"The Three Chapter Story and the Politics of Church"
the Inaugural Bishop Claude Payne Lecture given on
February 14, 2008, at the Seminary of the Southwest

There are two broad strands in American religious history. On the one hand are those who have seen the Bible as their constitution. On the other hand are those who see the Constitution as their bible. Tonight I want to propose a third strand.

My lecture is structured in three parts. I shall start by narrating in simple terms what I shall call the three-chapter story of American higher education. While it is a story derived from American higher education, I believe it is a story with resonance beyond higher education to the American church and indeed beyond the church and beyond America . But it is most easily grasped by considering American higher education, which happens to be my own current social location and the social location of most people here today. In the second part of my lecture I shall amplify and expand on the significance of the three chapters I have identified, looking at another threefold distinction that more or less maps onto the three chapter story. Finally I shall examine what these insights have to offer in setting an agenda for the politics of church in a new century.

The Three Chapter Story

Behind the tensions in modern American higher education lies a story. It’s a story that’s almost universally accepted in university and college circles – so universally accepted, in fact, that it’s seldom articulated. The story takes place in three chapters with a prologue. The prologue we could call pre-history. Pre-history was a time before 1900. In pre-history there were colleges and universities founded, shaped and dominated by the major Christian traditions. There were no doubt struggles over a whole host of scholarly and ecclesial principles – but in general this period is remembered about as clearly as the time of the dinosaurs, and considered just as relevant.

History really begins in chapter one, which broadly covers the first half of the twentieth century. Chapter one names the period when the churches traded their theological identity in order to retain their institutional influence. Faculties in many, perhaps most, of the church-related colleges and universities wrested control of those institutions away from the ecclesial hierarchies. Most of the tussles about academic freedom and such litmus tests as the teaching of evolution went the way of the faculties. The period was experienced by many as a time of conflict over scholarship and college culture. But it is remembered as a period when the stranglehold of white Anglo-Saxon control was tightened and the consensus among the dominant churches, institutions and social groups was overwhelming. It was experienced by many as a time of economic hardship but it is remembered as a period of social privilege, because particular social classes enjoyed access to opportunities from which others were excluded.

Chapter two refers to the period of significant social change largely associated with the third quarter of the last century. The way the story is remembered, excluded groups, notably African Americans and women, beat down the door of segregation and restricted access. White Anglo Saxon males stopped being seen as the source of all good and started being fingered as the cause of all evil. A ll this was against the backdrop of the Cold War, the Vietnam period and the sexual revolution. This period, known by one influential observer as “the dying of the light,” was characterized by a host of converging and diverging forces. Those inclined or tempted to follow a secularization hypothesis see chapter two as a more or less inevitable disenchantment of the world with its religious metanarratives. But seen as a power struggle, the issue was not inherently about religious truth or plausibility at all. For example the widespread assumption that chapter two renders Christian identity problematic in a campus context tends to ignore the depth to which the motivation and inspiration of many African Americans at the heart of the liberation movements were rooted in that same Christian tradition. Chapter two is remembered less as process of secularization and more as a revolt against privilege and hierarchy of any kind, and a statement of a profound confidence in the untrammelled will of the individual when given free expression.

The purpose of telling this three-chapter story is to suggest that chapter two is not an end point and that American colleges and universities now find themselves in a new context, which I am calling chapter three. One of the most evident characteristics of chapter three is that it is a battleground between those who identify strongly with the spirit of chapter two and those who lament all that they feel was lost in the passing of chapter one. It is this battleground that makes the identification of a three-chapter narrative so significant, and makes it evident how widespread and largely unquestioned is the assumption of its broad outline.

Those who have an interest in the advanced study and teaching of religion in general and Christianity in particular will recognize how this story has been played out in seminaries, divinity schools and religion departments. In many establishments the religion department or divinity school was an inherently chapter one institution. It assumed that Protestant Christianity was the template in relation to which all other forms of religious expression would be evaluated. Chapter two names the period when religious studies began to assert itself as the new paradigm. No longer was Christianity or were other faiths to be best understood from within Christianity: now the best place to understand and assess faith was from outside faith, at least procedurally if not existentially. The role of theology in the university seemed, to many, to be problematic, not perhaps because its fruits had been barren and its methods moribund, but rather more because it seemed to epitomize the spirit of chapter one.

