Pauline Theology Revisited: An Exegesis of Hope and Salvation in Romans 8:18-25

April 26, 2011

Romans 8:18-25 (NRSV)

¹⁸ I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us. ¹⁹ For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God; ²⁰ for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope ²¹ that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. ²² We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labour pains until now; ²³ and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies. ²⁴ For in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? ²⁵ But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.

Introduction

  Since Martin Luther, no scripture has been more fundamental for the Protestant doctrine of justification than the book of Romans.  Before questioning whether this in itself is justifiable, we must first ask whether these doctrines have done justice to Paul’s own theology.  More than any other epistle in the Pauline corpus, the seemingly generic tone of Romans lends itself to abstract theologizing, far removed from the context in which it was written.  Many Christian commentators have marveled at the complexity of Paul’s rhetorical structure in the development of the themes of grace and the Law, salvation, justification, and the opposition between the “flesh” and the “spirit” with which Paul struggles, and have come to view the letter as a summary of Paul’s theology rather than a letter addressing a concrete situation.

Following Luther, many Protestants have gleaned from Romans a doctrine of justification by faith alone (sola fide), as opposed to the works that prevail in James’ “epistle of straw.”  They have located salvation in the redemption from our bodies and this fallen creation, and a retreat from the corrupted flesh to the pure spirit.  Most strikingly, all of these notions have developed into a doctrine of personal salvation through the individual’s faith relationship to God which ignores the relationship of the individual believer to the community, to humanity at large, and to the rest of creation.

The inadequacy of such readings of Paul’s theology becomes readily evident when our attention is directed at one of the most climactic passages in the epistle: 8:18-25.  By examining this pericope in its social, historical and scriptural context, it can become a new hermeneutical lens for the epistle as a whole, as well as a vital corrective to many of the misguided and harmful trends in Pauline theology.  In it, Paul challenges us to expand our individualistic hope for personal spiritual fulfillment to an all-embracing hope for the redemption of our very bodies and the liberation of the entire earth from the futility of suffering and decay.  During this time of unprecedented devastation, degradation, and destruction of life in all forms, these challenging yet hopeful words of Paul perhaps resound even more poignantly than in his own time.

Literary & Redaction Criticism

Authorship

There is nearly unanimous agreement within serious biblical scholarship that St. Paul is the genuine author of the Epistle to the Romans. The only remaining question concerning its authorship and redaction is the precise role played by Paul’s secretary, Tertius, in producing the final written form of the letter (cf Rom. 16:22).  Cranfield identifies the three possible solutions to this question:

” (i) that he wrote the letter in long-hand to Paul’s dictation, or (ii) that he took it down in short-hand as Paul dictated it          and then subsequently wrote it out in long-hand, or (iii) that, acting as a much more independent secretary, he himself        composed the letter in accordance with Paul’s instructions.”

Most commentators more or less agree with Cranfield’s subsequent conclusion that, of these, (i) and (ii) are the most plausible given the painstakingly deliberate complexity of Paul’s rhetorical construction, and, by implication, the weight of the letter’s importance to Paul at the time he wrote it.

Genre and Purpose

Romans was most likely written sometime during the mid 50’s C.E. (Jerome Murphy-O’Connor narrows more precisely to the winter of 55-56), while Paul was still in Corinth. At the conclusion of Paul’s mission in Asia and Greece, he was preparing to return to the church in Jerusalem with the collection he had taken up—a rather risky endeavor considering the mounting tension throughout Paul’s missionary work between the Pauline cohort and the so-called “Judaizers.”

Due to the increasing hostility of the group of Pharisaic Jews (to whom Paul had formerly belonged) toward the now Gentile-infused Jesus movement and the ultimate frustration of his recent missionary attempts, Paul was ready to open a new chapter and a blank slate. Returning to Jerusalem with the collection was his only lingering obligation before he could begin a new mission to Spain.  The adversity attested to throughout his correspondence with the churches in Galatia and Corinth make it easy to understand why Paul was so ready to move on. This also explains the thematic and theological continuity between these letters and Romans: since Paul was beginning his blank slate by eliciting the support of a church he had neither founded nor visited, and thus was implicitly unaware of its specific situation and problems, Paul laid the groundwork by expounding the very problems that plagued his most recent missionary efforts.

Since his aim was to make such an impression as to win the support and assistance of the Roman church with his planned mission to Spain, Paul makes full use of his extensive philosophical, scriptural, and rhetorical education (both Jewish and Greek) to create his strong argument that God both desires the salvation of all creation and has enacted the very plan that will make make it happen.

Because he does not know what or by whom the Roman Christians have been taught, and since the house churches in Rome contained both Jews and Gentiles, he frames this argument in an all-encompassing narrative whereby God redeems the whole of creation. Though the narrative itself draws deeply from the Jewish scripture tradition, Paul also uses the Greek philosophical genre of diatribe—a dialogue written to both censure and persuade its audience.

Form Criticism

After an epistolary introduction and four chapters of bringing the Jewish and Gentile addressees into the dialogue, Paul develops the theological implications of his argument in chapters 5-8. The first four chapters describe the captivity of all humankind, Jew and Gentile, to the power of sin and then the righteousness of God, who has already made a way for all to be liberated from sin’s destructive power through the death and resurrection of Jesus.

The section in chapters 5-8 develops the “already” but “not-yet” completed plan of God’s redemption by rooting the hope of future reconciliation in the context of enduring present suffering.  Paul refers to the particular Jewish traditions of Adam’s sin and God’s promise of redemption to Israel to make a universal argument: Adam’s sin represents the need of all humankind to be renewed and conformed to its true identity, of which Jesus is the true image, and thus the promise of restoration made to Israel applies to all people.  This section comes to a climax in chapter 8 with the conclusion that it is the presence of the Spirit which enables the “firstfruits” of the new humanity God is calling together to overcome the devastating power of sin in this life (vv. 1-17) and which gives the future hope of the glorious redemption of God’s whole creation (vv. 18-30).  In this framework, the pericope of verses 18-25 is concerned in particular with explaining why the present condition of suffering and abuse endured by the entire created world is a source of hope rather than hopelessness.

There is an introductory thesis that relates present suffering to future glory (v. 18), followed by an explanation of the wider cosmic context of God’s creation suffering at the hands of fallen humanity but nevertheless groaning together with humankind in expectation of God’s new creation (vv. 19-23), after which the hope of this unseen future glory is again contrasted with the present existence of suffering in an unredeemed world (vv. 24-25). In the verses that follow, the groaning of creation and the children of God is related to the groaning of the Spirit who intercedes on their behalf (vv. 26-30), and who ensures the finality of their hope for redemption (vv. 31-39).

Textual Criticism

While scholars have identified as many as 15 different forms of Romans in the manuscript tradition, the essential integrity of 1:1 to 14:23 is virtually unquestioned. The multiplicity of variants primarily concerns the relationship of chapters 15 and 16 to the rest of the epistle.

The pericope of 8:18-25 is thus part of the earliest strata of Romans attested to in the manuscript tradition.  This is evidenced by the fact that it exists in its entirety on P46 (circa 200 C.E.), which is regarded as one of the earliest and most reliable extant manuscripts.

The majority of variations in the early manuscripts appear to result from either a scribal visual error (replacing the original with a similarly spelled word, such as the replacement of κτισεως, creation, with πιστεως, faith, in one manuscript) or from an attempt by the scribe to add grammatical clarity.

