August 15-16, 2008
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Contact: jesusradicals [at] jesusradicals.com

As election fever rises throughout the United States and the contest for the White House becomes more fierce, the masses will clamor for a new Commander in Chief to assume the seat of American power. This year, it seems as if the game has changed as a female candidate appears to fulfill feminist dreams and a viable Black candidate raises hopes for Black freedom and signals the weakening of racism. But is this really the case? For those who follow the One who confronted the powers and embrace the One who came as a Suffering Servant, these changes are not enough to leave this political system unchallenged. For those who envision an egalitarian world in which order and organization do not rely on the ever-present threat of state violence, bowing before the ballot box will not be an option.

Join us for this year’s Anarchism and Christianity conference as we explore alternatives to mainstream approaches to key issues raised in the current election, dream beyond the political options of our present system and imagine the other world we want to create. Get detailed session and housing info, and register to attend.

A group of white men around the age of 30 launched a new network yesterday that sets out to challenge “everything.”

Jarrod Lewis, one of the coordinators for the network believes that people are looking for “something different.” Says Lewis: “A few years ago, I started looking around and noticed that there are a lot of Churches, but not a lot of people actually living in the way of Jesus…I mean REALLY living the stuff, you know?”

And so, Lewis began blogging on his site “Breaking Lewis” about the need for radical change. Armed with Apple laptop, he would go to his local Starbucks, order a machiato macchiato and proceed to challenge the status quo. Over coming months, his readership grew into the hundreds, and be began to connect with folks who shared his concerns–and hopes–for the church.

As the group began to conspire, they realized the need to have some face to face time if they were REALLY going to spark ecclesial revolution. Last month, in a secret meeting near Seattle, Lewis met with 20 other men near the age of 30. Sipping their expensive coffee, wearing their snappy hats, and sporting slightly unusual facial hair, they began to scheme a revolution.

The first thing they did was to name their new movement and come up with a cool website. The new movement, called “The Revelation 21 Cohort” (www.rev21cohort.com) will continue to mostly be an online network…though the idea of a conference is being kicked around.

These young men, though all around the age of 30 and white, are diverse in other ways. “We value diversity. In fact, we’re theologically diverse. We’re all from different denominational backgrounds within evangelicalism,” says Lewis, who is a pastor of “Aquatic Community” in San Francisco.

Aaron Johnston, pastor of the Journey Community in Ann Arbor, Michigan, believes that even greater diversity lays ahead: “We’ve made it a point to say that we’re open to women and people of color. In fact, there is a Latino guy who is interested in joining us, I think.”

Gandhi’s elegant wisdom has been cherished by millions the world over for its austere capacity to summarize their own moral vision.  Radicals and anti-statists from all over the political spectrum have cherished Gandhi’s pithy commendation that the best kind of politic is an embodied politic.  “Don’t just vote for change: be the change” is how many hear it.  I imagine that many in the community here at Jesus Manifesto, not least myself, takes considerable encouragement from that kind of moral vision.

How apt, though, that in the highly fragmented culture of the West we should so love this quote — it piously endorses my moral vision — “Be the change you want to see in the world.”  The locus of the vision for this embodied politic is me.  It fits part-and-parcel into the most dangerous elements of western individualism, those which say, “Each of us must chart out our own ethical destiny, and so long as you are being real and true and authentic to that, then it’s all good.  Find your own path and be true to it.  Just don’t be a hypocrite.”

The moral vision of the New Testament, and indeed the entire Bible, is very close to that of India’s Bapu, but also crucially different.  The church’s moral vision is, most properly, to “Be the change God will eventually make in the world.“  God, not any one of us, is the projector of the moral vision of a world set aright that we are called move toward and to embody.  In the parlance of the Lord, “Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness”.  The church is the community whose life of love, holiness, and justice is a foretaste of God’s future for the world.  Paul uses a word for the Holy Spirit in His church that in modern Greek means engagement ring, the guaranteeing bond of the matrimonial bliss that is to come.