In his novel How Far Can You Go? the Roman Catholic writer David Lodge charts the effect of the social changes of what I am calling chapter two on a series of characters coming of age in the England of the period. Commenting on one couple who were a little slow to wake up to the new mores, Lodge says “they were having their sixties in the seventies.” The same could broadly be said of the American church in relation to the three-chapter story I have been telling. The American church in many ways has been a chapter behind the university. Part of the nostalgia for “chapter two” in much of the “progressive” part of the American church today may be due to the sense that, in the era of marches and sit-ins, the church was closer to the prow of cultural engagement and change than at any other remembered time, before or since.

There is no doubt that chapter three does not describe the whole of the American higher education scene today, and certainly does not describe the whole of the American church scene. There are places where chapters two and one – and even the prologue – are still visible, significant or even dominant aspects of the narrative. When one travels across a variety of American campuses and to a variety of American churches one finds institutions and individuals that are living in chapter one as if there never had been a chapter two and institutions and individuals who are fighting in chapter two as if there were no chapter three. Needless to say, there is considerable heterogeneity in each chapter. There have always been people living a chapter three ethos, even when the dominant narrative was of another chapter, just as there are very many people living today as if there were no chapter three. For example aspects of the early civil rights movement would I suspect have felt much more at home in chapter three than in chapter two. The usefulness of the three chapter story is not to tidy individuals and movements neatly into one quasi-historical chapter or another, but to identify a narrative that has a powerful hold on the contemporary imagination and to locate the unique opportunity it presents for the American church today.

My judgement is that in the popular American imagination the narrative of the prologue, chapter one and chapter two are largely beyond dispute. Each period of course has its areas of modest controversy. For some, the prologue is not irrelevant at all, but a period to be revisited for vision and purpose to back up the institutional memory of the first chapter or the liberative longing of the second. For others chapter one is wrongly characterized as a period of privilege but should be described as a period of hardship and struggle. For others again there is a dispute over whether chapter two is inherently non- or anti-religious, or whether it is incomprehensible without religious conviction. Many people in America have had little or no exposure to any form of Christianity that is not obsessed by the aspirations of chapter one, and often assume that chapter two has thus discredited the whole premise of the church. But the real issue is none of the above. The real issue is that the American university and the American church are now in chapter three, like it or not. And it is true that many people do not like it. Many people believe they must do everything they can to restore chapter one. And many other people are strongly invested in maintaining that chapter two is still going on.

I propose that chapter three names the context and the agenda for exploring the politics of church in America today. While the church in other nations may not have had quite such the same three-chapter narrative, there are many nations where the churches can identify with what I am calling the third chapter. Today’s lecture is concerned with mapping a Christian ethic for the politics of chapter three.

The Missiology of the Three Chapter Story

“Prophetic” is a much-used word in the American church. In the language I have been using, “prophetic” invariably means “in continuity with the tradition of chapter two.” What the word reveals is a very particular reading of history. This reading of history makes two core assumptions. The first is that it is possible to skip chapter one and look back to what I have called the prologue and there find, in the original purposes of America, all the principles and values one could need to resource the vision of chapter two. Thus chapter two is not simply looking forward to a new dawn of liberation and the untrammelled expression of the inner good of each individual; it is at least as much looking back to the founding DNA of the nation, located in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. The second core assumption is that there is a special affinity between this period that I have called the prologue and the prophetic tradition of the Old Testament. Both scriptural Israel and historic America have a special place in God’s heart. Both came to birth in escape from oppression. Both find their soul when they recall the way God provided for them through such fearful times. Both find their destiny as a light to other nations of the social harmony God has in store. And thus the prophetic tradition, when it demands equality for marginalized social groups and calls for those in conditions analogous to slavery to be set free, identifies not just with the founders of America but with the scriptural founders of Israel .

Prophetic evangelism means placing an individual, an institution or a situation in the light of a greater story. In the American context, prophetic evangelism has tended to mean recalling that all people have been made in God’s image, and thus equal, that a particular people, first Israel, now America, has been called into a covenant relationship with God, that as for Israel so for America this covenant is jeopardized most acutely by the people’s faulty memory, and that that faulty memory is most damagingly expressed in institutional oppression of the contemporary equivalent of the stranger, widow and orphan, that is, those excluded by false barriers of class, race or gender.

