Reading through John Piper’s response to N.T. Wright, The Future of Justification (see also Piper’s objections to Wright’s ‘good news’), and not having much of a background in Reformed theology, I found myself repeatedly asking where the idea that the real moral righteousness of God is imputed to those who are in Christ actually comes from. Although admittedly Piper has written a great deal elsewhere about the doctrine (167), I found the main exegetical chapter of the book (163-180) remarkably flimsy; and although I have set out below my immediate response to it, I can’t help thinking that I must have missed something somewhere.

Piper argues in this chapter against Wright’s definition of the righteousness of God as ‘God’s covenant faithfulness or impartiality in court’ that this does not get at the heart of what God’s righteousness is: it merely highlights a couple of things that God’s righteousness does (Piper, The Future of Justification, 164). God’s righteousness is really much deeper than either of these things. It is fundamentally his commitment to do what is right; it ‘consists most deeply in God’s unwavering allegiance to himself’; it is ‘his unswerving commitment to uphold the worth of his glory’ – and he demands the same ‘righteousness’ from us, that we ‘unwaveringly love and uphold the glory of God’.

Since we have failed to do this, we find ourselves on trial in God’s law-court, and at this point we arrive at what Piper regards as the critical questions:

When the Judge finds in our favour, does he count us as having the required God-glorifying moral righteousness…? And does this counting us as righteous happen because we meet this requirement for perfect God-glorifying allegiance in our own heart and mind and behaviour, or because God’s righteousness is counted as ours in Christ? (165)

Piper’s answer is that the latter is what happens when we are justified: ‘God counts us as having his righteousness in Christ because we are united to Christ by faith alone’.

The first thing to note about this argument is that it is thoroughly decontextualized. Wright is perhaps partly to blame for this by placing so much emphasis on the law court metaphor, but we have lost all sense of how what Paul has to say about righteousness belongs in all instances to an argument about Israel under particular historical conditions. Whereas Wright insists that the righteousness of God is in one way or another a factor of the covenant relationship between God and his people, Piper argues, in effect, that the righteousness of God precedes or transcends covenant. The effect of this is to make the covenant largely redundant – it has been left behind, and we are now in a grand universalized law court beyond the boundaries of a petty historical narrative about Israel. The doctrine then sounds as though it has been constructed on this universal theological premise and then read back into the texts.

The problem is that in scripture the question of the righteousness of God always (at least, I can’t think of any exceptions off the top of my head) presupposes, directly or indirectly, a covenant context, a historical context, and in most cases an eschatological context: it has to do either with how God acts in relation to his people or with how he acts in relation to the enemies of his people. As long as there is disagreement at this hermeneutical level, there is bound to be disagreement over the meaning of the phrase ‘righteousness of God’.

My second concern has to do with the exegetical reasons for thinking that Paul understood justification to entail the imputation of righteousness from one person to another. Piper considers five texts (he also examines Romans 10:4 in an appendix).

1. He points out that in Romans 4:3-8 justification is ‘conceived in terms of “counting (or imputing) as righteous”’ (168). He then quotes from Simon Gathercole’s critique of the New Perspective. The ‘justification’ of David presupposes the metaphor not of the law courts but of the ledger. On the one side, David’s sins are wiped clean; on the other side, a positive righteousness is attributed to him. The metaphor requires that this positive value must come from some, so we conclude that there has been a transfer of righteousness from God to David.

But while the logic of the metaphor may require this, it is not at all clear that Paul’s argument requires the metaphor. Gathercole alludes to Jubilees 30, but this hardly supports the contention and is in any case of little relevance for interpreting Romans 4. The killing of the Shechemites by the two sons of Jacob is reckoned to them as righteousness and inscribed on the heavenly tablets as ‘blessing and righteousness before the God of all’ (Jub. 30:19). These heavenly tablets are a record of the ‘righteous’ deeds of the sons of Jacob; they are not a ledger – there is no corresponding negative side on which their sins are listed. What we have are two books: a book of life and a ‘book of those who will be destroyed’ (30:22). It may be that in his book Gathercole presents a more coherent case, but on the face of it he appears to have misunderstood the Jubilees passage.

Besides, nothing in Romans 4:3-8 suggests that Paul has the specific ledger metaphor in mind. Just as Abraham’s faith or trust in the God who promises was reckoned as righteousness, so David’s faith in the God who forgives was reckoned to him as righteousness – and subsequently the faith or trust of those who ‘believe in him who raised from the dead Jesus our Lord’ will be reckoned as righteousness (Rom. 4:24). In effect, this trust is counted as a ‘righteous’ deed – and perhaps implicitly is written in the book of life. But the thought is simply that the act of trusting (rather than performing works of the Law) is judged as righteousness. There is no imputation or transfer of a moral quality involved in this.

2. Piper’s argument from Romans 5:18-19 fails, I think, because it simply reads too much into the connection between Christ’s act of obedience and the appointment or making of many as righteous. Certainly Christ’s obedience has had the effect of many being reckoned as righteous, but this is by way of faith – as we have just seen in 4:3-8, it is the person’s act of trusting that leads to the pronouncement ‘righteous’ or ‘vindicated’. There is no transfer of righteousness from Jesus to us: we are declared ‘justified’ because we believe in the one who was obedient.

The analogy with Adam, moreover, does not work the way Piper would like it to. There is no counting ‘as having sinned in Adam’ (170). Sin passed into the world, by the trespass of the one man many died, through one lapse condemnation for all people (there is no verb here), through the disobedience of one man many were made sinners – none of these statements requires the thought that Adam’s sinfulness was imputed or transferred to the rest of humanity.

3. In Philippians 3:9 Paul speaks of having a righteousness that is not his own by right of being an observant Jew but which comes from God. That he repudiates his Jewish heritage is an argument for rather than against keeping the covenant context in view. His ‘righteousness under the Law’ is not simply an instance of a generic legalism or moralism: it is the particular case in point: what does it mean to attain to the resurrection that will mark Israel’s eschatological vindication?

Piper admits that there is nothing in this passage on which to base a doctrine of Christ’s imputed righteousness (171). It has to be read in from elsewhere. Unfortunately, it seems that it has to be read in from Reformed tradition rather than from anything that Paul writes.

4. Piper’s argument with respect to 1 Corinthians 1:30 is that when the statement ‘you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us… righteousness’ is read alongside Galatians 2:17 (‘in our endeavour to be justified in Christ…’), it appears that Christ’s becoming righteousness for us ‘is related to justiification – our being counted righteous’ (172). I must confess, I have trouble following the line of thought here, but I fail to see how this constitutes an argument for the imputation of Christ’s righteousness to the believer in the forensic sense intended.

