Two Part Sermon Series on Revelation: On the Side of the Lamb Part 1

The Book of Revelation is an unwillingness to compromise.  To a society whose highest value is supposedly everything in moderation and bi-partisan, centrist politics, Revelation can be abrasive, for it presents to us a dissatisfied G-d and a Messiah who refuses to partake in the death-dealing prosperity of global empire.  Instead of locating themselves with moderate footholds to reach the greatest audience, we find G-d and G-d's Messiah overcoming systems of oppression and domination from the outside in.  This is why the interpretation of Revelation has been so incredibly messy.

Augustine of Hippo, perhaps the most well known theologian of all time, believed that the "1000 years" so famous in Revelation began with Jesus' resurrection; therefore, the entire medieval European community shook in trepidation at the advent of year 1000 as they waited for Satan to be set free.  Obviously, there was a sigh of relief when nothing happened.  Martin Luther admitted openly that he had no idea what Revelation was really trying to say, and hence, in whatever way anyone interpreted it was fine by him.  Tim LaHaye, Jerry Jenkins, and Hal Lindsey, on the populist level, convinced millions of people worldwide what the end time would look like with claims that we in fact live in them, defending themselves with the end times "script" of Revelation.  The book has contributed to endless speculation.

Catholics identified Luther as the beast; Lutherans said the beast was the Pope.  Hitler, Stalin, and nearly every president by one group or another has been labeled "the beast".  While I may not wholly disagree with these estimations, for anyone to conscript the imagery of Revelation into a module for identifying who specifically John had in mind when he prophesied about the beast or the number 666 is to misunderstand the nature of the prophetic and to deny Revelation's relevance to all Christians who came before us.  Folks, we will never be able to say with 100% certainty who exactly "the beast" is.  In doing so, we make ourselves into an elite group of people who have the privilege of being the ones John had in mind when he wrote Revelation.  If, then, we cannot identify all the symbols in Revelation on a 1-to-1 equivalency basis, how do we read Revelation?  How can we 21st century, middle-class, European-Americans (I preached this sermon to Evergreen Mennonite Church who are predominantly this demographic) make sense out of such a mysterious writing?

Basic Facts
When I say "apocalypse", we all have some common ideas in mind: the "world" has ended insofar as the structures, systems, governments, and human organizations that drive the gears of production and consumption are gone.  Apocalypse, however, is actually the Greek title of this book, and it means "to unveil" or "to reveal".  Ironically, Revelation has a tendency to obscure or to make things blurry.  I hope by the end of this sermon its message is a little more lucid.

Many people call this book "The Revelation of John", but quite clearly, it is nothing of the sort.  V. 1 states right off this is the "Revelation of Jesus Christ".  It is only fitting then that the main character is the Lamb who was slain.  Jesus shown as a Lamb has a vast array of symbolic background; it is the dominant image for G-d's Messiah in Revelation; and it is my favorite image of Jesus.

Though this is the Apocalypse of Jesus Christ, the book's author is none other than a man named John.  Many people claim this "John" is John brother of James, cohort of Peter, author of John the Gospel and 1, 2, 3 John, and one of the 12, but this is most likely not true.  The amount of expertise needed, particularly in the field of astronomy and astrology is hardly expected of a peasant fisherman like John son of Zebedee.  Moreover, just like it is today, John was an incredibly popular name.  Thus, we know very little about this John, but we do know a few things for sure.  John wrote from a tiny island off the coast of modern-day Turkey called Patmos.  Most likely, he was exiled there.  He was a Jewish Christian.  One of the oddities about Revelation is that it never explicitly quotes the Hebrew Bible.  Nevertheless, there are more allusions to the Hebrew Bible in Revelation that in any other book of the New Testament.  As a result, much of the imagery that would create and evoke powerful emotions is lost since none of us possess a knowledge of the Hebrew Scriptures like 1st c. Jewish Christians did.  The other unique feature of Revelation is that it does not use the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible.  This is totally bizarre since that was the standard translation of the day.  Instead, the author appears to work out of a Hebrew translation.  Every other New Testament book quotes the Greek, but Revelation only alludes to the Hebrew.  It is said that John "spoke Bible".  He was steeped so profusely in the Hebrew scriptures that it was impossible for him to avoid this level of allusions.  It was in his blood.