Prophetic evangelism thus has a quality in America significantly different from that found elsewhere, because it is telling a story it assumes its listeners already know. Prophecy finds its power precisely in reinvigorating a story that has grown dusty through lack of use. But prophecy is scarcely possible with no story commonly acknowledged as authoritative. In America the story has never grown dusty. This common story gives prophetic evangelism in America its unique quality. Moses led his people out of slavery, received the law, yet died before entering the Promised Land. The eighth-century prophets pleaded for Israel to recall its duty to the poor and outcast, and thus remember the story of its covenant with God – but they failed and the northern kingdom was obliterated by the Assyrians. The founding fathers, like Moses, brought America to freedom and laid down the quasi-divine covenant with the people. Martin Luther King, like the eight-century prophets, pleaded with the nation to recall its foundation, but like Moses, died before reaching the Promised Land. These broad outlines of the story the prophetic evangelist assumes everybody knows. The problem prophetic evangelism addresses is not so much evil, not so much an inherent flaw in the story, as forgetfulness of the prologue and its contemporary significance.

If prophetic evangelism is the characteristic mode of Christian existence in chapter two, then the characteristic mode of Christian existence in chapter one is kingly evangelism. Kingly evangelism names the desire of Christians to take a significant or dominant role in the ordering of society. Such a prospect has always been tempting, because it seems such an ideal vantage point from which to point to God’s ways to maximum effect and embody God’s life to maximum extent. It is an opportunity to legislate the kingdom of God . Again in America the attraction of this social strategy rests on a particular reading of American history. Instead of assuming the prologue focuses on the period following the Declaration of Independence, this view looks back a century earlier to the Puritan hegemony in New England, and the Calvinist tradition of seeking a godly society. Like prophetic evangelism, it too looks to the Old Testament for its inspiration and validation. But its role models are not so much the prophets as the kings. Saul, David and Solomon embody the kingly aspiration to see a person of God at the head of the affairs of state.

The much-cited first amendment to the Constitution is no barrier to the practice, or certainly the desire, for kingly evangelism. Kingly evangelism presupposes a Puritan New England context. Hence it leads to Christians enforcing conformity to what they perceive as Christian norms from people who are not Christians and have no desire to be. What should be an offer, an encouragement, a gift, becomes an expectation, an assumption, a requirement. Contemporary advocates of chapter one absorb the first amendment in much the same way as they absorb the legacy of chapter two: these are corrections to an otherwise seamless story.

And the problem with the seamless story goes further than the prophetic critique offered by the voice of chapter two – the cry of those excluded from the narrative. The problem is a theological one. It has two symptoms with one cause. The first symptom is that the Church becomes invisible in both kingly and prophetic evangelism. The scriptural archetypes assumed by both approaches are invariably Old Testament ones. The aspirations focus on the nation called out from among the nations, rather than the people called out from the world, the ecclesia called out from the polis. The effort is not to make one Church united throughout the world but to make one nation under God. The Church becomes simply a means to this greater end. In chapter one the Church is a means to the end of a social order dominated by elites that regarded themselves as natural leaders. In chapter two the Church is a means to an end of broadening access to the advantages enjoyed by the hitherto self-styled natural leaders, a process known as justice. But in both cases the Church serves the greater end of underwriting America ’s natural leadership in the world.

The second symptom is that Jesus is invisible. This could be for a number of reasons. It could be that Jesus is seen as an essentially private savior, having little to offer the public sphere of government or liberation. It could be that the social context of Jesus’ ministry is unfamiliar to America , being that of a people under military occupation, in no position to impose norms or shape a whole society – and thus pre-exilic Israel , rather than Jesus, seems the more transferable social context. It could be that in a society gathered around a broad theistic understanding, the specific mention of Jesus is a step across a line, jeopardizing a Jeffersonian Unitarian consensus and opening up doctrinal conflict and sectarian identity. All these are plausible explanations. But I suggest the real reason is that all God’s promises to Israel are being fulfilled – only not in Jesus. A nation has been called out from among the nations to be a people for God’s own possession, and in its sacrifice and resurrection it takes upon itself and transforms all the pain and hope of the world. All God’s promises to Israel are being fulfilled – in America . Jesus, the human Jesus rather than the personal savior, is invisible in America because America has become Jesus. There is thus no need for the Church as an end in itself because America is both the savior and the movement made possible by the savior’s coming. America truly is the agent of its own and others’ salvation. It has not just become the new Israel , it has become what the New Testament describes as the new Israel – Jesus. Just as, in the gospels, it is hard to speak of Church in the presence of Jesus, and thus Pentecost seems a fitting beginning for the Church, just so is it hard to speak of Church in America, because America is Jesus. America has assigned to itself the kingly role found in Israel and inherited by Jesus – the embodiment of the way God overcomes evil and brings life. This is the theological legacy of chapter one, a legacy that chapter two does not seriously question.