One possible exception which bears on the interpretation of the text is the debate about whether the first word in verse 21 was originally οτι (“that”), as it appears in P46, and as followed by the Nestle-Aland text, or the causal διοτι (“because”) as argued compellingly by Cranfield and Jewett.

While both options still yield essentially the same overall meaning, the latter variant gives greater weight to the preceding words of verse 20.  Nevertheless, most disagreements of interpretation among commentators concern how best to translate the passage into English.  Of these, the most problematic has been the debate concerning what is and is not included by the word κτισεως (“creation”) beginning in verse 19.  Barth argued that the term means “in the first place and above all man in general,” and, though he concedes that it can also be inclusive of all creation, he concludes that since “the world was created for the sake of man, to be dominated by man,” Paul’s use of the term in Romans 8 applies primarily “to man as the center of God’s creation.”

Most recent commentators have diverged from this interpretation, arguing that since creation’s groaning is addressed separately from that of humankind, and in parallel fashion, it makes the most since to assume Paul means specifically non-human creation. Furthermore, the structure of the pericope gives primacy to the groaning of the creation, and not that of humanity, which further erodes the plausibility of Barth’s position.

Source Criticism

  The overarching theme of present suffering and future glory, as well as the contrast between the seen and unseen in this pericope exemplify the thematic continuity between the issues Paul took up with the Corinthians and his letter to the Romans (cf. 2 Cor. 4:16-17).  Additionally, the connection between αποκαραδοκια (“eager longing” in v. 19) and bodily redemption (v. 23) is reminiscent of the same connection Paul makes in Philippians 1:20, the only other time he uses this word.

The most significant source for Paul’s material here, however, is rooted in the understanding of creation and redemption developed in Genesis and the prophetic books.  On face value, the use of κτισεως (v. 19) refers to God’s ordered creation in Genesis 1-2, as opposed to the Roman personified understanding of Mother Earth, but Paul’s contrast is more subtle.  He does, in fact, use personification, but in a way that specifically contradicts the Roman understanding: in contrast to roman depictions of Mother Earth as relaxed and reclining, Paul shows the creation leaning forward and craning the neck in “eager longing” of redemption (v. 19-23).

These verses make it abundantly clear that the “glory” in verse 18 does not envisage a future immortality for individual Christian believers; in continuity with the Jewish tradition, it refers to both the restoration of God’s presence with the people and the redemption of all creation (cf Isa. 6:3; Num. 14:21; Ps. 72:19).  The notion in verse 20 of the creation’s unwitting subjection to futility is deeply rooted in biblical tradition.  The most obvious source for this is the curse in Genesis 3:17, but this need not be taken as a ‘fall’ of creation; instead, the text shows that the ground is cursed because of Adam’s sin.

This explains the connection in the preceding verse to the “revelation of the children of God”—since it was through human fault that creation was subjected to futility (cf Eccl. 1:2; 2:1-17; Job 31:38-40), the creation longs for the restoration of humankind to its true calling: caring and preserving creation (Gen. 2:15).  The link between the “groaning” of nature and human sin can be seen in Joel 1:5-20, in which the earth suffers at the hands of human indiscretion and laments the humans’ iniquities long before they themselves began to suffer and repent.  This resembles the primacy of creation’s groaning and subsequent human groaning in Paul’s construction.  In opposition to the Roman myth that a human being attempting to play God (Caesar) can restore the world to an ideal state, Paul invokes a Jewish tradition (Gen. 3:17-19) in which humans attempt to play God and subsequently ruin their relationship with God, each other, and nature.

One further connection can be drawn between the structure and content of this pericope and Paul’s situation in Corinth.  The subordination of humanity to creation in sequence and by the implication of “but not only…but we ourselves” (v. 23) seem to deliberately contradict the sort of exceptionalism and enthusiasm of the fabled spirit people in Corinth.  Here, Paul associates the Spirit and the “firstfruits” of glory, however charismatic they may be, with the context of vulnerability and suffering. This is also highly significant for Paul’s audience in Rome who were suffering at the hands of the same Caesar who was revered and glorified as divine by the Roman civic cult.

Social-Historical Criticism

The elaborate interweaving of Jewish scripture tradition with Greek and Roman themes is no accident; it is Paul’s deliberate rhetorical strategy aimed at bringing together the Jews and Gentiles of the Roman churches.  Apparently, the early followers of the Jesus movement in Rome sparked so much agitation amongst the city’s Jewish population that the emperor Claudius was moved to expel an unspecified number of Jews from Rome in 49 C.E.

Regardless of how serious and extensive this expulsion was, the very fact in itself testifies to the potentially tense atmosphere between Jewish and Gentile converts a few short years before Paul wrote his letter.  To accomplish his goal of bringing both camps together (cf. Gal. 3:28), Paul had to steer between the Scylla of uncritical appropriation of Jewish and Roman-Gentile themes and the Charybdis of excessively harsh and alienating rhetoric which would only multiply the tension and augment opposition to his mission.  Nevertheless, it must be recognized that Paul’s main polemic is directed against the “gospel” of the Roman Caesar-cult, not against the Jewish faith.  Thus, Paul’s thesis in verse 18 declares that the glory is to be revealed “to us” as opposed to the imperial claim of glory for Caesar alone.

The allusions to Roman cultic beliefs in this pericope are manifold. The context of the “suffering” referred to in verse 18 and onward is the suffering of the Roman underclass who experienced harassment and deportation every day, and the idea that nature is suffering and “groaning” runs directly counter to the Roman cultic view of nature as idyllic.

Furthermore, the location of Paul’s redemption as a future event is designed to contest the argument, put forth by Virgil, that Augustus had fulfilled a sort of messianic expectation to reclaim Roman prosperity and usher in a golden age for the whole world.  As Jewett summarizes, “Paul cuts thru this propagandistic nonsense to refer directly to the παθηματα (“passions, sufferings”) suffered by Roman believers…in following a suffering Christ.”

The “futility” to which creation has been subjected was brought on by the military conquests and economic exploitation of Caesar that led to ruined cities, barren and torched fields, cleared forests, and polluted streams. Paul’s other reason for hedging against such imperial claims is that he is trying to recruit the support of the Roman churches for his subsequent mission to Spain; he is attempting to persuade Romans to submit in loving service to the “very barbarians that Rome believed it must subdue in order to bring about the golden age.”

Though this makes the Romans seem like an odd choice for Paul to seek out for assistance, he had little choice.  Since there were scarcely any diaspora Jews in Spain, and very few Greek speakers, Paul needed the Romans as a cultural and linguistic liaison; he could truly accomplish very little there without their help.

Praxis

This pericope hedges against any individualization of Pauline justification by demonstrating that for Paul, salvation is inconceivable without a whole new creation.  The fate of the entire created order is inextricably bound up with that of the human beings to whom God has entrusted the earth’s care.

Though this hoped for redemption will be consummated in the future, the life of the redeemed children of God can be entered even now.  As these children learn to how to live in God’s family, “their altered lifestyle and revised ethics begin to restore the ecological system that had been thrown out of balance by wrongdoing (1:18-32) and sin (Rom. 5-7).” The call to this life and its commitment to an unseen hope may be even more crucial today than in Paul’s own time.

Bibliography

Barth, Karl. A Shorter Commentary on Romans. Richmond, Va.: John Knox Press, 1959.

Braaten, Laurie J. “The Groaning Creation: The Biblical Background for Romans 8:22.” Biblical Research 50 (2005): 19-39.