Paul makes the statement in the context of his consideration of the ‘calling’ of the believers in Corinth (1 Cor. 1:26-31). His main point is that they have no reason to ‘boast’ according to worldly standards. In fact, God chose them precisely for that reason in order to ‘bring to nothing things that are’ – they are in themselves, in their very weakness and poverty, a prophetic sign with eschatological purpose. What they may ‘boast’ in is the fact that Christ has become for them ‘wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption’. Clearly ‘wisdom from God’ answers the ‘not many of you were wise’ of verse 26, and there may be a hint of a ‘Wisdom’ theology here. The immediate rhetorical relevance of the other three terms is less apparent, but there is no compelling reason to understand ‘righteousness’ here as a moral righteousness possessed by Christ or by God that is imputed to the Corinthian believers. To understand it as a reference to their status of having been vindicated, declared justified, in a world in which the powerful and wise stand condemned makes much better contextual sense (cf. Wright, Justification, 134).

5. The last, and for Piper most important, text is 2 Corinthians 5:21: ‘For our sake he made him to be sin  who knew no sin, so that in him we might become  the righteousness of God.’ Again, the principle issue appears to be how this statement works in the context of Paul’s argument. Piper regards it as having basically a soteriological significance and links it closely to verse 14: ‘one has died for all, therefore all have died’ (176). Wright argues that it forms part of a ‘long apologia for Paul’s apostleship’ (Wright, Justification, 136).

Wright deals with the verse at some length in Justification: God’s Plan and Paul’s Vision, 135-144, and should be read. But it seems to me that the crucial point to note here is that Paul is writing to believers, to a church, which must immediately put a question mark against Piper’s insistence on a soteriological setting for the statement. Paul is not making an evangelistic appeal; he is imploring a community that has lost faith in his ministry to be reconciled to the God who gave him the ministry of reconciliation.

The quotation from Isaiah 49:8 in 2 Corinthians 6:2 suggests that Paul has in mind Isaiah’s vision of a faithful servant who is instrumental in the restoration of sinful Israel. Given this background and the general context of the argument, when Paul says that ‘we’ have become the righteousness of God, it is likely that ‘we’ refers not to all those who believe but – as throughout this passage – to the suffering and ill-treated apostles, who have died to themselves, and who now play the role of ambassadors of God to an alienated community. In this narrative the question of a moral righteousness or perfection simply does not arise. The point is that because the apostles are in Christ, who was faithful, obedient, who did not rebel against his Father (ie. he knew no sin), they embody in themselves the ‘righteousness’ of the God who acts in keeping with his covenant faithfulness to reconcile his people to himself.

This has been a cursory examination with limited consideration given to Wright’s own response; and as I said, I may be missing some critical piece of Piper’s argument – which is an invitation to put me right. In any case, I am left wondering how the widening split between Reformed theology and the New Perspective might ever be resolved – or, perhaps more to the point, how emerging theologies might move beyond a controversy that is still so circumscribed by Christendom categories. Although Wright believes that the Reformation got justification badly wrong, he bends over backwards in his apologia to preserve the essentially Reformed character of the modern church. But it seems to me that the whole Christendom theological paradigm has become so unwieldy, so bent out of shape, so baggage-laden, so deeply polemical in its construction, and so out of touch with the narrative shape of biblical thought, that imaginatively, at least, we should scrap the whole thing and start again.

Martin Robinson (National Director of Together in Mission) is sounding upbeat about the church in the UK and Europe. In a short video clip that can be found on the Roxburgh Missional Network site, he suggests that although churches still face considerable difficulties and challenges, there has emerged over the last few years a new confidence and purpose that give grounds for optimism. He points to three significant developments.

One of the more peculiar objections that John Piper raises against Wright’s understanding of Paul’s ‘gospel’ is that the announcement that Jesus is Lord ‘is an absolutely terrifying message to a sinner who has spent all his life ignoring or blaspheming the God and Father of the Lord Jesus Christ’ (Piper, The Future of Justification, 86-87). It is, therefore, not good news at all.

He quotes Wright’s summary of Paul’s mission: ‘He was to declare to the pagan world that YHWH, the God of Israel, was the one true God of the whole world, and that in Jesus of Nazareth he had overcome evil and was creating a new world in which justice and peace should reign supreme.’ Then he argues that while this is not false, it is ‘unrealistically intellectualistic… mainly conceptual and minimally experiential’. Surely, he says, when Saul ‘fell to the ground under the absolute, sovereign authority of the irresistible brightness of the living Jesus,’ his first thoughts would not have been about intellectualistic concepts such as ‘a new worldview and a new vocation’ but about whether, as a persecutor of the church, he would survive the encounter.

I’m not sure if Wright addresses this objection directly in his response to Piper (Justification: God’s Plan and Paul’s Vision), but I have five observations to make.

1. Wright poses the question historically but Piper answers it existentially. Wright expresses considerable frustration throughout his book with the fact that his critics keep missing the point.

2. The announcement that Jesus is Lord would certainly have come as bad news for unrepentant Israel (eg. Acts 3:23) and eventually for the pagan world (Acts 17:22-31); but it was unquestionably good news for those Jews who sought the vindication or justification of Israel and of YHWH and for those Gentiles who found in the emerging Christian movement a compelling alternative to a morally and spiritually bankrupt paganism.

3. I’m not persuaded by Wright’s argument that in Jesus God was ‘creating a new world in which justice and peace should reign supreme’ – if nothing else, the ‘should’ in that statement seems to bring the whole proposition into question. But to dismiss Wright’s formulation as intellectualistic, conceptual and ‘minimally experiential’ is absurd. What Piper means, of course, is that it appears not to support or make room for the Reformation and evangelical preoccupation with personal salvation. But for the early church the confession that ‘Jesus is Lord’, in defiance of both the Herodians and Caesar, inspired by the intense and often ecstatic activity of the prophetic Spirit of God, was nothing if not experiential. Paul’s gospel was that God was vindicating or justifying his people under the present ‘eschatological’ conditions through the death and resurrection of Jesus. Even in itself that was not merely conceptual: it was a proclamation of what YHWH was doing. But it was an announcement that would have massive practical implications for individuals, communities and whole societies. It is astonishing that Piper should miss the point of that in his anxiety to safeguard a reduced narrative about sinners who find mercy.

4. The argument from Paul’s conversion also misses the point. Of course, it was bad news at that moment for Paul that Jesus had been raised from the dead (87) and good news that he was not destroyed for having hated Jesus and his followers. But that was not his ‘gospel’. The announcement that he was commissioned to make throughout the Greek-Roman world was that ‘Jesus is the Son of God’ (Acts 9:20; cf. Rom. 1:4), or that he is Lord. That appointment or enthronement then becomes the basis for the call to repentance and a change of spiritual (and indeed political) allegiance; it becomes the basis for the transformation that accompanies that change of allegiance. But we should not suppose that personal salvation is simply the fruit that is picked from the tree of the narrative about Israel, packed into boxes, and shipped for global consumption. We are like modern urban consumers who have lost all appreciation of the fact that the plastic-wrapped plums they purchase from the supermarket once hung from the branches of a tree.