On what grounds does the New Testament make such audacious claims?  First-century Judaism was a diverse thing, but a common element of its narrative and worldview for most Jews was the dividing of history between the present evil age and the Age to Come.  As things stood, Israel and the whole world were in a sort of exile: stuck under the powers, sin, and death, estranged from God.  Pagans ran things and the world was dark indeed.  Yet they endured, holding out in faith that the the Creator God would be just in the end, and somehow deal with all this.  So their hopes were a loosely tangled mesh of ideas:

• forgiveness of Israel’s sins, leading to
• the end of Israel’s exile, which might somehow eventually lead to
• the end of the world’s exile from God;
• the end of the present evil age and the arrival of the Age to Come.
• death will be swallowed up and the dead raised,
• the rebuilding of the Temple,
• the sending of the Messiah to overcome the enemies of God,
• a Davidic king,
• the kingdom of God himself,
• a new covenant,
• the Holy Spirit being poured out,
• giving of hearts of flesh instead of hearts of stone,
• a new heavens and new earth (new creation),
• the justice and righteousness and peace of God being established worldwide.

This list is not comprehensive, nor are its entries discrete from one another.  Some held on to a few of these, but not all.  But when the New Testament invokes one of them, it assumes this wider net of hopes that God is accomplishing in Jesus for Israel and the world.  They didn’t know if it would all happen at once, or if it would happen in stages.  Near as we can tell, there just weren’t too many dispensationalism-style charts for their hoped-for “end times.”  Should such a chart have existed, we might diagram it like this:

The turn of the ages, in the worldview of Jesus’ contemporaries, will be a largely discrete event: the old things will pass away and new creation will begin.  There’s no hard and fast science to this, but roughly, when someone talks about “the kingdom of God”, it would have been assumed by most Jews that they are talking about life on the other side of this epic shift, about life in God’s new age.

When Jesus arrives on the scene, he does just this.  He announces the kingdom of God arriving at last, that sins are being forgiven and the exile is ending.  He’s invoking this huge net of hopes, and spinning them into some unexpected ways.  Jesus talks about what we translate as “eternal life”, which literally is “the life of the age of ages.”  Biblical scholars agree that a fair, and indeed probably better, translation for this Greek is not “eternal life” but “the life of the Age to Come.”  In its last line the Nicene Creed calls it “the life of the world to come.”  It is the life of the change that God will one day make in the world.  Or, more properly, that He is already making in the world among those who know him!

Those who know and follow and pledge allegiance to Jesus, then have the life of the Age to Come.  By grace we have and are God’s firstfruits of what is coming.  We are gifted with it and tasked with this life of the new age, of God’s future and dream for his world.  The Age to Come has begun in the person of Jesus, and continues in the life of his church.  Hence Paul can say that “If anyone is in Christ, new creation!”  When we confess to having eternal life, as in John 3:16 for example, we don’t just mean “a personal relationship with Jesus” or that we will live forever in the resurrection, true though both of those are!  No: our hope is as deep as the first and long as the second, but as wide as the moral vision of a world set aright: the Age to Come, New Creation, the Kingdom of God!

Though many of these hopes have been launched in a kind of mustard-seed way, the world is still full of injustice and death and sin and sorrow.  Sometimes it can feel pretty damn hard to believe that the world is a different place, that the Age to Come is anywhere near!  We are stuck in the overlap of the ages.  Thus many diagram the Christian understanding of the ages as:

This is the moral vision of the New Testament: we are called to, as N.T. Wright says, implement God’s accomplishment in Jesus and thereby anticipate new creation.  In his Simply Christian, Wright says that:

The Spirit is given to begin the work of making God’s future real in the present.  That is the first, and perhaps the most important, point to grasp about the work of this strange prsonal power for which so many images are used.  Just as the resurrection of Jesus opened up the unexpected world of God’s new creation, so the Spirit comes to us from that new world, the world waiting to be born, the world in which, according to the old prophets, peace and justice will flourish and the wolf and the lamb will lie down side by side.  One key element of living as a Christian is learning to live with the life, and by the rules, of God’s future world, even as we are continuing to live within the present one” (p. 124).

We are no longer slaves of the old world, but citizens of God’s new world.  This is the ancient inner logic behind that oft-bandied adage “already/not-yet” for understanding passages about the kingdom of God.  It’s been inaugurated, and new creation is on the loose, but its fullness and consummation are yet to come.