There is a third Christological office, and a third form of evangelism, and a third chapter in the story. Priestly evangelism is not dazzled by the prospect of rule. It does not shrink its aspirations to fit a particular model of social change. It is specifically concerned to make Jesus visible – the incarnate Jesus whose full divinity shone through his full humanity, the Jesus who went to the cross because of the public cost of personal and passionate commitments, the Jesus who through resurrection and Pentecost empowers a people through deliverance from the legacy of sin and release from the fear of death. And it is specifically concerned to make the Church visible, a body of people who seek to shape a personal and communal life that imitates the pattern of Christ’s work. Priestly evangelism realizes that words are not enough. There must be actions to match. St Francis famously said “Preach the gospel at all times: use words if you have to.” Congregations aspire to become parables of the kingdom, which draw strangers and even enemies to wonder at the hope that is in these people’s hearts. But priestly evangelism is not restricted to the congregation. By being rooted in neighborhoods and committed to unselfconscious lives of service, congregations come to form partnerships across faith and other barriers to “seek the welfare of the city” and to learn from others the “paths that lead to peace.”

Priestly and prophetic evangelism are not alternatives. They work together. Priestly evangelism is concerned with giving prophetic evangelism something to point to, with demonstrating what the grace of God can do. Prophetic evangelism is concerned to engage the kinds of people priestly evangelism is often too timid or self-effacing to talk to. The priestly makes the prophetic less strident; the prophetic makes the priestly less complacent.

Kingly evangelism has been such a destructive force, still so much in fashion in certain quarters (and nowhere more so than in this country), that even faithful, devoted followers of Jesus Christ are in many cases reluctant to be drawn into the priestly and prophetic dimensions of evangelism because of the history of kingly excesses. The temptation is to go in one of two directions. The “prophetic’ temptation is to maintain the evangelistic fervor, but to take out the distinctively Christian elements of the story. Hence one shouts about peace, justice and human dignity but goes quiet about Jesus. The Christian story of creation, covenant, Christ, Church and consummation is replaced by a story of how privilege and ignorance are replaced by progress and equality. The “priestly” temptation on the other hand is to disappear into secluded Christian enclaves, not harming anyone but not benefiting anyone either, burying the talent of Christian hope in the hillside of cultural inhibition.

To give an insight into priestly evangelism, I return to my opening context: the contemporary American university. When I came to Duke University as Dean of the Chapel in the summer of 2005 I suggested that the role of the Chapel was “to keep the heart of the University listening to the heart of God”. This was designed to be a chapter three statement. I did not assume the Chapel was the heart of the University: I regarded that as a chapter one assumption. Yet I did not lapse into the doleful conclusion that the University did not have a heart: that would be a nightmare chapter two scenario. I regarded the ‘heart of the University’ as a perpetually contested notion, the debate over which was crucial to the University’s flourishing and concern for which was at the center of the Chapel’s mission. The “heart of God” was designed to be a description of Christ without an assumption of shared Christian conviction. It was thus an attempt to articulate the way Christians in chapter three may seek to practice intellectual generosity without sacrificing credal integrity. And the word “listening” aimed at a different mode of interaction from that associated with chapters one or two. I was not taking for granted that if the heart of the university listened to the heart of God the heart of God would say exactly the same thing to the heart of the university as it said to the Chapel. This was intended to be a demonstration of how the renunciation of control is in fact a deeper statement of faith than its retention. For in chapter three the Chapel assumes the heart of God will speak to the heart of the University, even if not in the way the Chapel might expect or even desire. This is a proposal for what chapter three can mean for the American church and the American university.

The Political Theology of Church in Chapter Three

“The work of political theology is to shed light from the Christian faith upon the intricate challenge of thinking about living in late-modern Western society.” So far in this lecture I have described the story presupposed by priestly evangelism in the late-modern American context, and I have contrasted it with the stories presupposed by prophetic and kingly evangelism, respectively. In what remains of this address I wish to outline the politics of priestly evangelism and to describe how priestly evangelism alters the notion of politics. What I seek to offer is a guide for living in chapter three.

If the defining term of chapter one is nation, or perhaps social control, and the defining term of chapter two is justice, or perhaps rights, then I suggest the defining term of chapter three should be forgiveness. Forgiveness was after all the central purpose of the priestly office in Israel . The priests were those who offered the sacrifices that embodied repentance and brought about reconciliation with God. The priestly office of Christ is that through which Jesus becomes both priest and victim, the sacrifice that ends all sacrifice and takes away sin. Priestly evangelism is that process by which the Church becomes a community through which individuals, neighborhoods, peoples and nations may (in the words of Genesis 12) find a blessing, be reconciled with God. Not simply by joining it: also by finding it a catalyst, an example, an inspiration, a living reminder, an embodiment of hope.