Beyond being a Jewish Christian, John is also an astral prophet.  1st c. people firmly believed that events in the sky affected events on the earth.  They believed stars were people and planets were gods.  Even Christians believed this.  John was a person whose vocation was to observe the sky and use it to understand past, present, and forthcoming events.  As a prophet, the proclamation of the interpretation of these events was a service to the congregations.  Unfortunately, he was exiled to Patmos.  His statement that this vision came to him on the Lord's day (1.10), that is the day of worship, implicates that John's writing was his fulfillment of his prophetic vocation from afar.  Since he would naturally speak all these things to the congregations if he was present with them, we can only assume that this book was intended to be read aloud to the congregations.  Revelation was written to be read in large segments aloud to congregations of people.  The intensity of its message is only amplified by this style of reading.

Social Setting
More than just being acquainted with John, we need to have a brief but solid conception of John's social world.  The province of Asia Minor where the original churches who received Revelation resided was a critical and prosperous portion of the Roman Empire.  Technologically advanced, the cities in Asia Minor hosted medical schools, ship ports, textile industry, and incredible construction projects including one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, the temple of Artemis/Diana in Ephesus.  What is more, Asia Minor was notorious for the promulgation of the imperial cult.  Most emperors did not demand to be worshiped as gods, but the people of Asia Minor praised them as such.  The first temple to Emperor Augustus was built in Asia Minor, and the coins circulated there showed how the Roman emperors were considered divine.

John reads and interprets the Roman Empire from the perspective of the Lamb who was slain.  Revelation's lens through which it interprets history is from under the blood of the innocent.  That the empire who claimed to bring peace to the whole world crucified the G-d of the universe as a Galilean itinerant preacher and miracle-worker scandalized John, and revealed to him the true nature of empire.  When Jesus rose again, he conquered the death-dealing, dehumanizing powers of the empire.  This is the revealed Jesus, the apocalypsed Jesus.  The revealed Jesus unveiled the empire's crime: legalized murder.  The revealed Jesus realigns perspective.  The slaughtered Lamb forces us to lose the viewpoint of the imperial, idolatrous systems of domination because systems like these are compromise.  Peace at the cost of killing G-d is no peace at all.  The Pax Romana is fraudulent; G-d alone can bring peace; and peace can only come through self-sacrificial love.

With all this in mind, John's vision becomes clearer.  The Roman empire becomes four warring horsemen destroying peasant people with violence and pestilence.  The emperors transform into beasts from the sea, and behind it all, evil itself, the fundamental enemy of G-d, drives the gears that make the imperial engine go.

What Does It Mean?
How then should we read?  Turning this book into an apocalyptic timeline risks paralyzing its explosiveness.  It will serve not as a manifesto for subverting the empire through self-sacrifice, but as an excuse to be complicit with the death-dealing powers of the empire since G-d will win in the end anyway.  The opposite problem of reading Revelation as a historical timeline that had cultural relevance then but not now also arrests the shattering effects of John's vision.  The book calls us to convert from being on top and repent of oppression.  It calls us to reorient ourselves onto the side of the Lamb that was slain with the positive belief that victory over the death-dealing powers can only come through such an orientation.  John puts us face-to-face with a G-d who does not share the throne, and when powerful people rise to a status in which they claim they are sovereign, only one thing can result: the death of the innocent.  Such immoral behavior in the name of progress, peace, and hope receives no toleration from G-d who locks up the beasts that possess the audacity to act with such hubris.  Meanwhile, we, the people of G-d are called to rescind our participation in this fraudulent peace.  Instead, G-d calls us to come and be a part of a different kingdom, a kingdom ruled by the Lamb where no more tears, sorrow, and yes, even death exist.

The Issue of Atheism

First, I want to humbly say I have not solved the problem.  I only want to make this observation.  From where to modern atheists derive morality?  If humanity is involved in evolution and a part of evolution is the rise and fall of species, the demise of homo sapiens sapiens at the hands of our own environmental destruction could be perceived as an evolutionary dead end.  We evolved the ability to kill ourselves, and we did (or we are).  If our species dies because of this, there is nothing wrong with that.  We, technically speaking, should die.  Still, many evolutionary biologists believe, morally, the destruction of the environment is bad.  Why?  Where did they get the notion that peoples should decide whether or not they fatally destroy themselves if their self-destruction is evolved?  I just want to know.  Is our belief to protect ourselves from ourselves a simple survival strategy?  If so, why would we evolve the capability to crush ourselves in the first place?  I have many questions that no atheists have answered yet.  Peace!

