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About ifaqtheology

Professor of Religion, Pepperdine University Specialties: Systematic Theology, Christianity and Culture Author of: God, Freedom & Human Dignity: Embracing God-Centered Identity in a Me-Centered World (IVP, 2013)

How to Use Jordan Peterson, We Who Wrestle With God: Perceptions of the Divine

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In my previous essay I made some suggestions about how to read Jordan Peterson, We Who Wrestle With God. In that essay I asserted that we should not read the book as if it were Christian theology, philosophy, psychology, or sociology. It is rather a “phenomenology of homo religiosus” or religious man; that is to say, it is a study of the ways in which human beings perceive and respond to the divine. In this essay I will suggest a few ways in which the book can be useful to Christians.

Why Read Peterson?

First, it is important not to be afraid to incorporate the wisdom of non-Christian thinkers into our thinking. Of course, we must do this with care. But faithful church leaders and even apostles have done this from the beginning. In Acts 17, Paul quoted two Greek poets, Epimenides (6th century B.C.) and Aratus (4th and 3rd centuries B.C.), approvingly: “In him we live and move and have our being” and “We are his offspring.” Paul taps into the near universal belief and experience that the divine is near, around, within, and active everywhere. The pressing question within the religious horizon of the Old and New Testaments was not “Is there a god?” but “What is the true nature of the divine?” and “Who is God?” And that is what Paul proclaimed to the Athenians that day.

We, however, cannot presume that our contemporaries experience the overwhelming, self-evident presence of the divine. They do not. It is doubtful that even we who believe in the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit experience it as well as the pagans in Athens did. We wrestle with the question of the existence and presence of God in a way no ancient person did. For many people, belief requires heroic effort. This modern feeling of divine absence is why we need to listen to Jordan Peterson and other thinkers who can awaken us to the universal divine presence felt so vividly by the Athenians and all premodern people.

The Question of God is Inescapable

As I argued in the first essay, Peterson reads biblical texts for their witness to the universal experience of the divine. Human beings are by nature religious, that is, human consciousness is so constructed that we cannot help but raise religious questions, questions of meaning, of life and death, being, eternity, and divinity.  Unless we are taught otherwise, we experience the power and beauty of nature, the inner call of conscience, the threat of death, and the lure of love as intimations of the divine. We feel the tension between the upward call toward the good, true, and the beautiful and the downward pull into sensuality and chaos. Peterson criticizes such modern errors as scientism, race and gender ideology, and utopian revolutionary theories (“idiocy” he would say) that blind us to what lies open before us: We live in Someone else’s world and we can never become what we could be unless we respond sacrificially to the divine call.

From a Christian point of view, Peterson does not provide satisfactory answers to the two questions Paul posed and answered in Acts 17: (1) “What is God?” Paul’s answer: “God is the Creator of heaven and earth!” And (2) “Who is God?” Paul’s answer: “God is the One who raised Jesus Christ from the dead.” But Peterson sets the conditions wherein these questions make sense. If we come to perceive the divine all around and within us, and if we feel compelled to choose between seeking the divine and falling into chaos, the next step naturally appears before us. It is to ask: “What and Who are you, Lord? How may I seek you and find you? What would you have me do?”

Peterson and the Bible

Peterson does not read the Bible as the canonical text for the Christian church. Nor does he read it according to the modern historical critical method, which seeks, not to hear the religious/moral message of the text with a view to obeying it, but to uncover the history of the composition of the present texts and to reconstruct the “true” historical events behind the text, neither of which we can know for sure. Peterson takes the biblical texts seriously as speaking universal truth learned in genuine encounters with the divine. Unlike modern historical interpretation, Peterson finds an existentially relevant and religiously compelling message in the Bible. It articulates a command built into human nature that we must obey or disobey. Once we have heard it, we can never return to our naive secular existence.

The church, like Peterson, reads the Bible for its religious/moral message. Unlike Peterson, however, the church reads the Bible as its authoritative scripture, as the normative story by which it measures all its teaching, theological and moral. But it does not contradict the ecclesial reading of the Bible to read it also as a witness to the universal human “perceptions of the divine” as does Peterson. Believers read the Bible as more but not less than Peterson. And this is why a person who is not a Christian can recognize their experience in many biblical texts and a Christian can recognize their experience in some pagan and secular texts. God has not left himself without witness in nature and in human consciousness! Peterson is on the side of the angels here. In my view, then, Christian preachers, teachers, apologists, and theologians could make good use of his work and the work of others like him.