Our moral life and vision, then, is as Wright said, to live according to the rules of that inbreaking world.  That world is, plainly enough, a world of peace, where swords are beat into plowshares and war isn’t studied.  It’s a world of forgiveness and full of the just love and loving justice of YHWH.  Now, most Christians will go this far, and agree that we live by the power of that age, and enjoy many of the gifts and beauties of it.  But to leap from those warm-fuzzy existential splendors, to what kind of shape those splendors are meant to take, is a challenging leap indeed.  So often we only want to receive the change God is making in the world, but not embody it.

Such a logic of being the change God will make in the world, though, was just beneath the surface of Paul’s moral imagination.  He saw dimly through the glass of prophetic promises about the Age to Come (Isaiah 2, 40, 66, etc.) and let the light of that day project through the prism of the risen Jesus, the image and the form for his own moral vision of a world and a humanity set aright.  He knew that he was in the overlap of the ages, and therefore, in a sense, “what time it was”.  He spells it out that explicitly in Romans 13:11-14:

Besides this you know the time, that the hour has come for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed.  The night is far gone; the day is at hand. So then let us cast off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light.  Let us walk properly as in the daytime, not in orgies and drunkenness, not in sexual immorality and sensuality, not in quarreling and jealousy.  But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.

He is calling us to live in God’s daylight, as children of the inbreaking world of shalom.  The old age, the nighttime, is on its way out, and all of its “exquisite shit of glory” (hat tip, Gabriel García Márquez) is no longer the stuff of the kingdom-pledging community.  Feel the freedom and the warmth and the beautiful tasks of this situation: we are all richly renewed by the dawn of God’s peaceable new age!

This provides a massive, and massively underused, narrative apologetic for Christian nonviolence.  We are to be nonviolent because the truly human being, Jesus our King, was — yes, true enough. And we are to be nonviolent because it doesn’t get the world much of anywhere — sure.  Oh, and yes, we should be nonviolent because God loves his enemies — Jesus used that one! But all of these can and should snap nicely into place within this bigger framework of the passing darkness of the evil age, and the inbreaking light of the Age to Come given us by Jesus.  We are peaceful because the age of shalom is here.  The dread weapon of the old age, Death, is beat.  Why live on its terms any longer?  The day is here.  “Come, O House of Israel, let us walk in the light of the Lord.”

Gandhi’s adage is meant to hold us fast to pacifism.  Our modification of it provides a far richer, God-projected, less individualistic, and more exciting story to likewise bind us close to the peaceful heart and world of God.  May that peace enrich and energize us all to a more radical faith.

Further reading: G.E. Ladd, The Presence of the Future; N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope, Simply Christian, The Resurrection of the Son of God; A.M. Wakabayashi, Kingdom Come.

27 July 2008

AT-TUWANI - At 1:50 pm, on Sunday, 27 July at least three Israeli settlers attacked Palestinian children and two internationals as they walked to their village of Tuba.  The children had been attending summer camp in the village of At-Tuwani.  As the fourteen children and two internationals, from Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT), were walking in a valley south of the illegal settlement outpost of Havot Ma’on, one masked settler came down the hill, throwing stones with a slingshot.  The children and CPTe Jan Benvie ran ahead, but other settlers were approaching them from the opposite side of the valley.  None of the stones thrown by the settlers struck the children, aged between 6 and 15 years old, and they were able to run to safety.

CPTer Joel Gulledge was filming the attack.  When the masked settler saw Gulledge with the video camera, he began directing his stones at Gulledge. The settler hit Gulledge in the leg with a rock and he was unable to run. The settler then ran to him, wrested the camera from him, and began beating him with a rock and the camera.  After that, the settler ran off with the camera.

On 22 July, the military did not escort the children.  Only seven children were willing to risk walking alone to At-Tuwani.  The children informed CPT that at least eight other children did not attend the summer camp because they were too afraid to walk without a military escort.  On the morning of 23 July, the army again refused to escort the children.  The children were chased by three settlers, one of whom was masked and carrying a stick, while they walked unescorted to the summer camp.  On 26 July, a military personnel informed internationals that the army would no longer provide an escort for the children, who were waiting for the army to arrive while four settlers from the illegal Israeli settlement outpost of Havot Ma’on shouted at the children.  The personnel would not give the name and brigade of the commander refusing to provide the escort.  When the international explained the dangerous situation for the children, the military personnel said, “I don’t think the settlers will attack the children.”

