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Household Economy: The Primitive Church and Contemporary Churches
“All who believed were together and had all things in common…” (Acts 2:44)
6/1/2010
Numerous New Testament texts reflect communitarian relationships among first and second generation Christian communities. For instance, there are the texts in Acts describing the pooling and apparent liquidation of resources for community support (Acts 2:41-47, 4:32-37) and organization for community care of the dependent needy (Acts 6:1-6), and Paul’s epistolary references to a wide-cast net to gather resources for Palestinian famine relief (Romans 15:25-29, 1 Corinthians 16:1-9).
We know that church history records numerous reversions to this primitive communitarianism, both in the midst of a dominant and comprehensive Christendom (e.g., the original Franciscans) and among precariously surviving believers in hostile environments (e.g., underground churches in 20th century totalitarian settings).
Thus the question arises: Can contemporary Christian communities in an increasingly secular, globalizing society develop and sustain alternative economic models and networks that are grounded in these biblical antecedents and actually useful and healthy? Or, to put it another way: Do Christians have a unique contribution to make to communitarian, earth-friendly conversations and experiments that are arising in response to the dominant global culture and its crises?
I. Looking at Selected Biblical Texts1. Awe came upon everyone, because many wonders and signs were being done by the apostles. All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the property to all, as any had need. Day by day, as they spent much time in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the good will of all the people. (Acts 2:43-47)
Salient points:a) The Christian community at this early juncture is geographically concentrated and – apparently – entirely Jewish. The euphoria created by the resurrection experiences and sustained by the “wonders and signs” – characteristic of Jesus’ ministry as recounted in the gospels, and now reproduced by the apostles -- created a unique optimism and esprit de corps. The primitive church was “a church where things happened. If we expect great things from God and attempt great things for God, things happen”. To the extent that this picture of the primitive community is accurate, it is based on intense, local relationships, the experience and expectation of extraordinary (supernatural) power, and a vivid expectation of the imminent return of Christ. The two witnesses on the Mount of the Ascension: “This same Jesus, who has been taken up from you intro heaven, will come again in the same way as you saw him go into heaven” (Acts 1:11).
b) There is a superficial resemblance to a socialist economic model – e.g., collective ownership, distribution according to need. But this is an economic model of liquidation, not production. Technically, socialism is a shared ownership of the means of production, presupposing an industrialized society. The vivid eschatological expectation of primitive Christians rendered questions of sustainability moot. Such questions notwithstanding, the primitive church “was a sharing church; these early Christians had an intense feeling of responsibility for each other”.
2. At present, however, I am going to Jerusalem in a ministry to the saints; for Macedonia and Achaia have been pleased to share their resources with the poor among the saints in Jerusalem. They were pleased to do this, and indeed they owe it to them; for if the Gentiles have come to share in their spiritual blessings, they ought to be of service to them in material things. (Romans 15:23-27)
Salient points:a) Pauline Christianity was an urban Christianity. Wayne Meeks declares: “Paul was a city person. The city breathes through his language.” He planted small cells of Christians in scattered households in cities across the northern Mediterranean basin; these cells communicated with one another through letters, official visits and contact with traveling Christians.
b) These channels of contact facilitated the sharing of economic resources between the largely Gentile Christian communities of the Greco-Roman cities and the Jewish Christians in Palestine. Paul leverages a sense of obligation in the Gentile beneficiaries of the faith birthed in Palestine to encourage unity among these disparate and scattered communities. Shared Christian identity trumps tribalism and enables radical sharing beyond the local communities. This sharing, too, has an eschatological dimension. “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male or female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). In this sense, Paul’s theology reflects the reality of its urban incubator, and celebrates it as teleological and normative, rather than responding with fear and loathing. “The urban handworkers included slave and free, with a fair range of status and means, from desperate poverty to a reasonably comfortable living, but all belong thoroughly to the city”.
By mid 2010 a historic shift in the distribution of world population will have taken place. For the first time in human history there will be more urban dwellers than rural dwellers.
3. Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break through and steal; but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, whether neither most nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. (Matthew 6:19-21)
Salient points:a) The sayings in Matthew 6:19-34 are modified from Q. According to the two-source theory, the author of Matthew uses as sources the Gospel of Mark and the lost-sayings source Q. Though the Gospel of Matthew likely postdates the destruction of Jerusalem (70 C.E.), Mark and Q likely predate that event, making the written tradition that preserves these sayings roughly contemporaneous with the Pauline epistles. The sayings contrast orientation to God with orientation to worldly wealth.
b) In God’s in breaking basileia, announced by Jesus and attested by his authoritative teaching and signs and wonders, one’s relationship to God, and in God, to the neighbor, relativises economic concerns. “But strive first for the Kingdom of God, and its righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well” (Matthew 6:33).
4. After this I saw another angel coming down from heaven, having great authority, and the earth was made bright with his splendor.
He called out with a mighty voice, “Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great!”
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Then I heard another voice from heaven saying, “Come out of her, my people, so that you do not take part in her sins…”
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
And the merchants of the earth weep and mourn for her, since no one buys their cargo anymore, cargo of gold, silver, jewels and pearls,
fine linen, purple, silk and scarlet, all kinds of scented wood, all articles of ivory….. (Revelation 18:1-2, 4, 11-12)
Salient points:a) The author reflects prophetic taunts found in such Old Testament texts as Isaiah 23-24, Jeremiah 50-51 and Ezekiel 26-27, and prophetic summons to flight found in such texts as Isaiah 48:20-22 and Jeremiah 50:8-10. “Wealthy Romans bought expensive products from everywhere”, and “Rome was the hub of a complex economic system that imported products from China, India, Africa and northern Europe”.
b) The various New Testament writings express an extreme ambivalence toward Rome. Jesus catches the Jewish leaders in Jerusalem in their ambivalence about the modus vivendi they had struck with the Roman occupiers in his response to their question about paying taxes: “Then give to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s” (Luke 20:20-26 and parallels). Paul used his Roman citizenship to his advantage in situations of peril (Acts 16:35-40, 25:1-12), and without question the Pax Romana facilitated his missionary enterprise and the extension and persistence of the primitive congregations. On the other hand, the upwelling of persecution under Nero (64 C.E.), the destruction of Jerusalem (70 C.E.) and the further persecution toward the end of Domitian’s reign (81-96 C.E.), overlay earlier sanguine attitudes with fear and hatred. Throughout church history, attitudes toward empire – including its economic manifestations – have oscillated along a spectrum spanning glorification, identification, withdrawal and judgment.
5. Then the angel showed me the river of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city. On either side of the river is the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month, and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. (Revelation 22:1-2)
Salient points:a) When God’s authority is fully recognized and God’s reign fully instantiated, there will be a sort of return to Eden, featuring health, harmony, and provision for all (cf, Isaiah 11:1-9, 41:17-20, Ezekiel 47:6-12). “Twelve kinds of fruit suggests the miraculous fruitfulness of the new world”.
b) New Testament images of sharing, harmony and (economic) restoration catch up the notable Old Testament theme of Jubilee.
The Jubilee year, announced on the Day of Atonement (Leviticus 25:9), was a time of social reform, intended to restore dignity and economic solvency to poor families alienated from their homes by mortgage and torn apart by debt slavery… Israel was conceived of as a network of families. One of the goals, if not the principle goal, of the law of Jubilee was to reunite families.
Jesus picked up the Jubilee tradition in his proclamation of the kingdom of God (Luke 4:18-19; cf, Isaiah 61:1-2). The Lord’s prerogative, or “favor” (Isaiah 61:2), inaugurates a new order and a “stunning social reversal which contradicted the appearance of things”. The common identity which united the dispersed Christian communities, their common experience of “one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of us all” (Ephesians 4:5), and of forgiveness and transformation in Christ (2 Corinthians 5:17), and their eschatological expectation created a natural convergence with the Jubilee tradition with respect to economic expectations.
II. Some Historical ConsiderationsMost commonly, surveys of church history concern themselves with what Diana Butler Bass calls “Big-C Christianity”. It is “the chronicle of popes, schisms and doctrinal fights”. It presupposes the predominant identification of the church with particular nations, cultures and power elites. To be sure, there are counter narratives concerned with a litany of sects, heretics and counter cultural Christian communities, but its agents and their activities were normally slotted as a wistful counterpoint to the dominant narrative. Butler Bass wishes to construct a genuine alternative historical template in which the “Great Command Christians (cf, Luke 10:25-27, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart … and your neighbor as yourself”) define the terrain.
