Author: Paul Louis Metzger

One thing that stands out to me as I read this collection of articles is that Christ’s church is much bigger than you and me. Contrary to inflated popular opinion, the church did not begin with us; and it won’t end with us either. As the church presses onward toward its destiny in Christ, we need to be sensitive and receptive to the wisdom that can be gleaned from the church in its diverse historical and contemporary contexts if we are to contend for the one true and historic faith against “isms” and ideologies aligned against the church in the present setting. While two heads are better than one, a multitude of sanctified imaginations are better than two. That being said, this issue introduces us to the wisdom of Celtic Christian practices, the present Pope, the Protestant Reformer Martin Luther, diverse worshiping communities, mainline Protestant pastors, and a young emergent-evangelical activist. Let’s see what our conversation partners throughout the ages and across the ecclesial spectrum have to teach us.

Rodney Clapp’s discussion of “green martyrdom” leads off this collection of essays. Clapp argues that consumer capitalism competes with the nation state as one of modernity’s most imposing leviathans. While consumer capitalism contends against classical Christian faith, the modern church in the West has largely surrendered to it. Clapp says of consumerism: “Consumerism inculcates desire for desire’s sake, in fact, a kind of deification of insatiable and free-ranging desire. Ever new experiences and goods are demanded. The perfect consumer is an addict who can never rest and never has enough.”

If the Western church is to have any hope of rising up and rebelling effectively against consumer capitalism, it must embrace martyrdom, which was esteemed by the ancient church. However, given the sophisticated and ever-adapting nature of consumer capitalism—realizing that it is more advantageous to seduce and utilize Christians than to kill them—Christians in the West must embrace green martyrdom, just as Christians in other times and places have embraced red (bloody death) martyrdom and white (suffering short of death) martyrdom.

Clapp stretches the use of “green martyrdom” beyond its Celtic origins, where believers withdrew to Ireland’s wilderness for solitary lives of prayer. Clapp speaks of green martyrdom for three reasons: first, green is the color of money, subverting capitalism’s fixation with money; second, green is the color of the earth, as in the case of the Celts, challenging consumerism’s reduction of the creation to a base commodity; and third, green is the church’s color for “ordinary time,” signifying that we must always be mindful of the ever-seductive presence of consumer capitalism. Characteristic traits of green martyrdom include laying our lives and bodies on the line for our way of life rather than making others suffer for it, as well as challenging idolatry and specifying greed as a chief manifestation of it. Among other things, green martyrs will remember “that early Christian martyrdom was a head-on confrontation of idolatry—a refusal to name and treat Caesar, rather than Christ, as Lord.”

We Christians can never reasonably claim to be on Christ’s side with all that his lordship entails if we succumb to consumer capitalism’s reign; nor can we ever claim in our intercultural discourse that God is on our side if we take seriously the claim that the Word became flesh. We now turn from consideration of ancient and Celtic Christian practices to the present day pope. Peter Casarella weighs in on Pope Benedict’s controversial speech at Regensburg and its importance for a post-September 11 world. The intent of the Pontiff’s address was to foster intercultural dialogue rather than hinder it, especially with the Muslim world. In his own interpretation of the Pope’s address, Casarella draws attention to the significance of the Word becoming flesh for intercultural dialogue.

Casarella puts the dialogical significance of the incarnation of the Word beautifully: “It requires the courage to do more than to be tolerant of the other just by virtue of the different viewpoint. Love comes into the equation, a love incarnated in the person of Christ. When we love with the logos, we are not abandoning our principles. On the contrary, we show our cards, so to speak, so that they can be tested by the public scrutiny of rational discourse. . . .”

Intercultural dialogue is the task of the university today; we cannot relegate the importance of such dialogue to a few special courses and lectures on the subject. Casarella shares from his own personal experience how important dialogue became to the faculty and students at Catholic University in Washington, D. C., in a post-September 11 world. While the current setting makes it clear why such dialogue is important, the incarnation provides the basis for such discourse in the university: “. . . if dialogue takes place within the broad expanse of the logos that takes on flesh, then there is no way that we can act with this logos to advocate that God must be on our side because he contravenes the normal rules of civil discourse. . . . Faith in Jesus seeks understanding, and this search is the authentic basis for intercultural dialogue.”

The Christian community’s needed opposition to consumer capitalism and pursuit of authentic dialogue find profound resources for meaningful engagement in ancient and medieval practices centered in the eternal Word made flesh. Our sanctification as Christians which includes confrontation of the fallen powers and charity in authentic dialogue is itself centered in Christ, according to Luther and his expositor, Olli-Pekka Vainio. While many will consider this point to be a no-brainer, it does not take much to think through how little consideration is given to Christ as the center of the Christian life, ethics, and sanctification. All too often in our discussions of such matters as ethics, interfaith dialogue, and the environment, we miss the forest while looking at the trees. Fortunately, this is not the case with Casarella, Clapp, and Vainio.