In October 2004, Israeli settlers attacked Palestinian schoolchildren and internationals in the same area as the attack on the 27th.  Two internationals were hospitalized and, after international media coverage of the attack, the Israeli Knesset recommended that the Israeli military provide a daily escort for the children to go to and from school.

Feeling rather left out, I began to worry. Perhaps I was still within my Evangelical cocoon. Or worse, maybe I was still crawling around on branches eating leaves. While my friends flew with new wings, was I still waiting to take off? Yet I felt as if I had emerged already, but by a different process; perhaps I had become a moth?

My question is, if I were to claim metamorphosis into a post/progressive-Evangelical/Conservative/Liberal existence, how did it come about?

Or, to change metaphors, most of my friends who claim a (re)birth trace their lineage through a secret promiscuity with Protestant Liberalism. But I was always much too self-righteous for that. So, is there another family line that can be traced beyond Evangelicalism not issuing from a liaison with Protestant Liberalism?

To make sense of this other possibility of a passage beyond, we have to look closely at the issue concerning how the Church publicly expresses its private beliefs; or, how we go “public with our privates.”

Going Public…

Now, the common complaint leveled against Evangelicalism is that it perpetuates a privatized faith without public effect. But of course this is not entirely true because the highest form of devotion for Evangelicals is to share their faith publicly at school, at work, in the heath club and every other arena of life. Discipleship is completed only when a believer confidently and regularly shares her faith in public. In a sense, Evangelicals are always willing to share their privates in public.

It could be argued that, in regard to matters of faith, Evangelicals are the true disciples of the sexual revolution. Thinking themselves much less repressed or socially inhibited, Evangelicals are willing to drop their religious pants at any time, while Protestant Liberals have much more modesty concerning their private beliefs. PLs are very reluctant to whip out their privates, but rather are reserved and careful, always referring to their beliefs in socially acceptable terms. Evangelicals, liberated from the embarrassment of their privates, are willing to freely expose themselves at any time: on the beach, at work or during dinner. It is the poor PLs who are repressed, denying the goodness of their private life, blushing whenever someone asks about the “hope they have within”.

Of course this evangelistic manner of “going public with the private” is not what critics of Evangelicalism are upset about. Rather they complain that Evangelicals all too typically fail to affirm the goodness of the world/society, and therefore fail to do any good in regards to economic, racial, gender, and environmental problems. Evangelicals go public with their privates on an individual to individual basis. But my maturing faith (fostered by reading OT prophets which are rarely, if ever, preached in Evangelical churches) left me disenchanted and demanding a social/communal aspect to Christian confession.

Coming Soon:
(part 2 of 3) Going Public with My Privates: Evangelical Liberalism/Fundamentalism
(part 3 of 3) Going Public with My Privates: Beyond the Private

Are Christians called to defend their faith? And if so, how?

Well, the answer seems simpler than we tend to make it, but it’s worth a counter example. Remember the issue with the cartoons of Mohammed a few years ago? There is a consistent ethic in the Muslim community worldwide that seeks to defend Islam and Mohammed’s reputation specifically, as a part of outworking their faith. At face value this is reasonable, although as the riots that occurred after the aforementioned offense showed, can result in unreasonable behaviour.

It’s therefore easy to see why Christians co-opt this behaviour. After all, if you care about Christ and the church, it’s difficult and painful to see people shame them. The more devout one is the more painful it becomes, and if you see your calling as one of defending the faith, then bearing arms (be they verbal or physical) makes some degree of sense.

But we’re not called to defend the faith. Christ does not defend himself against his oppressors. If people defame God, condemn him or blaspheme her, what is it to us? God is capable of dealing with them himself, and ultimately the offense is not to us, but to God.

In a similar sense, the scriptures are “sharper than a two-edged sword”. I may hold the text with some degree of respect but that doesn’t mean I need to defend it against those who do not.

Defending the faith assumes an impotent God, one who either is incapable or unwilling to defend itself, and assumes the ability and authority to defend it someone rests in our hands. While I hate arguments that revert to comparisons to Nazism or the crusades (see Godwin’s Law) that is precisely what the Crusades were; a misguided attempt at defending the faith and the historic locations of the faith against those who would corrupt it. God did not require defending then, and does not now.

