Shalom - The Jesus Manifesto: Radical Theology for Our Times

shalom.

Introduction: God-Talk in the Marketplace

‘In the Bible, shalom is a vision of what ought to be and a call to transform society.’¹ This is the strapline of a Mennonite theologian, Perry Yoder, and succinctly expresses the reason for this book. But what does ‘shalom’ mean? How can we talk about it? And can we do it in the places where people share things vital to their everyday lives?

I love markets, not just because of the products but because of the encounters between people. When I lived in rural France, come rain or shine we went to the weekly regional market, not just to buy fresh meat, fruit, fish and vegetables but also to meet those from neighbouring villages. We caught up on the news: who had bought that farm or house, who had died (and when the funeral was) or had a new baby, perhaps whose tomatoes or grapes had got blight or whether the wild boar had truffled through the vegetable gardens. This was the stuff and meaning of everyday life.

Earlier, when I had been leading an inner-city ministry in Leeds, a group of down-town pastors, community workers and I would regularly shop together in the famous covered market there. Gradually as we became known, we were able to ask others about our strategies and campaigns, to support and serve the city’s victims and dispossessed. Often while standing supping coffee at the market stall, the barista and his other customers would join in, helping chamfer our deliberations. This was God-talk in the marketplace.

During my final internship year at seminary, I lived in a Pennine mill town. It was still traumatized by the fact that some twenty years previously the ‘moors murderers’ had abducted a child from its very marketplace. Some of the stall-traders, spotting a new pastor, would loudly and publicly challenge me about why my God had allowed that dreadful thing to happen. One of my college lecturers unhelpfully suggested that I should tell them theirs ‘was a problem of theodicy’ (meaning why and how God allows evil and suffering – so now you know!).

So What Is ‘God-talk’?

That lecturer’s response highlighted a problem: very few people outside the church understood then nor understand now our religious language. Thus words like theodicy or eschatology (study of the ‘end times’, when Jesus will come again), or shalom, and even words like salvation or ecumenical or seminary are not part of many folks’ everyday vocabulary. Yet preachers and many other Christians dribble these words out, expecting others to be immediately on our page of understanding.

The church is not the only one at fault in its use of language. When I accompany friends and neighbours to hospitals, they often get rapidly told they are being referred to an oncologist, or psychologist or urologist without being given any chance to ask what that kind of ‘ologist’ does. When my bank tells me that I should have an early redemption mortgage, does this mean they know that Jesus is coming back before I have paid it off? A generation ago, most TV cooks could not have said, ‘Just make a white roux’ or ‘Reduce that stock’, but now this is everyday parlance for the gifted amateur competitors on popular TV shows like MasterChef, without any explanation for today’s viewers. Specialist language occurs in every walk of life.

Health and hospitals are a fact of everyday life. In these computerized days, with the Internet, it is almost impossible to operate everyday finances without a bank account . . . and all of us have to eat, so someone in your household has to understand cooking instructions. But we do live in an increasingly godless society, where most people have no ongoing encounter with any faith community and the language of spirituality or certainly of specific faith perspectives are alien to over 90 per cent of UK citizens. God-talk is not on their agenda – and, it is fair to ask, why should it be?

So, for those of us who want to use God-talk, it is our responsibility to make it intelligible and to ensure the questions we identify are those that others are genuinely asking – not what we think that they ought to be asking! In offering some way forward – I am hesitant to say ‘answers’ to those who may not even realize they are posing questions – both our language and actions need to be recognizable in the marketplace. And everywhere else.

‘God-talk’ = theology

Recently during hospitalization, my cardiologist asked what I studied and wrote about. My reply, ‘Theology’, simply caused him to shrug his shoulders and look quizzically back at me.

The word ‘theology’ is made up of two Greek words: theos and logos. Theos means ‘God’ and logos means ‘word’, or the active expression of understanding. Although this literally means ‘God-word’, it is far more appropriate to understand theology as ‘God-talk’ – how we give active expression to our understanding of God . . . as I explained to my cardiologist.

Traditional western understandings have always assumed theology to mean Christian theology. However, in today’s world, it is vital to recognize there are such schema as Hebrew/Jewish theology, Islamic theology, Sikh theology, Buddhist theology and so forth. However, unless explicitly stated otherwise, the use of ‘theology’ in this book means Christian theology.

As in other world faiths, Christian theology is not a single, defined entity, with a finite list of specific answers. However, both Islam and Judaism might veer towards this, implying the questioner or seeker has not yet found the appropriate answer in their combination of Scripture and practice. Consider that there are bound to be differences between Roman Catholic theologies and Protestant theologies at the very least. Whoever’s theology it is, they need to ensure that it is coherently understandable in the world’s marketplace.

Whose Theology Is It, Anyway?

