Aristotle and the Art of Shalom

I have been reading a book called Farming as a Spiritual Discipline by Ragan Sutterfield the past few weeks. In it, I encountered an idea that offers a serious insight across most of life. 

Sutterfield explains the Aristotelian concept of Stochastic art. This is any practice where the artist works within a predetermined system or organism with the goal of bringing that system to a place of health. For example, a doctor’s task is not to create something new but to work within the canvas of a human body to assist the person toward optimum flourishing. This is true of the farmer, as he works to make his property abundant within the land’s contours and the local ecology. 

It is also true of community development. The developer approaches his community with a sensitivity for the place’s unique characteristics--studying the culture, values and assets within the system--and cultivates them towards shalom. 

Greek thought has its pitfalls, but if handled well I think this idea reveals something of the nature of sanctification, the process toward discipleship and the messy nature of participating with God’s work to let it be on earth as it is in heaven. As Sutterfield says, these “are arts that can never be mastered.” There is a constant progression of discovery, of cresting one rise only to discover still higher peaks in the distance. In the effort to become like Jesus and to bring forth the New Creation, we discover the paradox that we can never be closer to our journey’s end when that end is infinite. It still lies just as far away as when we began. Though our quest is interminable, it does not cause us despair but amazingly becomes a wellspring of hope, for around each bend life is bursting onto the scene with new colors and fruits to be tasted. In this way, we learn just how graciously generous God truly is.

The Wanderer

I loved the painting Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog since the first time I saw it in an undergrad English Lit book. 

Some might see him as a triumphalist, Master and Commander of all that lies before him, embodiment of the "white man's burden," the consummate colonialist ever claiming ownership of that which was never his. 

Perhaps.

That's just not how I see it.

From my point of view, that is me standing there on that rock. It is any one of us, and, in a way, it is all of us. 

In my mind, the Wanderer is a pilgrim. An explorer aimed at discovery whose motivation is the journey and the experience and the encounter with things unseen, not the conquering of those things. 

The next set of destinations are clear. They rise up out of the mist beckoning him onward. But though the goal may appear obvious, the way there is shrouded in mystery and uncertainty. Risk and danger are inevitable. 

Because the Wanderer is foregrounded in the painting, he seems to loom large over the valley. But any hiker knows that is never one's own experience in such landscapes. When vast trackless expanses envelop you on all sides, your smallness is never more poignant. It is deeply humbling. However, once your desire to control your surroundings is overcome, a sense of self rightly conceived, of finding one's proper place within the world, can settle in.

This, to me, is what life is like. It is a journey full of missions that seem impossible and unplannable. Every next step is fraught with uncertainty, but that upon arrival shape us and draw us into discoveries that open our heart afresh to God and our fellow humans. 

One of those gracious discoveries is that there are others journeying through the fog. We are not alone on this path. Friends and family wait to embrace us and walk by our side if we will but begin. 

When I look at this painting I am reminded of the Israelites when it finally came time for them to enter the Promised Land. 

They stood on the banks of the Jordan and gazed across at that far shore, but in between the river raged at full flood tide. 

The way across was unclear. They could not even see where to place their first step.

But they were told to go.

And so they stepped out in faith, and it was not until they stepped into the roaring waters that the waves parted and a path was made.

The Gospel of Reconciliation

“Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: The

old has gone, the new has come! All this is from God, who reconciled

us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation:

that God was reconciling the world to himself in

Christ, not counting people’s sins against them. And he has committed

to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore

Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal

through us.” (II Corinthians 5:17-20a)

The past couples weeks I've been unpacking five components of the good news that the Kingdom of God has come and that Jesus Christ died for our sins. These dimensions were:

• humanization
• worldview reorientation
• community building
• shalom spreading
• present and future hope

Each of these is essential, an irreducible part of the gospel concerning what God has done, is doing and will do. What becomes obvious when it is phrased this way, is that the gospel and mission are inseparable. This good news is all about the mission that God has been on, the missio Dei that he is about and that he has chosen to include us in. One of the implication of God's activity is that those who follow him become recipients of his grace and eternal life. But that is an outcome, not the gospel itself. The gospel is that Jesus is God himself, alive and ruling over the cosmos. As King, justice is his prerogative. He has taken responsibility for the wellbeing of that which is his, setting about restoring all that has troubled his lands.

At the most fundamental level, this world is corrupted by relationships that fail to function as they were created to.