The Problem With the Modern Environmental Movement and Its Brief Moral Implications

The main concept we need to keep in mind when talking about environmentalism is that the planet will survive us, but we might not survive the planet.  The problem, then, is not terracide but suicide or, at the least, homicide.  No matter how much "damage" we do to the earth, we will only be able to relocate resources and alter geography.  What we can do by causing damage is bring about, directly or indirectly, the deaths of thousands, millions, or even billions of people.  The modern, essentially pagan, environmental movement, which demands the earth be saved for the earth's sake, puts reverence into nature at the expense of humanity.  Their critique, therefore, falls on deaf ears as a common person will never act radically and dangerously to protect plants and animals, but we can surely expect them to take to action in order to protect themselves and others.  Peace!

-ben adam

I Am Going to Colombia

At several moments in my life, G-d calls me in such a clear fashion it becomes impossible for me to avoid.  One of these moments happened about a month ago.  This is the brief story of that and the results.

A guy I know named Josh has a sister named Kait.  Kait went to Azusa Pacific University and majored in Social Work.  Following graduation, she moved to Vietnam to take a position with an Australian non-profit called AoG World Relief.  Not long ago, she visited Seattle for a little over a week during which time I discussed the details of her work and listened to many stories of her faithful undertaking.  In Vietnam, she worked doing general relief efforts while building connections with cohorts in order to begin a ministry for the liberation of women and men involved in sex trafficking.  Kait spoke with passion, excitement, and fervor while she exuded the Holy Spirit.  Her visit excited me.

More than excitement, I felt challenge.  The trouble with people practicing radical righteousness is their tendency to expose others' lack of integrity, particularly mine.  I saw in Kait a projection of everything good I wanted to do but was too afraid.  What holds me back?  Why do I stay in Seattle griping about rich, white people, working at a job I cannot stand, pretending as though one day I will be a respectable, Christian man who is known for his love for the oppressed.  Kait's visit exposed my fear.  I spent my life hesitating like those who hesitate to worship Jesus in Matthew 28 yet still receive the same command. 

Laid before me was my unwillingness to go where I feared.  I looked around at those whom I surrounded myself with.  I thought about Kevin and Marian Neuhouser specifically.  My great respect for them grew out of their experiences working among the poor and oppressed in Brazil.  Those times shaped them significantly in an extremely positive way.  My reflections revealed my need to partake in work amongst those who live beneath the heavy hand of empire.  Still, I feared.

Finally, during the first week of Lent, I prepared a sermon on Jesus' temptation in the desert in Luke.  In the sermon (which you can read below), I concluded Lent was a time in which we refuse the temptations that seem to grant us expedient relief or success and do the hard work to rid ourselves of actions that might embody these temptations.  What we give up, then, must be given up forever.  During the writing of that sermon, I felt the enunciation of Kait's challenge to my hesitant, complacent comfort manifest as G-d's ubiquitous command in the Bible, "Do not be afraid."  The command, so clear it was unavoidable, led me to sign up with Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT).

From May 12-25 I will be in Colombia working with a delegation on behalf of small artisan miners and small farmers in order to maintain their safety and livelihood in the face of a multinational gold-mining corporation who wants to mine on the 3 million acres of land where these people live.  Paramilitary and Colombian military roam the region.  Finally, I am stepping out.  I am going to go do what I know the L-RD requires of me.  Hopefully, this will lead to a full-time, 3-year placement with CPT.  I certainly hope it does.  In any case, I am stepping out without fear, knowing G-d will be with me.  Peace!

-ben adam

Old Wineskins or Dry Bones: Becoming Uncool

I live on Queen Anne Hill, but I work in Ballard.  When I attended SPU, I checked out bus passes in order to get to work.  I like riding the bus.  Some time ago, I began thinking about public transportation.  I appreciate it.  Public transit provides cheap mobility for those who cannot afford a car or are not physically capable of riding a bike or walking.  As I reflected on the usefulness of the bus, I donned my anarchist lens, and I saw clearly the way in which public transportation, not in principle but in practice, represents gentrification. 