Next Time: Perhaps I will follow up these essays with some reflections on Peterson’s moral and social ideas.

How to Read Jordan Peterson, We Who Wrestle With God: Perceptions of the Divine

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A Reading Guide

I just finished reading Jordan Peterson’s most recent book, We Who Wrestle With God: Perceptions of the Divine. In this 505-page, quirky, provocative book Peterson wrestles with certain biblical characters and stories, among which are the creation story, the fall, Cain and Abel, Abraham, Moses, and Jonah. As my essay title indicates, I will not be doing a full review. My aim, rather, is to give you my perspective on what the book is and is not, what it does and does not do; that is to say, I want to help you get the most out of reading it.

What the Book is Not

Not Christian Theology

Don’t read this book as if it were an exercise in Christian theology. Peterson is not a theologian. You will completely miss its important message if you measure his interpretations by the standards of Christian theology, orthodox, progressive, or liberal. Mistakenly reading it in this way will lead you to think at one moment that he is orthodox, the next heretical, and the next completely off the wall. Peterson does not read the Bible as the canonical scripture of the Christian church and does not adopt the methods and language of Christian theology. Don’t critique the book for not doing well what it makes no pretense of doing at all.

Not philosophy

We Who Wrestle is not a book of philosophy. Peterson is not a philosopher and does not attempt to deduce a system of metaphysics from self-evident axioms. Nor does he use logical analysis to clarify traditional philosophical problems and arguments. It’s not philosophy of science, philosophy of religion, moral philosophy, or philosophical anthropology. The book is much too mystical, hermeneutical, eclectic, and as I said above, quirky for that. Indeed, at points it reads like a stream of consciousness riff on a theme. So, don’t look for an internally consistent philosophy. You will be disappointed.

Not Christian Apologetics

Peterson is not a Christian apologist, though he could be mistaken for one. Peterson often asserts the “truth” of the religious and moral message of the Bible. He speaks of “inspired” prophets who open themselves to “revelations” of the “divine” and “reality.” And he consistently uses the words “God” “spirit” and “Logos” to refer to the highest Reality toward which we should aim. We should not, however, assume that he uses these words in exactly the same sense as they are used in the worship and theology of the Christian church. He does not. And he always qualifies assertions of “truth” and “reality” with question marks or other markers of tentativeness. In the end, Peterson poses the question of the “reality” of the divine as a decision between directing one’s aspirations toward the good, true, and beautiful or surrendering to the downward pull of evil, falsehood and the ugly. God is defined as the adequate ground of all we hold to be worthy of highest human aspiration. Listen to these words from his conclusion:

All these great, profound and unalterably memorable stories are characterizations of God…God is presented as the unity that exists at the foundation or stands at the pinnacle. In the absence of that unity, there is either nothing that brings together and harmonizes, in which case there is a deterioration into anarchy and chaos, or there are the various replacements that immediately swoop in, in their foul way, to usurp and dominate: the spirit of power that characterizes the Luciferian realm and produces the scarlet beast of the degenerate state. Does that make the divine real? This is a matter of definition, in the final analysis—and therefore of faith. It is real insofar as its pursuit makes pain bearable, keeps anxiety at bay, and inspires the hope that springs eternal in the human breast. It is real insofar as it establishes the benevolent and intelligible cosmic order…It is real as the force that opposes pride and calls those who sacrifice improperly to their knees. It is real as the further reaches of the human imagination, striving fully upward (pp. 502-504).

Not Historical and Literary Study

Peterson does not interpret the Bible in the traditional ecclesiastical or the modern historical and literary way. Don’t expect to learn much about the historical context of the events recounted in the texts or the setting and process of their literary composition. He does not concern himself with whether or not the events recounted in Genesis, the rest of the Pentateuch or Jonah really happened. Interestingly, Peterson’s method of interpretation has more in common with patristic and medieval than modern interpretation. The church fathers and medieval interpreters read the scriptures on four levels: literal, moral, allegorical, and anagogical or spiritual. The word “anagogical” means “leading upward.” In other words, to interpret biblical texts in an anagogical way means to seek in the text a mystical or spiritual truth about God and the soul. Peterson does something similar. He seeks evidence in biblical texts of human “perceptions of the divine.” The medieval interpreters were guided by their conviction that God spoke in the texts and if we purify ourselves and listen carefully, we can hear his voice speaking deep truths and mysteries. Similarly, Peterson assumes that these texts, as evidenced by their power to shape definitively and inescapably the culture we live in—that is, what we consider to be good, true, and beautiful—have proved themselves reservoirs of deep truth about the divine and the human. This truth, these perceptions, is what Peterson seeks to articulate.