Cranfield, C.E.B. Romans: The International Critical Commentary. Vol. 1. Edinburgh: T.&T. Clark Ltd., 1975.

Jewett, Robert. Romans: A Commentary. In Hermeneia—A Critical and Historical Commentary on the Bible, ed. Eldon J. Epp, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007.

Lawson, J. Mark. “Romans 8:18-25—The Hope of Creation.” Review & Expositor 91, no. 4 (1994): 559-565.

Murphy-O’Connor, Jerome. Paul: A Critical Life. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996.

Newman, Barclay M., and Eugene A. Nida. A Translator’s Handbook on Paul’s Letter to the Romans. New York: United Bible Societies, 1973.

Schreiner, Thomas R. Romans: Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 1998.

Toews, John E. Romans: Believers Church Bible Commentary. Scottdale, Penn.: Herald Press, 2004.

Read Full Post »

Ecolesiology—The Ecological, Ecumenical, and Economic House of God: A Perspective on Reconciliation

November 18, 2010

Introduction

The Christian themes of sanctification and reconciliation and their connection to the community life of the church are so integral and interconnected that they must be examined holistically; otherwise there is a tremendous risk of losing the core of these important teachings.  The individualization and spiritualization of the “holy” since the dawn of modernity, spawned by the so-called Enlightenment, has systematically purged it of its originally holistic, sacred community-centered orientation, which has led to the divorce of holy living from the so-called secular aspects of daily life.

This, in turn, has led to a mode of “ghettoized” Christian existence in North America and Europe that has sanctioned the emerging culture of consumption.

Cut off from the ability to critique the pitfalls of consumerism, the church has allowed itself to become another venue, or market of consumerism.  What needs to be addressed, beyond the obvious fact that over-consumption is destructive of the environment, is that “persistent and obsessive consumption is no longer merely a habit; instead, it is an addiction which rests on a foundation which functions as the equivalent of a religion.”

As such, it should be perceived as a threat not only to the ecosystem, but also to the Christian faith; it is, in short, the idolatry of our time.  Just as our toxic chemicals and industrial wastes pollute our air and water, causing sickness and death to animals and humans all over the world, so too the lies of consumerism seep into the aquifers of Christian spirituality and pollute our ways of reading and enacting the word of God.  How has this crisis come to be, and what can be done to reclaim our threatened faith?

Diagnosis: An Ecological, Economic, and Ecumenical Crisis

The ecological crisis, as it pertains to Christian faith, is rooted in the tendency in Western theology to emphasize the transcendent aspects of God and neglect the immanence of God.

When carried out to its logical end, this position leads to a view of the created world as a profane secularized realm of “resources” for human use, and to an otherworldly view of God’s redemption that only concerns humans.  This world, so the logic goes, is neither God’s true home, nor our own, but is merely the stage of the divine redemption of humanity and the forsaken arena from which humans will be liberated.

The industrial and technological plundering of the earth’s resources, however, “does not produce benefits for all societies but only for those that control…production, and it excludes others or grants them information by exacting heavy tribute (royalties).”

In other words, there is a direct link between the ecological exploitation that violates the earth and the economic exploitation that creates and increases the inequality between the rich and the poor.  Behind the modern myth of progress and infinite economic growth lies the truth that the only thing such a system is guaranteed to “grow” is inequality.

This is why Leonardo Boff and many other Latin American liberation theologians have increasingly taken notice of the inextricable link between ecological and economic liberation, doing so within the context of the doctrine of creation.  Yet the very fact that we so label theologians “Latin American” and “liberation”, among many others, elucidates the fact that the church in the West has tended to emphasize the Western view of God as all-encompassing, bracketing off other sources of theology as “contextual” theologies; in sum, the crisis can also be seen as an ecumenical one.  Only recently has the need for Western Christians to hear and be challenged by the prophetic and critical voices of other Christian traditions begun to be acknowledged.

Christians in the West are only now beginning to recognize that the biblical account depicts a deity who is both transcendent and immanent, and that the need to emphasize the latter aspect is crucial if the church wishes to be able to address the evils of our time.  We proclaim the trinitarian God who brought the world into being through God’s Word, who breathed life into all creatures by the Spirit which is none other than the personal presence of Godself in creation, and whose Wisdom and Word was made flesh in order to walk this earth alongside us so as to reconcile all of God’s creation—including, but certainly not limited to human beings (Col 1:20).  Therefore, we affirm with the apostle Paul, that God “is actually not far from us, for ‘In him we live and move and have our being’” (Acts 17:27-28).

We proclaim Emmanuel, God with us, and confess that it is God’s ruach, the breath and Spirit of life that is in us, and which sustains us; for we are reduced to dust when it departs (Ps. 104).

The remedy for Christian faith in the West is to replace the doctrine of creation that ignores everything but the phrase, “fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion” (Gen 1:28) with a more holistic, and ultimately more biblical doctrine of creation.  The purpose of this paper is to explore this doctrine as it plays out in the ancient metaphor of the oikos, the household of God.  The story of the oikos begins with the original harmony of the Architect’s creation, and unfolds in three spheres that have oikos as their etymological root: the ecological, the economic, and ecumenical, which is the consummated, holistic reconciliation of economics and ecology.  The story will correspondingly trace the human roles in the household from gardener and sustainer, to perpetrator and victim of domestic violence, to domestic servant, and finally to family member.  Only with a proper understanding of the ways of human sinfulness and the nature of the relationships that have been violated can the nature of the church as God’s oikos community of reconciliation begin to be understood.

Part I: The Ecological House and the Sin of Autonomy

The word ecology was coined in 1866 by the German Darwinian Ernst Haeckel from the Greek word oikos, meaning house, to refer literally to the household of living creatures on earth and their interwoven, interdependent community existence.

Wilderness ecologist Aldo Leopold once said, “We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us.  When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may being to use it with love and respect.”

Thus, we see that the underlying premise of the science of ecology, despite its basis in evolutionary biology rather than creation theology, is very close to the central emphasis of cosmology in the Jewish and Christian scriptures: God’s creation is fundamentally relational.

Biblically, the primeval home of the human being is characterized as an ecologically harmonious garden. We are also told that the human tenants of the garden violated its relational community and were expelled from it, and from that we infer that ecological relationships are significant and are in need of reconciliation.

All practices that dominate and exploit nature and other human beings are reenactments of taking from the Forbidden Tree (Gen 2:15-17), for “abuse and misuse of power are rooted in the desire to be like God” who is characterized in the industrial West as “a dominating, self-centered being with unlimited power.”

The need to respect the strictures of the Forbidden Tree out of reverence for life and respect for others, which seems weak and foolish to the powers of this world, reflects precisely the foolishness of the way of Christ which we profess to be God’s wisdom (1 Cor 1:21-25).  According to this story, the grasp for autonomy and the emphasis on the individual over the communal are sinful and destructive acts of domestic violence.

The book of Psalms is full of imagery of God’s house depicting the created world as the place in which God dwells with and among God’s people and in which he gives and sustains life.

The Hebrew scriptures depict a God who is intimately involved in the life and redemption of all creatures.  Both man and beast, we are told, “feast on the abundance of [God’s] house, and [God] give[s] them drink from the river of [God’s] delights” (Ps 35:8).  The whole earth—humans, other creatures, and the land itself—is seen as the victim of human iniquity (Mic. 7:13, Joel 1) and it cries out in despair for God’s redemption and the pouring out of the life-giving Spirit upon it (Joel 2:21-29).  All of creation, declares Paul in the first century, is groaning with labor pains in expectation of this consummate reconciliation (Rom. 8:22).  It is thus impossible, biblically speaking, to conceive of sanctification and reconciliation that does not pertain to the entire household of ecological relationships which were ordained by God and called good, and subsequently violated and destroyed by human acts of self-indulgent autonomy.

