The final assignment for the evangelism in the postmodern context class is a paper/project dealing with the topics and concepts of the class. As an auditing student I am not required to write this paper. I would like to, since this class has precipitated so much new thinking in me. I won't write it if I don't have an audience (even an imagined one!) so I'm going to write it here, as a post.
In considering how to evangelize in the postmodern age, Brian Stone asserts that the church need not bemoan its slide from the center of our culture to a more marginal place in society. The gospel does not require a position at the center, he says. Rather, it needs “saints who have taken up the way of the cross and in whose lives the gospel is visible, palpable, and true” (Stone,12). Good people, living good lives, in love of each other and of the Creator; sounds excellent. The question I would like to pose is whether the community has to be visibly, palpably and truly Christian. Stone says it does. The gospel does “require a people that has been made into the temple of God in which the Spirit dwells, built upon the church’s only secure foundation, Jesus Christ (1 Cor. 3:10-17)” (12). I would like to use the context of a high school classroom in a public American school as a context in which to test the hypothesis that such a community can be created without Christ as a foundation stone. Indeed it is the hope of teachers everywhere that they can create a community that operates on the values of love, equality, inclusion and justice that Christ preached, but who cannot legally invoke his name or any religious text in the classroom.
First, let's talk about the kind of community Jesus created, and the message he preached in that community.
David Bosch says that Jesus' ministry was not external. He did not go out to other nations and convert them, as Paul did, and as Jesus commanded the disciples to do in Matthew 28:18-20 with the "Great Commission":
18 Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 19 Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”
But because I am not willing to assume that anything written in the gospel actually proceeded from the mouth of Jesus, I'm going to look at what it appears he did rather than what he said.
How do we characterize his community, then? By "his consistent challenge to attitudes, practices and structures that tended arbitrarily to restrict or exclude potential members of the Israelite community" (Bosch, 27). Jesus knew that social change was an inside job, and went to work accordingly among his own people, the nation of Israel.
Incidentally, last night with the YAF we watched I Am Not Your Negro, about the life and work of James Baldwin, who also realized that he needed to work in his own American context during the civil rights era; he returned from France, where he had moved in 1948. This quote is from the warm New Yorker review of I Am Not Your Negro. It describes the moment when Baldwin knew he had to return to the U.S:
"It was 1957, and he was in Paris. He saw, on the front page of a newspaper, a photograph of Dorothy Counts, the fifteen-year-old daughter of a professor of theology and philosophy and the first black student admitted to Harry Harding High School, in Charlotte, under the Pearsall Plan to Save Our Schools. Instituted in 1956, the Pearsall Plan was North Carolina’s attempt to integrate public schools in a “moderate” way, after the Brown v. Board of Education ruling, in 1954."
Anyway, Baldwin is a present day Jesus in that he brought truth to his own country, even as those who were doing similarly, King, Malcolm X, and Evers, were being killed. (This is my first gesture toward the diminishing role of Jesus and his uniqueness in my theology).
Now, what kind of community did Jesus intend to create among the nation of Israel? Let's turn to Bosch:
"The revolutionary nature of the early Christian mission manifested itself, inter alia, in the new relationships that came into being in the community. Jew and Roman, Greek and barbarian, free and slave, rich and poor, woman and man, accepted one another as brothers and sisters. It was a movement without analogy, indeed a "sociological impossibility" (Hoekendijk 1967a:245). Small wonder that the early Christian community caused so much astonishment in the Roman Empire and beyond. The reaction was not always positive."
When I tell people that I teach in a high school, the most common response, conveyed as much through eye brows as though words, is "I wouldn't want to be in a classroom with 25 teenagers in this day and age!" It is true that a high school classroom that operates by the principles of Jesus' community seems like a sociological impossibility. How could it possibly be a place where students feel safe, heard, able to debate deep ideas, change their minds, be artistic and rational, critical and empathetic? But it can happen, even if we don't mention Jesus or read the Bible together. How? Let's look at how authors have described these principles that undergird "holy" community.
First of all, the gospel of Luke provides a new Commission, emphasizing the poor and oppressed. “The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
because he has anointed me
to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
and recovery of sight for the blind,
to set the oppressed free,
19 to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”[f]
This he reads to his home congregation, essentially, in Nazareth, before they try to kill him for it. Bosch goes on to say that the mission of the Christian community is to provide salvation. Gah! Run!
Salvation strikes fear into the hearts of most people. We must stick with Bosch to see what it means in Luke.