Not Psychology, Sociology, or Politics

Peterson is a psychologist and draws on his knowledge and experience as a therapist. But this book is not a book of psychology. Despite his many studied observations, opinions and off-handed comments about society and the political order, do not read the book as primarily about society or the state.

What the Book is

A Study of “Perceptions of the Divine”

As the subtitle indicates, Peterson listens to the biblical stories for “perceptions of the Divine.” Think about each word in this expression. First, these “perceptions” are human perceptions. The place where the divine is perceived is in the human psyche; hence the book is a study of the human soul as the locus of divine revelation, not a theology that attempts to speak about God in himself. Second, to perceive is not the same as to think or to theorize. Perception is, if not precognitive, at least preconceptual. In perception, we meet a reality that causes changes in us that we feel but cannot yet name. Peterson is careful to warn us that our “perceptions” of the divine can never be exhaustively translated into clear thought. God is always beyond our comprehension. Third, Peterson speaks in his subtitle of the “divine.” The “divine” is a general term that covers many different “characterizations” of the divine. Whereas “perceptions of the divine” are universal in human experience, the divine is named and characterized only in specific religious traditions. This book is about the universal human openness to and experience of the infinite, the upward call toward perfect unity and perfection, which as Peterson reminds us many times, is “by definition” the divine (e.g., p. 234).

A Phenomenology of “Homo Religiosus”

Peterson does not preface his book with a discussion of his methodology. He talks a bit about meaning and paradigmatic and archetypical stories. And when I hear such discussions I think of the psychology of C.G. Jung, the scholar of archaic religion Mircea Eliade, and phenomenologist of religious experience Rudolph Otto. Having read the book, I would characterize Peterson’s method as a phenomenology of “homo religiosus” (Eliade) or the religious human being. Phenomenology is the study of how things come to appear in human consciousness. Peterson listens to biblical texts, which were produced by prophets and deeply religious individuals, for their perceptions of the divine. That is to say, how and in what ways did the divine—the highest and the best—come to appear in their consciousness? And what kind of transformations happen to people who perceive the divine and made the sacrifices required to respond appropriately?

According to Peterson, these biblical texts voice something universally human. The book’s title is We Who Wrestle With God; not “They” or ‘Those” but “We.” Peterson challenges his readers to understand themselves as part of the “We.” Human beings by virtue of their humanity have no choice but to wrestle with God. The divine is always near, pressing in on us, calling us upward. Our destiny as individuals and as a society will be determined by whether we obey the upward call or in sloth or malice sink downward into chaos and destruction.

Next Time: In Part Two I will propose some ways the book can be useful to the individual Christian, the church, and society.

Was Jesus Really “Invisible” in Your Grandmother’s Church?

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I just read Scot McKnight and Tommy Phillips, Invisible Jesus: A Book About Leaving the Church and Looking for Jesus (Zondervan, 2024). I will not do a chapter-by-chapter review, but I want to share my thoughts.

The Argument

I decided to read this book for two reasons. First, one of the authors Scot McKnight wrote a very kind endorsement for my book, God, Freedom & Human Dignity (2013), and he is an insightful author. Second, I am also interested in the subject it addresses. A student in my current (Fall 2024) theology class brought to my attention his own process of “deconstruction” and return to faith. At first, I was confused because to me “deconstruction” refers to the French theory of literary interpretation, which assumes that works of literature never merely tell the truth or a good story but always construct a fictional world designed to preserve the power structures that advantage the author. The job of the interpreter is to sniff out (deconstruct) the ways the text seeks to deceive and dominate the reader. But I learned from the Invisible Jesus that the term “deconstruction” is now being used of people rethinking their Christian faith in critical ways. I suppose the term “deconstruction” fits what this group is doing because much of their critique focuses on exposing narratives that preserve abusive power structures within (mostly) evangelical and fundamentalist churches.

McKnight and Phillips paint a sympathetic picture of the “deconstructors.” They do not portray them as rebels, heretics, and anarchists. Deconstructors ask legitimate questions of their evangelical and fundamentalist churches. They challenge the hypocrisy of church leaders and question legalistic morality. They object to the church’s lack of concern for the poor and silence on racism and sexism. To them, the church seems too focused on money and right-wing politics. It’s too hierarchical, patriarchal, middle-class, and White. The deconstructors question the truth or importance of such doctrines as six-day creationism, male headship, ever-lasting punishment in hell, and the rapture.