5. Piper argues from Acts 13:39 that it is only when ‘the gospel preacher tells the listener what Jesus offers him personally and freely’ that the proclamation has the quality of ‘good news’ (86). But again the modern practice of gospel-preaching is being superimposed on the text. The issue is not whether the announcement that God has made Jesus Son of God or Lord or coming judge has positive implications for people that could be classified as ‘good news’. It is whether we preserve the essential narrative structure of New Testament teaching or collapse it to the level of personal conversion. Piper blithely overlooks the fact that the invitation to believe in Acts 13:39 forms part of a narrative about the salvation of the family of Abraham, in which Paul clearly states what he understands by ‘good news’, which is that God has fulfilled his promise to the fathers by raising Jesus from the dead and making him Israel’s king (13:32-33). It is on that basis that forgiveness of sins is proclaimed to Israel.

Leonard Sweet and Frank Viola have recently issued A Magna Carta of Restoring the Supremacy of Jesus Christ, a.k.a. A Jesus Manifesto for the 21^st Century Church. They argue in the preamble that Christianity is nothing more, nothing less than Christ, but that in the church today there is a serious danger of the person of Jesus being marginalized in the interests of fashionable political causes, labelled variously ‘justice’, ‘the kingdom of God’, ‘values’, and ‘leadership principles’. So they have issued this manifesto not merely in order to promote their new books but to bear witness to the ‘primacy of the Lord Jesus Christ’.

I agree with Sweet and Viola that there is a worrying drift in emerging theologies in the direction of what would once have been called a ‘social gospel’. But I’m not sure that a Jesus manifesto, as such, constitutes an adequate response. I think that it creates both theological problems through an over-simplification of scripture, and practical problems by fore-grounding an individualized Christ-devotion at the expense of the more fundamental vocation of the people of God to be ‘new creation’ in the midst of the nations and cultures of the world.

I have quoted the ten statements of the manifesto in full with half-baked comments added.

1. The center and circumference of the Christian life is none other than the person of Christ. All other things, including things related to him and about him, are eclipsed by the sight of his peerless worth. Knowing Christ is Eternal Life. And knowing him profoundly, deeply, and in reality, as well as experiencing his unsearchable riches, is the chief pursuit of our lives, as it was for the first Christians. God is not so much about fixing things that have gone wrong in our lives as finding us in our brokenness and giving us Christ.

I question the value of this absolute insistence on ‘knowing Christ’. On the one hand, insofar as this constitutes a genuinely biblical thought, it belongs primarily to an eschatological narrative about suffering and vindication: Paul counts everything as refuse for the sake of knowing Christ because he believes it to be his calling to share in Christ’s sufferings, death and resurrection (Phil. 3:8-11). On the other, it presents a strongly individualized Christ-devotion that does not clearly match the New Testament emphasis on Christ as ‘Lord’ in relation to a people. In other words, this sort of statement reflects the thought-forms of a modern evangelicalism, not least an American modern evangelicalism, rather than of the New Testament.

So I disagree with the emphasis on knowing Christ as the ‘chief pursuit of our lives’. That made a lot of sense for those who had to walk the same path of suffering and vindication, but they walked that path in order to get somewhere, in order to arrive at the freedom to be God’s people in the world, no longer subject to the condemnation of the Law, no longer enslaved to other powers. The light of Christ-devotion has become so dazzling in this manifesto that we are unable to see beyond to the effective, historical existence of the people of God, called in Abraham to be new creation, a witness to justice and compassion and, through worship and obedience, to the reality of the creator. In a sense, this is all summed up in Jesus, but this sort of confessional statement can just as easily eclipse as clarify the concrete spiritual, social and ethical obligations of being the people of God.

2. Jesus Christ cannot be separated from his teachings. Aristotle says to his disciples, “Follow my teachings.” Socrates says to his disciples, “Follow my teachings.” Buddha says to his disciples, “Follow my meditations.” Confucius says to his disciples, “Follow my sayings.” Muhammad says to his disciples, “Follow my noble pillars.” Jesus says to his disciples, “Follow me.” In all other religions, a follower can follow the teachings of its founder without having a relationship with that founder. Not so with Jesus Christ. The teachings of Jesus cannot be separated from Jesus himself. Jesus Christ is still alive and he embodies his teachings. It is a profound mistake, therefore, to treat Christ as simply the founder of a set of moral, ethical, or social teaching. The Lord Jesus and his teaching are one. The Medium and the Message are One. Christ is the incarnation of the Kingdom of God and the Sermon on the Mount.

It is correct to say that Jesus cannot be separated from his teachings, but what that meant for his disciples and for the early community and what it means for us now are two different things. I argue for a narratively framed theology that is sensitive to historical context (see also Should we still be making disciples?). While I agree that the person of Jesus must be central to our self-understanding and purpose as the people of God, we create considerable exegetical problems for ourselves if we attempt to read the New Testament in the light of a modern Christ-devotion. In particular, I think we miss the distinctive sense in which the early church understood itself to be shaped in its response to both Jewish and pagan aggression by the story of the Son of man who suffers many things, is raised from the dead, and eventually vindicated against his opponents.

3. God’s grand mission and eternal purpose in the earth and in heaven centers in Christ … both the individual Christ (the Head) and the corporate Christ (the Body). This universe is moving towards one final goal – the fullness of Christ where He shall fill all things with himself. To be truly missional, then, means constructing one’s life and ministry on Christ. He is both the heart and bloodstream of God’s plan. To miss this is to miss the plot; indeed, it is to miss everything.

My view is that the argument about the fulfilment of all things in Christ in the New Testament has to do primarily with the restoration of the people of God and the victory over Greek-Roman paganism rather than with a goal towards which the whole universe is moving. Again, this is largely a question of how we read the New Testament narrative. There is certainly a cosmic dimension to the person of Christ: first-born of all creation, through whom all things were created (Col. 1:15-17). But this should not be confused with the eschatological narrative by which Christ becomes Lord for the people of God, with his enemies subjected under his feet. This latter narrative culminates not in Christ filling all things with himself but Christ handing back everything to the Father (1 Cor. 15:28). Significantly, the two texts that most clearly speak of a final renewal of creation (Rom. 8:19-23; Rev. 21-22) do not present this in terms of the fulfilment of all things in a cosmic Christ.

4. Being a follower of Jesus does not involve imitation so much as it does implantation and impartation. Incarnation–the notion that God connects to us in baby form and human touch—is the most shocking doctrine of the Christian religion. The incarnation is both once-and-for-all and ongoing, as the One “who was and is to come” now is and lives his resurrection life in and through us. Incarnation doesn’t just apply to Jesus; it applies to every one of us. Of course, not in the same sacramental way. But close. We have been given God’s “Spirit” which makes Christ “real” in our lives. We have been made, as Peter puts it, “partakers of the divine nature.” How, then, in the face of so great a truth can we ask for toys and trinkets? How can we lust after lesser gifts and itch for religious and spiritual thingys? We’ve been touched from on high by the fires of the Almighty and given divine life. A life that has passed through death – the very resurrection life of the Son of God himself. How can we not be fired up?