Taken from When Helping Hurts by Fikkert and Corbett

Poverty, oppression, violence, loneliness, shame, environmental destruction--these all stem from the same fundamental cause. Broken relationships, starting with the failure to recognize God as God and worship him as Lord. Once that is lost, it doesn't take long for us to lose touch with ourselves, to begin mistreating others and to see creation as something which only exists to be exploited to meet our desires.

If one word could capture the gospel, the mission that God is on to repair all of this, I believe it would be reconciliation.

In 2004, a council of 47 delegates from 21 countries gathered in Thailand to craft a document called Reconciliation as the Mission of God: Christian Witness in a World of Destructive Conflict. It's available online, and I would strongly encourage anyone to read it. The rest of this post is an extended quote from that document which powerfully captures what reconciliation means for the Church today:


"God’s initiative of reconciliation through Christ transforms believers into God’s new creation. With all of creation, we await our final and perfect transformation in the end of time. At that time, when Jesus returns, God’s mission will be complete. People of every nation, tribe, and language, gathered as one, will worship the Lamb, the tree of life and its leaves shall be for the healing of the nations, and the new heavens and earth shall make the reign of God a reality with all things reconciled to God (Romans 8:18-39, Revelation 7:9-17; Revelation 21-22:5).

In response to all this, the believer is called to participate in God’s mission of reconciliation. This includes obeying Jesus’ command to humbly make disciples of all nations (Mt. 28:18-20), teaching them to follow the example of Jesus who suffered for a suffering world. The church is called to be a living sign of the one body of Christ, an agent of hope and holistic reconciliation in our broken and fragmented world. 

A serious impediment to God’s mission of reconciliation in our time is not only the reality of destructive divisions and conflicts around the world, but also quite often the church being caught up in these conflicts—places where the blood of ethnicity, tribe, racialism, sexism, caste, social class, or nationalism seems to flow stronger than the waters of baptism and our confession of Christ. While the church’s suffering faith is evident in many conflicts, the guilt of Christians in intensifying the world's brokenness is seriously damaging our witness to the gospel. The church’s captivity is both direct and indirect, whether actively furthering destruction and division, remaining silent or neutral in the face of it, or promoting a defective gospel. This is true of recent and current contexts including legalized apartheid (South Africa), “ethnic cleansing” (the Balkans), genocide (Rwanda), histories of racism and ethnocentrism (U.S.), terror and killing of civilian populations, and bitter, unresolved social divisions ranging from “sectarianism” in Northern Ireland, to Dalit “untouchables” and caste
in India, to the plight of Aboriginal peoples in Australia, to the Korean peninsula, to Palestinians and Israelis. Christians are often bitterly divided on both sides.

This troubled situation calls for prayer, discernment, and repentance, and a critical re-examination of the very meaning of mission, evangelism, discipleship, and even church in relation to God’s reconciling mission. This is particularly urgent given cases where vast areas of revivals and church planting have become vast killing fields (such as Rwanda, 1994), with Christians slaughtering neighbors and even other Christians. Yet even in the worst conflicts, signs of the quest for reconciliation can be detected in the church. Christians have shaped many of the world’s most hopeful breakthroughs for reconciliation. In becoming agents of biblically holistic reconciliation, we must learn to name and confess the sins of the past and present and encourage others to do the same, be willing to forgive, and live in new ways of repentance and costly peacemaking. Above all, Christians must be people of hope; hope in God’s victory in Christ and that, over time, reconciliation
can break in, because this is God’s mission."

The Gospel in 5D: Present and Future Hope

Lamps hanging in a room covered in mirrors. Super cool.

This is the fifth post in a series exploring that age old question, what is the gospel? 

Present and Future Hope

Good theology is often about the willingness to sit in tension.

The bible does not tie a neat bow around a bunch of answers and lay it at our feet. Nor does God provide quick fix solutions to our problems. That is not really what he is about.

He is about gaining worship and a people whose righteousness and unity collaborates with his work for justice. And he is willing to see these things played out over the long run. He does not do his work all at one time or rush the results. That would not be in the best interest of cultivating the kinds of relationships he is after.

What all this means is that the work of the gospel and its effects fall across the spectrum of history. There are things that have already been done and things that remain in need of doing. There are things which we have already received and things which we must wait for. There are things we are able to be accomplished in the current age and things which will not be accomplished until later.

This is what theologians have come the call the "already and the not yet" of the Kingdom. Jesus has already died for the forgiveness of our sins, but he has not yet returned to make all things new. The power, presence and counsel of God is already available to us through the Holy Spirit, but we still wait to stand in the presence of God and see him face to face. Shalom can already be brought to bear on the world in the present day, but it is not yet a reality for everyone everywhere and will not be until Jesus comes back to judge the living and the dead. Jesus is Lord, and yet the world tends to not look like.