McKnight and Phillips see deconstruction as a prophetic movement impelled by the Holy Spirit and in search of a Jesus-centered faith. Deconstruction is the negative side of many believers’ longing for a Jesus-shaped community of intimacy, generosity, equality, and inclusion. Deconstructors cannot see Jesus amid the institutional structures and activities of typical churches; hence the title of the book Invisible Jesus.

Analysis

Agreements

There is much to applaud in Invisible Jesus. Indeed, I made some of the same observations and critiques in my book Rethinking Church. Many churches are too clergy-dominated, stage-centered, and money-driven. We need to focus more on the Table of the Lord and small groups. Let every voice be heard. And let the way of Jesus, not corporate America, set the agenda. Amen! McKnight and Phillips are right to say that we ought to listen carefully and patiently to the deconstructors and learn from them.

Critical Observations

However I do have some concerns. (1) Over the last 5 to 10 years, exposing the evils of evangelicalism has become a cottage industry and a good strategy to get a book published by a major publisher.* I detect in McKnight and Phillips a mood that troubles me. Is it Uncharitableness? I don’t know how to characterize it. But there are many gratuitous barbs directed toward evangelicals. Perhaps this sharpness is related to the negative church experiences of the authors. Readers of the book will discover in the first chapter that both McKnight and Phillips think of themselves as deconstructors. They tell their own stories of deconstruction (pp. 5-10), which strikingly resemble the stories of many other deconstructors told in the book.

(2) In the opposite direction, McKnight and Phillips construct an almost wholly uncritical, even heroic, picture of the deconstructors. I don’t share their view. Do the deconstructors measure the faith of the churches they are leaving by the teachings of Jesus? Did they learn these lessons from Jesus alone? To the contrary, many of the deconstructors I know absorbed the values of progressive secular culture before or simultaneously with their departure from the evangelical church. And the Jesus they admire seems to champion secularized versions of toleration, peace, love, inclusion, equity, and diversity.

(3) It strikes me that the picture of a Jesus-centered church painted by Invisible Jesus is utopian or at least unhelpfully abstract. The real living church has always been imperfect and impure. The weeds always mix with the wheat. There will be disagreements even within a “Jesus-centered” church about what it means to be Jesus-centered! The authors leave the nature of this ideal church underdeveloped. Yes…we must love God and our neighbors, be kind, tolerant, take care of the needs of the hungry, naked, and homeless. But does doctrine, that is, the full range of biblical teaching, matter at all? Are there any rules for making sure that the powerful force of sexual attraction is used for good and not evil? What about marriage and divorce and abortion and LGBTQ+ ways of living? Is there any type of authority in the church?

(4) Perhaps I find myself somewhat critical of Invisible Jesus because McKnight and Phillips are writing to a different audience and dealing with a different problem than that with which I am most concerned. I do not deny that the evangelical movement is in trouble, and for many of the reasons treated in Invisible Jesus and other recent books. It’s just that I don’t live there. The people I am pastoring (especially my students) are being crushed not by evangelicals but by progressives. Where I live (the West Coast) the dominant culture is secular and hostile to any form of Christianity that takes the Bible seriously. For me, to write a book critiquing evangelicals would be smashing through an open door, jumping on the band wagon, beating a dead horse. I have no desire to take the devil’s side when the devil is already winning!

(5) Invisible Jesus implies but does not construct an alternative vision of faith and life of the people of God. I suppose we will have to wait for the authors’ next book. But if history is a good teacher, when you reject a Bible-based evangelical theology, an almost irresistible logic carries you all the way to Liberalism.

*See my review of Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (Liveright, 2021) from August 2022.

Unanswered Questions

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Two recent experiences provoked me to reflect on the disparity between what I want to know and how much I actually know. To live at peace with this disparity, I’ve had to develop strategies for dealing with my ignorance without falling into skepticism or dogmatism. I share three of those lessons below.

Two Humbling Experiences

First. My newspaper never arrives before I finish breakfast! For this reason, I keep my Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church on the dining table. This amazing resource contains 1798 double-column pages and many thousands of entries of relevance to church history. It begins with “Aaron” the brother of Moses and ends with “Zwingli” the Swiss reformer. I learn something new, interesting, and useful every morning. But I am also stung with something I’d rather not think about. Almost every time I read from that huge book I am reminded of my ignorance and my insignificance: the millions of lives lived, experiences had, institutions founded, and systems created.