The chapter three Church offers itself as a witness to the necessity and the possibility of forgiveness. Let us consider for a moment the parable of the prodigal son in Luke 15. The Church should be under no illusion that it is the father. It did not create and does not possess the gifts of grace; it has not been cruelly abused by its beloved child, enacting its death, taking and spoiling its livelihood before its time; it has not been publicly humiliated by its equally beloved child, refusing to join the celebration and making up stories about it and about the others at the party. No: the Church in chapter three knows it is always one of the two rival siblings – sometimes both. It has often been the younger son, incessantly splitting away from the household, headstrong and juvenile, mistaking its true home, oblivious of partnership, patience or prudence. It has often been the elder son, harsh, judgmental, self-righteous, over-sensitive, reluctant to join the party because of who else it might find there.

The parable of the prodigal son sets an agenda for the Church in chapter three. First, it is invited to the party, but is never the host, always the guest. It aspires to be at many tables, a partner in many projects, a participant in many programs – but the chair, the leader, the host of very few. It never assumes that where it happens to be is the party – it always recognizes that it and its partners – its brothers and sisters – will all have to move if they all are to discover the party. Second, it has to be a people that tells the truth. In the parable, the truth means recognitions like “I am eating with the pigs” and “I’m humiliating my father at least as much as my brother is.” Priestly evangelism makes no claim on a unique possession of the truth, but it insists that without truth there is no reconciliation. Third, it has to be a people encouraging, brokering and modeling reconciliation. The party does not depend on reconciliation – the party is the free gift of the father and is going on anyway: but without reconciliation, neither brother will get to enjoy the party.

The political agenda for the American church in chapter three therefore must center where the gospel centers: on forgiveness and reconciliation. Locally this must involve telling a truthful story about the past.

In Greensboro , NC a process has recently been completed by which a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the first in the US , sought to listen to and understand accounts and perspectives on the notorious events of November 3 1979 . On that day m embers of the Ku Klux Klan and American Nazi party killed five people and wounded ten others as Communist Workers Party activists gathered people for a statewide “Death to the Klan” rally and conference for racial, social, and economic justice. These are crimes for which there have been no convictions, no acknowledgement of culpability, and no apology. Because there is no common understanding about this painful episode in Greensboro ’s history, it continues to underwrite fear, division and distrust. In the words of the Commissioners themselves, "The passage of time alone cannot bring closure, nor resolve feelings of guilt and lingering trauma, for those impacted by the events of November 3, 1979 . Nor can there be any genuine healing for the city of Greensboro unless the truth surrounding these events is honestly confronted, the suffering fully acknowledged, accountability established, and forgiveness and reconciliation facilitated." Such movements, shifting the focus from conventional justice – in which it seems there must be a loser – to truth and reconciliation, in which everyone stands to gain, promise a pattern of healing that could sweep through the American South and beyond. It is a movement for restorative justice, which, again in the words adopted by the Greensboro Commission, “is fundamentally different from retributive justice. It is justice that puts energy into the future, not into what is past. It focuses on what needs to be healed, what needs to be repaid, what needs to be learned in the wake of crime. It looks at what needs to be strengthened if such things are not to happen again.” This is the agenda of the politics of chapter three.

Globally, the political agenda for the American church must involve reconciliation on three levels. Economically, it must involve issues of forgiveness in relation to global debt and the imbalance of world trade. Ecologically, it must involve reconciliation between America ’s relentless rate of consumption and the realities of the planet’s resources and climate. And theo-politically, it must involve a reassessment of America ’s self-styled messianic role in near eastern affairs, a reconfiguration of the state of Israel ’s role in the theological and political map of the region, and a revision of America ’s understanding of Islam. These are all familiar areas, too broad to expand on here, where in each case there is no future without forgiveness.

The irony of speech about God in public in America is that, while there is much of it, little of it concerns the central claims of the New Testament. Chapter one speech about God concerns God’s sovereignty and blessings, the honor of God’s name, sometimes God’s might and vengeful hand. Chapter two speech about God concerns God’s justice and liberating purpose and destiny. What is seldom if ever articulated in public speech about God is that the Christian gospel is about making one body through forgiveness and reconciliation. This was why the son of God gave his life and rose again – to reconcile people to God and one another. The language of priestly evangelism must be a public language about the necessity and possibility of forgiveness. This is the public political vocabulary of chapter three.

