetic and profoundly consistent with the gospel of Jesus Christ. Let me close by asking, what do you hope people will take away from this essay? First, I hope those who have never heard “kindom” language will be introduced to it, will come to understand its strengths and its weaknesses, that they will sit with “kindom” and consider it seriously as a term to include in their sermons, Bible studies, and their lives. I hope people will do deep dives into “kindom” and come to understand it as fully as possible. I hope for the same with “kingdom” language. 15
Just the Right Word Some of us are so far removed from what “kingdom” meant in Jesus’s time that we can be deceived as to its true meaning. We should be sure we understand why first century Christians would want to ask for God’s kingdom to come and what would that look like. We should also understand the peril of “kingdom,” realize that it may reinforce sexist and hierarchical dynamics in both society and in the church, and take steps to acknowledge and mitigate its sexist, hierarchical dimensions. My hope is that further study and conversation about these terms and how they apply in our lives today would help people to think in new ways about God’s activity and God’s call to us. These theoretical questions that we’re asking and reflecting upon have real life implications. It’s a true gift and privilege to be able to have these types of conversation, and at the same time it is vital that we recognize the actions the gospel of Jesus Christ calls us to in our familial, social, and political lives. v
Insights, The Podcast To listen to the full conversation with Professor Bridgett Green, tune into our Insights Podcast at
AustinSeminary.edu/Insightspodcast or wherever you get your podcasts. 16
Reflections
Empty-Talk Masquerading as God-Talk Febbie C. Dickerson
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n Proverbs 18:21 (NRVS), Solomon writes “Death and life are in the power of the tongue and those who love it will eat its fruits.” The writer speaks to the power of language and its creative force. That which we speak has the propensity to shape our thinking and fuel the ways in which we comport ourselves among others. Christians take rightful pride in making sure that our language and our conversations are life-giving. This often comes in the form of our God-talk, the language we use to present God, God’s work, our faith, or what we hope God will do on our behalf. Yet, if we are not careful, our God-talk can be unhelpful; rather than comforting, it becomes platitudinous or meaningless, empty-talk. The Proverbs are a collection of ethical short sayings designed to stir our thoughts as well as influence how we live in community with others. The context of the Proverbs is that of a young man receiving instructions from his parents on how to build and live his life. Chapters 1-9 include instructions to trust God (Proverbs 1:7; 3:5-6; 8:35) and to gain in wisdom (3:13; 4:5-6; 11: 9:10), as well as a warning that the young man keep his father’s commandments and not forsake his mother’s teachings (6:20-21). Chapters 10-22 demonstrate how the young man is to live responsibly in his family and community. He should work (12:11, 24; 13:4; 14:23; 16:3; 20:13; 21:5), honor and take care of his family (11:29; 15:27; 19:26; 20:20; 22:6; 28:24), and seek to have a good name (22:1). Proverbs 18:21, concerning the power of the tongue, suggests the importance of proper language in the context of family and community.
Febbie C. Dickerson is the associate dean of academics and associ-
ate professor of New Testament at American Baptist College in Nashville. Her research interest includes the Gospel of Luke and the depiction of women in Luke-Acts. She has essays in several recent books and is the author of Luke, Widows, Judges, and Stereotypes: Womanist Readings of Scripture (Fortress, 2019). 17
Just the Right Word While the Proverbs provide a guidepost for our behavior in community, the sayings also demonstrate how the foundation for our life in community with others can begin in our familiar dwelling places. Ideally, our home bases are where we develop rich notions of our lives in God, images of God, the expression of our faith, and our understanding of the Bible and theology. These foundational aspects can be the cornerstones of our meaning-full God-talk. The ways in which we see God determines how we express our convictions about God. How we live into our own faith impacts how we express and deploy our faith to others. Our view of God also determines how we speak to others about God. In The God We Never Knew: Beyond Dogmatic Religion to a More Authentic Contemporary Faith, Marcus Borg asserts that the predominant view of God among Christians is that of a supreme, distant deity, continually watching us from afar.1 Borg suggests that this common Christian understanding of the deity is of a God who is king, lord, judge, and lawgiver, all powerful and all knowing. In the light of these descriptions, God is seen as a taskmaster ready to punish followers for the smallest infraction. If our God-talk is developed from this perspective, it is easy to see how our tongues, even if well intentioned, may be full of death rather than life. For Christians with these views of God, God-talk stressing obedience to a wrathful or judging God becomes a way to demonstrate faith. It appears to be biblical and to reflect theological concepts such as “faith without works is dead.” Such God-talk is focused upon keeping us in line with the “rules’’ of God. It provokes a spirit of fear wherein we are constantly being careful not to run afoul of God, the almighty judge and law-giver. For those whose vision of God is shaped by this God-talk, God is the taskmaster waiting to correct humanity for their sins. Concerned about the way this vision of God draws upon a portion of the biblical witness, New Testament scholar and theologian Rudolph Bultmann argued that one’s God-talk is anemic if we only speak of God as an authoritarian entity beyond our physical existence. As Christian theology traditionally acknowledges, the transcendent God who is so far away is at the same time the immanent God who is so close. Bultmann suggests that our contemplations and understandings of God are developed in the crucible of our lived experiences, which may yield disappointments and traumas rather than in our oftentimes romanticized local congregations and communities. While there are myriad ways to encounter God, Bultmann argues that it is most often at the depths of despair that we truly experience God.2 Thus, God-talk is deployed to address an existential crisis. As long as life is moving according to our expectations—there is employment, the bills are paid, and groceries are in the pantry and refrigerator—our God-talk is limited or even non-existent. God-talk, however, matters for the encouragement of others. Unfortunately, it often becomes a platitude or meaningless words to the hearer because we don’t take the time to share our presence. The immediate reaction is to offer an answer or solution. Thus, the “I’ll be praying for you” when one encounters a crisis or the “I’m blessed” when asked how are you doing often rings hollow (even if sincerely intended). Since death and life is in the power of the tongue, our God-talk should 18