To put it in a question: What was the engine, or the accelerator, of the Lord’s amazing life? What was the taproot or the headwaters of his outward behavior? It was this: Jesus lived by an indwelling Father. After his resurrection, the passage has now moved. What God the Father was to Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ is to you and to me. He’s our indwelling Presence, and we share in the life of Jesus’ own relationship with the Father. There is a vast ocean of difference between trying to compel Christians to imitate Jesus and learning how to impart an implanted Christ. The former only ends up in failure and frustration. The latter is the gateway to life and joy in our daying and our dying. We stand with Paul: “Christ lives in me.” Our life is Christ. In him do we live, breathe, and have our being. “What would Jesus do?” is not Christianity. Christianity asks: “What is Christ doing through me … through us? And how is Jesus doing it?” Following Jesus means “trust and obey” (respond), and living by his indwelling life through the power of the Spirit.

The argument that incarnation applies to all of us is correct: the people of God is always the locus of divine presence in the world. But I would point out again that what Viola and Sweet have presented here is a very generalized argument that in certain important respects obscures or distorts the New Testament account of things. The New Testament model of Christ-devotion presupposes participation in the story of suffering and vindication.

5. The “Jesus of history” cannot be disconnected from the “Christ of faith.” The Jesus who walked the shores of Galilee is the same person who indwells the church today. There is no disconnect between the Jesus of Mark’s Gospel and the incredible, all-inclusive, cosmic Christ of Paul’s letter to the Colossians. The Christ who lived in the first century has a pre-existence before time. He also has a post-existence after time. He is Alpha and Omega, Beginning and End, A and Z, all at the same time. He stands in the future and at the end of time at the same moment that He indwells every child of God. Failure to embrace these paradoxical truths has created monumental problems and has diminished the greatness of Christ in the eyes of God’s people.

I have the same problem with this as with Frost and Hirsch’s ReJesus. It is true that the Jesus of history cannot be separated from the Christ of faith, but it is equally true that the Jesus of history cannot be separated from… well, history. This Jesus Manifesto demonstrates virtually no awareness of how Jesus was an actor within a story about the people of God. Jesus cannot be properly understood apart from that story. What we lose by the abstraction is a sense of existing as a historical people, called into being by the creator God, having to respond and adapt to historical and political circumstances.

6. It’s possible to confuse “the cause” of Christ with the person of Christ. When the early church said “Jesus is Lord,” they did not mean “Jesus is my core value.” Jesus isn’t a cause; he is a real and living person who can be known, loved, experienced, enthroned and embodied. Focusing on his cause or mission doesn’t equate focusing on or following him. It’s all too possible to serve “the god” of serving Jesus as opposed to serving him out of an enraptured heart that’s been captivated by his irresistible beauty and unfathomable love. Jesus led us to think of God differently, as relationship, as the God of all relationship.

No argument with this – except that it is still framed in terms of an individualized Christ-devotion, which misrepresents the biblical narrative and obscures the central missional role of a called people.

7. Jesus Christ was not a social activist nor a moral philosopher. To pitch him that way is to drain his glory and dilute his excellence. Justice apart from Christ is a dead thing. The only battering ram that can storm the gates of hell is not the cry of Justice, but the name of Jesus. Jesus Christ is the embodiment of Justice, Peace, Holiness, Righteousness. He is the sum of all spiritual things, the “strange attractor” of the cosmos. When Jesus becomes an abstraction, faith loses its reproductive power. Jesus did not come to make bad people good. He came to make dead people live.

This seems to me a necessary corrective to some developments in emerging theologies – the tendency, for example, to reduce ‘kingdom of God’ to a principle of social justice.

I strongly object to the translation of Matthew 16:18 that takes it as a command to ‘storm the gates of hell’: the issue here is whether death will overcome the church, not whether the church will break down the gates of hell. But this is a minor detail.

Viola and Sweet exchange one type of abstraction for another: they rescue the person of Jesus from being merely an ethical abstraction, but they abstract him from the historical-eschatological narrative that at all points undergirds and shapes the thought of the New Testament.

The dichotomy between bad/good and dead/live is overstated. Jesus had a great deal to say about unjust behaviour and about righteous behaviour. Paul argues that Israel was dead because of its sins – that is, because of a history of bad behaviour; and new life is manifested in changed behaviour.

8. It is possible to confuse an academic knowledge or theology about Jesus with a personal knowledge of the living Christ himself. These two stand as far apart as do the hundred thousand million galaxies. The fullness of Christ can never be accessed through the frontal lobe alone. Christian faith claims to be rational, but also to reach out to touch ultimate mysteries. The cure for a big head is a big heart.

Jesus does not leave his disciples with CliffsNotes for a systematic theology. He leaves his disciples with breath and body.

Jesus does not leave his disciples with a coherent and clear belief system by which to love God and others. Jesus gives his disciples wounds to touch and hands to heal.

Jesus does not leave his disciples with intellectual belief or a “Christian worldview.” He leaves his disciples with a relational faith.

Christians don’t follow a book. Christians follow a person, and this library of divinely inspired books we call “The Holy Bible” best help us follow that person. The Written Word is a map that leads us to The Living Word. Or as Jesus himself put it, “All Scripture testifies of me.” The Bible is not the destination; it’s a compass that points to Christ, heaven’s North Star.

The Bible does not offer a plan or a blueprint for living. The “good news” was not a new set of laws, or a new set of ethical injunctions, or a new and better PLAN. The “good news” was the story of a person’s life, as reflected in The Apostle’s Creed. The Mystery of Faith proclaims this narrative: “Christ has died, Christ has risen, Christ will come again.” The meaning of Christianity does not come from allegiance to complex theological doctrines, but a passionate love for a way of living in the world that revolves around following Jesus, who taught that love is what makes life a success… not wealth or health or anything else: but love. And God is love.

OK, I’m used to people disparaging academic theology. But what Viola and Sweet, for all their postmodern credentials, fail to acknowledge is that their interpretation of Jesus is paradigm-bound; they fail to grasp the extent to which their manifesto is the product of a limited and, frankly, short-sighted theological position. What good academic theology can do is help us to deconstruct the inherited paradigm – not perfectly, and invariably another imperfect paradigm must be substituted in its place, but I think a broad-based renewal of theology demands this.

Of course we worship the exalted Christ – the one who was installed as Israel’s king above all earthly authorities. But there is no reason to make that assertion at the expense of a critical reading of the biblical narrative. Viola and Sweet, for all their good intentions, are merely reinforcing a crippling modern dualism by insisting that academic knowledge of Jesus and personal knowledge of Jesus ‘stand as far apart as do the hundred thousand million galaxies’.

9. Only Jesus can transfix and then transfigure the void at the heart of the church. Jesus Christ cannot be separated from his church. While Jesus is distinct from his Bride, he is not separate from her. She is in fact his very own Body in the earth. God has chosen to vest all of power, authority, and life in the living Christ. And God in Christ is only known fully in and through his church. (As Paul said, “The manifold wisdom of God – which is Christ – is known through the ekklesia.”)