By the fourth century, two different responses emerged to the egalitarian demands of the Gospel and the egalitarian practice of the primitive church: monastic renunciation and the practice of charity. Basil the Great (c330-379) is historically associated with the first approach. Nevertheless, he established what we might call today a “multiservice center” at his church and monastery. From a sermon:
The bread in your hoard belongs to the hungry, the cloak in your wardrobe belongs to the naked, … the money in your vaults belongs to the destitute.
As increasing specialization of skills evolved in the Middle Ages, as urban craft guilds and the beginning of the “money economy” (capitalism) emerged in early modernity, these twin loci of Christian response to poverty and economic inequality became increasingly inadequate. One alternate response has been the periodic emergence of utopian communities, which, based on Christian principles, aim to reproduce the Gospel ideals, the personal relationships and the communitarian practices associated with the primitive church – often with equivalent eschatological overlay. One thinks of the first generations of English colonists in New England, who often thought of themselves as on “an errand into the wilderness” to establish “a shining city on a hill” as per the gospel metaphor.
Later examples include New Harmony, Indiana, founded in 1825 by the British philanthropist, socialist and reformer, Robert Owen – which had only a brief existence -- and the seven more enduring colonies of the Amana Society, settled in 1855 by members of the Community of True Inspiration, an offshoot of a seventeenth century German evangelical sect. It is interesting that the Amana Society began as a closed, communal, agrarian society devoted to sheep raising and wool products, but evolved into an industrial corporation manufacturing and marketing air conditioners, refrigerators and microwaves. The radical utopian economic community did not survive this transition.
A sensitive account by Clifford J. Green of his 1970s sojourn with his young family at the rural commune called “Koinonia” in the Greenspring valley north of Baltimore, Maryland (not the more celebrated Koinonia Farm founded by Clarence Jordan near Americus, Georgia) reminds us of the persistent challenges of communitarian ventures. The community welcomed Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims and others, and was intentionally interracial and international. But the founding director wrote unapologetically, “Christ was our leader. His presence was sought for wisdom, guidance and strength.” Christian faith and world service were the twin foundations of Koinonia’s life. Such was the range of technical skills and the esprit de corps among the original community members that the Kennedy administration sought help from Koinonia staff as they organized the Peace Corps.
Nevertheless, over time critical issues emerged around the relationship between nuclear families and community, the work of (within) the community – which was largely agricultural – and the necessity of work outside the community to address a chronic cash shortage; and questions of community identity, including but not limited to the tension between community openness and a clearly focused Christian faith identity. We are reminded that economic issues can never be neatly separated from theological and sociological ones.
One of the best known contemporary communitarian experiments in the United States has been the Sojourners Community. A group of seminarians at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois (suburban Chicago) pooled assets and incomes in the summer of 1971 and created a network of households and associated social programs. Their shared Christian faith and readings of scripture led them to oppose militarism (the Vietnam War was a flash point), corporate greed and exploitation of minorities within the United States and developing nations beyond our borders. They worked to articulate what ethicist Ronald Sider has called “a consistent pro-life ethic”, opposing abortion, capital punishment, war, in sum, all taking of human life from life in utero to the life of the vulnerable elderly.
In the fall of 1975, the Sojourners Community moved to Washington, D.C., in the very shadow of empire, so to speak, and developed such ministries as the Sojourners Neighborhood Center and wide-ranging advocacy through publishing and conferences. But even with the originating impetus of shared friendships and shared convictions, the “urban utopia” did not endure. The official self-interpretation of their journey is as follows:
Slowly the household communities gave way to an intentional community
(with a common rule of life). Needless to say, Sojourners has suffered its
own history of division, uncertainty and glory. Today, the community
context has shifted away from an intentional model; rather, we are a
committed group of Christians who work together to live a gospel life that
integrates spiritual renewal and social justice.
Left unsaid is the fact that the increasing celebrity and notoriety of Sojourners founder Jim Wallis, a prolific author and go-to sound bite producer for the evangelical left, overshadowed the communal nature of the Sojourners movement.
In one sense, it might seem absurd to seek generalizations from such a brief and idiosyncratic look at post-Apostolic attempts at Christian communitarian living. But I submit that a synoptic reading of our selected biblical texts and the historical considerations we have adduced will yield some fruitful insights about the possibility of Christian-themed economic models and strategies in today’s globalizing economy.
