Category: Editor’s Introduction

It is political primary season in America. As the nation gears up for the next Presidential election, we will be hearing a great deal about moral values. Presidential candidates understand which way the wind is blowing, and that they must articulate “moral values” if their campaigns are to build momentum.

This issue of Cultural Encounters deals specifically with various moral issues and liberation themes, such as concern for race, the war on terror, poverty, HIV/AIDS, and the environment. It is not the editorial committee’s aim “to endorse” every point in the pages that follow, but to raise crucial, and sometimes controversial, issues of life and death as topics the church must engage—during the campaign season and beyond. On the one hand, it is important that we not be carried away by every wind of doctrine (Eph. 4:14) but test the spirits (1 Jn. 4:1-6). On the other hand, it is important that God’s holy and powerful Spirit of love carry us forward to care for those beaten down by the Katrinas and Tsunamis of life. While never easy to balance, we need to pursue orthodoxy as well as orthopraxis, matching biblical conviction with compassion—a truly liberating theology.

With these tension points and concerns firmly in mind, it is appropriate that we begin this issue with consideration of the work of one of the leading (and also one of the most controversial) liberation theologians, Brazilian Leonardo Boff. Boff was silenced by the Roman Catholic Church for what it deemed heretical teachings. Lutheran theologian Rudolf von Sinner writing from Brazil speaks of Boff as a Protestant Catholic—“Protestant” because of his protest of ecclesiastical power and “Catholic” because of the cosmic dimensions of his thought. Von Sinner also maintains that Boff’s ecclesiology is a Christology from the people, and therefore Protestant, emphasizing the priesthood of all believers. Moreover, it is an ecclesiology of liberation in that it is “built up by and from the poor.” Von Sinner also claims that Boff’s ecclesiology is truly catholic—open to those traditions beyond the walls of Roman Catholicism.

While the church had a privileged—sacramental—status as “God’s presence in the world” in Boff’s earlier writings, his later writings “give the impression that the Church is giving way to the cosmos as the privileged prism” of God’s sacramental presence. And while von Sinner affirms Boff’s cosmic theology as a corrective to Protestantism’s “overly rational and individualistic” tendencies, he cautions against Boff’s “overly harmonious view” of God’s relation to the world (panentheistically conceived) “that would not do justice to the ambiguity of human existence.” Going further, while von Sinner affirms the contextual and truly catholic nature of Boff’s theology, he draws attention to the loss of “precise focus” in his later theological reflections. And while Boff’s concern for the concrete situation of the poor and authentic communal existence is commendable, he “tends toward an excess of concreteness” in his deliberations on divine perichoresis, as von Sinner maintains. Von Sinner’s essay leads us to ask how we can, on the one hand, maintain concern for the particularity and uniqueness of God’s revelation in Christ and the unique significance of the church while, on the other hand, articulating a sense of the comprehensive scope of salvation? All that follows bears this question in mind.

The comprehensive scope of Christ’s saving work means that Christ has a bearing not only on Roman Catholicism in Latin America but also on evangelicalism and Pentecostalism in South and North America combined. Building on his constructive assessment of Boff, von Sinner also criticizes both evangelicalism for overemphasizing the individual in God’s salvific purposes and neo-Pentecostalism for its prosperity gospel preaching. Von Sinner’s critique hits close to home, drawing attention to the fact that the concern over winds of doctrine blowing us off course is something that concerns us ultimately north as well as south of the border.

The next essay, by Gary Deddo, draws attention to North American evangelicalism’s excessive preoccupation with the autonomous individual and how this impacts negatively the movement’s engagement of race problems. Deddo articulates a Trinitarian model of human existence that sees the individual as bound up in a relational matrix with God and other humans. Grounded in this Trinitarian model, Deddo argues that the greatest problem with racism (and even some correctives) is the absolutizing of “race” and relativizing of the more fundamental reality—that everyone is our neighbor. Deddo also reframes ethical obligation in view of this Trinitarian anthropology. Over against the recurring danger of the Galatian heresy (Gal. 3:1ff.), where “we begin with faith in grace but end with trying to muster hope in our own works,” Deddo maintains that “a faithful Trinitarian anthropology announces that ethical obligation is founded upon the completed work of Christ, who has created and restored humanity in actuality.” This perspective bears upon all ethical concerns, including matters of race. It follows from this orientation that Christ is the neighbor who loves those outside his circle, including his enemies. We have the privilege of participating in his reality and bearing witness in our lives to what he has already accomplished on behalf of the church and the world. Jesus’ identity and activity makes it possible for us to be authentic witnesses, freeing us from indifference and autonomous activity to love our neighbor, whoever our neighbor might be.