Perhaps a small point, but Paul is taken out of context here. What he is saying in Ephesians 3:8-10 is that the ‘mystery’ of the inclusion of Gentiles in the people of God has now been revealed. That is the ‘manifold wisdom of God’ (he does not equate it with ‘Christ’) that is now revealed to the principalities and powers through the church.

The Christian life, therefore, is not an individual pursuit. It’s a corporate journey. Knowing Christ and making him known is not an individual prospect. Those who insist on flying life solo will be brought to earth, with a crash. Thus Christ and his church are intimately joined and connected. What God has joined together, let no person put asunder. We were made for life with God; our only happiness is found in life with God. And God’s own pleasure and delight is found therein as well.

Ah, I stand corrected – except that I think that this point needs to be made at the start. Scripture gives us a corporate narrative within which individuals find their identity and purpose, not a template for personal faith from which a collective entity is agglomerated. The latter may feel much more like the modern experience of church, but if we attempt to superimpose the modern experience on scripture, we will inevitably suppress important narrative and contextual structures.

I’ll let Sweet and Viola have the last word. I think a passage like the following still confuses elements of New Testament thought that should really be distinguished contextually: it is not all immediately and indiscriminately relevant to us; the New Testament does not provide us with an undifferentiated blob of Jesus teaching; and we take a huge theological risk in removing him from the story about Israel. But I fully understand that we always approach God through the story and the person of Jesus and that we cannot define a purpose for the church without taking full account of the existential and emotional force of that confession.

10. In a world which sings, “Oh, who is this Jesus?” and a church which sings, “Oh, let’s all be like Jesus,” who will sing with lungs of leather, “Oh, how we love Jesus!”

If Jesus could rise from the dead, we can at least rise from our bed, get off our couches and pews, and respond to the Lord’s resurrection life within us, joining Jesus in what he’s up to in the world. We call on others to join us—not in removing ourselves from planet Earth, but to plant our feet more firmly on the Earth while our spirits soar in the heavens of God’s pleasure and purpose. We are not of this world, but we live in this world for the Lord’s rights and interests. We, collectively, as the ekklesia of God, are Christ in and to this world.

May God have a people on this earth who are a people of Christ, through Christ, and for Christ. A people of the cross. A people who are consumed with God’s eternal passion, which is to make his Son preeminent, supreme, and the head over all things visible and invisible. A people who have discovered the touch of the Almighty in the face of his glorious Son. A people who wish to know only Christ and him crucified, and to let everything else fall by the wayside. A people who are laying hold of his depths, discovering his riches, touching his life, and receiving his love, and making HIM in all of his unfathomable glory known to others.

Mike Morrell prompted me initially to respond to Kevin Beck’s This Book Will Change Your World, and has now posted some thought-provoking comments. Since they mainly have to do with the thesis of Re: Mission, a new post seems in order. His basic argument, if I have understood him correctly, is that while there is something appealing to the postmodern about the emphasis on the narrative particularity of biblical truth, there is still something that “points to a certain cosmic or larger scope of inclusion of all humanity in the blessings of God, not just a subset called ‘the people of God’”.

His first basic point has to do with Jack Miles’ reading of Luke 4:16-19 in Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God:

…Miles, narrating the story of Jesus reading Isaiah’s scroll in the temple in Luke 4, notes how Jesus stops reading mid-sentence! Jesus reads “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,” but he excludes “the day of vengeance of our God” on Israel’s enemies.

Yes, Jesus stops reading Isaiah before the line about vengeance; but I do not argue that Jesus anywhere proclaims judgment on the enemies of Israel. In my view he does not look beyond the first eschatological horizon of judgment on Israel, the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans. I don’t think he goes on to envisage the overthrow of pagan imperialism as the arch enemy of YHWH and his people. It is the judgment and salvation of Israel that preoccupied him – he is barely interested in the inclusion of Gentiles in this salvation, let alone judgment on Rome. This is something that emerges at a later stage, as the church struggles to maintain its identity in the pagan world.

In fact, Jesus goes a step further, and tells them about the prophets’ rejection and God’s favorable visitation on the widow at Zarephath and Naaman the Syrian, which Miles reads as God’s calling a truce on the particularity-of-Israel/holy war mentality and an opening of God’s blessings indiscriminately on everyone. At which point, of course, the particularists in the synagogue drove Jesus out.

I’m not so sure that the reference to Elijah and Elisha can be read so easily as signifying the opening of God’s blessings indiscriminately to everyone. He mentions these stories to explain his saying that ‘no prophet is acceptable in his own country’: Elijah was sent to a widow in Zarephath, Elisha to Naaman the Syrian, despite the fact that there were plenty of widows and lepers in Israel. It seems too much to read into this argument ‘God’s calling a truce on the particularity-of-Israel/holy war mentality’ or ‘a certain cosmic or larger scope of inclusion of all humanity in the blessings of God’. They are stories that make sense on the presumption of Israel’s sense of vocation in the world; they are used to establish an internal critique of it; but I’m not sure that they constitute an abandonment of that mentality.

That does not mean that I think Jesus supports the maintenance of Israel’s particularity by violent means; but he says little that encourages us to think that he was working to remove (rather than transform) Israel’s sense of particularity in the midst of the nations.

What changes everything, of course, is that when the Gentiles are told about what God has done for Israel (this is the character of Paul’s apostolic mission as he explains it in Romans), many of them believe and receive the same eschatological Spirit. But Paul goes to great lengths to argue that this is entirely consistent with the story of the people of God descended from Abraham. The make-up of the people of God undergoes a radical change but this is as much to make Israel jealous as anything else in Paul’s view, and it does not appear to abrogate the connection with the promise to Abraham.

Or to approach from a different angle, the New Testament repeatedly interprets Jesus’ exaltation in light of Psalm 2, which is a story about how God delivers Israel’s king when he is defied by his enemies. I don’t really see how we can read these texts without being reminded of a story of the historical existence of a particular people – over which Christ has been made Lord and King.

The New Covenant, then, seems to be (at least potentially) the universalizing of the Hebrew God’s blessing and relationship toward the human family as a whole - humans made in the Imago Dei.

The language and symbolism of the New Testament seems to me intended to preserve the unique identity of the church in its narrative continuity with Israel – or better, with the vocation originating in the Abraham stories to be a new creation people. I do not think that we are still stuck in Israel, so to speak. My argument in Re: Mission is that Paul saw the possibility that Israel might repent following the destruction of Jerusalem, which would have made a big difference to the ongoing existence of the people. That didn’t happen, and in practice the Jewish root of the tree withered away, smothered by the inrushing Gentiles. So the church becomes universal in the sense that it is a multiracial people, but the missional pattern remains the same: the descendants of Abraham are blessed so that they may be a blessing to others. This seems to me to rely precisely on the effective existence of a particular chosen people, with a particular narrative memory, who embody in themselves the original creation blessing.