Dickerson be meaningful. Our families, local congregations, and other communal spaces will benefit from God-talk that is full of meaning rather than full of religious platitudes. Meaningful God-talk provides truthfulness for the hearer rather than religious correctness. The Proverbs, then, provide readers with guidance not only on how to talk about God, but also insight about the ways in which our God-talk is related to our actions with both family and community members. Therefore, meaningful God-talk should inspire us to be and to act in tangible ways with our families and friends. This helps us to recognize the need for God because of human limitations while calling us to be active in communal life. If our God-talk will be the life that is in the power of the tongue, it must both recognize human limitation and acknowledge existential conditions of life. Our God-talk and expressions of faith should embrace all of life, both the light and dark places. The writer admonishes, “Do not boast about tomorrow, for you do not know what a day may bring (27:1). Things happen in life that are beyond our control. When we encounter someone in crisis, our God-talk should be a reminder of the presence and handiwork of God. Sometimes, however, God-talk can sound like a subtle critique. This critique seems to be encouragement, but it suggests, for example, that the listener does not have enough faith. Thus, Proverbs tells us “The one who has knowledge uses words with restraint, and whoever has understanding is even tempered” (17:27). Providing life to another through careful words and comfort can be a healthy and life-giving response. Oftentimes God-talk is centered upon personal piety, but it may be even more helpful if it points persons toward the spirit of God that rests in communal spaces. The fellowship of believers, commonly understood as koinonia, typically has the meaning of being in association with another.3 What I am advocating is deploying meaningful God-talk that pushes us to be more participatory in other experiences by sharing our presence and tangible resources. We may need to do more than tell someone we are praying for them. Since a “friend loves at all times, and a brother is born for a time of adversity,” it may be prudent to stop and be in the moment to offer the prayer that is needed. It is in community that we are called to offer our presence (17:17). Giving our time to another is the essence of being present with another. Moreover, it is also in community where we find some of the best opportunities for solutions to our crises. “Out in the open, wisdom calls aloud, she raises her voice in the public square (1:20).” The brainstorming abilities of the collective can make the work light that moves us toward resolutions. Therefore, being present in community is the act of one person sharpening another, just as iron sharpens iron (27:17). Finally, our God-talk, if it is to be life in our tongues, should simply push us to be more responsive to human needs. If you have the resources and the ability, do not hold back your aid to another (3:27). “Do not say to your neighbor, ‘Come back tomorrow and I will give it to you’ when you already have it with you" (3:28). To do so, however, requires that we are ready to acknowledge diverse life and religious experiences. We then become focused on the movement of God rather than the 19
Just the Right Word individual. It is at this point that we are ready to be the hands and feet of God so that our words, our God-talk, is the fruit of life that emanates from our tongues. v NOTES 1. Marcus Borg, The God We Never Knew: Beyond Dogmatic Religion to a More Authentic Contemporary Faith (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), 58-59. 2. A counter point of view comes from a friend who is a biologist. She argues that in her work and study of animals, plants, or humanity and their environments, she encounters God daily. 3. Linda Peacore, “Church as Community,” Fuller Theological Seminary, September 29, 2010.
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Bearing Witness Eric D. Barreto
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he pressure was immense. I had to say something. I had to stand for something. Without my testimony, they might never hear the good news. In the churches where I grew up, we were regularly exhorted to “witness.” That is, I was taught how important it was for me to tell others about what Jesus had done for me. We were given paths through Paul’s letter to the Romans to convince others of their need for Jesus. Jesus’s command to make disciples was as clear an instruction as possible. And were we to avoid this act of discipleship, not only was our faithfulness at stake, so, too, was the possibility of the eternal life of others. Someone else’s salvation stood in the balance. That was my experience, at least. For others, the notion of bearing witness might draw different and various kinds of images and experiences. Of the streetcorner preacher berating those who walk by, confronting strangers with ugly assumptions about their sinfulness. Of the televangelist pleading for donations made at the edge of hope and despair. Of the youth minister at summer camp declaring the brokenness of teenagers already wrestling with confidence and doubt. For many of us, bearing witness might feel more like the vestiges of communities we have left behind or the practices of other communities we do not want to claim for ourselves. Bearing witness can thus sometimes feel incredibly burdensome, heavy in a way that replaces God’s grace with the demands of this leader or that one. Bearing witness can feel like an obligation none can really carry. Bearing witness can make us think that those who do not follow Jesus in this particular way
Eric D. Barreto is Weyerhaeuser Associate Professor of New Testa-
ment at Princeton Theological Seminary. An ordained Baptist minister, he wrote Ethnic Negotiations: The Function of Race and Ethnicity in Acts 16 (Mohr Siebeck, 2010), co-authored Exploring the Bible (Fortress Press, 2016), and edited Reading Theologically (Fortress Press, 2014). Find Dr. Barreto here: ericbarreto.com and @ericbarreto 21
Just the Right Word are in danger of rejecting God’s grace, that our friends and family and even strangers whose stories we do not know must not be in touch with the same Jesus who has saved me from my sins. In such accounts, “bearing witness” is not so much discipleship or faithfulness as it is an imposition upon others, a demand that God’s grace meet our pre-determined parameters. Witness in these approaches starts with me, with us, with what I and we must do and with what I and we know to be certain. And so I wonder if we have gotten “bearing witness” all wrong in too many churches. Some forms of witness misapprehend the God who calls us to be witnesses and misshapes the character of God’s grace. But the answer cannot be simply to drop the idea of bearing witness. In some churches bearing witness can seem simply out of bounds—something that churches over there do, but not us! In such churches the ways others have failed in bearing witness in a faithful way can be used as an excuse to ignore the call to make disciples and to witness to others about who God has been and what God has done. To abandon any hope to bear witness faithfully also gets witness all wrong. Instead, I would like to imagine witness as an invitation to see the ways the wildness and wideness of God’s grace spills over into our lives. “Bearing witness,” you see, is not just an announcing with our lips of how we have come to understand God but also a form of listening to the ways God has moved in and acted among and shaped communities prior to our witness. That is, witness does not bring God’s presence into places previously devoid of the divine. No, our witness can notice, narrate, even interpret how God has moved ahead of us and in that way help us glimpse anew God’s expansive, disruptive, and transformative grace. In the Acts of the Apostles—a rollicking tale of the ways God calls witnesses to the very edges of the ancient world’s cartographical imagination—we can catch a glimpse of a renewed imagination around witness and what kind of witness God might be calling followers of Jesus to bear today.