And even if, hypothetically, there were some rationale for defending God, what sense does it make to do so in a way that defames him? When hate mail and violence are the tactics resorted to, what God exactly are you defending?

Let us therefore put down our arms; in our words and attitudes particularly. Leave the faith undefended. Trust in the sovereignty of God…or don’t. But don’t engage in the hypocrisy that claims trust and draws the sword.

(image courtesy of Kingdom Come Desktops)

Author Bio:: Jordan Peacock lives and works in Minnesota with his beautiful wife and daughter. When not playing with technology or music, he’s writing comic books and wrapping up a university education.

“Oh, this isn’t a one-day kind of decision, friend,” Rusty said to Rod with a laugh. We all nodded.

Soon enough, though, Rusty slipped in a 20-second pitch for what brought him around to pacifism (a Christological reading of the Bible, wherein everything goes through the lens of Jesus – “If the Bible seems to disagree, let Jesus be the referee”). Jacob and I braced for the same old tit-for-tat eye-roll-a-thon of the same old arguments from each side. Old Testament this, and Romans 12 that – we’ve all probably been there, on one side or the other. Thankfully, though, this exhausting specter was hastily deferred to another time.

“Besides,” I said, “We’ve each arrived at Christian nonviolence, Christian pacifism, enemy-love, the Way of Jesus, or whatever you want to call it, through different paths.” For Jacob, it was reading John Howard Yoder’s What Would You Do?, while for me it was studying Jesus’ enemy-love teachings through the lenses of first-century history and a robustly Jewish theology of the ‘image of God’.

But it’s got me thinking a lot about how pacifists became pacifists, and why they remain pacifists. As with our first turning to Jesus at conversion, sometimes what turned us to Him isn’t what keeps us turned toward Him.

Our arguments usually run along the lines of one of the following:

• Utilitarian – “War makes corpses of us all”, “What has war ever solved?”, etc.
• Jesus said so – “Jesus taught enemy-love.”
• Jesus lived it – “God died for his enemies, so should we”
• Heart appeals – telling stories of the futility, brutality, and horror of war.
• Nonconformity – “We follow the Way of Jesus, not the Way of the World.”
• Christarchy – “Jesus is Lord, and therefore Caesar isn’t” (actually a line from non-pacifist Bishop N.T. Wright)

That’s certainly not a complete list of any kind, but I’ll bet it’s a net big enough to capture most of us somewhere in it. For a similar (and larger) list, see Yoder’s Nevertheless: The Varieties and Shortcomings of Religious Pacifism.

But there are a few angles of pacifism that I think we could better and more loudly argue. Two defenses of pacifism that I’d like to unpack in future Doxis posts here are “Inaugurated Eschatology” (the church as the microcosm of the Age to Come, as those called to live in the present world according to the rules of the one to come) and “Most War Still Sin, Says Romans 13” (the just-warrior’s favorite passage here winds up shooting itself in the foot). I will bring them up here in more detail in the weeks to come because I think that a robust inaugurated eschatology is becoming a tent-pole of emergent theology, and because the possibility of radically reclaiming Romans 13 as a stalwartly antiwar text can prove a particularly fruitful rhetorical coup in an election year.

In the coming weeks Rod will hear testimonies to how Rusty, Jacob, and I all became Christian pacifists. Rusty’ll talk about Christological lenses, Jacob will talk about utilitarian practicality, and I will talk about enemy love and inaugurated eschatology.

• If you are a pacifist, what would you talk to Rod about? What brought you to pacifism? And what arguments or experiences have become sunk in toward keeping you in pacifism?
• And if you’re not a pacifist, but have struggled with the issue, what would you tell Rod?

(Disclaimer: I realize many – perhaps most – of the Jesus Manifesto’s readers and writers are not strict pacifists/nonviolent/what-have-you. That so many of us here believe in a revolutionary gospel that resists Constantinianism needn’t guarantee that we also self-label as pacifists/etc.. Indeed I am entirely stoked to know and engage both sorts here.)

Probably not. AJ generally isn’t included in most of our cable packages, and definitely doesn’t pass the bunny-ear test.