Second. Recently, a long-time friend with whom I have not spoken in years called to catch up. During the course of our conversation, he asked what I thought of the state of the church in the United States. Perhaps he thought that because I’ve taught theology for 35 years to thousands of students from two generations I would have a grasp on what things had been, how they have changed, and where they stand. After a few lame attempts to say something intelligent, I think I said, “I really don’t know.”

You must understand that I’ve always had a passion to know, to understand my world, the flow of human history and my place in it. As a young person I had questions to which I needed answers. How can you act intelligently in a world you do not understand? So, I read and read. I read the Bible, theology, the history of nations, church history, and philosophy. Hundreds of books and tens of thousands of pages! I found satisfactory answers to some of my questions. But many more remain, and new ones arise almost every day.

The first lesson: know your ignorance. Perhaps I should say “feel” your ignorance, because you cannot know the extent of what you do not know. Speak and act with humility and caution.

Big Picture Theories

Of course, there is no shortage of big picture theories. Theories of society and politics, metaphysical theories, theories of human nature, climate futurology, economic theories, and theological visions. Comprehensive theories give us an illusory feeling of omniscience, of knowing the essential truth of all things. Perhaps that is why we like them. But there is no consensus about which theories are true. For abstract theories paint only the vaguest general outlines of their subject matter. They cannot be verified, for they do not create transparent understanding of why things in all their intricate interrelations are exactly as they are.

Our minds long for simplicity and clarity. Simplicity allows us to see the whole thing at one instant, and clarity gives us confidence that we see things as they truly are. Mathematical knowledge is the paradigm case of simplicity and clarity. Physics is the most mathematical of the natural sciences. But what you gain in certainty and clarity of knowledge you lose in descriptive power. For there is more to nature than quantity, much more! Knowing the basic physical/mathematical laws of matter does not give you the power to describe the actual state of the vast array of different kinds of things we experience in the universe. Such non-mathematical theories as we find in psychology, sociology, economics, and politics must be abstract, simple, and general for us to understand them. Like theories in physics, theories that deal with human behavior, insofar as they are abstract, simple, general, offer little help in understanding why things are the way they are in all their actuality.

The Second lesson: The wise person will avoid mistaking theory for actuality or the model for the thing. Theory never exhaustively explains actuality. Let the model direct your attention to the thing.

First-Hand Experience

We all know the limits of first-hand experience. No individual human being’s experience extends to every place and time. The very purpose of education is to make available to each individual the experiences and insights of countless other individuals from other places and times. It is the distinctive glory of humanity that we are not limited in knowledge and wisdom to our natural instincts or to what we can learn from our own experiences. Still, each individual must integrate information received from diverse sources into a unified whole centered in themselves. We are limited to the information we receive and to our powers of integration; we cannot leap outside of ourselves to get a God’s-eye point of view. Nor can we know how well our limited vision of things corresponds to a universal consciousness.

Though we must acknowledge the limits of our knowledge, few of us can believe that one individual’s vision of the world bears no resemblance to those of other individuals or to that of a universal consciousness. For this belief would render futile all attempts to learn from each other, to understand each other, or to achieve consensus. And why strive for a common vision apart from the conviction that this common vision bears some resemblance to reality? For then we would be limited to exploring the internal powers and possible objects of the human mind without reference to the way things truly are.

Now let’s revisit my two humbling experiences mentioned above. Admittedly, I cannot come to know and understand the experiences, thoughts and deeds of every human being who has ever lived. However, if I assume that all human beings possess the same powers, possibilities and weaknesses, I can learn more and more about my own humanity by studying the history of the human spirit in the lives of past individuals. (Reading entries from the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church makes sense after all!) Making the same assumption—that all human beings possess the same powers, possibilities and weaknesses—and thinking in the reverse direction, I can learn better to understand the experiences of other people by examining carefully my own first-hand experiences.

As I stumbled to answer my friend’s question about the state of the church in the United States, I ended up saying something like this: “I can’t speak from extensive, detailed knowledge of the big picture, but I can tell you how it looks from where I stand.” This humble and cautious approach seemed to satisfy my friend. He could compare his limited perspective with my limited perspective in a process that promised to clarify and supplement his understanding. Combined together many limited perspectives may move us all closer to the goal of comprehensive understanding.

The Third Lesson: Avoid both arrogance and despair (or dogmatism and skepticism) in your quest for true understanding. Listen carefully and dialogue respectfully to all voices and allow them to clarify and purify your first-hand understanding of the matter at issue.

