Part II, titled Theology: Believing and Belonging, continues the critique and deconstruction of American white evangelicalism by examining the doctrines of God, Jesus and Church. Gushee’s theology of God has six woven strands: Kingdom of God theology, social gospel theology, Holocaust theology, liberation theologies, Catholic social tradition, and progressive evangelical social ethics. Gushee is profoundly aware of the dangers attaching to claims of divine sovereignty, linked to biblical inerrancy infallibly interpreted within a closed doctrinal framework, and reflecting the agendas of male white power at the centre of a faith tradition. He has lived through the negative consequences of that mix.
As a scholar immersed in Holocaust history and reflection he insists that any Christian theology of God must stand questioned before Auschwitz, and the story of the Jewish people. He understands God in terms of the story of Israel, from which he draws this conclusion: the Hebrew Bible tells the narrative of “divine love for covenant peoplehood and mission on behalf of humanity.”(Italics original) Out of such reflection comes this: “The idea of a God who risks trusting us with freedom, and suffers from the choices we make, is critically important in moving us away from theologically problematic and morally disempowering understandings of divine sovereignty.” (80)
Using Jesus According to the New Testament by J D G Dunn as a starting point, the chapter on Jesus critiques ‘Jesus according to white evangelicalism’, as a pietistic, sentimentalised, prosperity Jesus, kept at a safe distance from the ‘apocalyptic prophet, lynched God-man and risen Lord’ of the New Testament. Gushee, like many of us, recognises the neglect and even silencing of Jesus in such an understanding of the Bible, God, and the Gospel. Those who suggest Gushee caricatures white evangelical portrayals of Jesus, may need to reflect more critically and honestly on the massive evangelical industry that lies behind the current dominance of the evangelical presence in current American politics.
Here again, Gushee blends testimony with critique, and his own past experience with his current thinking. Referring to the meaning of the Cross today:
”We kill one another. We killed our best. We killed God who came to save us. When we kill another, we kill the God who made them and loved them, who was in them and who came to save us. This is what I see these days when I look at the cross.” (99)
These words are fuelled by a lifetime spent within a tradition in which the cross is central to individual salvation but less prominent in discussions about injustice, poverty, racism, and environmental catastrophe. They are written by a Christian thinker steeped in Holocaust history and reflection, scarred by what he sees as the co-option of Jesus and the Christian Gospel for political ends, and in particular, a white supremacist understanding of human society and political vision; and these embodied in a Presidency and Administration given uncritical legitimacy by court Evangelical leaders.
The chapter on the Church gives a clear definition of what is needed: “The church is the community of people who stand in covenant relationship with God through Jesus Christ and seek to fulfil his kingdom mission.” (104, emphasis original) This description is some distance from what Gushee and other ethicists, social analysts and theologians see as the characteristic forms and goals of American white evangelical churches, their leaders and their political spokespersons.
“Evangelicalism is a consumer culture…What many heavily consumerized evangelicals understand church to mean has been taught to them through the most successfully marketed musicians, authors, trinket salesmen, and parachurch groups. Evangelicalism is also a brand, a kind of proprietary product that those at the top defend for a variety of reasons, including the fact that they and their institutions have vested financial interests in doing so.” (108)
As a contrasting alternative, Gushee describes two church contexts with which he is familiar and within which he currently flourishes. In First Baptist Church, Decatur, he is a class teacher to a group of people who opt to meet every Sunday to explore, discuss and study the meaning and implication of Jesus and his teaching of the Kingdom of God. Then he tells of his regular attendance at Holy Cross Catholic Church, and his perception that in the United States the Catholic Church has so much more awareness of the multiracial and multi-cultural society of a country significantly populated by immigrants, and is itself ‘richly global’.
The balance and tension between these two regular encounters with people of faith, have in common a sense of covenant love for all humanity as the base line of Christian activism and ethical behaviour. For Gushee, ecclesiology is about being a people focused on following Jesus, held together in covenant and mutual commitment, their common life expressed in Christlike compassion, the basis of that life being relational rather than contractual, Kingdom oriented in worship and obedience, and including all whom others reject; in effect being to others what Jesus was, friends of sinners.
(Part III of the review, titled Ethics: Being and Behaving will appear tomorrow.)
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