The videos of the special, titled “Inside USA: Christianity, Politics and Power,” are available in two parts on YouTube and certainly worth the 25 some-odd minutes it takes to view them.

I was struck at how different AJ’s questions were from U.S. news organizations. It seems as if the U.S. media can’t get beyond, “Yeah, but which candidate are you going to endorse?” (see Shane Claiborne’s Monday post on the God’s Politics blog). Al Jazeera, however, went a bit deeper in its questioning.

Right off the bat, while describing the rise and fall of the Moral Majority over the last 30 or so years, the story put front and center the glaring hypocrisy of Christian compliance and participation with a U.S. political system where money and lobbying rule the day. It is suggested that the church’s identity as following Jesus and politics’ propensity for greed and underhanded tactics are inherently incompatible. We’ve certainly seen that this is the case on the Christian Right over the last quarter-decade.

The thrust of the story, however, is what we’re all hearing quite a bit about in these days leading up to the November election: the changing political face of Evangelicalism. No longer are “Christian” and “Republican” synonymous, they say and write. Rising up is a movement of Christians asking different questions and seeking different politics to answer them.

But Al Jazeera’s report seems to cut through some of the apparent hypocrisy on the Evangelical Left as well, an insight rarely seen outside a few underground blogs, podcasts, and, of course, zines like Jesus Manifesto.

Host Avi Lewis interviews Tony Campolo in the second part of the piece. Strolling through the green lawns of Campolo’s Eastern University in Philly, Lewis almost immediately addresses the conflict of interest in Campolo’s political action and endorsement.

Lewis: You’ve written strongly about ending partisan politics in the church, calling on church leaders to end partisan affiliations. But then you endorsed Hillary Clinton before she dropped out.

Campolo: Yeah, and I think that as individuals, outside of the church, we’re able to do that. There’s a big difference as an individual speaking as a representative of a religious body, and calling upon the members of that body to support a particular candidate or party. And an individual standing up and saying, “This is who I am—“

Lewis: But you’re a leader. You have followers, you—

Campolo: I realize that that has implications —

Lewis: And you’re clearly a Democrat.

Campolo: Obviously. Everybody knows that.

Lewis: And you’re hoping that more Evangelicals will vote Democrat this time.

Campolo: I certainly do.

And with that, the damage is done. Viewers are seeing what Lewis and Al Jazeera had already recognized: That much of the “Religious Left,” of which Campolo, sojourners founder Jim Wallis, and author Brian McLaren are the elder statesmen, is succumbing to the very same pitfalls and trappings as the Religious Right. Campolo dichotomizes the “individual Christian” from the “public Christian,” suggesting that if he simply states that he’s endorsing a candidate as an “individual outside the church” and not as a respected leader, ordinary followers will be able to tell the difference.

Indeed, the public face of our faith is the only witness we have to a broken world crying out for release from its dead-end power plays. Campolo does nobody any good by playing by the same old dead-end rules. Lewis calls him on this a few minutes later in the interview:

Lewis: I’m just having trouble understanding how Evangelical moves in the political arena, which you strongly support and hope go in a slightly different way politically than they have, are different from having Christian values turned into government policy, which is an exclusive version of religion in public life — not a catholic one with a small “c.”

Campolo: Let me say this: There is a lot of common ground. Whether you’re Jewish, whether you’re Muslim, whether you’re Christian, you would agree on this: That helping the poor is a divine order. That we are compelled by Scripture, whether you are going to the Hebrew Bible, the Christian Bible, or the Koran, you’re compelled to respond to the needs of the poor. Let’s start there. And furthermore, when I deal with my agnostic friends, even my atheistic friends, they say caring for the poor is essential. Fine, can we start there? Can we start with caring for the environment, which all religious traditions ask us to do? Are there a number of things we can hold in common? …Sometimes, I think it’s about time Christians start getting back to what the Bible says instead of listening to the pulpit. And that’s why certain Evangelicals like myself and Jim Wallis say, “Let’s go to the Bible.” So in short, we sound like Billy Graham, saying, “It’s about time we look at what the Scripture says instead of what the spokesperson for the Religious Right are telling us.”

