I asked questions . . . Maybe this new book will help me with answers.

I'll try to keep this brief. It's 8:30 already, and I am still in my pajamas, sitting on the couch, alternatively reading, writing, and answering emails. I should be working or cleaning or something that is more productive than this. 

I spent some time asking questions about justice and Jesus and the American church in my previous post about Mark 11 and Jesus overthrowing the money changers in the temple. I don't have answers really, just questions.

And then I started my next book, Reading Romans Backwards: A Gospel of Peace in the Midst of Empire, by Scot McKnight. I'm hopeful that this book will help me see who Jesus is in the justice/equality/politics debates.

And this isn't a debate about Republicans and Democrats; there are deeper issues than that. It's just that politics touches every aspect of life. I suppose it always has; I just wasn't aware of it. But being a follower of Jesus Christ isn't about being a good conservative or a good progressive or something in-between; it's about being like Jesus, living like Jesus, thinking like Jesus--or at least increasingly doing all those things. (We will never "arrive" at perfection.)

And so McKnight starts his book with a short narrative about a church in Georgia, 1950. A farmer down the road brought a Hindu to church with him one Sunday, and that Hindu hard dark skin. The church voted to expel the Hindu and the family that brought him to church because "such practices were not in accord with the practices of other members" (xiii).

And McKnight says this is where we need to start when we look at Romans because it is easy to critique the early churches and their debates, to see ourselves as more enlightened, more like Jesus. But he says our issues are the same as their issues: "the issue is the inability of the Privileged and the Powerful to embody the gospel's inclusive demand and include the Disprivileged and the Disempowered" (xiii). And lest anyone gets let off the hook, McKnight adds, "The mirror of this issue is the Disempowered claiming their own kind of Privilege and Power."

And it's so easy to see this in the 1950s Georgia church, but so much harder to see it in our own world. We all want privilege and power. Here's a country church, not exactly privilege and power, but they exercise it over an Indian man and a family that wants to introduce him to Jesus.

And so we may see ourselves as disempowered, but we probably then turn that on others. Right now many people in the American church see themselves as disempowered. After all, America doesn't even pretend to be a Christian nation anymore, and the media frequently mocks Christianity. Christians are concerned about an American culture which legitimizes abortion, gay marriage, and sexual immorality, and they feel as they no longer have a voice.

And so they claim their own kind of Privilege and Power. And so on and so forth, and if this were a book, I would need concrete examples, but no one is reading this, and I'm just trying to figure out McKnight's ideas so I'm not going to seek those examples out.

But what does this have to do with Romans? After all, Romans is all about salvation, Roman Road and all that.

McKnight claims "Romans is about Privilege and Power."
He asserts, "Paul's gospel deconstructs Power and Privilege." Rather, it is about "Peace in the empire, and it is a radical alternative to Rome's famous Pax Romana." 

Context, of course, is everything in trying to understand a text. This book was written to the church in Rome, a church saturated with its own view of the world, in the center of an empire spreading a version of peace that isn't really peace for most people. It's order, but it's order which privileges some people at the expense of others. And that's what the church in Rome knows.

McKnight says Paul is not just establishing theology but calling out "the lack of lived theology, the lack of peace in Rome." He is creating a praxis, a way of living, and offering a rationale for that praxis. Jesus offered peace. He came to represent the poor (the Disprivileged and Disempowered), to preach good news to them, to free the captives and give sight to the blind (Luke 4:18).

This isn't so that they can turn and oppress the oppressors or some other class of people but so that all be free.

If Jesus' followers don't do that, then they are not following Jesus. If we cite theology, but we do not live it, we strip the theology, the study of God, of any real power other than that which we can grab in our own Power and Privilege.

And so this book is about how to create a praxis, a practice, a method, of lived theology of Peace, in our church communities, rippling outward.

McKnight is a theologian, and while this isn't really what I might call "academic discourse," it contains elements of academic discourse, complicated logical explanations, lots of end-notes, lots of references to other texts. Any reflections I have on this book are for two purposes: 1) to figure out and understand what McKnight is saying; 2) to sort out how to apply what McKnight is saying.