Acts of Witness For many readers of Acts, Jesus’s exhortation to the disciples that they would “be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth” (1:8) serves as a table of contents for the book. The disciples begin to share the good news in Jerusalem at Pentecost and then proceed to share that good news in ever-widening circles. By the time the narrative closes, Paul is all the way in Rome. I wonder if too many of us have read this call to be witnesses as a call simply to announce what God has done for me. We read Acts and see Peter standing at Pentecost, Stephen narrating Israel’s history before a crowd that would turn on him, Paul preaching at synagogues throughout the Mediterranean world, and we imagine that witness is primarily an act of declaration, speaking, announcing. But notice what actually happens in the narratives of Acts and in the sermons that proliferate in this story. First, notice how regularly and consistently the disciples point to what God has done both in the past and in the present. Witness starts with announcing not 22
Barreto what they know, not what they have concluded but what God has done. Think of Peter’s proclamation at Pentecost that notes how God manifests the proliferation of “… my Spirit upon all flesh…” (2:17a). I am struck, too, that in Peter’s witness, he preaches even beyond his immediate understanding. The same Peter who bears witness to God’s Spirit falling upon “all flesh” will have his imagination broadened by the Spirit’s disruptive presence when he meets Cornelius in Acts 10. Second, notice how regularly and consistently the disciples point to the surprising ways God has acted, to the ways God has been faithful to God’s promises even as we sometimes have to wonder how God’s promises and actions cohere. The long and complex narrative of the encounter between Cornelius and Peter culminates in Peter’s proclamation, “I truly understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears [God] and does what is right is acceptable to [God]” (10:34). The same Peter who testified that the Spirit would fall upon “all flesh” had to draw near to Cornelius in order to really wrap his mind around that reality. God further surprises Peter, his companions, and Cornelius’ household when the Spirit interrupts Peter’s witness and falls upon all who had gathered (see 10:44!). God, it turns out, is in the business of surprising us, disrupting our assumptions about belonging. When God says “all flesh,” it turns out God actually and truly means “all flesh.” Bearing witness sometimes means being caught up in God’s surprising ways and making sense of them on the fly. Thus, witness might call us to name the disrupted assumptions about God and the shape of God’s grace we have carried with us. Third, notice how regularly and consistently God’s activity happens in the background of the narrative. Think for instance of the surprising presence of Jesus followers in Rome when we reach the end of Acts with Paul in chains in the capital of the Empire. Who told them about Jesus? Who bore witness to God’s grace to them and helped form these communities of faith? Acts does not narrate those events. It is as if that witness happens in the background static that is God’s surprising activity. A similar wondering emerges for me in the fabulous narrative of the Ethiopian eunuch’s encounter with Philip in 8:26–40. Philip encounters this educated and rich person whose identities—religious, ethnic, gendered—are complex. I want to turn our attention to the close of the story when after their baptism, the Ethiopian eunuch sees Philip no more and “goes on [their] way rejoicing” (8:39). Philip had been swept away to another place by the Spirit. What did the Ethiopian eunuch do next? Presumably, they returned home singing of the goodness of God’s grace all the way back to a place folks in the world around the Mediterranean might have accounted as “the ends of the earth.” This raises a number of questions. What if the Ethiopian eunuch delivers the good news to the ends of the earth and thus fulfills the command Jesus gives his disciples in 1:8? What if the Ethiopian eunuch has fulfilled Jesus’s call, a call they did not receive from Jesus himself but from the Spirit that empowered both the disciples at Pentecost as well as the Ethiopian eunuch’s long return to “the ends of the earth?” And what if they did so, what if they bore witness to the goodness of God, and the church had no idea 23
Just the Right Word how far and how wide the news had spread? That is, imagine if Acts had continued beyond the twenty-eighth chapter to record a Jesus follower coming to Ethiopia, expecting to be the first to bring the story of Jesus only to discover that the Spirit had moved far ahead because an unnamed Ethiopian eunuch had already witnessed at the ends of the earth. As it turns out, “bearing witness” needs to account for God’s propensity to make places we count as nowhere into God’s own home and to make peoples we tend to dismiss as outsiders or even interlopers into God’s own dwelling place. Witness never precedes God’s activity or calling. Witness always means swimming in the wake of God’s expansive, always surprising grace.
Centering Witness on God’s Activity In recent days, I have been thinking of witness alongside the tragic succession of the deadly responses of police to Black women and men. Black communities have been sharing for a long time the dehumanizing and too often deadly encounters with police that shaped how children are taught and how communities struggle. These are old, old stories. And yet so many others did not believe the witness of Black communities until smartphones proliferated and such encounters could be captured digitally. For too many communities, even the testimony of multiple communities members was deemed insufficient. Too many—some naïve, some knowing and complicit—demanded proof, proof that has finally been coming, bearing grotesque but incontrovertible video witness to the truth of the witness of Black communities. Witness is an act of trust in a God who sends us to see and tell of all the things God has been doing all along. It is also an act of trust that God will be present in places I have never been and among peoples not my own. It is an act of trust that the stories our neighbors tell are true, reliable, transformative. “Bearing witness,” it turns out, is not a unilateral declaration of an idea, concept, or belief. Witness is not just a series of words or propositions we share with others. Witness is not the sharing of abstract, generic truths to those we assume are ignorant of them. Witness can only happen after my “ears to hear” have been listening carefully for the living Word among the words of erstwhile strangers, when my “eyes to see” have been seeing God’s grace at work among all peoples, and when my body is in diverse spaces. Only then will I notice how God has already acted, how God has already spoken. Only then will I be able faithfully to bear witness. That is, our witness is fundamentally a response to God’s gracious activity, to God’s prophetic call to justice and mercy, to the manifestation of God’s resurrection power unto the ends of the earth. v
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Pastors’ Panel We asked religious leaders for their reflections on ministry in light of this issue’s lead article. Here is what they told us. T HE PA NE L The Reverend Jasiel Hernandez Garcia (MDiv’18) is associate pastor for mission and engagement at Central Presbyterian Church in Atlanta, Georgia. The Reverend Kathy Lee-Cornell (MDiv’16) is a pastor serving in Grace Presbytery. The Reverend Alex Patchin McNeill is executive director of More Light Presbyterians.
