At Cultural Encounters, we talk of the need to be biblically informed and Christ-centered. While that certainly involves knowing biblical information, it ultimately entails the scriptural formation of all of life so that we engage culture truthfully, righteously, and meaningfully for Christ’s sake.
Thus, it is significant that the opening essay begins with the Lord’s statement: “Teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.” It is not enough to teach people what the Lord says. It is crucial that we go much further and teach believers to obey what he says. Thus, we need to wed orthodoxy to orthopraxis. Nowhere is this need more keenly felt today than in the area of economic obedience. Evangelicals have largely failed to speak out against consumerism; instead, we find a kind of “tacit acquiescence to consumerism through silence,” argues Michael Andres. As a result, we are in danger of turning the Great Commission into the grand consumption— ‘Go into all the world and buy, sell, and consume.’ It follows from the contemporary distortion of the Great Commandment: ‘Love yourself above all else.’ We settle for being consumed by so little when God calls us to be consumed by so much more. His holy love alone can liberate us from our bondage to stuff so that we can love others freely and live fully—with no fear of late payment fees.
It is hard to find much prophetic talk coming from evangelical churches on materialism and consumerism, but there is a lot of talk about how to turn a profit in religion. You might think that with all our marketing tricks and religious trinkets we are back in Luther’s day. While we are not buying and selling literal indulgences or bits of Christ’s cross and saints’ bones, we are marketing the gospel, indulging in things that will help us advance our spiritual and material estate. While we could certainly learn a great deal from significant Catholic critiques of consumerism and materialism, given our Reformation heritage, it would also be wise for us to take another look at Luther and his Protestant impulses.
From Luther’s perspective, the church does not replace Christ or subsume Christ. And the Scriptures serve as a prophetic witness that reminds us that Christ is the transcendent ground of our faith. The doctrine of sola Scriptura for Luther did not signify the absence of tradition, but rather that all human tradition is subject to Scriptures as the voice of the living Lord. Kimlyn Bender’s remark on Baptists and evangelicalism in his article on the Reformation heritage is fitting here: “It is one of the tragic ironies of history that one of the Baptists’ most important contributions to the church universal in its witness to God’s lordship, sovereignty, and freedom over all earthly powers and authorities has been replaced in much of Baptist thought today with an emphasis upon the authority of the individual and its freedom from the communal ties that bind, and certainly this trend is reflected in broader evangelicalism as well.”
When we fail to submit all human traditions and individual preferences to Scriptures’ critique and free ourselves from authentic communal ties, we are in danger of being imprisoned and imprisoning others. All too often, the Bible has been used for colonizing, subjugating, and oppressing others rather than for freeing individuals and people groups from imprisonment. Derek Alan Woodard-Lehman speaks of how Europeans gave Africans the Bible but took their land in return. In this light, it is important that we heed his advice to submit our readings of Scriptures to the global church for critique so that we come to read the Bible as “postcolonial subjects.” Along similar lines, not only must the church disciple the nations, but a truly missional theology will involve the conviction that “Christian disciples must be discipled by the nations” if we are to move beyond Western and dominant cultural forms of syncretism. I would add that the Reformation impulse concerning the need to be reformed daily by the Word involves engaging others from diverse traditions whose own readings reveal to us our cultural blind spots in hopes of hearing God’s life-giving Word anew.
The privatization of the Bible and the Christian community in the West has fueled the colonization of the nations, leading one of this issue’s contributors, John M. Perkins, to declare elsewhere: “We have evangelized the world too lightly.” When we fail to see the church as a public alongside other publics and subject to all of God’s mandates disclosed in Scriptures, it is very easy for us to see the church as a voluntary association of religious individuals whose true allegiance lies elsewhere—namely to the state, the market, or some other institution. In her interview with Matt Jenson, Kristen Deede Johnson calls for an understanding of the church as a public that can in no way be confused with such organizations as the PTA, for “the church is meant to fully inform and shape its people, to be their primary allegiance, in ways that other organizations are not trying or are not supposed to be.” This will entail an awareness of the church’s Scriptures as definitive for shaping its life as a distinct public conversing with other publics as salt and light in the world.
In a letter to his professor, Marcus Borg, written after his evangelical conversion experience, Patrick Williams speaks of Scriptures’ authoritative shaping of his new life in Christ. While Williams does not espouse Protestant Orthodoxy’s doctrine of inerrancy espoused at such evangelical institutions as Multnomah, hopefully we all share his appreciation for historic evangelicalism’s emphasis on Scriptures’ authority in the believer’s life. As Williams says, “I have needed this focused evangelical orientation in order to break through the bonds of my ego so as to find real life, the truly meaningful life of following God in Jesus Christ.”
The Bible has served as an energizing force for liberation in the life and ministry of John and Vera Mae Perkins and their family. In this issue, their daughter, Elizabeth Perkins (the Executive Director of the John M. Perkins Foundation), speaks of how God used people in her life to restore her hope in humanity when she almost lost hope because of her home being vandalized on more than one occasion. In addition to hope-filled personal encounters, her vision for building strong communities from the ashes of communities in disrepair in the inner city of West Jackson, Mississippi based on Zechariah 8 also sustains her. When God’s word takes root in concrete communities like hers, there’s no telling what God’s people might do. The Perkins Foundation’s work serves as a prophetic and public witness against the individualistic and consumeristic forces so prevalent in our culture today.
The last two articles in this issue address the plight of the prison and ex-offender populations in our country. Both articles also speak to the captivity of the culture at large. In response to the Lord’s questioning, “Did you visit me in prison? Were you concerned about the prisoners?” John Perkins declares that in our society today, “We are here dealing with our own failures! And we are here to free ourselves—from our own captivity. That captivity is materialistic captivity! We have the resources, but we are captive to our own selfishness. We are captive to our own individualism. We are captive to our own meanings in life, our own jobs—we are captive to culture.” Only God’s holy love and Word can free us from our imprisonment. Only then will we move beyond building more prisons and move beyond charity to building authentic community.
In my essay titled “‘Folsom Prison Blues’ Revisited,” I employ cultural icon Johnny Cash to speak a word of judgment, comfort, and hope to the American church. In the consumer church culture, churches are enslaved to church growth and marketing forces that lead us to compete with other churches to own “bigger and bigger market shares and portions of the religious pie.” Only as we gain a fresh vision of Johnny Cash’s ‘Personal Jesus’ will we become truly a missional community. Only as we are captured and consumed by Scriptures’ declaration of God’s glorious love and mercy and grace will we be freed from our Folsom blues spiritual imprisonment and work to free those behind bars: “Not to us, O LORD, not to us [nor to our respective churches] but to your name be the glory because of your love and faithfulness” (Ps 115:1, NIV).
We have our work cut out for us as Christ’s community, as we seek to engage our contemporary culture truthfully, righteously, and meaningfully—teaching our disciples to obey everything Christ has commanded us. In God’s grace, he has not left his church alone, for the Lord himself will be with us always, loving, leading, guiding, and directing us through his Word and Spirit to pastures in the Promised Land far greener than anything our market economy can provide. Then we can say with all God’s saints throughout the ages, “Free at last!” As a community reformed daily by God’s Word in the power of the Spirit, we can be a reforming force for good, no longer remaining silent in the face of Mammon, but serving as a redemptive voice crying out in the consumer wasteland, “Prepare the way of the Lord.”
—Paul Louis Metzger, Editor