Part II: House Economics and the Sin of Theft

We have already seen that the ecological aspect of the household implies humanity’s limitation; there is no room for autonomy in a web of interdependent relationships.  Where ecology refers to these interrelationships, economics refers to the proper ordering of these relationships; it is what sustains the delicate balance of the community of creation.

Obviously, the first part of the word economy comes from the same Greek word, oikos.  The second part comes from nomos which refers to laws or regulations.

To speak of God’s economy is to assert faith in the fact that God has ordered creation in such a way that all creatures can be sustained through the proper relationships of ecology.  It implies that each creature has its own proper place and that the earth can provide no more and no less than what each creature needs to live.  Jesus spoke of God’s economy by saying, “Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them” (Mt. 6:26).  It is important to note Jesus’ contrast between what the birds do in God’s economy and the obviously human activities of sowing, reaping and especially gathering into barns.  In Luke 12, Jesus speaks of a rich man who stores a surplus of food in an extra storehouse that he built because of his perceived need for security; what this man was not prepared for was the fact of his death.  This man’s sin, as Wendell Barry poignantly explicates, is theft, because “by laying up ‘much goods’ in the present…we incur a debt to the future that we cannot repay.  That is, we diminish the future by deeds we call ‘use’ but which the future will call ‘theft.’”

This passage thus ties Jesus’ command to seek first the kingdom of God with our economic behavior.  By taking more than our proper share we are committing theft and violating our relationships; our relationships are always both ecological and economic.

A second dimension of these passages, is that there is a difference between the human economy, as alluded to by the sowing and reaping activities, and the ecological economy in which the birds are fed by God.  The human economy, however, fits inside of and is wholly dependent on the larger ecological community. When we pretend our economy is not contingent in this way, we are guilty of domestic violence, because the human economy deals with materials and forces that we did not and cannot create–the fertility of the soil, the precipitation that irrigates the soil, and even the human productivity and ingenuity that is commodified as labor.

We cannot create systems of abstract, monetary value that are not entirely dependent on and derived from the only real ecological value: life.  Only God’s Spirit can breath this value into existence and it is thus a sacred value.

In Barry’s words, the problem is that the human industrial economy “sees itself as the only economy.  It makes itself thus exclusive by the simple expedient of valuing only what it can use.”

However, once we acknowledge God’s economy, “we are astonished and frightened to see how much modern enterprise is the work of hubris” and that it thus “is based on invasion and pillage of the Great Economy,” Barry’s word for God’s economy.

Furthermore, the reliance on technology and industry to solve the problems they create renders it a fruitless enterprise plagued by the need to result to mechanical solutions that can only operate by oversimplifying problems.  Since all of creation is God’s house, we have nowhere to dwell but in God’s economy, and thus, “whether or not we know that and act accordingly is the critical question, not about economy merely but about human life itself.”

This awareness can only be cultivated out of the recognition that we are embodied residents of the created natural world and as such we are unavoidably a part of God’s ecological economy; without such an awareness, our entire understanding of God’s house is reduced to the “environment” and the “economy” and both are confined to the sphere of other “social issues” as opposed to the spiritual issues which are the supposed concern of God and the church.

Poverty, when understood biblically, is neither solely a material condition nor simply a spiritual condition; it is both.  In Matthew’s version of the Beatitudes, Jesus addresses the “poor in spirit” (Mt. 5:3), but in Luke he merely says, “Blessed are you who are poor” (Lk 6:20).  Similarly, economic sinfulness is neither solely a violation of God nor merely a violation of human beings; it is both.  Thus, when Jesus ‘cleanses the temple’ in Mark 11 he is committing a prophetic act that is both a religious and economic statement, and this is further evidenced by the two prophecies he quotes: the first is a statement by God about the nature of God’s house and who it is for—”a house of prayer for all nations” (Is. 56:7)—and the second deals specifically with how humans have profaned God’s house by making it “a den of thieves” (Jer. 7:11).  We might ask, in what way was God’s house made a den of thieves?  Of course, we only need to turn to Jeremiah 7:5-10 to discover the reason: the people do not execute justice with one another but instead they “oppress the sojourner, the fatherless, or the widow, or shed innocent blood” (vv 6-7) and God refuses to allow the doers of such domestic violence to dwell in God’s house, so God asks, “Will you…then come and stand before me in this house, which is called by my name, and say, We are delivered!—only to go on doing all these abominations? Has this house…become a den of robbers in your eyes? Behold, I myself have seen it” (vv 9-11).  The sheer volume of prophetic writings pertaining to the indivisibility of executing justice and worshipping God make it impossible to drown out the biblical cries of the poor and oppressed.

Honoring God is inseparable from executing justice, the right ordering of relationships in God’s house (oikonomia or economy) and in the context of relationships, economic justice and ecological justice are also implicitly inseparable.

Part III: Ecological, Ecumenical and Economic Reconciliation

Now that we have begun to view the crisis holistically within the paradigm of God’s house we can begin to glimpse what is implied by the term reconciliation.  Etymologically, the word reconcile comes from Latin and means “to bring back together.”  It is a bringing back together that is ecological (relationships), economic (order), and also fundamentally ecumenical (holistic).  We have seen the ways in which humans have engaged in domestic violence against God’s house by pillaging it and tearing it down; reconciliation, in this sense, is the Architect’s plan of restoring the house to its intended form—both its material foundation and its family relationships.  It is not uncommon to hear the church called God’s house in Christian circles, but what is significant is that the imagery of God’s house in scripture is not of brick and mortar (Is. 66:1) but it is rather imagery of living flesh: the Body of Christ.  It is after building this embodied image of the church that Paul goes on to mix in the imagery of God’s house:

So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, in whom the whole structure, being joined together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord.  In him you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit (Eph. 2:19-22).

The language of Paul depicts human beings, we who commit domestic violence and theft and property destruction in God’s house, as being brought back (reconciled) into the household.  More than that, these humans are now being called family members who serve as a “dwelling place for God by the Spirit.”  In the reconciliation through which God is bringing us back, the relationship between humanity and God is mended mutually; we are allowed back into the house as family members, while at the very same time, we are opening up to allow the Spirit of God to dwell in us!  But what can this mutual indwelling possibly mean?  How can this help us to understand the nature of the church and to find our place in the midst God’s project of reconciliation?  What does this have to do with the ecological, economic and ecumenical life of the church?

To understand all this, it must be remembered that the same trait is at the very core of the biblical imagery for God, creation, human beings, Jesus Christ, and the church: they are all alive.  According to Jürgen Moltmann, we have failed to understand the role of the church in the missio Dei and reconciliation because we have fundamentally misunderstood the mission of Christ: “Jesus didn’t bring a new religion into the world.  What he brought was new life.”

He argues that the Gospel of John quite explicitly states what God has brought into the world through Jesus Christ: life (Jn. 14:19), and in the Synoptic Gospels, he says, “Where Jesus is, there is life…sick people are healed, sad people are comforted, marginalized people are accepted, and the demons of death are driven out.”

The salvific work of the Holy Spirit in reconciliation cannot be confined merely to the spheres of religion and spirituality because it is the integrating redemption of the whole of life.  Reconciliation does not mean leaving this life to enter into eternal life; it is the breaking in of eternal life for the transformation of this life.