Has there been a time in your ministry when the power of words has seemed especially salient? Jasiel Hernandez Garcia: During these past fourteen months of the pandemic, it has become important to define what we mean when we pray for healing. Unlike cure, healing does not make the daring promise of reversing or eliminating that which compromises the stability of the body, mind, or spirit. The power of using the word “healing” in our intercessions for one another resides in its ability to include the things we hope for, but without forgetting that there is not an expected result. When we pray for healing, we are reminded that there is a multitude of ways for God to make us whole once again. Kathy Lee-Cornell: People look to faith leaders and the church to speak most often when they themselves are at a loss for words. Whether it is in the face of deep personal loss or in the aftermath of a global event or disaster, my position comes with the unique responsibility to acknowledge the pain of our hearts and the suffering in this world. In doing this, publicly acknowledging the frailty of the human condition, I believe there is an invitation to gather in community, where our presence is often more powerful than our words, and we make the journey together towards our collective healing through the power of God’s tender love and abiding presence. Alex Patchin McNeill: In my ministry as executive director at More Light Presbyterians, which for over forty-five years has worked to ensure the visibility, participation, and celebration of LGBTQIA+ people in the PC(USA), I have seen firsthand that words have the power to give language to the shape of our identities, to affirm (or deny) the love of God, and the Belovedness of all God’s creation. Every day I 25
Just the Right Word hear from people who are just discovering or claiming language to name who they are and who they feel God is calling them to be. I also hear from those whose pastors and faith leaders used words to strengthen (or sever) their connection to God and to their communities. I counsel many pastors who worry about whether they have the right words, concerned they don’t know all the terminology for those in the LGBTQIA+ community to be able to articulate their support. Some confess they have chosen silence instead, thinking it’s better to be quiet than say the wrong thing. However I believe silence, in its lack of words, creates a space for the harmful words of the world to take root and take over. This ministry has convinced me that our words have the power to create inclusion or to sow disillusion and exclusion. Are there ways in which you have needed to use words or language differently in various ministerial contexts? Lee-Cornell: I am often engaged in some version of code-switching as I interact with various individuals, groups, and communities within and outside of the congregation. Code-switching is defined as “the process of shifting from one linguistic code (a language or dialect) to another, depending on the social context or conversational setting.” Particularly around issues of social justice, I encounter individuals situated at varying levels of knowledge and understanding of topics such as migrant and refugee resettlement, LGBTQIA rights, and systemic racism and poverty. Unfortunately, many people these days are only learning about complex issues from media soundbites or clickbait headlines. By code switching among different contexts, I hope that I am better able to meet people wherever they are and to accompany them as they increase their level of understanding, empathy, and curiosity to dig deeper into the issues that are relevant to those whose lives and circumstances may be wholly different than our own, but whose fullness of life matters to God, and so it ought to matter to us as well. McNeill: I stand in a lot of church fellowship halls offering definitions of words of identities, clarifying the syntax of a sentence of affirmation, and building the case for why LGBTQIA+ inclusion is urgently needed in our faith communities as well as the incredible life-giving impact it can have within them. I choose words carefully there so that others might shed scales of fear to be able to see and believe. I participate in a lot of conversations with my LGBTQIA+ siblings, planning worship and liturgy in joyful affirmation of God’s diversity of creation, attentive to the movement of the Spirit to further expand the bounds of inclusion, aware of Christ’s call to the work of justice. Our language shifts from justifying the presence of LGBTQIA+ people in the life of the church to centering the experience and wisdom LGBTQIA+ people bring to our understandings of faith and our life with God.