"...one could say that, for Luke, salvation actually had six dimensions: economic, social, political, physical, psychological, and spiritual. Luke seemed to pay special attention to the first of these. We may thus detect a major element in Luke's missionary paradigm in what he writes about the new relationship between rich and poor" (117).
Another element of Luke's interpretation of salvation that I like is that "for Luke salvation is, above all, something that realizes itself in this life, today." (393). Heck yes! That translates to the classroom, because no teacher is going to be consoled, looking down the pike at a semester with her unbearable class, by the idea of salvation coming next summer, let alone in the next life. Outside the gospel, this understanding of salvation proliferates in this postmodern era, says Bosch. According to Greshake, "Salvation does not come through change in individuals but through the termination of perverted and unjust structures.
The problem, and the seed of the colonial-missionary catastrophe, was that "Salvation, defined in the American way, had to be exported to the 'mission fields'. In this paradigm, sin is defined preeminently as ignorance. People only had to be informed about what was in their own interest. The Western mission was the great educator, which would mediate salvation to the unenlightened" (396).
This smacks to me of the spread of a market economy. If people are in touch with their own self-interest as separate from and above their relations to their communities, they'll be saved, and able to function in an advanced way in a capitalist society.
To what extent can I teach my students what is in their best interest? My conviction this year has been that literacy is what matters. I need to teach them how to read words and images because it's what they need to know to survive in this society. It's a tool that will facilitate all future learning. But of course I will try to teach them much more than that, indirectly. I'll try to teach them about the dignity of all human beings; I anticipate that lesson coming up, from me or another student, everyday.
Which brings me at long last to the descriptions of the daily community of Christ: What does it look like for people to live together as the hands and feet of Christ?
I turn to Lesslie Newbigin, who describes salvation as dependent on the community in which one lives. He describes here "the whol way of understanding the human situation which is characteristic of the Bible. Here, in contrast to both the Indian and the modern Western views, there is no attempt to see the human person as an autonomous individual, and the human relation with God as the relation of the alone to the alone. From its very beginning the Bible sees human life in terms of relationships. There is no attempt to strip away the accidents of history in order to find the real essence of what it is to be human... The Bible does not speak about 'humanity' but about 'all the families of the earth' or 'all the nations'. It follows that this mutual relatedness, this dependence of one on another, is not merely part of the journey toward the goal of salvation, but is intrinsic to the goal itself. For knowing God, for being in communion with him, we are dependent on the one whom he gives us to be the bearer of this relation, not just as a teacher and guide on the way but as the partner in the end. There is, there can be, no private salvation, no salvation which does not involve us with one another" (Newbigin, 82).
This is certainly true in the classroom. Students who pursue education alone, facing a computer screen, even though they have all recorded information at their fingertips, have a lifeless education. They are not "saved" in any way from the drudgery of human existence. In a classroom, through our interactions with one another we are indeed saved and, in my opinion, exalted.
Newbigin says that the community of Christ will have six characteristics:
1. It will be a community of praise.
2. It will be a community of truth.
3. It will be a community that does not live for itself but is deeply involved in the concerns of its neighborhood.
4. It will be a community where men and women are prepared for and sustained in the exercise of the priesthood in the world. (This made me think of this blog, in which a Baltimore teacher describes how he read James Baldwin with his twelfth graders and at least one of them went out and led a rally in the streets for Black Lives Matter.)
5. It will be a community of mutual responsibility. ("If the church is to be effective in advocating and achieving a new social order in the nation, it must itself be a new social order.")
6. It will be a community of hope.
Now, Newbigin believes that Jesus and the Bible and Christian identity are essential to the sturdy formation of a community on these principles. I don't know why. A classroom can function like this even if there are no Christians in it. I've seen it.
Stone seems to hold similar ideas about what a community that leads to salvation looks like, but he too, as indicated in my first paragraph, thinks it can only be Christian.
"...Christian salvation is ecclesial - that its very shape in the world is a participation in Christ through the worship, shared practices, disciplines, loyalties, and social patterns of his body, the church. To construe the message of the gospel in such a way as to hide or diminish the unique social creation of the Spirit that the first Christians called ecclesia is to miss the point of what God is up to in history - the calling forth and creation of a people" (16).