Thus, the apostle Paul writes, “For this perishable body must put on the imperishable, and this mortal body must put on immortality…then shall come to pass the saying that is written: Death is swallowed up in victory” (1 Cor. 15:53-55).  Salvation is the process in which all things are reconciled through Christ which begins with the renewal of God’s people, then the renewal of all the living, and then is finally consummated with the renewal of the earth (Joel 2:21-29).  According to the bible, the signal of the Spirit’s presence is vitality and the true end of history is completion of God’s ecology wherein all relationships are indwelled by the Spirit and taken into the community of the triune God.

The church fits into this process as a living community that is also a community of life.  It is not insignificant that the ‘theology of life’ is now a source of ecumenical hope for the church, as it has been emphasized by Pope John Paul II, the liberation theologian Gustavo Gutierrez, the Korean theologian Chung Hyung Kyung, the German protestant Moltmann, and many others from divergent Christian traditions.

These thinkers are calling for the church to be the community of God’s people who work to support a ‘culture of life’ and who denounce the destructive powers of death.  In this sense, it is an ecological church, because the premise of ecology is that life is community.  This communal character reflects the communal character of God revealed in the doctrine of the Trinity.

Biblical descriptions of the experience of the Spirit are often feminine, such as that of being ‘born anew’ or of the Paraclete who comforts as a mother comforts (Jn. 14:26).  Thus, many Christians outside the clutches of patriarchal Rome (such as Syria) have come to view the Holy Spirit as the divine mother.

The benefit of this image for the context of the oikos is that it helps us to see the divine-human community of the church: our father is the Father of Christ, our mother is the life-giving Spirit of God, and the Son of the living God is our brother.  As a human community, then, we are a community of brothers and sisters in fellowship with our true Mother and Father.

Finally, as a church that exists within an insatiable human economy in which there is never enough, we are called to be a community that confesses the good news of God’s economy: there is enough.  Those of us who come into the church from places of privilege humbly admit that God is the liberator of the poor, oppressed, marginal, and downtrodden.  Those who come into the church from a position of material poverty must also admit that spiritual poverty is also a very real affliction.  For those of us who are wealthy, we must recognize that most of the wealthy people who come to Jesus in the Gospels found him to be too difficult to follow.  There is, however, one counterexample which we are challenged to follow: Zacchaeus, who gave half of everything he owned to the poor and paid back everything he took fourfold (Lk. 19:1-10).  Zacchaeus was committed to reconciliation and accordingly worked very hard to restore the relationships he had violated and broken.

In God’s economy, money is not in itself good or evil; what matters is justice and community.  In the New Testament picture of God’s community of the church, there are both rich and poor members, but what is important is that they are nevertheless a community of equals who are dedicated to sharing with one another and meeting the needs of the community (Jm. 5, Act. 4).  In fact, it is precisely this kind of diversity—the rich and poor communing together—that is essential to how God’s economy works.  It is precisely by bringing the rich and the poor together into relationships that the resources of the rich can be directed to meet the needs of the poor–both spiritually and materially.  That is because “the opposite of poverty is not property.  The opposite of both poverty and property is community.”

Conclusion: Homecoming

The household of God is the community that is marked by the ethic of the Sermon on the Mount (Mt. 5-7).  This community’s vocation within the holistic project of God’s reconciliation is to be the people who have returned home to the house of our true Father.  In this oikos, we have all been the prodigal sons and daughters who return from estrangement glad even to be readmitted into our Father’s house as domestic servants but unimaginably surprised by the grace of being accepted warmly and lovingly, though certainly undeservingly, as sons and daughters (Lk. 15:11-32).

Our challenge, however, is to remember this as we call all our other long lost siblings back into the household, lest we should be like the brother in the parable and start to hate our returning brothers and sisters out of entitlement and jealousy.  We know that as the family grows, it will also change in ways that may make us uncomfortable.  Where these attitudes of fear, insecurity, and self-preservation surface in the community, they will be corrected by an affirmation of the good news of God’s economy: there is enough for everyone!  Then and only then will we be equipped for our role in reconciliation: to continue the homecoming by welcoming all who will enter into God’s ecological and ecumenical household.

Bibliography

Barry, Wendell. “Two Economies.” Review & Expositor 81, no. 2 (1984): 209-223.

Boff, Leonardo. Cry of the Earth, Cry of the Poor. Translated by Phillip Berryman. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1997.

Conradie, Ernst M. “The Whole Household of God (Oikos): Some Ecclesiological Perspectives.” Scriptura 94 (2007): 1-9.

Edwards, Dennis. Jesus the Wisdom of God: An Ecological Theology. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1995.

Gottfried, Robert R. Economics, Ecology, and the Roots of Western Faith. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1995.

Harper, Brad, and Paul L. Metzger. Exploring Ecclesiology: An Evangelical and Ecumenical Introduction. Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2009.

Jung, L. Shannon. “Grounded in God: Ecology, Consumption and the Small Church.” Anglican Theological Review 78, no. 4 (1996): 587-602.

Lee-Park, Sun Ai. “The Forbidden Tree and the Year of the Lord.” In Women Healing Earth: Third World Women on Ecology, Feminism, and Religion, Rosemary R. Ruether, 107-116. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1996.

Moltmann, Jürgen. The Source of Life: The Holy Spirit and the Theology of Life. Translated by Margaret Kohl. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997.

Park, Rohun. “Revisiting the Parable of the Prodigal Son for Decolonization: Luke’s Reconfiguration of Oikos in 15:11-32.” Biblical Interpretation 17, no. 5 (2009): 507-520.

Schut, Michael. “Coming Home: Economics and Ecology.” Anglican Theological Review 91, no. 4 (2009): 581-588.

Snyder, Howard A. Liberating the Church: The Ecology of Church and Kingdom. Downer’s Grove, Ill.: Inter-Varsity Press, 1983.

Read Full Post »

Beyond Stewardship: Immanent Theology and the Redemptive Mission of Life

God’s Mission is nothing less than the sending of the Holy Spirit from the Father through the Son into this world, so that this world shall not perish but live…For the Holy Spirit is ‘the source of life’ and brings into the world – whole life, full life, unhindered, indestructible, everlasting life.

– Jürgen Moltmann

 

Introduction

Notions of Stewardship

The concept of stewardship has a long history of application to the context of Christian understandings of the relationship between human beings and the natural world.  Thus, there is no singular or all-encompassing concept of what stewardship specifically means; there are many interpretations.  As is the case for virtually every biblically-derived notion, proponents of stewardship have often misinterpreted or abused their scriptural sources and consequently developed unacceptable concepts.  The most prevalent text for understanding human stewardship of the natural world is the second creation narrative in Genesis 2, which states that God placed the original human being in the garden “to work it and keep it” (v. 15).  In the same account, God creates all of the animals to be in community with the human being and with each other, and then consummates the created community by giving ha adam (the earthling) an ezer kenegdo — a human companion and counterpart to share the task of working and keeping and sustaining God’s garden (2:18).  Now the harmonious community of creation was complete and it was good, just as God intended.  Though not explicitly mentioned, this passage is foundational for a concept of stewardship that entails the work of maintaining the harmony of God’s creation by working to sustain the relationships among creation in three spheres: between humans and God, between humans and each other, and between humans and the other creatures God has made (vv. 18-19).  So far, this is a healthy conception of stewardship that is rooted in solid exegesis.