III. Plotting a Way Forward1. The Economy as Relational. Our English word “economy” comes from the Greek oikonomia, meaning “household”. The implication is that fair division of labor and sharing of resources are based on relationships of trust, as in a household. For millennia, as human beings lived in tribes and villages, relationships based on personal knowledge and trust (or warranted mistrust) were the rule. On this globe of nearly seven billion inhabitants and nearly five hundred megacities (more than one million population), it may seem ridiculous to talk about an economics of personal relationship. Instead, perhaps the best we can hope for is a stable family of nations, widely recognized protocols of international trade, and transparent laws and contracts. NAFTA, CAFTA, the IMF, the World Trade Organization, etc. are attempts at such stability, transparency and transnational cooperation. But their conception and operation invariably reflect the interest of the powerful, according to their critics.
Nevertheless, quite apart from Christian faith, there is a wide-spread reversion to the local in our day, from Farmer’s Markets in urban America to microcredit in developing nations. Perhaps the most widely known exponent of microenterprise today is Noble laureate Muhammad Yunas, the Bangladeshi economist who began the Grameen Bank with a loan of $27 to forty-two village women in 1976. Two principles underlay Grameen Bank’s strategy: 1) very small infusions of capital could make a dramatic difference in the lives of the very poor;
2) the capital would be jointly managed by members of a group, so that there would be mutual accountability.
Obviously this strategy does not depend on Christian principles. But the deep relationships and shared worldview existing within gatherings of Christian believers, at their best, when wedded to such a strategy, would strengthen it and invest it with divine mandate. The microenterprise accountability groups mirror the mutual accountability narrated in Acts 2:42-47, 4:32-37, 6:1-6, Romans 15:25-29 and 1 Corinthians 16:1-9. David Bussau and Russell Mask narrate the wedding of microenterprise principles, as per Yunas and others, to Christian practices and principles such as a personal relationship to Jesus Christ, a holistic (Kingdom of God) vision for development, shared Scripture study, accountability to local congregations and tribal reconciliation in settings as diverse as Cambodia, the Dominican Republic, Ghana, Liberia, the Philippines and Thailand.
2. The Local and the Global. Critics of microenterprise strategies typically say that small infusions of capital into local systems do not affect regional and global systems; at best they offer marginal mitigation in situations of chronic scarcity and unsustainability, while creating consumerist expectations that are self-defeating. In response to the first prong of this critique, one might say that Christian congregations and their groupings (denominations, regional and global communions, ecumenical councils, parachurch organizations) at their best blend the accountability of the local with the comprehensive vision of the broad fellowship they sustain. And holding fast to Jesus’ alternative rendering of our relationship to our possessions can dilute the strength of the second prong of his critique. Shared life in Christ teaches us about “enough”.
Hans Kung has spoken of the pressing need for a global economic ethic.
To more and more people, a painful truth is evident: this economic
crisis is characterized by a notable absence of common ethical values
and standards… One might ask: but isn’t achieving a global ethic
an issue of individual morality? Not at all: it is also an issue of
corporate morality, and it concerns the market economy as a whole.
Kung goes on to speak of “core values and standards that are universal” – not culture specific – and that can be found in the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament -- and in Kung’s assessment, also in the Koran and the religions and philosophies of Indian and Chinese origin. Among these core values are respect for the individual, transparency and fairness in economic life, the rejection of every form of violence in economic interactions, and the sustainable treatment of the natural environment.
Lutheran ethicist Pamela Brubaker discusses a more narrowly Christian foundation for an economic ethic, including “a Jesus narrative with a syntax of solidarity with the other”, Jesus’ envisioning of the basileia as “essentially communal and social”, the justice teaching of Jesus rooted in the Old Testament prophetic tradition, the call to an ethical conversion (dirty hands and voluntary simplicity) and the accountability of congregations and transcongregational groupings. Finally, Brubaker speaks of a theology of the cross which means that “a privileged church needs to come to terms with its illusions of security” and its complicity in unjust structures.