If we take the incarnation seriously, at least, then Jesus’ baptism of repentance (changing courses) in the Jordan at the beginning of his public vocation is telling).

I would interpret Jesus’ ‘baptism of repentance’ differently. The issue there seems to me to be his identification with a retold exodus narrative: he is obedient Israel passing through the waters and entering the wilderness for 40 days, where he gets right the choices that Israel got wrong.

I’ll even grant you that this ‘something’ cosmic might not have been the main focus of the New Testament writers - perhaps it was least present in Jesus himself. But perhaps next-generation interpreters like Origen and, later, Gregory of Nyssa, were being faithful interpreters of the Gospel in their time, taking what was in the first use meant for the lost sheep of Israel and applying its language for the hungry unwashed masses.

This is a very interesting perspective – I think it helps to differentiate between the contingent outlook of the New Testament writers and subsequent theological reflection on the texts from a very different historical and cultural position. But I would argue that what is emerging in this post-New Testament era is a Christendom theology, profoundly influenced by Greek thought, increasingly disconnected from its narrative origins, that eventually comes to see Christianity as a universal, privileged culture. My argument would be that with the effective collapse of Christendom our best hope is to recover the historical particularity of the texts, not in order to recreate the first century church, but to gain a fresh sense of their narrative trajectory.

On the other hand - and I say this respectfully - the idea that there’s an eternally-existing subset of ‘the people of God’ bearing weak-force witness to a limited redemption enacted by a Hebrew tribal deity that will one day save them and put their world to rights is kind’ve bleak and not terribly compelling.

Respectfully, Mike, I don’t think this is what I’m saying – though I like the way you put it! The core biblical narrative, as I see it, has to do with the troubled, difficult historical existence of a people called to exist in the world as ‘new creation’ – called by God to embody collectively, as a sign to a world that has adopted a quite different agenda, the full justice, integrity, beauty and God-centredness of created life, to experience through that the original blessing of creation, and to mediate that blessing to the world. Redemption is part of that story – in fact, there are several moments when the God of this people must act to deliver his people from their enemies, from the consequences of their own stubborness and stupidity, and so on. The redemption that is in Christ is of a peculiar nature: it grounds the people in grace rather than Law. But it is still primarily a narrative moment in the story of a people. I’m not sure what you mean by the statement about a ‘tribal deity that will one day save them and put their world to rights’. I see in the New Testament the hope of a final renewal of creation – partly as an inference from the resurrection, partly as a statement about the ultimate sovereignty of the creator. But salvation is not the primary issue: it is rather that seminal vocation to be an alternative world, a creational microcosm, for the sake of God and for the sake of others.

In ‘Postmodern illusions and performances’, the fourth essay in A Future for Africa, Emmanuel Katongole argues that postmodernism is unlikely to prove the blessing for Africa that many had hoped. He accepts that it continues to have some usefulness as an intellectual style that casts suspicions on ‘classical notions of truth, reason, identity, and objectivity; of the idea of universal progress or emancipation, of single frameworks, grand narratives, or ultimate grounds of explanation’ (Eagleton). But in its various cultural expressions it barely constitutes an advance on the crudest forms of modern western self-interest as most starkly illustrated by Kurtz’s ‘final solution to the problem of difference’ in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: ‘exterminate all the brutes’ (74-75).

Katongole focuses on three areas of what he regards as destructive postmodernization in Africa.

The first has to do with the much acclaimed postmodern celebration of difference. Far from seeing this as protective of African interests, he argues that

there is something sinister about the postmodern celebration of difference, which at the same time renders differences ineffectual or inconsequential. In other words, the ability to recognize otherness and difference everywhere might just as well amount to an ironic shielding of oneself from listening or attending to the particular and historical claims of the “other”. (76)

Travel and the expropriation of cultures and cultural artifacts by the postliberal media in the interests of ‘info-tainment’ have stripped differences of their moral and historical claims; they become merely aesthetic – ‘another aspect (commodity) for the postliberal individual to enjoy, especially if he lives in the rich countries of the North’ (79). In this respect, the postmodern celebration of difference ‘turns into nothing but a monologue about difference’.

Secondly, in their eagerness to participate at least at some superficial level in a postmodern global economy, African countries have fallen into the trap of ‘leap-frogging’ over immediate economic realities ‘through different theories and programs of “development” to Western patterns of life and consumption’ (81). Under the modern evolutionary paradigm economic development could be plotted in a predictable linear fashion. Postmodern reality, however, is decentered and unstable, offering a very poor basis on which to address basic local issues of ‘cassava, millet, or goats’. In a distracting global economy, millions are condemned to a very insecure localized existence, which Katongole believes goes a long way towards accounting for Africa’s widespread ‘rebel madness’ (82).

Thirdly, Katongole returns to the theme of ‘condomization’ as an expression of a postmodern ‘playful nihilism’ (see also Katongole: AIDS, suspicion, nihilistic playfulness, and new creation).

…condomization is not just about the convenience of disposable condoms, but more importantly, it is about the popularization of a certain form of sexual activity, i.e., one detached from any serious attachment or stable commitment, but which serves to promote a certain nihilistic playfulness of the unstable, decentered and postliberal self. (84)

The postmodern approach to issues of sexuality, which insists on the right of a person to choose what to do with his or her body, necessarily erodes familial, tribal and church traditions which insist that ‘freedom does not come naturally, but is the result of training into the relevant practices and habits or virtues’ (85).

Under these conditions, the best hope that African Christians have for survival lies in relocating themselves themselves within forms of community which are ‘able to offer not only resistance, but an alternative to the nihilistic playfulness of postmodern culture’.

This can be misunderstood. Katongole makes the important point that fundamentalist religious groups in Africa, both Christian and Muslim, have issued a call to resist the corrosive effect of postmodern culture by returning to traditional forms of community. What these groups lack, however, is the capacity for a critical and selective response – that is, in the language of Hauerwas, a ‘tactical’ response.

Hauerwas shows that with the collapse of Christendom the church finds itself in alien territory, immersed in postmodern culture, with no ground to call its own into which it might withdraw for safety. Given this, the church cannot pursue a ‘strategy’ in the sense described by deCerteau: it cannot define its own secure territory, a place of power, from which strategically to deal with the ‘other’. Rather the church must think and act ‘tactically’ on foreign territory.

What this means for Hauerwas is that the church cannot now rely on its ‘institutional existence’: it must provide its members with the skills to survive critically and selectively in a postmodern world, but as part of a ‘community whose story is powerful enough to sustain their tactical existence with hope’ (88).

How we tell this story – how we interpret the biblical narrative – is another matter. Katongole merely observes that the narrative character of scripture is often ‘obscured in an attempt to objectify scripture as “Word of God,” which can be mined for individual tips for salvation or for some kind of “revealed morality”’ (88-89). But the observation is a crucial one, important both hermeneutically and theologically: we cannot make sense of scripture by abstracting it from the history of the community that created it and which is shaped by it.