But I also promised that before I finished I would describe how priestly evangelism alters the notion of politics. The church in chapter three must aspire to a renewed understanding of politics – not the calculation and distribution of limited resources but the deliberation over the best use of the abundant gifts of God. What this means is the recognition that the church is itself a politics. In chapters one and two the theoretical and popular conceptions of politics largely centered on the nation state. The politics of the church meant either the extent to which the churches took up single-issue causes in the public sphere, or the struggle to hold together denominations and other such groupings amid different notions of power, identity and authority. But in chapter three, having relaxed their assumption that they are always obliged to think for the whole state in a public policy mode, the churches are more able to attempt and display imaginative possibilities of social relations otherwise not thought possible. It is not that public policy is unimportant, it is that the most significant contribution the church can make to public policy is to model what a community resting on forgiveness looks like. If the heart of politics in chapter one was administration and in chapter two was legislation then in chapter three it is imagination. Priestly evangelism means the church offering the world practices that presuppose eschatological time – practices like nurturing and caring for those who can bring no economic benefit to society, those whom eugenics would edit out of the human script; practices like keeping vigil at places where young men have been gunned down, simply to witness to the hope and love that abide despite violence and fear; practices like making friendships across class and racial barriers, simply to tap the limitless resources pent up by chapter one’s politics of segregated scarcity.

And here my parable comes from the following chapter of Luke’s gospel, Luke 16.1-9. The parable of the shrewd manager is a story about political economy. The manager loses his job in a world dominated by sudden mood changes, by gossip and anxiety. Rather than feeling sorry for himself or hiring an attorney, he sets about writing off the debts of the rich man’s major creditors. In other words, he decides to change economies – or, in my language, to change chapters. The significance of the term oikonomia or household management is evident from the repetition of the phrase “welcome me into their homes” (vv 4, 9). His household is bankrupt, so it is time to think about other people’s households. It is time to change his oikonomia.

This is a story about two economies and their rival politics. The economy of the rich man is mammon. Its politics only includes certain people, only buys certain things, only lasts a limited length of time. Mammon is fundamentally the economy of scarcity. It is the world in which there is not enough to go round. Mammon requires each person to expend most of their energy ensuring they secure more than an even distribution of goods and resources. The economy of the manager after he’s been fired is manna. Manna, as in the wilderness, is always more than enough. It only dries up when the people of God try to take two days’ supply at once. Manna’s politics is for everybody, gives what money can’t buy, and never expires. Manna is the political economy of abundance. It is the currency of the kingdom of God . The secret of happiness is learning to love the things God gives in plenty. The name for those things is Manna.

What happens in this parable is that the manager gives up trying to squeeze people for a living and starts making friends instead. He realizes the friends are more important than the money – or even the job. He moves from mammon to manna, from an economy of scarcity and perpetual anxiety to an economy of abundance and limitless grace. And when the rich man sees him on the day of final reckoning, the rich man realizes that the manager’s economy is bigger than his. He says ‘I can see my economy is smaller than yours. You’re the one who’s living in the great economy. I need to learn from you’.

In the light of the parable of the shrewd manager one can see that the politics of both chapters one and two presuppose scarcity. In different ways they both take for granted that there are limited opportunities and resources in the world and life is largely a matter of getting what one can and protecting what one has got. Much the same is true of the two brothers in the parable of the prodigal son. Each assumes scarcity. The younger son estimates the worth of the father by what he can inherit from him and convert into cash. When the cash, a limited resource, runs dry, he calculates that he can buy himself back into the family by working as a hired hand. The elder son assumes that any gain for his brother is a loss for himself. The return of his brother can only be a reduction, never an addition. The father meanwhile exudes abundance from beginning to end. He loses half his property, lives through a famine, and is humiliated by both sons, but is perpetually on the threshold of a party.

Chapter three politics is about the enjoyment of those things that are not in short supply, whether those things are called friendship, kindness, or communion. The shrewd manager realized that professional and financial security was a limited resource, but friendship was an unlimited blessing. So he changed economies. Thus acts of generosity on the part of congregations and churches – giving sanctuary to the asylum-seeker, assistance to the Habitat home self-builder, or no-strings finance to the first-time low-income entrepreneur – are not selfless sacrificial acts but simply participation in the great economy. The greatest political challenge for the church in chapter three is to demonstrate that the things that most matter are not in short supply. All the most pressing ethical questions presuppose scarcity. In the case of medical ethics, this usually means scarcity of life. In the case of immigration, this usually means scarcity of resources and opportunities. In the case of ecological ethics, this usually means scarcity of ozone, or clean water, or species, or ground well above sea level.