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Pastors’ Panel Was there a time in your ministry when you were frustrated by an inability to find the right word? Hernandez Garcia: In my current ministry setting we have not been able to agree on what to call the group in charge of taking the lead on addressing issues related to social justice. Finding the right words for what we call this particular group often feels like an impossible task. At first, the name Dismantling Racism Task Force was selected. However, upon further reflection we realized that the word dismantling implies that there is an end to racism and injustice, and we concluded that systems of oppression are not easily terminated. We then switched to Anti-racism Task Force. While this change affirmed our main objective, it also demonstrated a sense of combativeness and negativity. Therefore, in an effort to emphasize the good that comes out of this group’s work, we are now considering the name Task Force for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion as a more comprehensive solution to this dilemma. Is there a particular word choice that you have seen as especially important as you have shaped the character of your ministry? McNeill: One of the defining words of my ministry is "abundance," characterized by the belief that God is abundant—bigger and more expansive than we could imagine. God is bigger than all the words we’ve ever used to describe who God is. As people created in the image of God, we, too, are abundant, bigger, and more expansive than we’ve often had the words to describe. Faith in an abundant God is a powerful antidote to the myth of the scarcity of God’s love for a select few and a reminder of the unforeseen possibilities that arise when we faithfully follow the call of the Holy Spirit. A belief in an expansive, abundant God gave me the courage to understand my gender transition ten years ago as an act of faith. It has given so many faith communities the guidance to make visible and tangible inclusion a cornerstone of their ministries. Belief in an abundant God gives us new language to be reformed in our understanding of our identities, our ministries, and our calling as God’s people. Hernandez Garcia: The phrase “people experiencing homelessness” has shaped how I minister to those who lack housing opportunities. Before serving in my current ministry setting, I was not aware of the complexities of using the word “homeless” to describe people who are struggling to find a permanent housing solution. It was only through conversations with those who are facing this social issue and through engaging more fully with housing policies that I realized how homelessness is not a final state of being, but a description of an experience that is caused by many factors—many of which originate from social, financial, and labor injustices. Referring to someone as homeless makes their lack of housing their defining feature. If we say that a person is experiencing homelessness, their story, their interests, and their hopes are then recognized and lifted up. Only then do we see them not as a problem to be solved, but as a beloved neighbor we can work alongside to make a lasting difference. 27
Just the Right Word Lee-Cornell: My calling to ministry has always been centered around the word "mission." I long for churches to remember what it means to be a missional church. If you stop by any congregation and ask them about how they are involved in mission, you will likely hear a list of service projects, like supporting a food pantry, tutoring with the neighboring public school, and trips taken to visit global partners and support their efforts to build sustainable communities. I have certainly been complicit in guiding people of faith to see their involvement in mission as being sent out into the world to serve the poor with love and compassion. There is certainly something of value in doing so, but I still wonder if what God desires for us is not simply to be sent out but to be open to the sending of God’s Spirit into our own lives and communities so that we might be transformed into more sustainable communities. What buildings, programs, budget items, staff and yes, traditions, might we release out of our grips to openly receive the transformation needed in our lives and in our churches to where mission was no longer our act of charity but our worship? v
Please support the publication of Insights by making a gift online: AustinSeminary.edu/donate or by returning your gift in the enclosed envelope. 28
Faculty Books Recent publications by Austin Seminary professors 2 Kings (Wisdom Commentary, vol. 12), written by Song-Mi Suzie Park, Associate Professor of Old Testament, Austin Seminary. Collegeville,
century church, society, and world. Dr. Park contributed to the Wisdom Commentary series with her study of 2 Kings. This book in the Old Testament/ Hebrew Bible provides an account of ancient Israel’s divided monarchy period from the 8th to the 6th century B.C.E. The stories in 2 Kings are focused initially on the activity of the prophet Elisha in the Northern Kingdom of Israel (2 Kings 1-13), and then, it transitions to the accounts related to the last monarchs of the Southern Kingdom of Judah and into the Babylonian Exile. Dr. Park structures her commentary based on the twenty-five chapters of 2 Kings. Her commentary is done chapter by chapter, except on a few occasions where the content required longer sections. One important feature of the Wisdom Commentary series is that it provides an enhanced diversity of interpretation by including brief essays of “Contributing Voices” remarking upon various passages that reflect a diversity of perspectives in the interpretation of select passages. Park’s volume includes contributing voices on topics such as “Girls and Sexual Abuse in the Ancient Near East” by Carolyn Pressler (44), “The Powerful Israelite Slave Girl” by Julie Parker (63), “Jezebel as the Other” by Judith McKinlay (113), “The Naming of the Queen Mother” by Ginny Brewer-Boydston (159-60), “A Postcolonial Reading of Empire in 2 Kings” by Gregory Cuéllar (211), and “The Forgotten Female Prophets of the Hebrew Bible” by Wilda Gafney (290-91). In addition to her careful and thorough analysis of 2 Kings, Dr. Park offers two outstanding contributions to the Wisdom Commentary series. The first includes the insights emerging out of her social location as a 1.5 generation Korean American female scholar of the Hebrew Bible. She says that this upbringing has made her
MN: Liturgical Press, 2019; 408 pages; $39.95. Reviewed by Ahida Calderón Pilarski, Professor of Old Testament/Hebrew Bible and Chair of the Theology Department at Saint Anselm College (Manchester, New Hampshire).
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iblical commentaries are a significant research genre in biblical studies, offering a verse-by-verse (or sectional) analysis of individual books of the Bible. In the last fifty years, this genre experienced significant developments in format and focus;1 however, these have been mostly to provide information about “the world behind” (i.e., literary and historical background) and “the world of” (i.e., original context of) the biblical text. The Wisdom Commentary (WC) series is a groundbreaking project that is incorporating traditional as well as new methods and approaches to address also “the world in front of the text”2 (i.e., new ways the text proves meaningful in the light of our modern context) while remaining faithful “to the ancient text and its earliest audiences.”3 The WC is a multi-volume series (58 volumes) providing the best of current feminist biblical scholarship to aid preachers, teachers, scholars, students, and all readers “in their advancement toward God’s vision of dignity, equality, and justice for all” (https://litpress.org/ wisdom-commentary-series). It adopts a feminist lens as it engages the Bible in its totality, tackling issues in the text related to gender, sexual identity, class, race, ethnicity, religion, physical ability, etc., so that troubling texts do not perpetuate unjust practices, mindsets, and interpretations. Because of this considered focus, the Wisdom Commentary series is a vital contribution for the 21st-
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Faculty Books Reasonable Faith for a PostSecular Age: Open Christian Spirituality and Ethics, written by William Greenway, Professor of Philosophical Theology, Austin Seminary. Cascade Books, 2020; 284
“especially sensitive to issues pertaining to women and to those whom society regards as unimportant and marginal” (xlv). This particular lens, combined with her expertise in the ancient Near Eastern world (especially regarding gendered language of warfare), brings to light numerous and diverse cases of power imbalances (not just regarding gender) that have gone unnoticed in other commentaries. Second, Dr. Park offers a thesis regarding 2 Kings as a whole. This is not only an innovation in the genre of biblical commentaries, but it is an important contribution to the field of biblical studies. Dr. Park convincingly demonstrates that while the main narrative of 2 Kings “proclaims the masculinity and prowess of YHWH, it also simultaneously deconstructs and upends this assertion at the conclusion of the book when it describes Israel and Judah’s destruction by foreign nations” (xlii-xliii). Park’s commentary on 2 Kings is an important new resource for scholars, pastors, and lay readers. Park and the fifteen “Contributing Voices” offer cogent, fresh, and salient readings of 2 Kings, and make an invaluable contribution to 21st-century biblical scholarship.
pages; $28 (paper).