The very word ‘theology’ implies that it is a ‘work of the people’; as it is everyone who must give active expression to their understanding of God. Logically, this must mean that those who are either ‘followers of God’s way’ or those who study the relevant holy writings and their practical outworking among people can explore that active expression.

We should note that the distinction between followers and students is a product of the modern era, from the final third of the nineteenth century to the present day. In the early centuries of Christian discipleship, the male owners of venerable intellects, known as the Church Fathers, made explicit and active expressions of faith. One such, Anselm, defined this as ‘faith seeking understanding’, or fides quaerens intellectum in the Latin which he used; these linguistic terms are still used in theological circles today.²

Even by the mid-twentieth century, a seminal theological work still understood the Christian community as the best place to give active expression to faith:

It is surely a fact of inexhaustible significance that what our Lord left behind Him was not a book, nor a creed, nor a system of thought, nor a rule of life, but a visible community. He committed the entire work of salvation to that community. It was not that a community gathered round an idea, so that the idea was primary and the community secondary. It was that a community called together by the deliberate choice of the Lord Himself, and re-created in Him, gradually sought – and is seeking – to make explicit who He is and what He has done. The actual community is primary; the understanding of what it is comes second.³

Here the writer declares that the starting point is God’s initiative in Jesus Christ – thus making this a ‘Christian theology’; then it is the calling of the gathered followers to be both the visible and witnessing community of the gospel. This means that the essential structure is an unfolding narrative of a community rather than a set system of belief.

This is in sharp contrast to the doctrinal history of the church. In order to bind the faithful together, hymns, common prayers and short statements of faith were (and are) used within the community of faith. Within just a few hundred years, these ‘statements’ evolved into the classic creeds of the church. Even when there was dispute over their content, it was Christian theologians who argued the case, before a presiding secular ruler, who would question and probe before deciding who presented a better weight of argument. Once Christendom⁴ had been established, those creeds could be used as the test for Christian orthodoxy, allowing dissenters to be persecuted to death. This was the excuse for the morally indefensible crusades of the twelfth century and then, later, the Spanish Inquisition and similar persecutions.

A world of changing views

Historically, some scientific discoveries deemed to be at odds with the church’s teaching were denounced as heretical, causing exile or worse for those scientists. The novel Galileo’s Daughter⁵ powerfully explores this behaviour in the Catholic Church’s reaction at the time to Galileo’s discovery that the world revolves around the sun. The European invention of the printing-press in 1440 had enabled anyone to publish their ideas without the imprimatur of the church, its bishops and their teaching hierarchy. God-talk could be in the marketplace, whether the church liked its flavour or not.

The invention of the printing-press coincided with burgeoning scientific discovery, artistic endeavour as well as philosophical and intellectual enquiry. Italian artists and European philosophers like More, Erasmus and Machiavelli all contributed to ensuring this era became known as the Renaissance, from the sixteenth century onwards.

Later, in the eighteenth century, that same intellectual and publishing freedom enabled scientists like Newton, historians and philosophers such as Spinoza, Descartes and Locke, to argue for greater reason and logic. From this period, known as the Enlightenment, it was no longer defensible for the church to claim the intellectual high ground of thought and to assert that theirs was the only all-encompassing world-view. God-talk was and still is rightly challenged by the marketplace.

Darwin’s thought and publications,⁶ advancing evolutionary theory, obviously contradicted the church’s blind affirmation of the Genesis narratives as the only possible explanation of creation. The breadth and ongoing agenda of the ensuing public discussion by thinkers, radicals and Edwardian newspapers showed that the church had to accept debate on the world’s terms and not just hide in their theologians’ ivory towers. While we return to the implications of this in Chapters 1 and 3, the conflicting nature of the debate is revealed in the novel, Father and Son.⁷

Theological debate cannot be confined within the church. It must find its place in the marketplace. The general interest in the Open University’s popularization and sound-bite usage of self-proclaimed atheists, such as Richard Dawkins,⁸ has meant that to posit a Godless world-view is considered not only appropriate but often desirable. Thus:

Living in a world in which modern science explains and dominates life, it makes no sense to begin from God as a starting point if one wants to make oneself understood in context. What is to be taken for granted is not the supreme being once called ‘God’, but the impossibility of associating anything at all with this word: our situation is characterized by a pragmatic, unmilitant and painless atheism.⁹

Conversations and Journeys

What I failed to realize while I was at seminary in Birmingham was how unthreatening serious conversation and academic dialogue with humanists and other non-believers should be. But the Jesus community so often hoodwinks itself if it does not accept that others can, will and want to enter that God-talk debate if we are intellectually open to it – and choose to make it intelligible to them. God-talk can be in the marketplace. I had so often found that already with ‘Jack’ and his disparate band of customers at the anarchist Black Flag bookshop, hidden down an alley in inner-city Birmingham.

Also, I had already found that my visits to the communities of Iona (Scotland) or Taizé (France) or the Waldensians (Italy) tested my use of religious language, my thinking about community or my practice of prayer far more than the rich life in an academically driven collegiate seminary, trying to train us for ministry.