In Seattle, people commonly plaster environmentalist stickers all over their cars (even gas-guzzlers like Subaru Outbacks).  They feel superior or vindicated by doing this.  They make up the Martin Luthers of environmentalism.  If they believe environmentalism is good, the earth will be saved.  The next group of snobbish people come in Priuses and bio-diesel powered Volkwagens.  This group wants to reform cars and petroleum use.  They accept the basic construct, but the answer to the problems is fully attainable without abandoning the current system.  Another group of people either ride the bus or ride their bikes.  The bussers and bikers willingly sacrifice the expediency of the automobile for frugality and longer travel times.  A few of these people do this for environmental reasons.  Some bike to be cool (fixed-gear riding hipsters), some bike to stay in shape, and everyone busses in order to save money.  Herein lies the gentrification.  The upper and middle class in Seattle longs for environmental justice.  They want the earth and its inhabitants to not suffer in the way they currently do.  However, it rests beyond their imagination that the practices expected of them within their strata actually affect the deteriorating ecologic community.  How do we go about decoupling this worldview?  How do we begin critically observing our own activity, repenting of our inconsistency, and move into a life characterized by integrity and sustainability?

I begin by advancing a new philosophy of being.  I believe this philosophy already exists but only in small pockets and never holistically.  First, we must identify the root problems: ubiquitous neo-liberalism coupled with neo-conservatism.  Liberals themselves are people devoted and committed to "social justice".  They talk about environmentalism, gay rights, women's rights, and racism.  Accordingly, they vote to increase taxes so the government can create programs to aid those who struggle through life.  Liberals flock together.  They create certain identifying markers in order to recognize each other.  They love coffee.  Finding a poorly dressed liberal is difficult.  They put "Coexist" stickers on their cars and hang Indian prayer flags on their porches.  Their homes look like Ikea ads.  Everything matches.  Everything is expensive.  Liberals and neo-liberalism meet in the liberal need to be identified as proper consumers.  Consumerism marks out the liberal identifiers.  Resources, then, require requisition in order to maintain identity.  The government obliges by increasing taxation, utilizing taxes for neo-imperial outreach, and creating welfare systems that keep a working-class population from becoming like the upper and middle classes.  Meanwhile, they woo the consuming masses to sleep with debates about foreign policy (which looks more like Middle East policy than it does foreign policy), healthcare, and the environment.  The opposite, equal reaction resides in neo-conservatism.

Conservatives represent pietism.  They do not identify social injustices as the issue at hand; personal irresponsibility causes the problem.  Neo-conservatism, therefore, simply employs a different strategy in order to attain the same ends as neo-liberalism.  First, neo-conservatism convinces its adherents that they are good, righteous people who deserve material goods and prosperity.  In order to attain this prosperity, they engage in neo-imperialistic activity through warfare and opening free trade markets for multinationals in majority world countries.  Like liberals, they carry identifying markers.  These markers mandate access to overabundance.  The neo-conservatives woo their constituents to sleep with talk about piety: anti-gay, anti-abortion, anti-drug, etc.  Major divergence between neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism comes in domestic policy.  Since the neo-cons are agaisnt so much, they cut taxes and devote the remainder to imperialism.  Hence, they appear more interested in wars for resource acquisition and neo-colonialism.  Neo-libs, when they enter office after the neo-cons do not alter this spending (hence, Obama's expansion of military spending); instead, they spend on social programs in complement to their imperialistic, capitalistic agendas.  This keeps socially minded folks at bay while the real damage occurs beyond their vision.

I say all this to demonstrate one thing: the ways in which we orient our lives affect policy.  The need to look hip, to own throw-away possessions such as Ikea cabinets and cell phones that last one year, to own a car, to live in a nice house causes the government and corporations to organize themselves in certain fashions.  The U.S. does not destroy entire cultures and people groups simply for the sake of greed.  Greed derives from demand.  When people supply a major demand and make boatloads of money, they cannot (or do not), like the rich young ruler in Luke, give up their wealth simply to solve the issue of injustice, especially when they believe the true injustice is that homosexuals cannot wed.  Our main source of resistance comes outside the realm of this operating system.  Why?  How?  Since the system itself demands loyal adherents defined by consumerist cravings (if it did not, how would the government maintain its strength?), we cannot expect tweaking the system to achieve the desired result.  In the end, what is most important to them, profit, will win out.  How do we resist?  We get rid of the demand.  We become uncool.

Another group exists beside the saved-by-faith-environmentalists, the hybrid-drivers, and the bikers.  We are very few.  We walk.  As we walk, we mourn the death passing us by on the roads.  Our tears are for both the people in their cars, isolated and in a hurry, and for ourselves as we breathe in the carbon monoxide expelled by them.  Our mourning is for those who are exploited, oppressed, and killed for the sake of putting so many cars into our society.  More importantly, we represent a group who knows the way to sustainability comes in social justice tied directly to personal piety.  The problem is, this is not cool.