Reviewed by Jeannie Corbitt, The Monie Pastoral Resident at Preston Hollow Presbyterian Church, Dallas, Texas.
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illiam Greenway’s remarkable ability to lift the veil— to perceptively recognize and powerfully name obscured realities—is on full display in his most recent book, Reasonable Faith for a Post-Secular Age. Here is an example. In the face of widespread suspicion of religion as a mechanism of oppression and a common understanding of different faith traditions as incommensurable, even opposing, entities, Greenway names a simple truth: “no historic faith tradition says despise your neighbors, kick the downtrodden, exploit the weak, think and act only for you and yours, abuse creation” (19). It is a stunning observation. All the more stunning, Greenway would agree, for its obviousness. Here is a clear, farreaching ethical consensus: we ought not exploit the weak. Here is a rich resource for the global uniting of people of faith against the many unjust structures that promote or implicitly require exploiting the poor. Yet the consensus remains, to so many, obscured. When studying religious traditions, even people of faith are far more likely to dissect differences among the traditions than learn to name, let alone act upon, this profound moral consensus. Though this assertion is a sidecomment to his overall purposes, in what it achieves we see in microcosm the overall
NOTES 1. See Elmer Martens, “Commentary Changes in Format and Focus: An Overview,” in The Genre of Biblical Commentary: Essays in Honor of John E. Hartley on the Occasion of His 75th Birthday (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2015), 54-80. 2. For an explanation of the connection between feminist inquiry and biblical interpretation, see Ahida E. Pilarski, “The Past and Future of Feminist Biblical Hermeneutics,” BTB 41 (2011): 16-23. 3. Barbara Reid, “Editor’s Introduction,” in Song-Mi Suzie Park, 2 Kings; Wisdom Commentary, vol. 12 (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2019), xix.
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Faculty Books trajectory of Greenway’s book: Unveil a reality manifestly present yet strangely hidden. Interrogate and explicate the how and why of its hiddenness (i.e. ask, who benefits from obscuring a global faith consensus about not exploiting the weak? How has the consensus been so effectively obscured?). Elucidate how the reality, once unveiled, offers us a significant and hopeful path forward in these fraught times. The central reality, manifestly present yet strangely hidden, that Greenway masterfully unveils in his book is that of agape. Adapting Emmanuel Levinas, Greenway defines agape as the reality of having been seized in and by love for others. Agape is not “from us,” that is, “is not a product of any decision on our part,” though we might “harden our hearts” to agape (17). Rather, agape is God, “insofar as God is love” (18). In light of agape, the moral consensus alluded to above is revealed to be no happy coincidence. The shared ethical concerns of the historic faith traditions (along with those of spiritually sensitive people from all walks of life and belief, including secular) are shared precisely because they are born out of the same experience of being seized by passionate concern for others. For people of faith, my brief description risks painting agape as “God Lite,” so it is important to say that Greenway is not at all interested in reducing God to an experience. He writes that God of course “may be more than agape … may be personal,” for example, “may be triune” (18). His interest is rather in naming as real (rather than a matter of mere conditioning or taste) our responses of horror at another’s suffering and our responses of joy at another’s delight. For in awakening to the realness of agape, humanity can begin to acknowledge and act out of our remarkable spiritual and ethical common ground. In doing so, we can start to heal the “devastating fracture … between the predominant social and political forces shaping global civilization, on the one hand, and globally shared affirmation of what is good and loving, on the other” (20). A truly beautiful aspect of this book is that it is morally integrated in the theory
it advances and its treatment of others as the theory is advanced. Greenway’s belief in a love that seizes all people for all others is evident in his treatment of the scholars he engages—Stanley Hauerwas, Richard Rorty, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Jeffery Stout, Charles Taylor, and Bernard Williams. Greenway is sensitive to contexts and careful never to converse with caricatures. Most beautifully of all, he sees the secular scholars whose postmodern deconstructionism undermines the very ethical concerns they so clearly hold, as the “surprised sheep” of Matthew 25 (205). That is, he recognizes them as people who have lived in surrender to having been seized by concern for others, even if they could not name the reality that seized them. They have fed the hungry, welcomed the stranger, visited the sick; unknowingly, they have done so to God. Thus, of some of the very scholars others would label as his intellectual opponents, Greenway says, theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven. In this way, the book is not at all “ammunition” for people of faith to “beat” opponents or even to “prove” God. Even as he challenges secular thinkers to recognize assumed materialism and outright rejection of faith as a subjective and sectarian position, Greenway also challenges people of faith to hold their own convictions differently. For awakening to agape reminds us that our faith, much more than being about personal salvation or even right doctrine, is about living in surrender to having been seized by concern for others. This is as hopeful as it is hard. As Greenway reminds us, “insofar as people since the creation of the world have not hardened their hearts … in times of wonder and times of horror ... but have … been seized in and by love for every creature of every kind, God’s eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have indeed been understood and seen through all God has made” (193).
Reviews continued on page 32 31
Faculty Books Joy: A Guide for Youth Ministry, edited by David Franklin White, The C. Ellis and Nancy Gribble Nelson Professor of Christian Education and Professor of Methodist Studies, Austin Seminary, and Sarah F. Farmer. Wesley's Foundery Books, 2020;
are never enough volunteers for the lockin. And yet most youth ministers will say they love this work. They do it for joy. Joy: A Guide for Youth Ministry, edited by David F. White and Sarah F. Farmer, offers a provocative explanation for this phenomenon—and as a result it belongs on every pastor’s shelf. This readable, practical volume is the most comprehensive leadership resource to emerge from the Yale Center for Faith and Culture’s “Joy and Adolescent Faith and Flourishing Project,” a multi-year, multi-scholar research effort that was part of Miroslav Volf’s massive Joy and the Good Life Project (2015-2018). Under the direction of Harold “Skip” Masdack, longtime pastor and founding director of the Youth Ministry Institute at Yale Divinity School, scores of scholars, countless youth ministers, and an impressive array of theological luminaries lent their energy to answering two simple—and maddeningly slippery—questions: “What enhances joy for young people?" and "What blocks it?” (Full disclosure: like White and Farmer, I was among the multitudes enlisted to answer those questions.) If we do youth ministry for joy, this book is our indispensable guide. Most chapters address specific practices or experiences that allow teenagers to experience divine joy: self-emptying, beauty, friendship, testimony, worship, forgiveness, to name a few. Like a prism, the book’s multiple authors bend the light on joy and youth ministry in many directions, and work from various theological starting points. Like most multiple-author books, there’s a certain jolt in moving from one pair of authors to the next—each chapter is written by a scholar/ practitioner team. But for me, the diversity of theological explanations of joy was one of the book’s chief delights. Diverse as they are, the authors are unanimous in their insistence that humans
284 pages; $24.99 (paper).