I don't see why such a community must be the "unique social creation" of the Christian church. Why insist on our text and our prophet/deity-man? Students will bring their life experiences to a text, to a discussion, and they will construct, together, their own meaning. Bosch sees this:
"Paul Ricoeur and other recent literary critics have, in a great variety of ways, advanced the view that every text is an interpreted text and that, in a sense, the reader "creates" the text when she or he reads it. The text is not only "out there", waiting to be interpreted; the text "becomes" as we engage with it. And yet, even this new hermeneutic approach is not going far enough. Interpreting a text is not only a literary exercise; it is also a social, economic, and political exercise. Our entire context comes into play when we interpret a biblical text. One therefore has to concede that all theology (or sociology, political theory etc) is, by its very nature, contextual."
Can the "theology" born in the classroom be as legitimate as that found in church?
Stephen Bevans says that in the postmodern age, "culture and world events become the very sources of the theological enterprise" (16). This means that when kids come into a classroom and reflect on what is happening in their lives and how it relates to a common material we are studying, they create theology. In his book Models of Contextual Theology, Bevans describes one model called the Praxis Model, which the pastor is something of a midwife, accompanying the pregnant woman during the journey of pregnancy and providing aid and guidance during the birthing process. What is created is in no way the midwife's; it's the mother's child. The midwife has only helped make sure that the idea arrived safely in the world, despite dangers, snafoos and pain.
This analogy also works in the classroom. I midwife my students into producing their own theology about the way the world works, and their role in it.
What is the role of the teacher in all this?
I return to Bosch. He explains the role of the spirit in inspiring mission (which remember, is to provide salvation in the form of economic, social, political, physical, psychological, and spiritual empowerment).
"The spirit not only initiates mission, he also guides the missionaries about where they should go and how they should proceed. The missionaries are not to execute their own plans but have to wait on the Spirit to direct them" (114).
I am not the central player in my classroom, as suggested by the midwife analogy mentioned earlier. Let those kids shine! My role does, however, include setting the parameters for a community, (ecclesia) that is counter cultural in the way Jesus' was (remember how shocked the Roman world was by the seating chart at Jesus' dining table).
Anthony Robinson and Robert Wall write, in the introduction to Called to be Church: THe Book of Acts for a New Day that "The focus [of today's mission] is God's ecclesia, God's community taking for in the world, which even provides a new world and a new vision for those who share in it" (3).
I simply cannot reconcile a model in which we need to overcome all of Christianity's well-deserved notoriety in order to convince people to give this ecclesia a try. Let's live out those principles in classroom community.
Books:
David Bosch, Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in the Theology of Mission.
Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society.
Anthony Robinson and Robert Wall, Called to be Church: The Book of Acts for a New Day.
Bryan Stone, Evangelism After Christendom.
In considering how to evangelize in the postmodern age, Brian Stone asserts that the church need not bemoan its slide from the center of our culture to a more marginal place in society. The gospel does not require a position at the center, he says. Rather, it needs “saints who have taken up the way of the cross and in whose lives the gospel is visible, palpable, and true” (Stone,12). Good people, living good lives, in love of each other and of the Creator; sounds excellent. The question I would like to pose is whether the community has to be visibly, palpably and truly Christian. Stone says it does. The gospel does “require a people that has been made into the temple of God in which the Spirit dwells, built upon the church’s only secure foundation, Jesus Christ (1 Cor. 3:10-17)” (12). I would like to use the context of a high school classroom in a public American school as a context in which to test the hypothesis that such a community can be created without Christ as a foundation stone. Indeed it is the hope of teachers everywhere that they can create a community that operates on the values of love, equality, inclusion and justice that Christ preached, but who cannot legally invoke his name or any religious text in the classroom.
First, let's talk about the kind of community Jesus created, and the message he preached in that community.
David Bosch says that Jesus' ministry was not external. He did not go out to other nations and convert them, as Paul did, and as Jesus commanded the disciples to do in Matthew 28:18-20 with the "Great Commission":
18 Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 19 Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”
But because I am not willing to assume that anything written in the gospel actually proceeded from the mouth of Jesus, I'm going to look at what it appears he did rather than what he said.
How do we characterize his community, then? By "his consistent challenge to attitudes, practices and structures that tended arbitrarily to restrict or exclude potential members of the Israelite community" (Bosch, 27). Jesus knew that social change was an inside job, and went to work accordingly among his own people, the nation of Israel.
Incidentally, last night with the YAF we watched I Am Not Your Negro, about the life and work of James Baldwin, who also realized that he needed to work in his own American context during the civil rights era; he returned from France, where he had moved in 1948. This quote is from the warm New Yorker review of I Am Not Your Negro. It describes the moment when Baldwin knew he had to return to the U.S:"It was 1957, and he was in Paris. He saw, on the front page of a newspaper, a photograph of Dorothy Counts, the fifteen-year-old daughter of a professor of theology and philosophy and the first black student admitted to Harry Harding High School, in Charlotte, under the Pearsall Plan to Save Our Schools. Instituted in 1956, the Pearsall Plan was North Carolina’s attempt to integrate public schools in a “moderate” way, after the Brown v. Board of Education ruling, in 1954."