That is to say, scripture is not only an account of a community’s journey with God, it in turn creates a “community of memory” – people capable of reading and reliving the same story by placing themselves in the biblical tradition. This overall political context not only endows scripture with moral authority, it allows us to see that the reading of scriptures is not just some pious exercise, but a political exercise, and even a subversive form of politics. (89)

That seems to me a necessary premise today for biblical interpretation. The danger it presents is that the biblical narrative will be reduced to moral and sociological dimensions because we have trouble conceiving a political narrative that is genuinely evangelical – or for that matter genuinely biblical if the story is not told with sufficient attention to detail. But if we can oversee an uninhibited convergence of the political and the ‘evangelical’ (in the full narrative sense of the term), I think we will have the basis for a robust post-Christendom theology.

William Cheriegate asked me to expand on the following remark in my post on Transmillennialism – not least for the benefit of those who ‘grew up in the midst of a conquering American “christian” empire’:

To my mind, the Bible has lower expectations about the nature of the impact of the people of God on the world around it.

The expansion has become something of a story in its own right, a summary of how I think the biblical narrative situates us in the world, shapes our calling as a distinct people of God, and sets the scope of our expectations and ambitions.

The struggle for existence

The Old Testament tells the story of a people that is called to live with a ‘new creation’ integrity in the midst of the nations. The nature of that creational ‘integrity’ is defined by the Law, which determines the people’s relationship principally with God and with each other (love the Lord your God, love your neighbour as yourself, as Jesus summarized it), but also with the land and with their neighbours. But consequences are attached; much is at stake. If the people maintain that integrity, they will prosper; if they persistently fail to maintain that integrity, they will suffer disease, famine, poverty – and ultimately will fall victim to the powerful nations around them (cf. Deut. 28:15-68).

The boundary of this people is defined geographically. There is some political expansionism, some prosyletism, the occasional prophetic foray into neighbouring territory; but essentially this small world of God’s new creation, the outcome of the promise to Abraham that God would bless and make fruitful and multiply his progeny in a land that he would give them, remains confined to a small corner of the Middle East.

Its existence is always a precarious one: the borders of the country are always contested, its security is always at risk. This is the point at which the kingdom motif becomes significant: the people come to Samuel and ask for a king so that they may be like the other nations, a king who will judge them and ‘go out before us and fight our battles’ (1 Sam. 8:19). Israel’s king is the one who will solve the problem of – and the problems that arise from – their political insecurity and vulnerability, the one who will safeguard their boundaries.

A salvation made known to the ends of the earth

In the end integrity fails to the point that God sends the Babylonians to punish his people. The boundaries are dramatically breached. Jerusalem and the temple are destroyed, the land is devastated, and a large part of the population is taken into exile to serve the king of Babylon. But this leads to a more fundamental theological crisis because Israel’s defeat could also be interpreted as a defeat of YHWH, a humiliation of YHWH. So we have the crucial argument in Isaiah that contrary to appearances Israel’s God is sovereign over the nations, is more powerful than the hand-made gods of the nations, and will demonstrate this by rescuing his people from their captivity. The good news, therefore, that is proclaimed to Israel is that ‘your God reigns’ – not in any absolute sense but in the historical sense that he will bare his holy arm ‘before the eyes of all the nations, and all the ends of the earth shall see the salvation of our God’ (Is. 52:7-12). In other words, he will prove himself to be Israel’s king by acting to re-establish the integrity of the people as ‘new creation’: ‘behold, I create new heavens and a new earth, and the former things shall not be remembered or come into mind’ (Is. 65: 17).

This narrative both forms and delimits the universal expectation. The salvation of Israel before the eyes of the surrounding nations will show the world that Israel’s claims about YHWH are not empty boasts: YHWH indeed has the power to take the hand of Cyrus and lead him to restore his people to their homeland, and the nations will declare, ‘Surely God is in you, and there is no other, no god besides him’ (Is. 45:14). It is an expectation that culminates in the conviction that ‘every knee shall bow, every tongue shall swear allegiance’ to the God of Israel (Is. 45:23). This is the final recognition of the pagan nations that their idols are worthless, that YHWH alone is God, but it remains an integral part of the story of Israel’s salvation. It is worked out not by the global expansion of Israel but by the incidental participation of the nations in the restoration of the people and in the worship of Israel’s God (eg. Is. 66:18-21).

At the name of Jesus

So when we come to the New Testament and Paul’s argument that ‘at the name of Jesus every knee should bow… and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord’ (Phil. 2:10-11), we should hear in this not the aggrandizing belief that eventually the whole world will become Christian but the climax to a story about the people of God and the pagan nations, the victory of the crucified Jesus over the king who regards equality with God a thing to be grasped. This finally establishes the security of the people of God as it exists in the midst of the sometimes extremely hostile nations and cultures of the world.

The story, however, does not stop there. The Edict of Milan in AD 313 symbolically marked the moment when the gods of the ancient pagan world gave way to Christ in accordance with the hopes first articulated in Isaiah. This seems to me an unavoidable conclusion if we are to take the New Testament seriously as a historical and realistic text. Rightly or wrongly, Christendom sought to give expression to the conviction that YHWH is sovereign over the nations through the various forms of political, intellectual, cultural and ultimately military power that it had available to it.

The ‘conquering American “Christian” empire’ is a late manifestation of that mode of being the people of God in the world, but it seems pretty clear now that the Christendom paradigm cannot be sustained: we can no longer, as the people of God, marshal the West’s political, intellectual, cultural and military resources to defend and propagate our belief that Jesus has been given the name above every name. So we have again become acutely aware of our vulnerability, our isolation, as a holy people amidst the nations and cultures of the world; and we have to ask once again what it means to be a new creation people – now in Christ, with all that that entails – for the sake of God and for the sake of others.

After Christendom

We are looking for new modes of being to replace the expansionist, imperialistic, institutionalized Christendom mode. Perhaps we are something more organic; perhaps simply a people, a tribe, a global community. Perhaps we are fractalized prophetic communities, imaginative story-telling communities, commissioned to tell the story of the creator through the concrete circumstances of our existence, in diverse, even conflicting ways, under diverse conditions. Perhaps we are a dispersed priestly people who mediate between the world and God. Perhaps we are localized collectives that seek to model justice and an awareness of the createdness of things. Perhaps we are all of these… and more.

The point is that our calling is not to save the world, not to assimilate all cultures and peoples into the kingdom of God, but to be an authentic new creation, both actually and prophetically, in the midst of things. Salvation, in this narrative, is something that happened historically to a people. There are all sorts of ways in which we now participate in that salvation, but there is an important sense in which it is behind us – it is what God did for his people at a time when they faced not merely exile but destruction at the hands of an enemy that presumed to govern the whole world. Abraham was summoned from Haran not to save the world but to be the beginning of an alternative world, a faithful microcosm within the corrupted macrocosm.