 

Problems and Critiques of Stewardship

The problem with the idea of human stewardship of the earth is not found in the text of the Bible itself, but rather in the abuse of the text in its employment for the justification of corrupt and sinful human constructs.  The twin creation narratives of Genesis have been abused in such a way as to confound the proper biblical understandings of all three aforementioned spheres of relationship.  In the first place, it has been forgotten that the first humans were not simply land managers for an absentee landlord-God. On the contrary, the Lord God was present, dwelling and walking with them and the other creatures in the garden (cf. Gen. 3:8).  The immanent presence of God in creation cannot be neglected; it is the God’s ruach, the breath and Spirit of God, which animates and sustains all living creatures and renders them mere dust when it retreats (Ps. 104:29;146:4; Job 34:14).  When God is seen as wholly transcendent and absent from creation, stewardship quickly devolves into an anthropocentric view that appropriates the charge to dominate and subdue the earth (Gen. 1:26) and ignores all of the biblical constraints on this privilege.    Yet, when this critique is carried to its logical extreme, the result is a pantheistic view that ultimately also loses the fundamental basis for respecting the natural world—that it is God’s creation and we, as God’s creatures, are answerable to God for how we interact with it.  Furthermore, when God is characterized and caricatured as exclusively male, the sense of domination takes on a sexist dimension and finds in Genesis 2-3 evidence for the primacy and superiority of males over females (cf. 1 Tim. 2:9-15). The only way to resolve these problems and begin answer their critiques, then, is to reclaim a panentheistic theology that realizes God is beyond gender, recognizes both God’s transcendence and immanence and which respects God’s creation, affirms God’s ownership and lordship over creation, and sees God as both the preeminent source and indwelling sustainer of all life.  The benefit of panentheism is that it can hold God’s well-attested transcendence and often neglected immanence in tension, affirming the fullness of the divine nature without reducing God to one or the other extreme.  After surveying the foundational scriptures for such a theology, it will become abundantly clear that the missio Dei, God’s work for the redemption of creation, is at its core a missio vitae, a mission of life.

 

Old Testament Foundations

Ruach: The Spirit of Life

All that exists is created through and sustained by God’s ruach, the very breath

of life.  It enveloped the entire earth when God began to speak created life into being (Gen. 1:2), and still fills the world and holds all living beings together (Isa. 34:16).  So dependent is all life on the immanent presence of God’s ruach in creation that Job says, “If he should set his heart to it and gather to himself his spirit and his breath, all flesh would perish together, and man would return to dust” (34:14-15).  It is through the denial of God’s presence in creation that human sinfulness brings about the violation and destruction of life—both human and non-human.  For if, by the breath of the Spirit, Godself is present in creation, indwelling and supporting all life, then there can be absolutely no basis for an anthropocentric worldview.  If the very Creator is here, and not somewhere else, then it matters what we do and how we interact with God’s creatures.  It is no accident, then, that in the very same passage in Job, the presence of God’s spirit leads him to proceed directly to talking about justice!  Throughout the Old Testament the knowledge of God as Creator is inextricably bound up with God’s presence on earth, and that is precisely why justice is among God’s most fundamental concerns; in a very real sense, a violation of creation or creatures is simultaneously a violation of the Creator. More specifically, sin and injustice are essentially violations of life—all of the violence, deprivation, vulnerability, suffering and oppression that characterize human sinfulness are connected with death in that “they are all something death steals from life.”

 

Sin, Injustice and Death

That the Old Testament writers connect justice with God’s life giving immanence in creation becomes abundantly clear in the writings of the prophets, in which the concrete victims of human sin and injustice are depicted in the crying out of creatures both human and non-human.  One clear example of this occurs in Joel, where the prophet declares that because the “fields are destroyed, the ground mourns” (1:10).  He goes on to exclaim, “How the beasts groan! The herds of cattle are perplexed because there is no pasture for them; even the flocks of sheep suffer” (1:18).  The ground itself, and the creatures that depend upon it are said to “pant for [the Lord] because the water brooks are dried up” (1:20).  In the vulnerability of embodied suffering, non-human creatures, both plants and animals, know to cry out for the God upon whose Spirit they depend for their very life; it is the humans in this passage who are the last to realize this need, and it is they who are to blame for the suffering endured by all the creatures.  The desolation of the earth is “because of its inhabitants, for the fruit of their doings,” says Micah (7:13), and the ensuing punishment is brought upon this terrestrial dwelling place because humans “fill their master’s house with violence and fraud” (Zeph. 1:9).

 

The Household of God and the Missio Vitae

All of God’s creatures are linked by their mutual sharing of life in God’s household, the community of creation, as we have seen in Genesis 2.  The scientific word for the study of this intricate and interconnected community of creation is ecology, which comes from the Greek root oikos and refers literally to the household shared by all living organisms.  Wilderness ecologist Aldo Leopold once said, “We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us.  When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.”  Thus, we see that the underlying premise of the science of ecology, despite its basis in evolutionary biology rather than creation theology, is very close to the central emphasis of cosmology in the Jewish and Christian scriptures: God’s creation is a fundamentally relational community of life.

The other connection made by the prophets with regard to the injustice of human sin as a violation of God’s oikos is an economic one: the sin of slavery, oppression, and economic exploitation of the poor by the wealthy. While the first part of the word economy comes from oikos, the second part comes from another Greek word: nomos, which refers to laws or regulations.  In the oikos of God, ecology and economy are inextricably linked.  Thus, when Jesus ‘cleanses the temple’ in Mark 11, he quotes from two prophetic texts that speak to this connection: the first is a statement by God about the nature of God’s house and who it is for—”a house of prayer for all nations” (Is. 56:7)—and the second deals specifically with how humans have profaned God’s house by making it “a den of thieves” (Jer. 7:11).  We might ask, in what way was God’s house made a den of thieves?  Of course, we only need to turn to Jeremiah 7:5-10 to discover the reason: the people do not execute justice with one another but instead they “oppress the sojourner, the fatherless, or the widow, or shed innocent blood” (vv 6-7) and God refuses to allow the doers of such domestic violence to dwell in God’s house, so God asks, “Will you…then come and stand before me in this house, which is called by my name, and say, We are delivered!—only to go on doing all these abominations? Has this house…become a den of robbers in your eyes? Behold, I myself have seen it” (vv 9-11).  The sheer volume of prophetic writings pertaining to the indivisibility of executing justice and worshipping God make it impossible to drown out the biblical cries of the poor and oppressed.  Injustice everywhere elicits the cry of the ecological community, as we saw in Joel, as well as the cry for economic liberation from the poor and oppressed.  Therefore, we do not understand the prophetic witness to God’s divine judgment at all unless we understand that “the judgment is for the cleansing of the world, not is demolition.”

These lamentations and God’s judgment, however, is not the end of the story, for God listens lovingly to the cries of creation’s suffering and detests the empty worship of those who call to him but do not practice justice; and to both parties, God offers the same solution: “Seek me and live” (Amos 5).  In the fallenness of the Godforsaken world of human sin and injustice, we suffer and cry out in the feeling that there is not enough to sustain us; death is everywhere encroaching on our very existence.  This is not the end of the story, as Moltmann eloquently suggests, “But if God is not far off, if God is near, if God is present among us in the Spirit, then we find a new, indescribable joy in living…we are at home.”  The prophets affirm that God does indeed dwell in this very cosmos, and that God is with us, neither far off nor cordoned off in the brick and mortar of the temple (Isa. 66:1).  Joel looks forward to the time when humans will join the earth and the animals in praising God, the giver of life, when God says, “I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh” (2:28).  For now, the “palace is forsaken,” says Isaiah, but only “until the Spirit is poured upon us from on high, and the wilderness becomes a fruitful field…then justice will dwell in the wilderness, and righteousness abide in the fruitful field” (32:14-16).  After God’s redeeming work to restore the household community of creation, when God’s missio vitae is fulfilled, God says, “My people will abide in a peaceful habitation, in secure dwellings, and in quiet resting places” (32:18).  In this beautiful prophetic vision, not only is humanity liberated, but so too are the animals set free from economic bondage, for God also says, “Happy are you who sow beside all waters, who let the feet of the ox and the donkey range free” (v. 20).

