A New Book

I am currently reading a book entitled Mere Discipleship. The author, Lee Camp, was a student under John Howard Yoder at Notre Dame. The book developed out of a sense of need for a “Yoderian ‘Mere Christianity.’” Basically, it is a popularized Politics of Jesus. I read Politics over Christmas and have been reading similar books and articles since. It is interesting to see an insurgency of theology based upon the Kingdom of God in relation to the social systems of culture. While I agree with most of these authors, Yoder, Camp, Hauerwas, and Rodney Clapp, I am starting to think about how this theology is actually practiced in a church. Maybe it’s because I have attended churches that have a conversion based theology (which presents itself more readily acceptable to certain Gnostic tendencies), but I have not experienced the Church that Camp and Yoder have explained. I believe it exists, but so far, with few exceptions, it seems to only exist in the mind of its adherents.

I feel as if I am being too vague. “This” is referring to a broader all encompassing purpose of God where church and even religion are not God’s goal or intended end. The church is merely a means to bringing about God’s Kingdom: the embodiment of God’s will. In actuality, the church is supposed to be the incarnation of such a will. A divine will made known by an accepting, loving, and reconciling God who breaks us of our addictions, binds us together in fellowship, and not only atones (pardons our evil) but frees us from it as well. The Kingdom is a coming and present reality of love, peace, justice, and communion. Camp explains it this way, “Church is, in other words, simply a community of disciples, gathered together to order their lives according to the will of their Lord who lives still in their midst.” The Church is God’s primary venue of bringing about his Kingdom, and if his Kingdom truly embodies peace and justice, should not the Church also proclaim peace and justice?

To think about the Kingdom as an actual social entity may be strange for some. But when we think about the way in which Jesus taught, the words he used, and the life he lived, the Kingdom cannot be taken any other way. When Jesus prayed “Your Kingdom come” he prayed for the Kingdom to become “on earth” what God intended it to be all along, what it is “in heaven.” If you think about church, we already are forming a separate society, though perverted, still unique. We have formed our own lingo (sin, atonement, Born Again, converted, saved), our own practices (Eucharist, tithing, baptism), and ultimately our own culture (though many times polarizing ourselves from everyone else). One of the problems with the modern interpretation of the gospel revolves around the individualism that pervades our culture and ultimately our churches. Consumer driven capitalism has made it easy to get what I want, when I want, and how I want it. I want to be rich, buy a big house in the suburbs, take care of my family, and live my life. And yet this pervasive narcissistic culture has had more influence on the church than the church has had on the world. I want my sins taken care of so I can go to heaven and ultimately I can be happy. Christianity has been at best a nice treatment of psychotherapy. Forget that the way of Jesus is the way of a cross. I happen to like the Americanized Jesus better: a morale booster and money promoter.

We then read the actual gospel account about a man who told the rich to sell all they have, give to the poor, and follow me on the road to the cross. Perhaps when Jesus said ‘I am the Way’ he meant that in order to be reconciled to the Father, you must follow my way of life and not just arbitrarily accept his death as permission to live how you want. In other words, Jesus’ healing of the sick, compassion for the poor, forgiveness for the adulterer, and love for our enemies is a way of life, the way of the Kingdom. A military chaplain once said that “chaplains are not on military bases to bear witness to theological convictions, but to serve the military establishment: what was desired [of military chaplains] was a morale officer.” The Kingdom of God is a social entity that beckons us to order or even change our allegiances.

What happens when the allegiance of our nation-state clashes with our Allegiance to God and his Kingdom? Sadly, we Americans have accepted the powers of this world (money, prestige, and even war) as if we were promoting the powers of God. How can we bring about God’s Kingdom by using the weapons of hell? The end becomes the only factor of our morality. Who cares how we do it, as long as peace wins in the end. A United States Senator once wrote that “God almighty in his infinite wisdom [has] dropped the atomic bomb in our lap….[W]ith vision and guts and plenty of atomic bombs,…[we] can compel mankind to adopt a policy of lasting peace…or be burned to a crisp.” Does anyone see the irony of this statement? Now we’re stuck with thousands of nuclear weapons while we try to keep other nations from developing any. It is no wonder the world hates us.

Some evangelical Christians still assume that America is actually a type of new Israel: that America will be the nation that brings about God’s purposes. I recently watched some religious programming and was quite frustrated when I heard that the first established English colony was being viewed as a divine mandate that established America as a “Christian nation.” I then look at history and see that this colony (Jamestown) was actually a royal charter colony with the sole purpose of bringing in revenue. They expected Mayan gold and were willing to pillage and destroy to get it. To their surprise, mosquito-ridden swamps replaced gold and a large agriculturally based Indian Kingdom thrived. Within 10 years the Indians had either been forced off their land or killed. Now if this is truly a divine mandate I would not want to serve that divine lord. All this to say, it is a dangerous thing to assume that God has taken sides with a certain nation-state. To wage war as the world does, one assumes that God’s way is not good enough. It simply is not a worthy social ethic. If we were to actually love our enemies we would be destroyed, so we must do things the way the world does.

This is a pretty significant rationale. Such thinking makes it very easy to fall into a type of reductionist theology: Christianity and discipleship is reduced to a strictly ‘spiritual’ state of my soul. As long as my soul is right with God that is all that matters. Christianity then would have no bearing on culture, society, or social systems. I’m forgiven and ‘heaven bound.’ The only reason I’m on this earth is to get more people into heaven with me. Forget the holistic redemption that comes with the Kingdom: the sick, homeless, poor, less fortunate, and oppressed.

So now I’m back to thinking what this would look like in an actual church. What would happen if our teaching changed to fewer ‘altar calls’ and more compassion? What if Christians started to pray and support those in war torn nations and worked toward reconciliation through peaceful agendas? What if the first thing a homosexual thought about a Christian was that he was loved? What if church actually became something that was embodied on an every day basis rather than on a Sunday morning? What if tithing was actually practice for giving to others throughout the week? Obviously this not only takes a change heart and mind, but a change in action too. It might actually cost something to be a Christian. But that would only fulfill Jesus’ calling of counting the cost before following Him. Bonhoeffer once wrote that “Christianity without discipleship is always Christianity without Christ.”