But who is my neighbor? Writing from New Zealand, Murray Rae brings the question to bear on the West’s war on terror and all its talk of Christian values. In the States, we are so bombarded with the rhetoric of Christian values and the terror campaign that we might fail to hear Jesus’ stump speeches on enemy love. In such situations, it is important to listen to brothers and sisters in Christ from around the world. In view of Jesus’ ethic disclosed in the biblical narratives, Rae is wary of talk of “Christian values.” He believes that we in the West isolate values from this biblical context. What is needed is “a properly theological account of Christian ethics.” He goes on to say: “The rhetoric of Christian values often serves this reductive purpose and thereby constitutes an attempt to preserve the perceived moral value of Christian faith while abandoning the central claims of the gospel, most especially the resurrection of Jesus Christ,” whereby God reorders creaturely life. Like Deddo, Rae also draws attention to Galatians. The fruit of the Spirit “are not values to be striven for, but reminders of what outcomes should ensue from our participation in the story of the gospel.” Whereas talk of “values” often involves removal of ethics from the particular gospel story, talk of “reminders” does not. On the latter view, the Gospel remains indispensable, and so too its radical call to discipleship.

Whether we are dealing with racism (as in the case of Deddo) or the war on terror (which Rae analyzes), Rae argues that revenge has no place in the ethic of the crucified and risen Christ’s kingdom. Whereas revenge breeds more violence, forgiveness—while costly—follows from adherence to Christ’s story. “Such acts of forgiveness cannot be ascribed a value; that is to say, they carry with them no surety, no banknote guarantee of success. They are acts of faith, rather, in which we entrust the outcome to the God who raised Jesus from the dead.” In spite of the Gospel story and all the talk today of “What would Jesus do?” there probably won’t be much talk of neighbor love or enemy love—certainly not a neighbor like Bin Laden—during the presidential primary season’s debates over moral values. Again, the candidates know which way the wind is blowing.

Which wind, though, are we concerned for as Christians? The cultural currents around us, or the wind of the Holy Spirit, who births a high pressure zone spirituality? We can never move toward enemy love if we are not captured by God’s love in Christ. For R.N. Frost, God’s love poured out by Christ’s Spirit “is like a high pressure zone in the souls of those captivated by Christ.” Like the wind that flows through the Columbia River Gorge from high pressure to low pressure, those compelled forward by the love of Christ will give themselves to causes requiring social activism, without being exhausted by such causes. With Rae, Frost is wary of what often passes for “Christian”—whether we are talking about values or love. We need to place love in the biblical context of Christ’s call on his disciples’ lives. “Moral values” as such will not involve the imitation of Christ’s kingdom: “What cannot be imitated is Jesus’ heart. If his Spirit is not present in those who claim to follow him, the transforming wind of his pneuma is also absent. But if the Spirit is present, so is a willingness to sacrifice all selfish ambitions” for one’s friends, as well as for one’s enemies. Moral lessons, propositions, and values will not do it—only God’s sacrificial, enemy-loving love. Such a perspective leads to infinite compassion—“Our care, and our compassion for others, is placed within a frame of reference as big as God himself” and will spill forth from our union and communion with God to a world that desperately “hungers to be loved.”

As the Christian community is swept along by God’s costly and expansive love poured out in our lives through the Spirit of the crucified, risen, and ascended Christ (Deddo, Rae and Frost), God’s people will inevitably engage in holistic outreach and action along the lines noted in the reflection pieces by Jim Wallis, Tony Campolo, Susan Slonaker, and Peter Illyn. These “Cultural Reflections” essays are not systematic treatises on theology and culture, but reflections that involve wrestling with our Christian faith in our concrete cultural context.

