Category: Journal Issues

In this article, Josh Butler argues that Revelation 4’s classic depiction of worship around God’s throne presents a picture of prophetic political challenge. Butler proposes that the scene’s location in heaven places it over the public life of the world, through examination of the heavenly throne’s Old Testament roots as a symbol of God’s kingdom reign over the earth. In orienting worship around God’s throne, John confronts Roman imperial ideology in the first century, with its claims to autonomous rule over the earth. Likewise, John’s vision in Revelation 4 provides resources for today’s Church to counter the privatization of its faith: reclaiming worship and heaven as political categories and framing the church’s vision for and participation in the public life of the world around the kingdom reign of God.

With the demographic center of Christianity shifting from the continents of North America and Europe to the continents of Africa, Asia and Latin America, Dr. Soong-Chan Rah asserts that there is now a corresponding shift from a Euro-Centric American evangelicalism to a multiethnic American Christianity. While there has been a noticeable decline among the population of white evangelicals, the influx of Christian immigrants has helped to sustain and grow the American church in the ethnic minority and multiethnic communities. Despite these changes in the demographics of American Christianity, Rah argues that there is still a Western, white cultural captivity of the American evangelical church, which prevents progression towards the ‘next evangelicalism’. The power dynamic of American Christianity needs to be addressed in order move towards a more multicultural expression of the church.

J. Kameron Carter replies to questions concerning his recent work Race: A Theological Account. Carter expounds on his thesis that the problem of whiteness in the west may be traced to roots in early Christianity’s split with Judaism, explaining that it was the biologization of the split between that created the white, Christian race, as opposed to the Jewish, oriental race. Throughout Carter counters historic Christianity’s culpability in the genesis of racial reasoning with ways in which a proper Christology may offer ways of conceiving identity that may avoid the violence inherent in the discourse of modern identity politics, finding specific application with gender and other instances of oppositional identity formation in the modern west.

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