Let's turn to some scriptures that express this tension.

• "The Kingdom of God is near." Mark 1:15 
• "...your Kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven." Matthew 6:10
• "...nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There!’ for behold, the kingdom of God is in the midst of you.” Luke 17:21 
• "My kingdom is not of this world." John 18:36 
• "For by grace you have been saved by faith." Ephesians 2:8 
• "Not that I have already obtained this or have already reached the goal; but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own." Philippians 3:12 
• "He has rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins." Colossians 1:13-14 
• "Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen." Hebrews 11:1 
• "Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: the old has gone, the new is here!" 2 Corinthians 5:17
• "I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God; for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hoe that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies. For in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience." Romans 8:18-24

The examples could go on and on.

There is hope of freedom from sin, from despair, from shame, from loneliness, from hunger, from homelessness, and from violence today. People don't have to wait! These things are transformations that are experienced every day and it is the church's mission to spread this joy and abundant life far and wide. However, we do not yet live in a world where every tear has been wiped away and every burden has been lifted.

These are the tensions present in the gospel.

The good news has been done. It is being done. And it will be done.

It is a present fact and a future faith.

This is the source of all our hope.

It is why we can do what we are called to do even when things are rough. The examples could go on and on.

It is why we can do what we are called to do even when things are rough. Part of the play on words that I hope this blog's title subtly conveys is that history is on an unwavering march toward shalom. Shalom is the great culmination of time itself! Even though our eyes have not seen it, we know that our God is faithful to fulfill his promises and that we are to join him in this work of love today. Therefore, stand in the tension friends.

Work persistently.

Hope tenaciously.

Love unboundedly.

The Gospel in 5D: Shalom Spreading

Today is installment four--and the centerpiece--in the series The Gospel in 5D. I repeat myself a bit from this blog's very first post, but oh well...if it's worth saying, it's worth saying again :) Check out the past few posts to get the whole picture!

The Gospel as Shalom Spreading

Jesus commenced his ministry as an instrument of the Old Testament concept shalom when he entered the Galilean synagogue and declared, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor” (Luke 4:18-19). 

Shalom, I am convinced, is the character of the Kingdom of God. Where Jesus is Lord, there is shalom. 

This word is one of the most evocative in all of scripture. Shalom exists when all people equitably experience peace and justice, a comprehensive rightness in the relationship between all things. It “can refer to a material and physical state of affairs” in which well-being, prosperity, abundance, safety, justice and peace are normative for the community (Shalom: The Bible's Word for Peace, Justice and Salvation by Yoder). We are provided examples of shalom through the healing, feeding, reconciling ministry of Jesus, in the sharing and mutually caring life of the early church (Act 2:42), and in the eschatological visions of the New Heaven and the New Earth (Rev 21-22).

Spreading these characteristics of shalom is what we think of as "mission."

Following after Jesus’ example as the “man for others,” the Church as bearers of the gospel are charged with the ministry of shalom spreading. Jesus taught that in caring for the marginalized members of society, we were loving him (Matt 25). Paul instructs disciples to “shod your feet with the gospel of peace” (Eph 6:15). Shalom is a function of the two greatest commandments being worked out through the life of the Church: love the Lord your God with all your heart soul and mind and love your neighbor as yourself (Matt 22:37-39). 

Though not spelled out in concrete terms, this provides the Christian answer to the question: how do we bring about genuine transformation? 

Shalom is manifested through love. However, we cannot be careless with the meaning of love, as it is an ambiguous term with as many meanings as there are people. Thankfully, we are not left in the dark. “In a number of different ways, the New Testament teaches that the central way Jesus revealed that “God is love” was by freely sacrificing himself on the cross. ‘This is how we know what love is,’ John writes, ‘Jesus Christ laid down his life for us’ (1 Jn 3:16, cf. I Jn 4:9)” (taken from a post by Greg Boyd). 

Jesus’ love, and therefore the love which Christians are called to embody for the spreading of shalom, is shaped like the cross. Love is therefore a nonviolent methodology for the common good which extends itself even to the enemy. 

No one describes the Jesus-way of shalom producing love better than Howard Thurman: “You must abandon your fear of each other and fear only God. You must not indulge in any deception and dishonesty, even to save your lives. Your words must be Yea--Nay; anything else is evil. Hatred is destructive to hated and hater alike. Love your enemy, that you may be children of your Father who is in heaven” (Jesus and the Disinherited).