 

New Testament Appropriations

The Immanence of God in the Incarnation

We have seen the firm Old Testament foundation for a panentheistic theology that affirms God’s life-breathing presence in creation and its implications for understanding the missio Dei as a missio vitae, a mission of redeeming and restoring life.  In the New Testament, these scriptural traditions are not only affirmed; they are radically recontextualized; God not only pours the Spirit on all flesh—through the incarnation of the Jesus Christ, the Son and second person of the Christian Trinity, God has indeed become flesh!  This is not seen as simply a symbol or merely a doctrinal suggestion; the only heresy explicitly described as such in the entire New Testament is not believing precisely that extreme statement: that God has become flesh in the person of Jesus Christ (1 Jn. 4:2-3).  At the incarnation, the immanence of God is revealed in a new and more profound way; it is Emmanuel, God with us.  The one in and through whom all of creation has come into being, according to John, “became flesh and dwelt among us” (Jn. 1:14).  In the same Gospel, Jesus later says, “I came that they may have life and have it abundantly” (10:10), and after the resurrection, he tells his disciples, “Because I live, you also will live. In that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you” (14:19).  Thus, for Moltmann, the fourth Gospel states quite directly what it is that God has brought into the world through the incarnation—life—and this leads him to state that, “God’s mission is nothing less than the sending of the Holy Spirit from the Father through the Son into this world, so that this world should not perish but live.”  Through Christ, then, we understand that the beginning of the pouring of God’s spirit anticipated by Joel and Isaiah has indeed entered the world, this very world, and that it is sent out to us by Christ himself.

 

Reconciliation in Christ

The apostle Paul connects the notion behind John’s words about Christ with the imagery of God’s nature in Isaiah 34:16 in his epistle to the Colossians: “all things were created through him and for him…and in him all things hold together” (1:15).  Having brought together the Old Testament understanding of God’s creation and life-sustaining activity and the incarnation of God in Christ, Paul goes on to speak about what was accomplished in this miraculous event, “For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven” (vv. 19-20).  God’s reconciliation, says Paul, is not just for all humans, or all animals, or all life; it is for the entirety of creation.  In his letter to the Romans, Paul strikes this chord even more eloquently, speaking of the “hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God” (8:21).  Before speaking about our own hope, Paul speaks of the hope of creation crying out in yearning for God’s Spirit, just as the ground and the animals did in Joel 2.  For the fate of the earth is not merely to be the staging ground for human salvation; with the earth, from which we were made, our own fate is inextricable bound up.  Thus, Paul goes on:

For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now.  And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies.  For in this hope we were saved (vv. 22-24).

Here we get a new image of life in the redeemed household of God: family.  In Jesus Christ, the firstborn, we have the hope of life and adoption into the very family of God.  We do not get the idea that we will escape this world, nor our bodies; instead we are promised the “redemption of our bodies.”

 

 

 

The Body of Christ

It is not uncommon to hear the church called God’s house in Christian circles, but what is significant is that the imagery of God’s house in scripture is not of brick and mortar (Is. 66:1) but it is rather imagery of living flesh: the Body of Christ.  It is after building this embodied image of the church that Paul goes on to mix in the imagery of God’s house:

So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God…In [Christ] you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit (Eph. 2:19-22).

In the reconciliation through which God is bringing us back, the relationship between humanity and God is mended mutually; we are allowed back into the house as family members, while at the very same time, we are opening up to allow the Spirit of God to dwell in us!  But what can this mutual indwelling possibly mean?  How can this help us to understand the nature of the church and to find our place in the midst of God’s project of reconciliation?  To understand all this, it must be remembered that the same trait is at the very core of the biblical imagery for God, creation, human beings, Jesus Christ, and the church: they are all alive. Moltmann says that we have failed to understand the role of the church in the missio Dei because we have fundamentally misunderstood the mission of Christ: “Jesus didn’t bring a new religion into the world.  What he brought was new life.”  Thus, as we read the accounts of Jesus’ earthly mission in the Gospels, we discover that, “Where Jesus is, there is life…sick people are healed, sad people are comforted, marginalized people are accepted, and the demons of death are driven out.”  According to the bible, the signal of the Spirit’s presence is vitality and the true end of history is completion of the missio vitae wherein all relationships are indwelled by the Spirit and taken into the community of the triune God.  To us, the firstfruits of God’s redeemed household have been entrusted.  It is in this sense that we, who by grace have been allowed back into the house, indeed even welcomed in as actual family members, can conceive of ourselves as oikonomoi—stewards.  Such an understanding is not hierarchical, nor does it seek to dominate the household in the place of an absentee Master; it is ecumenical.  For the literal sense of the word “ecumenical” is of all the inhabitants of the household living together as a family.

 

The Church and the Missio Vitae

Home Economics 101

As a church that exists within an insatiable human economy in which there is never enough, we are called to be a community that confesses the good news of God’s economy: there is enough.  Those of us who come into the church from places of privilege humbly admit that God is the liberator of the poor, oppressed, marginal, and downtrodden.  Those who come into the church from a position of material poverty must also admit that spiritual poverty is also a very real affliction.  For those of us who are wealthy, we must recognize that most of the wealthy people who come to Jesus in the Gospels found him to be too difficult to follow.  There is, however, one counterexample which we are challenged to follow: Zacchaeus, who gave half of everything he owned to the poor and paid back everything he took fourfold (Lk. 19:1-10).  Zacchaeus was committed to reconciliation and accordingly worked very hard to restore the relationships he had violated and broken.  In God’s economy, money is not in itself good or evil; what matters are justice and community.  In the New Testament picture of God’s community of the church, there are both rich and poor members, but what is important is that they are nevertheless a community of equals who are dedicated to sharing with one another and meeting the needs of the community (Jm. 5, Act. 4).  In fact, it is precisely this kind of diversity—the rich and poor communing together—that is essential to how God’s economy works.  It is precisely by bringing the rich and the poor together into relationships that the resources of the rich can be directed to meet the needs of the poor–both spiritually and materially.  That is because “the opposite of poverty is not property.  The opposite of both poverty and property is community.”  In this community of sharing, it becomes possible to speak, like Arias, or “evangelization by hospitality.”

Homecoming

The household of God is the community that is marked by the ethic of the

Sermon on the Mount (Mt. 5-7), and its mission must reflect this ethic.  This community’s vocation within the holistic project of God’s missio vitae is to be the people who have returned home to the house of our true Father.  In this oikos, we have all been the prodigal sons and daughters who return from estrangement glad even to be readmitted into our Father’s house as domestic servants but unimaginably surprised by the grace of being accepted warmly and lovingly, though certainly undeservingly, as sons and daughters (Lk. 15:11-32).  Our challenge, however, is to remember this as we call all our other long lost siblings back into the household, lest we should be like the brother in the parable and start to hate our returning brothers and sisters out of entitlement and jealousy.  We know that as the family grows, it will also change in ways that may make us uncomfortable.  Such are the challenges to the oikonomoi, the stewards of the household.  Where these attitudes of fear, insecurity, and self-preservation surface in the community, they will be corrected by an affirmation of the good news of God’s economy: there is enough for everyone!  Then and only then will we be equipped for our role in reconciliation: to continue the homecoming by welcoming all who will enter into God’s ecological and ecumenical household.

