"I want to suggest instead that you imagine that there is a heaven and that it actually overlaps with earth and that that’s very confusing but it’s what was embodied in Jesus and what Jesus wants us to embody in our own lives by the Spirit. It’s not the anarchist’s dream, it’s not the romantic dream — the critique of empire is not, “Oh, no, let’s not try and organize the world; let’s go back and each sit under our vines and our fig trees.” Well that would be nice but again that’s not where it’s at; and it’s not the Marxist dream either, which is actually part of postmodernity, a parasitic on modernity. It is rather saying, yes, God does want there to be authorities, nationally and internationally, I believe, but he wants them to be held to account and it’s the task of the church to avoid the sterile left-right polarization of issue after issue after issue. You know how it goes, that somebody votes one way on one issue and so it’s assumed that there’s a package of all sorts of other issues that go together, and if you tick one box on the left you’re going to tick them all and if you tick one box on the right you’ll tick them all. I need to tell you your left-right spectrum in America does not correspond to our left-right spectrum in Britain — it does a bit but it’s quite confusing, actually, it’s quite different. And we need to uncouple those issues and name them one by one, and sometimes as a Christian you’ll find yourself voting with the left and other times you’ll find yourself voting with the right. And if that means that ultimately we need to vote for better systems with better ways of discovering what we really deeply believe, maybe we ought to be doing that too. And we are not to be scared, we are not to be scared, by the rhetoric of the new right, nor are we to be conned by the rhetoric of the new left — if you have ears then hear — rather we are to work and pray for exodus, for liberty, not for free trade but for fair trade, in economic and military and ecological matters.
How are we going to do this? By re-envisioning and re-appropriating worship and mission in the light of all that’s been said, in the light of the full biblical story. Worship is not simply Christian entertainment or making a miscellaneous nice party with lots of nice music. Christian worship is humbly adoring the Creator God and thereby being renewed in his image. And image-bearing includes that love of the world which shares the love which was Christ’s, which sent him to die on the cross, renewed in his image and strengthened by his body and blood, into a transformative spirituality which expresses itself naturally and obviously in the work for new creation in the world. I had a message the other day from a friend the other side of the world who lives in a really, frankly, rather dualistic church, where he was struggling to hold together evangelism and social justice, and saying, “My church finds it very difficult. Social justice seems to be the sort of thing those liberals do, and I want to be able to talk about social justice — how do I do that?”
NT Wright
2 comments:
Sometime in the past--probably the twenties or thirtie--the idea that concern for social issues was somehow liberal and dangerous took root in the conservative church and it still grows there. I used to try to show my students how Jesus spent most of his time preaching and doing the social gospel, but it was a hard sell. It's a terrible divide, this faith/works conflict.
I was visiting my daughter and her family and had the opportunity to go to church with them. After the service a young man came up to me and said, "I understand you're a Methodist minister". I confirmed his statement and he continued, "I hope you don't preach that 'Social Gospel'!" I looked at him, smiled, and said, "Oh, you took that out of your Bible, how convenient for you". I have never been able to do that. I've had to settle for being right/left, blue/red, liberal/conservative.
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