Category: Articles

There are many biblical commands regarding economic justice, limiting material possessions, and resistance to covetousness. However, evangelicals have been unduly influenced by an American culture with a pervasive ‘will to have’ and consequent consumptive practices: by remaining largely silent on matters of economic obedience and justice, mimicking the economic practices of the prevailing culture of acquisition, and holding uncritical and unbiblical attitudes towards material possessions as evidenced by the role of the Christian cultural products industry. Instead, evangelicals should be wary of using consumerist methods to further the faith and oppose the deleterious effects that consumerism has on beliefs, practices, theological reflection, and power. Finally, I try to show that a consumer ‘theology’ is fundamentally at odds with the evangelical theological tradition, particularly its notion of sanctification as theocentric, gracious and sufficient.

In light of recent ecumenical discussions and achievements, many are asking to what extent historic theological divisions between Catholics and Protestants have now been overcome. This essay approaches this question by examining the recent study by Mark Noll and Carolyn Nystrom entitled Is The Reformation Over? An Evangelical Assessment of Contemporary Roman Catholicism. The present essay argues that while much progress has been made in the dialogue between Roman Catholics and Protestants in general and evangelicals in particular, issues of ecclesiology will continue to divide the communions for the foreseeable future, and that these issues resist resolution precisely because they are ultimately Christological as well as ecclesiological. This essay attempts to shed light on these Christological and ecclesiological differences.

Though outright imperialism has been declared passé, the present era of globalization nonetheless remains implicated in the colonial project, as do the Church and the Bible. Within such conditions Christian theology and biblical interpretation must be(come) actively postcolonial, or else remain culpably, if passively, neocolonial. Thus Musa Dube asks, “Given the role of the Bible in facilitating imperialism, how should we read the Bible as postcolonial subjects?” In answering her own question, Dube develops a postcolonial feminist “reading prism” with and from the ordinary reading practices of African women. This essay explicates her hermeneutics and explores the possibilities of reading the Bible with and through Dube’s prism as a white Western male. In so doing, it argues that white Western Christians must attempt such readings and engage in postcolonial struggle.

Contemporary political discourse tends to either languish under lazy appeals to tolerance or devolve into the violence of irreconcilable difference. In her recent book, Theology, Political Theory, and Pluralism: Beyond Tolerance and Difference, Kristen Deede Johnson examines the tradition of political liberalism exemplified by Rawls and its recent post-Nietzschean critics whose agonistic political theory finds conflict basic to politics. Proposing a constructive model of ‘conversation’, Johnson calls for a more deeply Christian political engagement that resists a privatization of belief in the name of ‘tolerance’ while
refusing to resort to the rhetorical violence of a triumphalism that would equate state and church.

Consumer capitalism rivals–and perhaps surpasses–the nation-state as one of the two most powerful and formative “leviathans” of modernity. Though consumer capitalism in central aspects contradicts and obstructs the convictions and practices of classical Christianity, the modern church in affluent countries has largely capitulated to it. This essay suggests that purchase for real and really Christian engagement of consumer capitalism may arise from returned attention to one of the crucial aspects of New Testament and classical Christian witness—martyrdom. But capitalism, in contrast to communism, has learned that it is more effective to seduce and co-opt Christians than to kill them. So there is needed an account of martyrdom that does not entail physical death by violence (red martyrdom), but which, after the way of the cross of Christ, resists personal and corporate formation as self-interested, addicted, envious, and un-self-controlled consumers. White martyrdom, recognized particularly in the monastic movement, is one historical manifestation of such an account. Another and lesser known is the Celtic-based green martyrdom. This essay briefly reprises green martyrdom’s origins, then concentrates on playfully but seriously imagining how green martyrdom might embody a true faith of the cross in our day, when the excesses of consumerism threaten not only Christian formation but the very fate of the earth itself.

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