Reviewed by Kenda Creasy Dean, The Mary D. Synnott Professor of Youth, Church, and Culture, Princeton Theological Seminary.
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sk pastors and parents: Why youth ministry? and you’ll get a range of answers, most of them focused on what teenagers need: they need religious instruction and divine encounters, safe passage into adulthood, healthy activities, wholesome friends, caring adults. Youth need to learn to serve others, to care for those who suffer or are unlovely; they need to know they belong in the church, and learn skills that help them participate and maybe even lead in it. Teenagers need a community that will counter the daily humiliations of being an adolescent, a place where they know they are loved and enough. They need to hear that they belong to a bigger story—to God’s story—and that God has a unique and important role for them to play in it. No youth leader would argue these benefits—but few would say these are the reasons they do youth ministry. Ask youth leaders why they spend countless (usually unpaid) hours hanging out with other people’s kids, and most will say: “Because I love it.” For the uninitiated, it’s a perplexing answer: what about the late hours, laughable wages, abysmal ROI’s? What about the tragic struggles of teenagers: the tears and rage earned by rejection, abandonment, invisibility? What about the lack of accountability— you can’t make youth participate, you can’t punish them for forgetting their homework, you can’t schedule opposite their countless other priorities, and there
Continued on page 36 32
Christianity & Culture
Moving Forward and Stepping Through Theodore J. Wardlaw
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oss Douthat is a columnist for The New York Times. Born in 1979—the same year in which I received my last diploma—he is the youngest regular op-ed writer at the Times, and went there from The Atlantic where, in his mere thirties, he had been a senior editor. Douthat is a devout Catholic of generally the conservative variety, and is certainly, as well, a political conservative. Sometimes his editorials irritate me with their prickliness, but thankfully not all of them, so I continue to read his columns and am frequently quite grateful for them. What I am particularly grateful for is his unapologetic and thoughtful Christian piety—something you don’t get every day from a New Haven-raised Magna Cum Laude-holding Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard. Douthat is a faithful believer, a faithful Christian, and unabashedly so.
Theodore J. Wardlaw has been president and professor of homi-
letics at Austin Seminary since 2002. Educated at Presbyterian College, Union Presbyterian Seminary, and Yale University, he previously served as senior pastor of Central Presbyterian Church in Atlanta as well as parishes in New York, Texas, and Tennessee. He is a regular contributor to the Presbyterian Outlook and The Christian Century. 33
Christianity & Culture Recently he wrote the lead editorial in the Sunday New York Times—an essay titled “How to Think Your Way Into Religious Belief.” It is deeply philosophical, so I had to read it several times in order to grasp its central points. His intended audience was the many highly educated people “who hover on the doorway of a church or synagogue … [wanting] to pass on a clear ethical inheritance to their children. They find certain God-haunted writers interesting and inspiring, and the biblical cadences of the civil rights era more moving than secular defenses of equality or liberty.”1 “Yet,” he goes on, “they struggle to … reach a state where the supernatural parts become believable and the grace to accept the impossible is bestowed.” He acknowledges that this struggle encourages some of these seekers to simply “treat piety as an act of the will undertaken in defiance of the reasoning faculties, and see what happens next.” However successful such a project may be for some, Douthat encourages another way to approach religious belief—as a leap of faith. “Instead of starting by praying or practicing in defiance of the intellect, you could start by questioning the assumption that it’s really so difficult, so impossible, to credit ideas of God and accounts of supernatural happenings.” In this disenchanted world in which we live—a world shaped by Galileo, Copernicus, Darwin, and Einstein—Douthat encourages us to consider nonetheless that the world was created with intent, that we are fashioned in the image of the world’s creator, and that this connection to a supernatural plane enables us to experience higher-order things ranging, says Douthat, “from baseline feelings of oneness and universal love, to strange happenings at the threshold of death, to encounters with beings that human beings might label (gods and demons, ghosts and faeries) but never fully understand.” Then, he says, consider the possibility that all of this is still true! After all, he suggests, our minds have something in common with whatever mind designed the universe, “and a better reason to think of ourselves as made in a divine image than the medievals ever knew.” There is much more to absorb in this essay, but I am most intrigued with a profound invitation—a sort of “altar call”—that Douthat issues in his last paragraph. “If you are standing uncertainly on the threshold of whatever faith tradition you feel closest to, you don’t have to heed the inner voice insisting that it’s necessarily more reasonable and sensible and modern to take a step backward. You can recognize instead that reality is probably not as materialism describes it, and take up the obligation of a serious human being preparing for life and death alike—to move forward, to step through.” I think on these words in this extraordinary COVID time in which we are still living. We don’t know what the shape of our church’s faith will look like on the other side of all of this. Many are predicting that, after the ravages of this disease and its attendant terrors that have swept across the whole planet undermining nations and systems, it will become quickly apparent that scores of former practitioners of that faith will in fact do the “reasonable and sensible and modern” thing and just take a step backward—out of any engagement with the walk of faith. Maybe these 34