Over against those who would focus consideration of the Christian life in ethics or sanctification—giving rise to the moral matrix whereby we gauge how good or bad people are based simply on what they do or don’t do—Vainio’s Luther would have us see that “the Christian life is structured by the notion of transformation according to the image of Christ. This transformation is essentially Christological, where everything is managed by Christ present in faith.” Christ is not simply an exemplar for our sanctification; he is also the agent and content of our sanctification. This leads us to participate in a matrix of a completely different kind. Only after Christ is formed passively by faith in the believer does the believer actively engage through faith the law and society in a profoundly transformational manner.

As with most things, Luther got to the heart of the matter, not concentrating his attention simply on the external form. He was after the spirit of the law, not the law as an end in itself. No wonder then that Luther was determined to translate the Word of God into the language of the German people (rather than leave it in Greek, Hebrew, or the authorized Latin translation) and turned bar tunes into hymns. Luther understood the need for contextualizing the Gospel to diverse cultural settings. The same holds true for Stephen Bailey, who helps us see the importance of content being wed to cultural context in view of the Spirit’s particularization of Christ’s work and his message in diverse settings.

Bailey argues that worship styles mirror the social experience of God’s people to a greater extent than we may realize. He employs Mary Douglas’s “grid and group theory” to analyze the relation of worship preferences to their cultural sources. In the end, Bailey hopes to help Christ-followers see how God’s Spirit bears witness to Christ in a diversity of cultural forms and identities. Bailey’s insights can assist us in getting beyond our worship wars in the States, where we often measure spirituality based on conformity to the dominant style (whatever that may be), and aid contextualization of the gospel overseas where so often the dominant Western culture globalizes its form rather than globalizes the gospel in terms of local cultural mediums. Bailey helps us get beyond the Babylonian Captivity of the church’s worship to imperial forms so that God’s people can move in keeping with the harmony birthed at Pentecost—where everyone praised God in Christ in their own tongue.

Just as those in the dominant culture often fail to listen to marginalized voices, all too often professors in the academy fail to listen to the voices of pastors and their people. Not so with Michael Jinkins, who provides us with much needed reflections on current issues facing the church by those with the greatest investment in the church’s life—the clergy. Jinkins asked those he interviewed the following two questions: “What are the two or three biggest challenges facing your congregation as it looks to its future?” “How do you go about reflecting theologically on these challenges?”

The five issues Jinkins explores as a result of his investigation are pluralism, stewardship, “therapeutism,” consumerism, and Pelagianism. What is surprising is the shape the meaning of these terms take in view of the contexts of those interviewed. I will leave it to the reader to discover their surprising shape. The reader should not be surprised, however, by the significant reflections provided by those surveyed. What should be surprising is how seldom those of us in the academy take to heart the questions and considerable practical wisdom of those in the church. Perhaps if we did, those in the church would take to heart our theological musings a bit more? Jinkins helps us—if we are listening—get beyond this gulf. While he claims his methodology is unscientific, his findings hardly lack significance for scientific investigation on behalf of the church in our seminaries and universities.

Academics must learn to listen to all voices—including those from within the young emergent crowd. In our “Cultural Reflections” essay, Brandon Rhodes reflects upon the shattering of long-standing religious and political allegiances and theological claims; many young evangelicals like himself are looking instead to center their faith in an embodied politic grounded in a missional theology of hope. In place of understanding the gospel as focusing primarily on “how to get into heaven after you die,” Rhodes and his comrades are seeking to live out an understanding of the gospel as more prominently emphasizing “how to share little bits of heaven here on Earth before you die.”

In reacting to an all-too future eschatology, the young emergent crowd must guard against an overly-realized future where the kingdom is completely present and where sight is lost of the transcendent ground and goal of our faith, which can never be reduced to the political systems of this world or to church practices. This being said, Rhodes’s reflections provide important safeguards against both extremes, namely, his call for an embodied faith grounded in a missional theology of hope. Without such embodiment, the vacuum exists whereby the state or market can so easily replace and displace the church as the alternative politic and economy of the kingdom. Without such transcendent hope, the church will tend to take matters into its own hands, and as a result will not have the strength or resources to contend against communal and kingdom counterfeits in the here and now.

At the outset of this editor’s introduction, I remarked that one thing that stands out to me as I read this collection of articles is that Christ’s church is much bigger than you and me. In conclusion, I would add that Christ is much bigger than his church, though united to her for all eternity. Far from leading to escapism or paralysis, our hope rooted in faith in God’s loving wisdom poured out through the incarnate Christ in the Spirit makes it possible for the church to move forward from ancient times into the future of this new millennium. This collection of essays gives us food for thought and strength for the journey, as we become sensitive and receptive to the wisdom that can be gleaned from the church in its diverse historical and contemporary contexts, even as the church herself bears witness to Christ’s inexhaustible wisdom that serves as a light for our path until our faith in Christ becomes sight and we reach our eternal home.

—Paul Louis Metzger, Editor

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