 

The Missio Vitae in Context

The Stewardship of Life

We have expanded our view of God and the church in order to glimpse the

missio Dei in a new lens: the life-affirming activity of God on behalf of all creation.  As disciples of Jesus who are welcomed into the family life of God’s household, we are stewards of life called to participate in God’s mission, whose aim is the abundance of life (Jn. 10:10).  “If we could start from that premise,” Douglas Hall argues, “The despondency that now so often clings to our discourse on mission…would be exchanged for a new sense of being needed.”  It is the grounding in the missio vitae that finally enables us to get beyond stewardship as a flawed framework, dismissed by economic and environmental activists as archaic and oppressive, and shrugged off by the church as a periphery slogan and biblical euphemism for shrewdness.  Instead, the stewardship of life becomes “a way of designating the very core of our faith. In a time given over to the courting of death, the gospel means: stewarding life!”  Throughout the Old Testament, from Deuteronomy to the prophets, God’s people have been confronted with a choice: “I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse.  Therefore choose life” (Deut. 30:19).  In the New Testament, we learn that in Christ, God has personally brought this life into the world.  On the cross, Christ took upon himself the world’s response to the charge in Deuteronomy 30, in order to transform the world’s opting for death into the possibility and promise of new life.  Hall poignantly remarks, “I am interested in rediscovering the mission of that Jesus; and I suspect that it doesn’t have very much to do with getting people to say, ‘Lord, Lord.’”

Lest we should fall into a form of Christian legalism and merely solicit the empty cry of ‘Lord, Lord,’ we must remember the task to which we have been called.  As Johannes Nissen reminds us, “Mission is not only about verbal proclamation but healing action as well, and it strives not just for church growth but for the wholeness of creation.”  To be a community of healing, we must seek out and identify with vulnerable and suffering creation.  What we need is “compassion so that we enter into the suffering of the earth…In sharing its wounds, we will become participants in the healing of the earth.”

 

Implications

What does it mean to be a community of sharing justice and peace in God’s household?  For starters, we must recognize that the basic unit of God’s salvific mission is not the individual, or even simply humanity; it is the whole of creation.  “Justice, biblically, is the rendering, amidst limited resources and the conditions of brokenness, of whatever is required for the fullest possible flourishing of creation.”  The primary advantage of beginning to adopt this point of view for the concern of evangelism is that it entails truly good news for everyone.  What agent for centripetal mission could be better than being known as the community that is dedicated to the fullest possible flourishing of all creation?  Who could possibly find in that goal any bad news?  The sheer universality of this claim identifies it with the very heart of the gospel itself and also opens up a vital starting point for dialogue.  In a postmodern world in which models of authority and conquest are distrusted and abhorred (and for good reason!), the humble goal of upholding all life and identifying with the most vulnerable members of creation will open more doors than any other missionary model.  Jesus did not lay down his life so that we could avoid our responsibility, and the cross that we must take up in our own time is that of affirming life in a world in which it is always and everywhere threatened.  If we send missionaries to Iraq or Afghanistan alongside the troops whose bombs and bullets are killing and destroying their lands and people, what success could we possibly expect?  Yet if there are Christians in those places, risking that their own lives may be caught in the crossfire, to stand alongside Iraqis and Afghans in the name of Christ, what better witness could be asked for?  How can the Christian mission reach those people who are already laying down their lives for the life of the world today, but who do not know the Lord for whose mission they work?  As Hall points out, “Those who are really giving their lives for the world’s life today are too altruistic to be concerned primarily for their own salvation.”  But what if the message of the Gospel and the hope of salvation is not just about me?  Then, I suppose, there would be a mission worth joining, a God worth serving, and a community—indeed, a household and family— truly worth participating in.  Then, we might actually have some good news to proclaim to a world numbed and deafened by the ceaseless drone of bad news.

References Cited

Attfield, Robin. “Environmental Sensitivity and Critiques of Stewardship.” In Environmental Stewardship, Edited by R.J. Berry, 76-91. New York: T & T Clark International, 2006.

 

Boff, Leonardo. Cry of the Earth, Cry of the Poor. Translated by Phillip Berryman. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1997.

 

Conradie, Ernst M. “The Whole Household of God (Oikos): Some Ecclesiological Perspectives.” Scriptura 94 (2007): 1-9.

 

Dyrness, William. “Stewardship of the Earth in the Old Testament.” In Tending the Garden: Essays on the Gospel and the Earth, Edited by Wesley Granberg-Michaelson, 50-65. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987.

 

Edwards, Dennis. Jesus the Wisdom of God: An Ecological Theology. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1995.

 

Gottfried, Robert R. Economics, Ecology, and the Roots of Western Faith. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1995.

 

Hall, Douglas J. The Stewardship of Life in the Kingdom of Death. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1985.

 

Jegen, Mary E. “The Church’s Role in Healing the Earth.” In Tending the Garden: Essays on the Gospel and the Earth, Edited by Wesley Granberg-Michaelson, 93-113. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987.

 

Knights, Philip. “”The Whole Earth My Altar”: A Sacramental Trajectory for Ecological Mission.” Mission Studies 25, no. 1 (2008): 56-72.

 

Moltmann, Jürgen. The Source of Life: The Holy Spirit and the Theology of Life. Translated by Margaret Kohl. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997.

 

Newbigin, Lesslie. The Open Secret: An Introduction to the Theology of Mission. Grand   Rapids: Eerdmans, 1978.

 

Nissen, Johannes. New Testament and Mission: Histonrical and Hermeneutical Perspectives. Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 2007.

 

Palmer, Clare. “Stewardship: A Case Study in Environmental Ethics.” In Environmental Stewardship, Edited by R.J. Berry, 63-75. New York: T & T Clark International, 2006.

 

Park, Rohun. “Revisiting the Parable of the Prodigal Son for Decolonization: Luke’s Reconfiguration of Oikos in 15:11-32.” Biblical Interpretation 17, no. 5 (2009): 507-520.

 

Rasmussen, Larry L. “Creation, Church, and Christian Responsibility.” In Tending the Garden: Essays on the Gospel and the Earth, Edited by Wesley Granberg-Michaelson, 114-131. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987.

 

Van Dyke, Fred, David C. Mahan, Joseph K. Sheldon, and Raymond H. Brand. Redeeming Creation: The Biblical Basis for Environmental Stewardship. Downer’s Grove, Ill.: Inter-Varsity Press, 1996.

It would be nearly impossible to cite the biblical references to the theme of economic justice exhaustively, but here is a short list: Is.1:2-4, 56:4-8, 58:6-7, 59:13-15; Jer. 11:13-16, 22:4-5,13-17; Ezek. 9:9, 12:2-3, 14:11, 37:10-14; Hos. 4:1-3; Joel 1:9-20, 2:12-16; Amos 3:15; Mic. 7:13-17, Zep. 1:9; Hag. 1:4; Hab 2:8-20; Zec. 3:7

 

Read Full Post »