Wardlaw prognosticators are right. But I am betting my life that they aren’t. Just this past summer, my wife, Kay, and I vacationed in two special places for us—first, the North Carolina mountains, and then, for a week, our favorite coastal beach near Charleston. Then, on our trip back to Austin, we stopped for a couple of days in Natchez, Mississippi, where Kay spent most of her growing-up years. Natchez is, in many ways, a charming little city. It once had more millionaires per capita than anywhere else in America, and its wealth was built in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries around cotton and on the backs of enslaved peoples. Today, it is a tourist town, and people come from all over the world to tour its antebellum mansions. We enjoyed walking around and seeing so many of the sights that mattered to us—particularly the beautiful old Georgian-style historic Presbyterian church where, one July afternoon in 1978, we were married. That church sat near another old sacred space—the oldest Jewish synagogue in the South—and just next to it sat the oldest surviving Episcopal church building in Mississippi. From one angle of vision, the place dripped with elegance. But the larger story of Natchez, just like the larger stories of Charleston, Savannah, New Orleans, Memphis, and so many other cities (Newark, Chicago, Cleveland, Tulsa)—maybe every city in the world, ultimately—is more complicated. There was one downtown street on which we walked where there was a building in ruins. Perhaps there had been a fire, or perhaps the building had sheltered in some way the strategies and narratives of hatred. We didn’t know. But we noticed, on a large piece of plywood stretching across much of the width of where that building had sat, a multi-colored likeness of Martin Luther King Jr. His face was alive with shades of black, brown, orange, blue, green, pink, and red. And next to his face were printed these words, King’s words: “I have decided to stick to love … Hate is too great a burden to bear.” Is it finally true that the “reasonable, sensible, and modern thing” is to retreat from commitment to faith, to “take a step back” into a cultured and comfortable agnosticism that seeks respite from the burdens of believing? Perhaps, in the minds of many, yes. But I know students at the Seminary, and challenging faculty and dedicated staff and committed congregations who would answer, no. They are believers, perhaps by choice but perhaps also because the Spirit leaves them no other choice. They are willing to make—indeed they make every day—that leap of faith of which Douthat speaks. They know the reasonable arguments to the contrary, arguments arrayed each evening in whatever news source you watch: the lingering curse of COVID, the overheated hatred of racists and white supremacists, the rough and tumble of the economy, the precarious nature of national and global politics. They know how those arguments amount to a case for backing up on believing and backing down from commitment. And still they leap, trusting that all of this is not mere random chance, a roller-coaster ride to absurdity. They are betting their lives on the faith that God is in this somewhere, holding open the door to a future as unimaginable as it is incongruous with reason, a future that holds both life and death alike in its sway. They keep that door in view with the eyes of faith, and they 35
Christianity & Culture are moving forward and stepping through.
v
NOTE 1. Ross Douthat, “How to Think Your Way Into Religious Belief” (New York Times, Sunday, August 15, 2021, p.4-5 Sunday Review; all subsequent unattributed quotes in this essay appeared in the same editorial.
Faculty Books Continued from page 32 are made for joy, and that youth ministry must reclaim it both for the sake of young people and for the sake of the church. White and Farmer are intentional about highlighting biblical notions of joy, in which joy is the gift of a gracious Creator, and is not something youth can conjure up or “happens” to them by chance. Calling joy a “root metaphor” for youth ministry, White argues that reclaiming joy for youth ministry is crucial in light of modern secularism’s “disenchanted” worldview, which has “evacuated the world of such things as mystery, wonder, grace, and transcendence” (3). This worldview puts joy at risk, since it denies the possibility of ekstasis—an experience of transcendence, of being pulled beyond ourselves into something so expansive and so mysterious than we cannot comprehend it. We can only receive it with awe and thanksgiving. The million dollar question, of course, is why root youth ministry in joy at a time when so many young people are suffering so tremendously? This question is not lost on the authors of this book, who all
admit that suffering is joy’s necessary companion. To be fair, thousands of years of Judeo-Christian thinking have not resolved the problem of human suffering either, and neither does this book, but it gave me a vocabulary that helps me avoid “cheap” conversations about joy with young people, whose immediate pain makes joy seem completely out-of-reach. Interestingly, the book’s first pages illustrate the twin paths of joy and suffering. A grieving youth minister, reeling over the recent death of his father, is chaperoning some ebullient middle high youth at a dance, who pull him into their circle in spite of himself. The youth don’t deny his suffering; they embrace it, and him, in their joyful dancing. Such is the nature of divine joy. God’s three persons are united in a perichoretic dance that embraces suffering but refuses to let suffering have the final word. Instead— suffering and all—we are pulled into the very heart of God, where there’s a dance in progress. Thanks be to God. v
Coming in the Spring 2022 Issue: Praying in Anxious Times in an issue honoring the retirement of
Professor David W. Johnson 36
AUSTIN PRESBYTERIAN
THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY Theodore J. Wardlaw, President
Board of Trustees Keatan A. King, Chair
James C. Allison Lee Ardell Janice L. Bryant (MDiv’01,DMin’11) Kelley Cooper Cameron Katherine B. Cummings (MDiv’05) Thomas Christian Currie James A. DeMent (MDiv’17) Jill Duffield (DMin’13) Britta Martin Dukes (MDiv’05) Peg Falls-Corbitt Jackson Farrow Jr. Beth Blanton Flowers, M.D. Stephen Giles Jesús Juan González (MDiv’92) William Greenway Cyril Hollingsworth Ora Houston
John A. Kennedy Steve LeBlanc Sue B. McCoy Matthew Miller (MDiv’03) W. David Pardue Denice Nance Pierce (MATS’11) Mark B. Ramsey Stephen J. Rhoades Sharon Risher (MDiv’07) Conrad M. Rocha Lana Russell John L. Van Osdall Michael Waschevski (DMin’03) Teresa Welborn Elizabeth C. Williams Michael G. Wright
Trustees Emeriti
Lyndon V. Olson Jr., B.W. Sonny Payne, Max Sherman, Anne Vickery Stevenson
Fall 2021
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