Anyway, Baldwin is a present day Jesus in that he brought truth to his own country, even as those who were doing similarly, King, Malcolm X, and Evers, were being killed. (This is my first gesture toward the diminishing role of Jesus and his uniqueness in my theology).
Now, what kind of community did Jesus intend to create among the nation of Israel? Let's turn to Bosch:
"The revolutionary nature of the early Christian mission manifested itself, inter alia, in the new relationships that came into being in the community. Jew and Roman, Greek and barbarian, free and slave, rich and poor, woman and man, accepted one another as brothers and sisters. It was a movement without analogy, indeed a "sociological impossibility" (Hoekendijk 1967a:245). Small wonder that the early Christian community caused so much astonishment in the Roman Empire and beyond. The reaction was not always positive."
When I tell people that I teach in a high school, the most common response, conveyed as much through eye brows as though words, is "I wouldn't want to be in a classroom with 25 teenagers in this day and age!" It is true that a high school classroom that operates by the principles of Jesus' community seems like a sociological impossibility. How could it possibly be a place where students feel safe, heard, able to debate deep ideas, change their minds, be artistic and rational, critical and empathetic? But it can happen, even if we don't mention Jesus or read the Bible together. How? Let's look at how authors have described these principles that undergird "holy" community.
First of all, the gospel of Luke provides a new Commission, emphasizing the poor and oppressed. “The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
because he has anointed me
to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
and recovery of sight for the blind,
to set the oppressed free,
19 to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”[f]
This he reads to his home congregation, essentially, in Nazareth, before they try to kill him for it. Bosch goes on to say that the mission of the Christian community is to provide salvation. Gah! Run! Salvation strikes fear into the hearts of most people. We must stick with Bosch to see what it means in Luke.
"...one could say that, for Luke, salvation actually had six dimensions: economic, social, political, physical, psychological, and spiritual. Luke seemed to pay special attention to the first of these. We may thus detect a major element in Luke's missionary paradigm in what he writes about the new relationship between rich and poor" (117).
Another element of Luke's interpretation of salvation that I like is that "for Luke salvation is, above all, something that realizes itself in this life, today." (393). Heck yes! That translates to the classroom, because no teacher is going to be consoled, looking down the pike at a semester with her unbearable class, by the idea of salvation coming next summer, let alone in the next life. Outside the gospel, this understanding of salvation proliferates in this postmodern era, says Bosch. According to Greshake, "Salvation does not come through change in individuals but through the termination of perverted and unjust structures.
The problem, and the seed of the colonial-missionary catastrophe, was that "Salvation, defined in the American way, had to be exported to the 'mission fields'. In this paradigm, sin is defined preeminently as ignorance. People only had to be informed about what was in their own interest. The Western mission was the great educator, which would mediate salvation to the unenlightened" (396).
This smacks to me of the spread of a market economy. If people are in touch with their own self-interest as separate from and above their relations to their communities, they'll be saved, and able to function in an advanced way in a capitalist society.
To what extent can I teach my students what is in their best interest? My conviction this year has been that literacy is what matters. I need to teach them how to read words and images because it's what they need to know to survive in this society. It's a tool that will facilitate all future learning. But of course I will try to teach them much more than that, indirectly. I'll try to teach them about the dignity of all human beings; I anticipate that lesson coming up, from me or another student, everyday.
Which brings me at long last to the descriptions of the daily community of Christ: What does it look like for people to live together as the hands and feet of Christ?
I turn to Lesslie Newbigin, who describes salvation as dependent on the community in which one lives. He describes here "the whol way of understanding the human situation which is characteristic of the Bible. Here, in contrast to both the Indian and the modern Western views, there is no attempt to see the human person as an autonomous individual, and the human relation with God as the relation of the alone to the alone. From its very beginning the Bible sees human life in terms of relationships. There is no attempt to strip away the accidents of history in order to find the real essence of what it is to be human... The Bible does not speak about 'humanity' but about 'all the families of the earth' or 'all the nations'. It follows that this mutual relatedness, this dependence of one on another, is not merely part of the journey toward the goal of salvation, but is intrinsic to the goal itself. For knowing God, for being in communion with him, we are dependent on the one whom he gives us to be the bearer of this relation, not just as a teacher and guide on the way but as the partner in the end. There is, there can be, no private salvation, no salvation which does not involve us with one another" (Newbigin, 82).