The Gospel in 5D: Community Building

This is part three of my series looking at five dimensions of the gospel. Check out the last couple if you haven't read them yet!

The Gospel as Community Building

Liberated from the alienation of Sin, we are freed to enter into relationship. Sin’s relational destructiveness isolates us from one another, driving a wedge between ourselves and healthy relationship with God, our own self, others and the created world. The scope of Jesus’ redemptive work is cosmic, “For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross” (Col 1:19-20). The gospel makes relationship possible and draws once segregated people together in community.

The fact that Paul declares the power of the gospel for salvation on behalf of both the Jew and the Greek is radically significant (Rom 1:16). For these two ethnic groups to share the table fellowship of communion was an enormous paradigm shift. The universality of the gospel creates one unified body of Christ while we retain our diversity (1 Cor 12:27). We are not separated from each other on the basis of being “Jew nor Greek..slave nor free...male nor female; for all...are one in Christ Jesus” (Gal 2:28). However, our various forms of distinctiveness--gender, culture, age, and more--remain intact as we worship around the throne of God (Rev 7:9-10).

If there is one dimension of the gospel the 21st century Church desperately needs to hear afresh, it is this one. The gospel has systematically been reduced to individualized salvation interpreted as access to eternal life, heaven when we die and a personal relationship with Jesus. 

There's a lot of issues with this, but I'll just point out two.

First, our journeys of spiritual formation and discipleship are not meant to be solitary enterprises. There is a reason why the majority of the "you's" we read in Paul's epistles are in the plural form, addressed to the whole church. We simply can't grow in spiritual maturity or Christlikeness alone. These things are fleshed out in the context of relationship where following Jesus is hard. Piety is easy when you're alone! It is as a community that the Church's worship and ecclesial practices glorify God. Not only that, we each need the wisdom of our community to reveal dynamics of the Christian life we could not comprehend on our own. And, painfully at times, we need others to reveal those parts of ourself that we've ignored or haven't allowed God to deal with. 

Second, the world is a heart breakingly divided place. Follow this link to a map of America. The map is made up of colored dots that represent people's ethnicity. Zoom in on your city. How integrated is it? Less than you would hope, I guarantee it. What ethnicities live on the poor side of town? In the cities I've lived in, they almost exclusively minorities. Who lives around where your church is? 

This function of the gospel may be the most important component of our witness. Society is as divided as ever, which means the church has the opportunity to prove that our faith empowers us to be different than the rest of the world. As the diverse and unified body of Christ, we become what Lesslie Newbigin described as the “hermeneutic of the gospel.” When we come together in unified missional witness, our community life is the best apologetic for the truth of the living God. Over 50 years ago, Martin Luther King Jr. called Sunday mornings at 11:00am the most segregated hour of the week. Let us make more progress on this statistic in the next 50 years than we did in the last. The future of the Church's relevance depends on it. 

As I will explore in the next post, it is as a community that the Church is able to practice alternative ways of being in the world, ways that make this planet a more just and beautiful place, the ways of shalom. We simply can't skip this dimension of unity. And why would we want to? Life is so much richer together! 

The Gospel in 5D: Worldview Re-ordering

Because who decides what's up?

Continuing to explore the gospel into the second dimension...

The Gospel as Worldview Re-ordering

Jesus is Lord! Caesar is not. 

In Thessalonica, Paul and Silas are imprisoned on the accusation that “They are all acting contrary to the decrees of the emperor, saying that there is another king named Jesus” (Act 17:7). In the New Testament, the empire is the the embodiment of Sinful power in human institutions of power. The missionaries do not deny that their accusers are speaking the truth because, for them, the gospel is a subversion of the world viewed through the empire’s lens and the way of life it imposes.* 

The good news that Jesus is Lord leads us into theological reflection as the task of reconceiving the world through the lens of Jesus’ Kingship. Jesus was constantly reinterpreting the world for his followers: “You have hear it said...but I say to you” (Matt 5:21-22). Those who heard him teach were amazed at his words because he preached as one with authority, reinterpreting the law in a manner they believed only God was capable of doing (Mark 1:22). Paul understood that for people to live out their new identity as Christians, they must learn to see the world differently. He therefore instructed his followers, “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God--what is good and acceptable and perfect” (Rom 12:2). 

It is this function of the gospel as reordered thinking that instills our vision for how the world should be with Jesus in charge. Until our worldview is transformed, we do not know how to live well or what to pursue.

* Thanks to my buddy Ivan Paz for tipping me off to this verse.