Review: ‘Jesus Wants to Save Christians’
Written by Brandon.D.Rhodes : October 7, 2008
I would love to meet the new hires at Zondervan. First they publish Shane Claiborne’s subversive first book, The Irresistible Revolution, in 2006. Then in 2007 they release the fantastic The Books of the Bible, with refreshingly provocative book intros and formatting (these things matter to some of us). And earlier this year they released Claiborne’s downright incendiary Jesus for President, an Ellul-draped tour de force of counter-imperial theology and story.
Now, The Z has published the latest from Rob Bell and Don Golden (hereafter just ‘Bell’, sorry Don) – Jesus Wants to Save Christians: A Manifseto for the Church in Exile. Things seem far from business-as-usual at the Newscorp/Murdoch-owned business of usually conservative publications. And though some radicals are using their about-face to shame these authors for lining the coffers of the heartless heart of the Christian-Industrial Complex, it’s at least as deserving an opportunity to thank God for using even the Mouth of the Beast to invoke the revolutionary Spirit of Jesus around the world.
And invoke revolution it does. Bell shatters our conventional flannelgraph treatments of the First Testament. More than a homiletical goldmine of manly stories to prooftext contemporary empire-building, to Bell the story of Israel is one written as a critique of empire from a “below-empire” perspective about God’s anti-empire people who, despite exile, still only want empire. The story starts in Egypt, visits Sinai, settles in Jerusalem, and is carried away to Babylon; this is a storyframe Bell later uses to jam the church into. Obviously, there’s a lot of missing gaps in Bell’s Brueggeman-soaked abridging of the First Testament, but these gaps are filled in as the book progresses.
The trajectory of that story, Bell insists, is the prophetic cry for a New Exodus, a Way forward out of exile and into God’s possibilities. He and Golden masterfully weave many strands of yearning, frustration, and hope from Israel and bring them to the only focal point one can expect: King Jesus. If you think you’ve seen this done before — hasty references to scattered prophecies that Jesus fulfills — then sit back and hold on. Jesus’ fulfillment of Israel’s story is rarely captured with such elegance, fresh insight, and poetic dance as Bell gives us.
Bell’s New Exodus theology of the cross isn’t new, but with Jesus Wants to Save Christians in particular it is a welcome and compassionate entry into today’s roaring atonement battles. Before Bell and Golden is the raging sea of conservative evangelicals splashing about the personal, purity, and penal aspects of the cross. Behind them, the bustling army of emerging-church scholars and bloggers waving their “It’s Social Too, Dammit” swords high. Their New Exodus way of telling the story creates a path through the waters that, to cut the army/sea metaphor off there, all parties can find themselves travelling on.
And that’s where the revolution is launched. This robustly biblical New Exodus story reveals that God is always on the side of the oppressed, and through the cross of Jesus Christ is always working to exodus us out of those oppressions. Jesus is the new Moses, leading his children out of the ways of empire, of death, and of sin itself. We as the church are tasked with continuing to be God’s counter-imperial people, being called out of the empire and into the kingdom. Jesus wants to save Christians… from empire.
Bell sharply points out that this means we’ll all find ourselves alongside some pretty unlikely people in this Exodus Way. We’re family now, going through these waters, and that means churches have got to overcome class, political, racial, and ideological differences as they go. Dumpster-diving anarchists and gun-toting Republicans are in it together now, this big strange family. Bell is convinced that it won’t do for us to avoid each other. No, he seems to say: the Eucharistic vision is all about joining together in our sufferings and weaknesses. Jesus teaches us that the anarchist and the Republican needs one another, and that the world in particular needs them both. The world needs them not under those labels, though, but as the very Body of the Christ, broken and poured for the world.
This book’s great contribution to the church is a two-fold challenge: a revolutionary revival-like summons to status-quo Christianity, and, I believe, a gentle ecumenical subpoena to the fringe/emergent/radical church.
Bell upsets status-quo Christianity by insisting that Jesus isn’t done saving them yet: their imperial ways are colliding like nails with the cross of the Lord. Granted he dosen’t say it quite that snottily, but he also doesn’t beat about the Bush. Bell’s is a heartfelt and inviting summons for the American church to repent and be saved from the Empire, ere they find themselves in exile once more.
If Bell and Golden’s snazzy book only offered that, they’d only be reinventing the wheel in an ironic marketplace gnoshing glibly on all things radical. Particularly in their final chapters, they pair their subversive flair with a fine, subtle challenge to those of us already on the Exodus Way out of the empire: Christ’s body so needs you, and you them. This New Exodus thing, to Bell, is too big to just let the ersatz Guevaras and fauxhemians through. The real revolutionary cries out to God for all of God’s people to be saved from this sin, death, and empire. Grander and deeper than the enclave-spirituality of some radicals, Bell hearkens the new conspirators (neo-monastics, Jesus radicals, emergent, etc.) to a love and compassion that bleeds for Iraqi and American alike. It’s a love that subverts the Empire’s social filing system which would segregate us looneys from the rest of the herd. In the economy of God, the revolution to the revolutionaries still turns out again to be revolutionary against the empire.
Fancy that.
Brandon Rhodes lives, works, writes, and worships in Portland, Oregon. He enjoys long conversations over coffee, yerba maté, and beer.
He is also one of the co-editors at Jesus Manifesto.If you appreciate articles like this, consider making a donation to help Jesus Manifesto pay the bills.
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The Englewood Review of Books reviews books that are valuable resources for the people of God, as we follow the mission of God. The books reviewed are not necessarily books from the “Christian market,” and most of the books that we review will not be stocked in your local Christian bookstore.
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