Whether one takes a more strictly Christian view, as per Brubaker, or seeks the broader, but perhaps less focused vision of Kung, the fact remains that faith communities retain a unique ability to unite the local, as exemplified by microenterprise strategies, and the global, as demonstrated by their global scope and universalizing principles. In history, this has been exemplified by the expansion of the deeply personal Pauline churches, the Christian fervor of abolitionist movements in the UK and the USA in the nineteenth century, and the astounding scope of the modern missions movement, c1800 to present. Accusations of racism and cultural imperialism notwithstanding, it is astounding that – for instance – Middle Africa has gone from 1.1% Christian in 1910 to 81.7% Christian in 2010, comprising 105 million believers. Similar trends obtain in Eastern and Southern Africa, South-Eastern Asia and Melanesia. Johnson, et.al., estimate that there are 14 million vocational Christian workers globally, lay and ordained, with some 400, 000 working outside their own culture. They are healing, teaching, developing water projects, enhancing agriculture and extending microcredit as well as evangelizing. Or perhaps, as expressions of evangelization (representing Good News). Thus does the local meet the global.
3. Unity in Diversity. As we are thinking of the astounding global trends of mass migration of peoples and jobs, allow me to indulge briefly in personal anecdote. My career, both in church ministry and the academy, has unfolded in a series of multicultural vortices. I taught at an American Baptist Seminary which brought together Midwestern rural and small town Caucasians, urban blacks, students of Cherokee and Navaho descent, and international students from India, Thailand, Japan and the UK. Later, I taught at a Presbyterian seminary where Filipino, Korean, Vietnamese and South Sea Islanders mixed with gay and straight North Americans, both white and black, and natives of a long list of Central and South American nations. (For the typically conservative international students, the concept of “gay Christians” was an oxymoron.)
At First Baptist Church, Portland, where I am currently senior pastor, we worship in English, Spanish and Cambodian each week, and on any given Sunday, attendees include members who are Oregon/Arizona “snow birds”, others who maintain second homes on the Oregon coast, and those who come to church from the Portland Rescue mission or a night spent under a bridge. In Sunday Bible study, worship and church meals, people of the most diverse and incompatible backgrounds come to know one another as “brother” and “sister”. And a constant stream of international visitors and ongoing international ministry partnerships binds this one local congregation to the nations. When we help one local brother “in recovery” to find work and lodging, or direct financial resources to the children’s center in Cambodia where we have worked with our own hands, our unity in Christ converges with all the categories of diversity I have implicated in these sentences and more.
4. Simplicity. A recurrent theme in discussions of economic justice and sustainability is that of simplicity. If people free themselves from an obsession with material goods, then exploitative pressure on the laboring classes, natural resources and ecosystems is relieved. So the thinking goes. Simplicity advocate Art Gish declares:
Affluent western society has given us one clear path to the promised
land. Work, hard, earn lots of money and consume as much as
possible… Affluence has not meant the liberation of human creativity
and self-realization, but a new form of slavery and dehumanization.
People demand continual novelty, yet tolerate incessant dullness.
There are plenty of gadgets, but little meaning and purpose. Because
our goals are quantitative, our lives have little quality.
This sort of critique from the midst of American affluence may ring hollow to marginalized people striving to obtain clean water, an adequate diet and secure housing. But it can be argued that if, for example, the 5% of the world’s citizens residing in the United States would moderate our stupendous consumption, pressure on the global environment, nonrenewable energy sources, industrial metals supplies, world fisheries, etc. would be dramatically reduced, and more resources would be available for the rest of the world. The problem with such an argument is that unless large segments of the human family imagine and live out a dramatically different view of human well-being, shifting consumption patterns by this group or that will have little effect. What might this alternative view of human well-being look like?
If our economy were built increasingly upon the exchange of ideas and information rather than consumables (a trend already noted by myriad observers); if writing, singing, dancing, cultivating, declaiming, painting, sculpting, crafting, cooking, tailoring, etc,. became economically important rather than marginal; if the global communication fostered by the internet were interwoven with this artistic temperament and its products; then we might see the emergence of a post-industrial global economy – an economy of the spirit – that could foster human well-being on a large scale with a much smaller material footprint. If millions of Christian believers – in their local congregational settings and in their regional and global networks, united by their faith whether residing in affluent or developing nations – took with total seriousness the joyful injunctions of Jesus to live non-anxiously, to eschew accumulation, and committed to live in the relationships of sharing and mutual accountability described by Paul, this might create a tipping point toward a truly just and sustainable global economy.