And the most significant form of scarcity of all is sin. Sin creates silence, inhibits trust, enhances fear, discredits truth, disenchants wonder, dismantles joy. And this is why the politics of abundance are inherently linked to the politics of forgiveness. Forgiveness redeems scarcity as resurrection redeems the cross. Resurrection restores the life of Jesus as a gift to God’s people, rather than a hopeless gesture in the face of overwhelming scarcity. Resurrection therefore offers a limitless past in addition to an unlimited future. Forgiveness, in both the parable of the prodigal son and the parable of the shrewd manager, is the fundamental way in which one enters into eternal, abundant life. Forgiveness teaches one to love the things God gives in plenty, and to love them not as an instrument to use but for their own sake.

Thus the politics of Church in chapter three are a public statement that there is no shortage of the things that really matter. The Church enacts through baptism that the past is no longer a sea of lies and deceit but now a storehouse of limitless experience and wisdom. And the Church embodies in Eucharist that the bread of life is more than enough nourishment for all the world for ever. In its life of prayer the Church calls for the world of scarcity to be transformed by the inbreaking realm of abundance. After all, in the paradigmatic Lord’s Prayer, the three central petitions make this very plea. “Give us…” is a request for sufficiency in the present. “Forgive us…” is a request for the restoration of a limitless past. And “Deliver us…” is a request for freedom from the fear of a limited future. It is a prayer to become members of the great economy, the economy depicted in Christian worship.

This is a politics that subverts the social control of chapter one and transcends the justice of chapter two. It is a politics that depends entirely on cross and resurrection. It is the politics of chapter three. It is, I humbly suggest, the politics of Jesus.

Footnotes

Colleges that emerge from this era and still survive include Harvard (Congregationalist, 1636), William and Mary (Anglican, 1693), Yale (Congregationalist, 1701), Princeton (Presbyterian, 1746), Dartmouth (Congregationalist, 1769), and Rutgers (Dutch Reformed, 1766). Roman Catholic colleges began to emerge with Georgetown (1789), and eight more had been founded by 1885. See the discussion opened up in Gavin D’Costa, Theology in the Public Square : Church, Academy and Nation ( Oxford and New Malden: Blackwell 2005) 38-56.

See James Tunstead Burtchaell, The Dying of the Light: The Disengagement of Colleges and Universities from their Christian Churches (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans 1998). D’Costa summarizes for example Burtchaell’s account of the reasons for institutional change in Catholic colleges and universities in this era: “… a decline of religious orders in the 1960s, so that personnel were not available to staff universities; an increasingly secular society, leading to the decline of Catholic students and their loyalties to Catholic institutions; financial crises in these institutions requiring them both to change the curriculum to recruit students and also change their forms of governance quickly to ensure massive state aid when the question of their religious nature was questioned as being conflict with the First Amendment (an issue only resolved in the mid-1970s, after most institutions had already changed); the low level of excellence achieved, leading to emulation of secular (latterly Protestant) rivals; a movement in the curriculum away from rigorous confessional theology to academic historically oriented study of Christinaity, followed by the growth of religious studies (known by various names); the decline of worship and Catholic praxis being central to all staff and students; the decline in religious having key positions as presidents; and finally, the acceptance of modernity within lay and ecclesial circles.” (D’Costa, 48) Burtchaell also speaks of the importance of a single president in running a large institution (and therefore the opportunity for rapid change) and the increase in specialisms and the emergence of the career academic, meaning that faculty were increasingly focused on their own career prospects and research opportunities (See D’Costa 50). Burtchaell (x) notes that (to translate his argument into my language) Catholic colleges had their chapter one during the Protestants’ chapter two – in other words that the changes overcoming Catholic universities mirrored those that had taken place in Protestant colleges since the 1890s. This story is told in George Marsden, The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief (New York: Oxford University Press 1994) and Douglas Sloan, Faith and Knowledge: Mainline Protestantism and American Higher Education (Louisville: Westminster John Knox 1994).

David Lodge, How Far Can You Go? (London: Penguin 1981).