Right before this portion of the interview, Campolo had referenced Jim Wallis’ oft-quoted metaphor about how politicians change their views based on the direction of the wind, but the mandate for politically active Christians is to change the wind.

Do Campolo’s words sound like a wind change?

No, his words – along with much of the conversation surrounding progressive Christianity – reflect slightly different wind direction (as the interviewer points out), but the same wind nevertheless. Like Lewis, I too had a hard time understanding how what Campolo is advocating is any different than the strategies of the Religious Right: Seeking to build up a movement to bring about godly principles through legislative means. What Campolo also fails to recognize here is that the Religious Right uses Scripture every bit as much as progressive Christians to justify its political action.

What is needed, and what a few crazies on the margins are calling for, is a “third way” – a solution to our global crises and biblical mandate that subverts rather than joins the “powers and principalities of this dark world.” What is needed is a “back to the Bible” campaign showing that Jesus’ movement of love spread not through political coercion or leveraging power, but by sacrifice, martyrdom, and simple acts of charity.

I wish Shane and Psalters were given a little more face time in the Al Jazeera report, because they are leading this campaign. But alas, I suppose most viewers really only want to hear about who’s endorsing who in “politics as usual.”

I guess this love movement is going to have to stay underground for a bit longer.

Author Bio:: Steve Holt is a disciple, writer, husband, and proud father to an apricot mini poodle, and he lives and conspires in East Boston, MA. You can find his musings about faith, culture, and mission at harvestboston.wordpress.com.

So, say it along with me, kids: INCONCEIVABLE!

To which, we appropriate reply: You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

And hence, ladies and gents, the point of my current ramble.

Here at Jesus Manifesto, we often spend a bulk of our comments defining terms, and this is definitely a strength of the website. Together, we flesh out what we mean when we use certain words, what they have come to mean culturally, or words we might substitute to enhance our intended meaning. As a community of contributors and responders, we work to get to the marrow of the message we are communicating. For instance, terms that commonly crop up for examination around here are “church”, “Christian” and “anarchist”. Other words we’ve grappled with include “evangelical”, “inerrancy” and “radical”. Obviously, the list could go on.

One important distinction of words for me has been the comparison of “peacekeeper” and “peacemaker”. The clarification actually began as I was studying Beth Moore’s Living Beyond Yourself: Exploring the Fruit of the Spirit, along with my local community of believers. Since joining the conversation at Jesus Manifesto, the difference between the two terms has only become clearer. The idea of “peacekeeping” often finds us clinging to a false sense of peace, where if our circumstances appear calm, safe and secure, peace must be present. On the other hand, “peacemaking” is an active and selfless pursuit of peace in the midst of crisis and chaos, trusting Christ while embodying the opposite of the sins of division: hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions and envy.

Understanding the distinction in those terms mirrors my understanding of the difference between a “housekeeper” and a “homemaker”. A “housekeeper” works to maintain a (possibly false) sense of order and decorum in a home. A “homemaker”, on the other hand, is a person who actively works to create a home environment… the love, the relationships, the hospitality, the organization, the warmth. It’s the difference between seeing keeping the home as just another chore on your life’s to-do list, or viewing it as a valuable responsibility of someone who chooses to take on marriage and family. In my case, as a single woman, there is still a desire to be a homemaker, even in my sphere of influence, offering hospitality and grace to those who pass through my threshold.

Does that make me sound traditional?

Those who know me would probably say that, indeed, I am - which is precisely what brought this line of thinking to the forefront of my mind.

When I published the article Daughters and Sons, as well as the satire Challenging Fathers, I highlighted them on my personal blog and stated emphatically “I am an egalitarian”. While online this may have induced several “attagirls,” in real life it generated meaningful discussions about what I mean by the term and how it has been interpreted by others.

The American Heritage Dictionary defines “egalitarian” as affirming, promoting, or characterized by belief in equal political, economic, social, and civil rights for all people. I was reminded, however, that many use the term to imply people are just alike, with no differentiating characteristics, personalities or preferences. Put another way, some people take the term to mean that there is absolutely no difference between males and females (apart from the overt biological distinctions). In definition the word has one implication, in practice it can yield quite another.