We still evangelize; but evangelism is simply the public proclamation, through speech but also through the drama of our shared lives, that the creator God is, that he has gathered a people for his own possession from all the nations of the earth, that he has demonstrated his abundant love for them and through them, that he has instilled in that people the capacity and potential of a new created life, that he has given them a king who cannot be toppled by any earthly power, that he will ultimately hold humanity accountable, and that evil and death will not have the last laugh.

It is a proclamation that is to be heard universally, but it is always the story of a circumscribed people, its boundaries safeguarded by its crucified Lord, that must embody the story of God for the sake of others. Many will hear it and believe; they will become part of the Spirit-filled collective. But they will believe, in weakness and humility, for the sake of the many who cannot or will not believe.

I read Kevin Beck’s This Book Will Change Your World in response to some gentle and persistent prompting from Mike Morrell. As Mike observes, there are some interesting similarities and some distinct differences between Kevin’s exposition of Transmillenialism and the thesis of The Coming of the Son of Man and of Re: Mission. Some of the issues raised were addressed a few years ago in a post on Transmillennialism™ on Open Source Theology. I won’t go into great detail here but will list some of the thoughts that came to mind as I read the book, which hopefully will help to clarify the main points of agreement and disagreement.

In the first essay, ‘Remembering Idi Amin’, Katongole explores his own childhood memories of Idi Amin in an attempt to understand how the present condition of Africa has been shaped by memories of colonial and post-colonial brutality. He notices that his ‘happy’ memories of the early period of Amin’s rule are much more vivid than his memories of the troubles that ensued and concludes from this that a ‘constructive conversation about memory… must move beyond a focus on recollections in our mind, to an examination of concrete habits and patterns of life’ (10). He adopts the phrase ‘geographies of memories’ to denote the broad socially embodied nature of memory.

Although in many respects Uganda has moved on and has seemingly forgotten Idi Amin, Katongole points to three aspects of modern Ugandan life that indicate that at some deep level the memory of the years of terror continues to control social behaviour (13-18).

First, he attributes the preoccupation of modern Ugandans with violence, in the media but also in real life, to the very public displays of violence by which the Amin régime was sustained – and to which even the church became habituated.

Secondly, the expectation of economic advancement through ‘luck and the right connection’ rather than through education and hard work can be traced back to Amin’s creation of a class of supporters – prominent among them his absurdly fashionable secret service agents – who quickly got rich through their loyalty. It would be natural to see the popularity of prosperity theology as an extension of this belief that wealth can be acquired effortlessly through having the right connections.

Thirdly, the hardships of Amin’s Economic War have ironically left a legacy in Ugandans’ determination to have a good time: ‘Since many had come to expect very little in life, even finding oneself alive at the end of a day became an occasion for celebration’ (18).

The first part of the ethical and theological response to this ‘tentative’ analysis is to recognize that the ‘task of memory is in fact a conversation about the present’: the ‘ethical task of remembering is nothing but living with a certain attentiveness to the stories, habits, and practices that shape our lives today and form us into the sort of characters or people we are’ (19). This accounts for Katongole’s impatience with ethical pragmatism: ‘social ethics in Africa has tended to be overly prescriptive and no sufficiently descriptive’ (22). Africa remains shaped by the memory of colonialism and apartheid, of war and exploitation, and while that is the case, no amount of well-meaning exhortation will fundamentally change things. The memory of violence ‘remains a loaded gun that goes off ever so frequently’ (21).

The need, then, is for alternative memories or alternative narratives, which is the point at which we may begin to construct a relevant Christian social ethics. Katongole suggests two ‘geographies of memory’ that shape the lives of Christians: scripture and the Eucharist.

First, the Bible is not primarily a moral book, a compendium of abstract guidelines for the spiritual life. It is the story of a community; it is itself a ‘geography of memory’. It gives the church the narrative structure that shapes its present identity.

Secondly, Christians are invited to locate themselves in the biblical narrative, but they are ‘specifically invited to locate their lives within what the German theologian John Baptist Metz has accurately termed “the dangerous memory of Jesus Christ”’ (24).

This memory of Jesus is a dangerous memory because it constantly assaults the present with its unfulfilled demands, with its repressed conflicts and open wounds; calls it into question, and opens up possibilities and a new future of reconciliation and hope. Such hope and future of forgiveness and self-sacrificing love cannot but appear dangerous to a world that is accustomed to living with fear and the pursuit of self-interest.

The formation of Christian communities that embody these alternative narratives, Katongole believes, should be at the heart of the ethical response to Amin and his memory.

The situation we face in the West is, of course, very different and the analysis of our ‘geography of memory’ would be very different. But the basic thrust of Katongole’s essay seems to me pertinent: the church must take a much more deliberate approach to the concrete embodiment in its community life of alternative narratives.

We have been working through the Sermon on the Mount at Community Church Harlesden in the last few weeks, reading it as Jesus’ way of forming a new community, emerging from a dramatized retelling of the exodus narrative, with distinctive ethical and religious practices, for the purpose of embodying an alternative story for Israel in crisis, a narrow road leading to life instead of a broad road leading to the destruction of war. It provides a marvellous paradigm for the self-conscious missional initiatives that are emerging in the post-Christendom landscape. It shows us both how to re-form ourselves by retelling the biblical narrative and how to develop a new missional stance with respect to a culture that has repudiated its Christian past.

I have started reading Emmanuel Katongole’s A Future for Africa: Critical Essays in Christian Social Imagination as preparation for the Amahoro conference in Johannesburg in a couple of weeks. Katongole is a Catholic priest from Uganda who is now associate professor of theology at Duke Divinity School and co-director of its Center of Reconciliation.

His broad argument, as stated in the introduction, is that what Africa needs to overcome its various intractable social problems – ‘poverty, violence, instability, tribalism, and so forth’ – is not more good advice, not ‘abstract principles and recommendations’, but a new imagination. Christian ethics for Africa has been so preoccupied – understandably – with the ‘search for realistic and pragmatic considerations and solutions’ that it has failed to grasp the fact that the problems are ‘wired within the imaginative landscape of Africa’ (x).

He believes, however, that this landscape can be transformed by ‘concrete Christian communities whose way of life and practices are able to interrupt the history of violence, tribalism, and corruption’. The collective memory or identity of modern Africa has been shaped by a particularly damaging set of stories and practices. Once we realize this, Katongole argues, we are bound to ‘attend to the full range of Christian stories and practices as concrete and real alternatives, through which a different imagination can begin to take shape through the life of the church’ (x-xi).

It seems to me that there are some instructive parallels between the situation of the church in post-colonial Africa and the situation of the church in the post-Christendom West. So one thing to look out for here will be whether Katongole’s attempt to imagine alternative futures as they are embodied in the concrete existence of Christian communities that are ‘shaped by visions and practices that stem from a different imagination’ is stark enough and strange enough to enable us to understand our own missional vocation more clearly.