Our society prescribes worth and value through appearance and possessions.  The result of this value-system can only be seen in melting glaciers, growing deserts, famines, and economic disparity.  The answer to this cannot come by investing more trust into a government who wants nothing but the extension of this value-system that keeps them in power.  We need a new devotion to social justice that does not expect the government to care for the vulnerable.  We need a new value-system that relies on small communities providing services organically without the desire for profit.  We must become uncool.  We must refuse to partake in the systems that make cool what it is.  I do not think my thoughts on this are over, but I will leave them here. Peace!

-ben adam

A Dirge Over the Sins of Andrew Jackson and Others

I wrote this poem last year on July 4th.  A friend of mine wanted me to post it, and I need to get back into writing poetry anyway.  Here it is:

Seattle suburbia feels like a morgue.
Yes, a morgue, not a cemetery;
this is no hallowed dead sanctuary.
It is a massacre
a genocide, and the only memorial
is the cities
named after those who died.
People say slavery was evil, inhuman,
and the grandchildren of those dragged
from Africa demand reparations.
Do not panic white folk!
We donated the desert
to the first American nations.
Land of the free; home of the brave?
By our forebear's aggression who is free?
me and you?
Those under their oppression
what can they do?
They can build casinos and make poor men rich.
They can kill deer, bear, and cougars.
They can drink alcohol
and toil on the land,
but it is hard to grow corn
when your soil is made of sand.
What have you done you liberal, white Seattlite
driving in your car
drinking coffee at the stoplight?
You practice justice by voting for light rail,
but your gentrification only builds another ghetto.
It seems the final solution was never let go
while you hate quietly inside your million-dollar condo.
Next time you wake up
remember who died
for your home's foundation:
Seattle
Tacoma
Snohomish
Issaquah
Sammamish
Tukwila
We live in an abomination.
A morgue.

Reflections on Walter Wink

On Monday this week, I read, from cover to cover, Walter Wink's The Powers That Be.  I meant to read it for some time now.  Since N.T. Wright populates my entire reading list (I have finished five of his books since December), I decided to interrupt my Wright project with a little liberal theology, and I must say, I loved it.  For the past few days, I reflected on this work, and these are my first few impressions about it.

This book represents a simple summary of Wink's The Powers Trilogy.  Essentially, Wink distilled his scholarly work into an accessible volume for laypeople.  He fulfills what my professor Dr. Rob Wall calls his responsibility to scholasticism and to the Church by doing this.  I appreciate his efforts.

First and foremost, Walter Wink is an activist.  He makes this very clear by telling stories about his days in the Civil Rights Movement in the '60's and his work against South African Apartheid.  Like all writers, Wink responds to the problems he sees in current systems.  More precisely, he writes to give theological weight to the solutions of these problems.  With activism as his platform and theology as his instrument, Wink argues for the Church to commit itself to complete non-violence as a centerpiece of its faith statement.  The lines of his argument are as follows:

The main problems Wink encounters derive out of his activist stance.  He concerns himself with what stands in the way of the effective liberation of those who suffer.  To Wink, the barrier to liberation is, what he calls, The Domination System.  The Domination System is nothing new and can be seen all the way down through history whenever one group of people oppresses another for the sake of greed and self-interest.  Wink realizes The Domination System is an evil, demonic animal which requires sustenance.  The food of this beast grows in the corresponding corollary to The Domination System: The Myth of Redemptive Violence.  The Myth of Redemptive Violence provides The Domination System with a narrative that can be reproduced in an infinite number of ways which convinces all involved in The Domination System (oppressor and oppressed alike) that without The Domination System the world would collapse and only the violence perpetrated by it can save us from this fate.  The Myth looks roughly like this: a powerful being or system has caused harm or distress to a certain other being or group; from within the oppressed group, a powerful being or system arises to defeat and kill the oppressor, ending the reign of terror; as a result, the victorious protagonist becomes the ruling victor who creates a space in which the liberated can live free and in harmony; but eventually, the once righteous liberator becomes the dominating oppressor, beginning the cycle all over again.  This Myth, seen from the Babylonian creation myth to today's children's cartoons, maintains silent ubiquity by coercing its adherents into believing it is normative.  This omnipresence, Wink argues, is so pervasive it even infiltrated the way in which ancient Hebrews conceived of G-d; thus, it produced vast amounts of violence in the Hebrew Bible as the will of G-d.  Jesus interrupts this Myth, and exposes it for what it really is: legalized immorality.  He paints Jesus in an activist light as one who courageously revealed the truth about the one true G-d who has no part in The Domination System.  Oppressive structures killed him for his insolence, and the early Church only half-way understood his purpose.