Oliver O’Donovan describes a very different kind of chapter two that shows how much the British context he presupposes differs from the American context I am describing. But he also seems to assume he and his readers are now in a “chapter three” climate. “In our days it is not religious believers that suffer a crisis of confidence. Believers did suffer a serious one two or three generations ago, and the results of that crisis in small church attendance and the de-Christianizing of institutions are still working themselves out around us. But that crisis was precipitated by the presence of a rival confidence, a massive cultural certainty that united natural science, democratic politics, technology, and colonialism. Today this civilizational ice-shelf has broken up, and though some of the icebergs floating are huge – natural science and technology, especially, drift on as if nothing has happened – they are not joined together anymore, nor joined to the land.” The Ways of Judgment: The Bampton Lectures 2003 ( Grand Rapids MI and Cambridge , UK 2005) xii. Of course the British chapter one and prologue are likewise very different from the American ones.

For a longer treatment of evangelism using the same Christological terms as are invoked here, see Samuel Wells, God’s Companions: Reimagining Christian Ethics (Oxford, UK and Malden, MA: Blackwell 2006) 57-64.

O’Donovan prophecy quote xv.

Charles Marsh provides a very helpful and rewarding survey of the racial dimensions of what I am calling chapter two. Speaking of the Mississippi pastor and activist John Perkins, he says, “Perkins began using the term ‘prophetic’ to describe the counter-cultural practices of the Christian community (long before Cornel West took on the term to describe a faith imbued with the ‘sobriety of tragedy, the struggle for freedom and the spirit of hope’), and he thought hard for the first time about the connection between racism in the south and national military spending, nuclear stockpiling, and the political neglect of the poor.” Charles Marsh, The Beloved Community: How Faith Shapes Social Justice, from the Civil Rights Movement to Today ( New York : Basic Books 2005) 180. Charles Marsh has a clearer vision for the visibility of the church in chapter two than I do.

Of course the first amendment is regarded by many as simply limiting the influence of the state on the church, and making no claims vice versa. See Lambert’s work cited below.

Frank Lambert’s The Founding Fathers and the Place of Religion in America ( Princeton , NJ and Oxford , UK : Princeton University Press 2003) bears out the story I have been telling. He describes the first defining moment in American religious history as 1639, when “a group of New England Puritans drafted a constitution affirming their faith in God and their intention to organize a Christian nation.” (1) He is referring to the delegates from Windsor , Hartford and Wethersfield who drew up the Fundamental orders of Connecticut , “which made clear that their government rested on divine authority and pursued godly purposes.” The second defining moment is 1787, when the founding fathers drafted a constitution that made no reference to God or divine providence, and seeking only secular, political ends. The battle since has been between those who champion a Christian nation and those who applaud religious freedom with a liberty of conscience for all. (1-15)

It is illustrative that when an attempt is made to make Jesus visible, for example by John Howard Yoder, the project is widely dismissed as sectarian and assumed to be advocating social withdrawal. See J.H. Yoder, The Politics of Jesus: Behold the Man! Our Victorious Lamb (Second Edition, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans 1994).

Oliver O’Donovan, The Ways of Judgment x.

http://www.greensborotrc.org/faq.php

Ibid, quoting Susan Sharpe Restorative Justice: A Vision for Healing and Change (Edmonton, Alberta: Mediation and Restorative Justice Centre 1989).

N. T. Wright offers a helpful overview of the global dimensions of the Christian commitment to and faith in forgiveness in his Evil and the Justice of God ( Downers Grove , IL : IVP 2006) 131-65. He draws particularly on Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation (Nashville: Abingdon 1996), L. Gregory Jones, Embodying Forgiveness: A Theological Analysis (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans 1995) and Desmond Tutu, No Future without Forgiveness (London: Rider 1999).

I am immensely grateful to Ched Myers for helping me see the economic dimensions of this and other parables. See his The Biblical Vision of Sabbath Economics ( Washington D.C. : Church of the Saviour 2001). The notion of the great economy comes from Wendell Berry, “Two Economies” in Home Economics (New York: North Point Press 1987) 54-75.

I have a sense there is a correlation between what I am calling “those things that never run out” and Augustine’s distinction between those things we use and those we enjoy. “Some things are to be enjoyed, others to be used, and there are others which are to be enjoyed and used. Those things which are to be enjoyed make us blessed. … To enjoy something is to cling to it with love for its own sake. To use something, however, is to employ it in obtaining that which you love, provided that it is worthy of love.” (Augustine, On Christian Doctrine translated by D.W. Robertson New York : The Liberal Arts Press 1958, 1. III-IV, 3-4, p. 8.) I suggest those things that we should learn to enjoy are those things God gives us in plenty; whereas those things that are in short supply we may suppose we are to use.

Note -- This lecture was first presented at Garrett-Evangelical Seminary's Setting an Agenda for Political Theology symposium on March 27, 2007