Wallis speaks of “two great hungers in our world” today—the hunger for spirituality and the hunger for social justice—and these hungers are inspiring a movement that is sweeping the nation. In this context, Wallis calls for a new and expansive conversation over moral values, which is concerned with more than the two issues of abortion and marriage. Wallis believes it is not only important that political discourse include this discussion on moral values, but that this conversation on moral values transforms politics. “Politics is failing. While one should not withdraw from politics, one doesn’t just join politics either. One has to change it, move it, transform it. You can’t just replace one wet-fingered politician with another. You have to ‘change the wind,’ and then politicians move in a different direction.” Speaking like a revivalist and civil rights preacher at times, Wallis alludes to “Amazing Grace” and “altar calls.” It reminds me that without a fresh outpouring of God’s Spirit and without a firm grasp of the triune God’s redemptive ways, we will not be able to contend against the crises of our day. Without a firm hope that Jesus has gone through the grave to be raised by the Spirit, and that we are called to ride his Spirit’s storm of holy love, we will not be able to do in our day what Wilberforce and Newton, Wesley, Finney, and King did in theirs.

Tony Campolo and Susan Slonaker of REACH Ministries address the church’s failure to respond redemptively and compassionately in the HIV/AIDS crisis situation. Rather than reaching out to these modern day lepers with the healing touch of Christ, we often call out, “Unclean! Unclean!” When we act in this way, we fail to experience a fresh sense of Christ’s presence in our lives. Quoting Jesus’ words in Matthew 25, Campolo says: “Whatever we do ‘for the least of these,’ we do for Christ himself. The Christ, who died on Calvary, who was resurrected, and who is in the world today, chooses to use children such as those found at the REACH Camps as a sacramental means through which to present Himself to us. Mother Teresa once said, ‘Whenever I look into the eyes of a man dying of AIDS, I have the eerie sensation that Jesus is staring back at me.’” Mother Teresa and Campolo have taken a lot of heat for such statements, oftentimes from religious leaders who have not likely taken the time to reach out to “the least of these” of whom Mother Teresa and Campolo speak.

I have the rare privilege of looking into the eyes of Mother Teresa whenever I meet with Susan Slonaker of REACH Ministries. “Caught in the whirlwind of God,” this tiny woman is a mighty force to reckon with. However, if it weren’t for God’s overwhelming whirlwind presence in her life, and her being overwhelmed by the beautiful and often neglected children stricken with HIV/AIDS, she would not be able to cope with the religious establishment and secular forces that stand in the way of ministering Christ’s healing touch to these children. Woe to the person who stands in the way of letting the little children come unto him. I encourage you—the reader—to get involved with REACH Ministries, to be caught up in the whirlwind of God as you reach out to touch a child in need through REACH. As in the case of Slonaker—whose life changed dramatically when she was “whipped off” her “feet by the whirling wind of the Spirit,” your life will never be the same again.

I also encourage you to consider carefully the whirlwind world tour of “the Cossack and the Cannibal,” which Peter Illyn of Restoring Eden narrates. You will come face to face with a Christian tribal leader from Papua New Guinea named Yat, and will learn that your neighbor not only lives next door to you, but also lives across the world, and is impacted by the choices we in the West have made for centuries—choices that are taking the natural world around him and his people away from them forever. Yat senses which way the wind is blowing this primary season, and the winds of change do not bode well for him. Hopefully, as you read, you will be moved as Yat was moved in South Dakota—not standing before the finished monument to the four presidents, but before the unfinished monument to Crazy Horse. How crazy is it that for all our talk about moral values in America, and access to Christian Scripture, the church in America has “become so embedded in the culture of our present world that we do not recognize that our way of living, which we implicitly view as divinely sanctioned, is not rooted robustly in biblical truth,” as Illyn notes. Whether we are thinking about those of other races, adherents of other religions with whom the West is at war, little children with HIV/AIDS, or the indigenous peoples of Papua New Guinea, we are thinking about our neighbors. What is our God thinking about us? And which way is the wind blowing in your life?

—Paul Louis Metzger, Editor

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

In this essay, Rudolf von Sinner offers a reinterpretation of Liberation theologian Leonardo Boff’s theology. He describes Boff as a “Protestant Catholic.” Boff was Catholic in the sense of being a theologian with a very broad cosmic vision and protestant because he was not afraid to confront ecclesiastical power-bases and dogmatic theologies. Boff sought always to establish his theology in the reality of life, not in ivory towers. Von Sinner highlights four major themes in Boff’s theology: the Church, the Cosmos, the Triune God, and Praise to God—explaining the significance of each, while remaining aware of Boff’s shifts of opinion over time. Von Sinner points out that as Boff moved further away from his Roman Catholic origins, his theology became less religious and more spiritual—concerned with reconciliation and justice for all people. Regardless of the specific Protestant and Catholic aspects of his theology, von Sinner explains that Boff was always Evangelical, in that the Gospel was his principal guide for life’s journey.

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