Hope, for Wink, in the face of The Domination System, comes in a two-step process.  First, Wink holds the worldview that spirit infuses everything.  From the Pentagon to a preschool, spirituality mediates within all structures.  Thus, the spirituality of everything can, as all spirits can, be redeemed.  Some of these things which can be redeemed, such as the law, need simple or complex recreation; some others, such as Nazism, sexism, or racism, require total abandonment.  Our first step in redemption is clothing ourselves in what Wink deems an "Integral Worldview".  Once we recognize this worldview to be the case, the second step in the process of redemption occurs through Divine and human collusion manifested as direct non-violent action against The Domination System.  This, after all, was what Jesus did and what later Christians would fail to understand as they drifted back into oppressive, demonic structures.

My reaction to Wink's argument is both positive and negative.  First, I fully affirm his view of a ubiquitous system of dominance that oppresses others for its own gain and sustains itself through the telling and retelling of an indoctrinating myth that convinces people of its indispensability.  Furthermore, I 100% agree with the conclusion concerning non-violence.  If we employ the logic of the Myth of Redemptive Violence against oppressors, we simply insert ourselves into the cyclical destruction of The Domination System.  Meanwhile, we will fool ourselves into believing we are creating freedom or newness (just as the Myth prophesied we would).  Hence, the only conceivable way to escape the Myth's all-encompassing hold is to step outside its operating parameters and do what it least expects: non-violence.  Jesus, in my perspective, demonstrated this way of life in the most exemplary way.  Wink and I cohere at this point.  Finally, I share Wink's Integral Worldview.  In general, Wink's largest conclusions are those that I affirm.

My dissension with Wink comes in his nuances.  Primarily, we disagree in the extent to which The Domination System must be abandoned.  He states clearly Nazism represented a spirit which should not be redeemed but abandoned.  Whether or not you agree with his worldview, nearly everyone would agree with him on this point.  Nonetheless, the government in the U.S., which has committed genocide against dozens of tribes, afflicted entire people groups under slavery and then Jim Crow, cripples the poor beneath the military-industrial complex, and fights multiple explicit and secret wars around the world, belongs in the category of redeemable which he makes clear by insisting he is a devoted patriot.  I cannot agree with Wink here.  If the purpose of the nation-state exists to defend its artificial borders from would-be assailants, we can see, by observing the U.S. and its hyper-militarized fetish, where such logic takes us.  Nationalism and the good of the state must be abandoned.  Subversive love of G-d and neighbor must replace it.  Secondarily, Wink's biblical scholarship is inconsistent and jumbled.  He writes off the Epistle to the Hebrews as complicit in The Domination System, yet he maintains the authority of some Pauline texts.  He exegetes gospel passages, yet he limits their interpretation to his own agenda.  As a result, Jesus looks less like G-d's decisive act in history to deal with sin (or The Domination System) in its fullness via non-violent activity and more like a failed social activist like Martin Luther King Jr. or Ghandi who at least understood what the latter two had in mind during their movements.  Consequently, he denies the Trinity, and damages his argument in the process.  Even though I still agree with his final conclusion, by refuting Jesus' divinity, Wink only allows Jesus to be one who teaches us how G-d is.  Instead, by holding Jesus as the second person of the Trinity, we see, in his non-violent, direct action against the powers that be, the very way in which G-d chooses to reveal G-d's self.  Not only, then, would this add theological substance to Wink's argument; it would add an ethical mandate for Christians to follow suit.

Finally, Wink believes the future of Christianity does not lie in debates about salvation and justification but in our ability to live out G-d's all-embracing love through peaceable means.  I believe this to be half true.  All the bickering about who is in and who is out creates a dynamic in which we forget Jesus is Lord, and we recreate him as life-jacket.  Jesus is the King, and it is time we started living by his kingdom edicts.  However, we must have faith that Jesus is Lord.  Faith and obedience are therefore two sides of the same coin which is the Gospel.

How we live this out will eternally be under argument; Wink gives us a useful guide tool.  The Church's days of domination are over.  Time has come for us to pick up our crosses and follow the Lord.  Peace!

-ben adam