While a definition for “complementarian” was not present, we can work off the definition of “complementary”, which is supplying mutual needs or offsetting mutual lacks. Again, a term that can mean one thing in definition but may manifest itself in ways that are not intended, if assumptions are made based on gender, race, socioeconomic status, or other generalized categorizations.

I have seen and experienced misguided understandings of the idea of “complementarianism”, but a good friend reminded me that there are equally misguided notions of “egalitarianism” floating about in our society. Luckily, we have theologians who have wrestled with our complementary roles outside the sphere of male/female interactions. Luckier still, Christ doesn’t use either of these terms, and we are not bound to one or the other.

In Body Politics: Five Practices of the Christian Community Before a Watching World, John Howard Yoder discusses “the fullness of Christ” in hopes of throwing “light on a set of problems about roles, relationships, professions, and skills, concerning which we are often at odds.” In the discussion, Yoder refers to the priesthood of the believer as a “complementarity of gifts”:

The hand of the body or the eye is in no sense “individual.” It is unique and irreplaceable, yet it can possess and exercise its own dignity, its own life and role, only in its bondedness with the other members. It can be crippled for no fault of its own when some other part of the body suffers.

He goes on to concludes with,

There are as many ministerial roles as there are members of the body of Christ, and that means that more than half of them belong to women… The transformation that Paul’s vision calls for would not be to let a few more especially gifted women share with a few men the rare roles of domination; it would be to reorient the notion of ministry so that there would be no one ungifted, no one not called, no one not empowered, and no one dominated. Only that would live up to Paul’s call to “lead a life worthy of our calling.”

If we’re using Yoder’s definition, perhaps I am a complementarian after all…

Editorial disclaimer: It is hard to write satire about Barack Obama. Why? Because even if you use ridiculously positive language about Obama, his supporters won’t think it is satire. For example, if someone says: “Obama incarnates the perfect love of Christ,” I will chuckle at the absurdity of such a statement. But one of my friends might go wide-eyed and nod their head in solemn agreement. Conversely, the New Yorker demonstrates the challenge of using negative imagery for Barack. Nevertheless, I offer this feeble attempt at satirizing the Barack Obamenon.

A vote for Barack Obama is a vote for Jesus…not that I agree with everything he stands for. I mean, I am an independent sort of thinker. I am firmly convinced that God is neither a republican or a democrat. But Barack Obama transcends such distinctions. He flies high over such petty concerns on shimmering gossamer wings. Golden light emanates from his perfect form. His smiling eyes looking down upon me with a look that pierces my soul! I get lost in his smile, and long for one of his chiseled arms to hold me close while the other smites a damning blow to poverty and oppression.

Don’t get me wrong. As a Christian, my ultimate hope is in Jesus alone. I don’t trust in politicians or the State to accomplish what the church is called to do–that is to bring transformation and true freedom.

But Barack is a Christian. And I believe that Jesus is pouring his Spirit upon Barack Obama for a time such as this. Barack brings hope in the midst of darkness. He himself is our peace, who has made Republicans and Democrats one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility. He is like a father to the fatherless and a defender of widows!

Don’t get me wrong. There are things I don’t like about Barack. For example…he isn’t bold enough in speaking what is on his mind–his illuminated, brilliant mind. It is almost bordering on sinfulness for him not to share his thoughts, for his voice is a gift from heaven. His booming baritone bellows soft mysteries that only angels can truly comprehend. When he speaks, possibilities open. New futures are made possible. Women weep for joy and children laugh with gladness. Wicked men mourn their transgressions and hardened men melt like ice on a hot spring day. Every one of his delicately formed words is its own tender miracle. Why should he hold back a treasure that was meant as a gift to the whole world?

As you can see, I have thought this through. I have weighed the pros and cons and made the choice to vote for Obama–warts and all (of course, I’m being metaphorical, since I am certain no blemish or corruption has ever touched his gorgeous frame).

I encourage you to vote for Obama too. I’m not saying that voting for McCain would be a sin. Nor am I saying that it would be a horrible, disgusting sin for you to not vote at all. But I am saying that to vote for Obama is to vote for Jesus. And to NOT vote for Obama would mean that you don’t love Jesus, the poor, or your own mother. To NOT vote for Jesus would be to render Jesus’ life and message meaningless. That’s all I’m saying.