This is certainly true in the classroom. Students who pursue education alone, facing a computer screen, even though they have all recorded information at their fingertips, have a lifeless education. They are not "saved" in any way from the drudgery of human existence. In a classroom, through our interactions with one another we are indeed saved and, in my opinion, exalted. Newbigin says that the community of Christ will have six characteristics:
1. It will be a community of praise.
2. It will be a community of truth.
3. It will be a community that does not live for itself but is deeply involved in the concerns of its neighborhood.
4. It will be a community where men and women are prepared for and sustained in the exercise of the priesthood in the world. (This made me think of this blog, in which a Baltimore teacher describes how he read James Baldwin with his twelfth graders and at least one of them went out and led a rally in the streets for Black Lives Matter.)
5. It will be a community of mutual responsibility. ("If the church is to be effective in advocating and achieving a new social order in the nation, it must itself be a new social order.")
6. It will be a community of hope.
Now, Newbigin believes that Jesus and the Bible and Christian identity are essential to the sturdy formation of a community on these principles. I don't know why. A classroom can function like this even if there are no Christians in it. I've seen it.
Stone seems to hold similar ideas about what a community that leads to salvation looks like, but he too, as indicated in my first paragraph, thinks it can only be Christian.
"...Christian salvation is ecclesial - that its very shape in the world is a participation in Christ through the worship, shared practices, disciplines, loyalties, and social patterns of his body, the church. To construe the message of the gospel in such a way as to hide or diminish the unique social creation of the Spirit that the first Christians called ecclesia is to miss the point of what God is up to in history - the calling forth and creation of a people" (16).
I don't see why such a community must be the "unique social creation" of the Christian church. Why insist on our text and our prophet/deity-man? Students will bring their life experiences to a text, to a discussion, and they will construct, together, their own meaning. Bosch sees this:
"Paul Ricoeur and other recent literary critics have, in a great variety of ways, advanced the view that every text is an interpreted text and that, in a sense, the reader "creates" the text when she or he reads it. The text is not only "out there", waiting to be interpreted; the text "becomes" as we engage with it. And yet, even this new hermeneutic approach is not going far enough. Interpreting a text is not only a literary exercise; it is also a social, economic, and political exercise. Our entire context comes into play when we interpret a biblical text. One therefore has to concede that all theology (or sociology, political theory etc) is, by its very nature, contextual."
Can the "theology" born in the classroom be as legitimate as that found in church?
Stephen Bevans says that in the postmodern age, "culture and world events become the very sources of the theological enterprise" (16). This means that when kids come into a classroom and reflect on what is happening in their lives and how it relates to a common material we are studying, they create theology. In his book Models of Contextual Theology, Bevans describes one model called the Praxis Model, which the pastor is something of a midwife, accompanying the pregnant woman during the journey of pregnancy and providing aid and guidance during the birthing process. What is created is in no way the midwife's; it's the mother's child. The midwife has only helped make sure that the idea arrived safely in the world, despite dangers, snafoos and pain.
This analogy also works in the classroom. I midwife my students into producing their own theology about the way the world works, and their role in it.What is the role of the teacher in all this?
I return to Bosch. He explains the role of the spirit in inspiring mission (which remember, is to provide salvation in the form of economic, social, political, physical, psychological, and spiritual empowerment).
"The spirit not only initiates mission, he also guides the missionaries about where they should go and how they should proceed. The missionaries are not to execute their own plans but have to wait on the Spirit to direct them" (114).
I am not the central player in my classroom, as suggested by the midwife analogy mentioned earlier. Let those kids shine! My role does, however, include setting the parameters for a community, (ecclesia) that is counter cultural in the way Jesus' was (remember how shocked the Roman world was by the seating chart at Jesus' dining table).
Anthony Robinson and Robert Wall write, in the introduction to Called to be Church: THe Book of Acts for a New Day that "The focus [of today's mission] is God's ecclesia, God's community taking for in the world, which even provides a new world and a new vision for those who share in it" (3).
I simply cannot reconcile a model in which we need to overcome all of Christianity's well-deserved notoriety in order to convince people to give this ecclesia a try. Let's live out those principles in classroom community.
Books:
David Bosch, Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in the Theology of Mission.
Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society.
Anthony Robinson and Robert Wall, Called to be Church: The Book of Acts for a New Day.
Bryan Stone, Evangelism After Christendom.