I do remain grateful for my seminary and academic studies but they were teaching me how to defend both the orthodoxy of the creeds as the way of belief and the right of the church to dictate the questions for both society and the marketplace. Soon, I realized that voices from the theological margins, including black or feminist or liberation theologians, were framing stronger and better marketplace questions than the orthodox white, western, male academics whom we had to study to pass the necessary exams. I found far more challenge in reading the more radical, ‘new’ theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer,¹⁰ Dorothee Soelle¹¹ and Jürgen Moltmann.¹² They were asking my kind of marketplace questions.

What kind of God . . . and where?

How could I believe in the omniscient, omnipotent God of the creeds if that same God did not intervene against the despot or challenge us further as millions starved? What kind of omnipresent God is this who can ignore the plight of the victimized, the oppressed or the starving? And if God had all these ‘omni-’ qualities, why did we need to bother with prayer if God knew it all and had it all within grasp?

Dianne Oliver’s contemporary words summarized my views then: ‘It is in Jesus Christ where we encounter a new vision of God that we are able to see who God really is – not the supreme being in the starry sky but the God who is forever vulnerable and dependent by hanging on a cross and tying God’s very life with that of the world.’¹³ This is the God of the marketplace, who is open to question and who lives and dies with those whom the world devalues.

This is the God whom I want to talk about, to follow, to discover more of as, together with others, we can share the blessing of Jesus in proclaiming that we believe in life before death as well as after it. A lifetime of world travel, life in congregations, communities and different countries, academic study and listening to voices from the margins continually reaffirm that it is the way of Jesus, rather than the God of the creeds, by which the church must reorient its life. In all of this, one word kept recurring – shalom.

What Lies Ahead

The next two chapters are an exploration of shalom as a biblical concept rooted in the Hebrew pilgrimage and then in the life and ministry of Jesus and his followers. If we dare to ask the question, ‘What are God’s intentions?’, we uncover many of the concerns of those in the marketplace about their own wellbeing and future as well as seeing alternatives to secular thinking about the economy, ecology and our shared lives.

I found far more relevant questions and even some answers in the various movements of liberation theology and radical church history as well as in the work of so-called political theologians. Looking back at my diaries from thirty years of ministry among people’s life-questions, I have easily distilled the seven most common human questions and, in consecutive chapters in Part 2, sought to explore each of those questions to ‘learn about Jesus-shaped discipleship’ from the relevant standpoint of these different, radical and political movements. In each of these, I have utilized the voices and words of people within those movements to show how each one helps us understand shalom in their context. In that ‘learning’, we have to ask what this means for our daily living – both as individuals and within our communities or neigh-bourhoods, which provide both canvas and relationships. I believe there can be ‘a manifesto for Jesus-shaped living’ and I delineate some principles in the four chapters of Part 3.

Ultimately, we have to recognize the individual human choice whether to accept or reject God’s invitation to participate in that ‘new creation’ (2 Cor. 5:17), which Jesus prefigures, and so reshape the world, our neighbourhoods and ourselves in God’s image. Part 4 reflects upon how we can respond, before a five-point conclusion and a booklist to accompany your ongoing journey.

Join me on a journey with some God-talk?

¹    Perry B. Yoder, Shalom: The Bible’s Word for Salvation, Justice, Peace (Newton, KA: Faith and Life Press, 1987), p. 5.

²    Daniel Migliore, Faith Seeking Understanding (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1991, 2004).

³    Lesslie Newbigin, The Household of God (London: SCM, 1953), p. 20.

⁴    The pact between church and state, from Constantine in the fourth century ad, enabling Christianity to be the ‘official religion’ of the state while gaining favourable privileges for itself.

⁵    Dava Sobel, Galileo’s Daughter (London: Fourth Estate, 1999).

⁶    Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (London: Wordsworth Classics, 1998).

⁷    Edward Gosse, Father and Son (London: Penguin, 1949).

⁸    Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford: OUP, 1976); Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (London: Penguin, 2006); Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (London: Black Swan, 2006).

⁹    Dorothee Soelle, Thinking about God (London: SCM, 1990), p. 171.

¹⁰   Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Christology (London: Fontana, 1966).

¹¹   Dorothee Soelle, Political Theology (London: SCM, 1974).

¹²   Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God (London: SCM, 1984).

¹³   Dianne L. Oliver, The Theology of Dorothee Soelle (ed. Sarah K. Pinnock; Trinity Press, New York, 2003), p. 125.

Part 1

What Are God’s Intentions?

1

Shalom – God’s Intention for All Creation

Shalom is the substance of the biblical vision of one community embracing all creation . . . The vision of wholeness, which is the supreme will of the biblical God, is the outgrowth of a covenant of shalom (see Ezekiel 34:25), in which persons are bound not only to