I have described this shift positively, in self-conscious reference to the scriptural paradigms referenced above (pp 1-5); Sallie McFague acknowledges the inescapable difficulties of such a shift. But these difficulties, too, have a home in the theologia crucis of both Catholic and Reformation tradition. McFague speaks of the “kenotic living” (self-emptying, cf, Philippians 2:5-11) of the unbaptized Christian Simone Weil, who
… lived a radical and brief life of solidarity with her poorest and
often starving fellow citizens during World War II. She said that
our tendency is to love others because of our needs, not theirs,
our hunger, not their hunger.
The kenotic lifestyle is the reversal of this natural tendency, in fellowship with Jesus. This kenotic paradigm, continues McFague, is not a negative statement about life. “Rather, it is the recognition that life’s flourishing on earth demands certain limitations and sacrifices at physical and emotional levels”. Self-emptying, letting go, embracing simplicity can liberate self and other, and indeed, the earth itself.
5. Accountability. The theme of accountability is prominent in the scriptural passages examined above. This accountability is first of all to those with whom we interact directly in the local congregation. But furthermore, the accountability in the primitive church was to the brothers and sisters in the congregations scattered from Palestine to Rome. Today the accountability is to the communities of believers around the globe, and it is our common accountability as our faith unites us across languages and cultures; finally the accountability is to the entire human family and to earth community. Within the body of Christ shared faith vested in the face-to-face relationships of local congregations expands along lines of national and local communions and councils to embrace a common vision of shared well being.
Ron Sider, in his classic Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger, develops a theological/economic model in which “economic fellowship” (koinonia) is coordinated with economic justice (67-90), and then speaks in great detail of strategies for transformation based on this “economic koinonia”, from communal living to congregational networks to a “graduated tithe”(establishing an income baseline for simple, adequate living and then increasing one’s sharing proportionately as one’s income rises above this baseline) (189-222). All of these strategies assume the mutual accountability we have discussed above. “Unless Christians anchor themselves in genuine Christian community, they will be unable to live the radical nonconformity commanded by Scripture and essential in our time”.
Bear one another’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill
the law of Christ. (Galatians 6:2)
6. An Eschatological Vision?
We began our exploration by noting that the communitarian lifestyle of the primitive Christian churches was unsustainable because it was eschatological. The believers described in the early chapters of the Acts of the Apostles “had all things in common” and liquidated their assets to insure the well-being of every member of the community until Jesus’ soon return. Obviously this economic strategy could only endure in the short term. And yet I would argue that today as in the first century C.E. we live in a world limned by eschatological horizons.
The secular eschatologies of dialectical materialism and consumerism have been pursued with great fervor and found largely wanting. Catastrophic eschatologies of nuclear winter and pandemic and global climate change loom over us in a way that lends realism to the fantastic images of John’s Apocalypse. Yet in a wonderful irony, John Cobb has argued that strategies aimed at creating economic sustainability depend upon “an eschatological attitude”. Cobb explains:
Some Christians may elect to live now in terms of what they envision
as quite new possibilities for human society even when they don’t how
to get from there from here… To exert energies in these ways is not
to live in an irrelevant world of make-believe. It is to live from a
hopeful future.
The New Testament image of this hopeful future is the Kingdom of God. Certainly the Kingdom of God is not our engineering project, neither in terms of social or technical engineering. It is God’s sovereign activity, and it is “at hand” (Mark 1:15), it is “coming with power” (Mark 9:1). But when we discern that power and live out of that hope, “we discover that there is a power at work in us that can transform even our distorted wills”. It is the “openness of the future and the unlimited power of transformation that is the grace of God”. It begins with the invitation to homo economicus that “whosoever believes should not perish but have everlasting life” (John 3:16) – the ultimate open future. And it concludes with images of ultimate mutuality and sustainabilty.
For in [Christ] all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell,
and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all
things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace
through the blood of his cross. (Colossians 1:19-20)
On either side of the river is the tree of life with its twelve
kinds of fruit producing its fruit each month, and the leaves
of the tree are for the healing of the nations. (Revelation 22:2)
David L. Wheeler
First Baptist Church of Portland
June 1, 2010
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