“The Workers are Few”

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It seems that we have heeded only too well James’s admonition that not many of us should become teachers (James 3:1). But not for the same reason! James finishes his warning with these words: “because you know that we who teach will be judged more strictly.” I doubt that the prevailing ignorance and lack of good teaching in the church today can be attributed to the fear of the Lord.

The Need

Many of you know what it is like to feel called to preach the gospel and teach the faith and to feel overwhelmed with the task. We feel something like what Jesus may have felt as he looked at the people:

When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. Then he said to his disciples, “The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field” (Matthew 9:36-38).

It takes so long to bring a believer to maturity! Paul felt it:

My dear children, for whom I am again in the pains of childbirth until Christ is formed in you, how I wish I could be with you now and change my tone, because I am perplexed about you (Galatians 4:19-20).

We want to train others so that our work can be multiplied, but sometimes our teaching does not seem to bear fruit. The writer of Hebrews expressed this frustration in these words:

We have much to say about this, but it is hard to make it clear to you because you no longer try to understand. In fact, though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you the elementary truths of God’s word all over again. You need milk, not solid food! Anyone who lives on milk, being still an infant, is not acquainted with the teaching about righteousness. But solid food is for the mature, who by constant use have trained themselves to distinguish good from evil (Hebrews 5:11-14).

There is so much work that needs doing and there are so few who can do it. I am not speaking here about a shortage of seminary-trained, professional clergy. Indeed, we need more of those too! But I am thinking about a shortage of individuals willing to prepare themselves to be volunteer or part-time teachers, spiritual mentors, and leaders of God’s people.

The Call

If you are open to preparing yourself to teach, mentor, and lead others or you know of someone (man or woman) who is open to this, this essay is for you. Perhaps you cannot devote several years of your life to studying theology in a college, graduate school, or seminary. But that does not mean that you cannot embark on a course of self-education in theology. Today I want briefly to set forth the basic principles of theological education.

The Preparation

In Part Three of my recent four-part series “A Time for Orthodoxy” (September 15, 2024), I highlighted the three basic factors that must be brought to bear on any debate about what the church should believe and teach: scripture, tradition, and office. In one of the concluding paragraphs, I said this:

Scripture, tradition and office provide mutual support and together are often called “the three-legged stool.” All three of these authorities are necessary for preserving the identity and unity of the Church, the Christian college and other parachurch institutions. Church leaders would be completely powerless to make and enforce decisions if they could not appeal to Scripture as the prime authority to give divine sanction to their decisions. And if tradition has no recognized authority for the community, leaders cannot convincingly assert their interpretation of Scripture as the true one!

Because Scripture and tradition play such indispensable roles in the teaching function of the church, anyone who would teach, lead, and guide the church must know them well enough to apply them to whatever problems arise. Hence the study of Scripture and tradition are essential to the preparation of church teachers at whatever level.

Study Scripture

Above all, a teacher of God’s people must know the scriptures. You need to become familiar with the entire Old and New Testaments: narratives, law, history, poetry, prophecy, and gospel. This step though elementary is fundamental, for you cannot understand that with which you are not familiar. One can read the Bible on many levels and for many legitimate reasons. Most often people read it looking for encouraging examples of faith, morality tales or rules, or devotional thoughts. And these are legitimate reasons, but apart from the next step they do not produce understanding. To understand, we must also read the Bible for its cumulative image of the nature, character, and purposes of God and for its picture of the nature, condition, and duties of human beings to God.

Study Tradition

The Bible is the norm for all Christian doctrine. Sadly, however, some people misunderstand or twist the scriptures to fit their own private preferences. As I argued in the four-part series I mentioned above, the church’s widespread and long-term understanding of Scripture, which we call “tradition,” should carry more weight than the private musings of one individual. Hence your self-education in theology must include the study of church history. From the first to the twenty-first century, the church has faced many crises and challenges. It has produced many brilliant and spiritual individuals. It has filled whole libraries with profound studies of the faith. And anyone who would be a teacher of God’s people today must have some familiarity with the church of the past.

Two Proverbs

In carrying out the project I am envisioning we need to keep in mind the wisdom voiced in two contrary proverbs:

“A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.”

If you don’t keep in mind the limits of what you know you will become arrogant and reckless. Most heresy is created by mistaking a partial truth for the whole truth.

“Something is infinitely better than nothing.”

Because, having read the Bible and a few good books on the history of the church you are much less susceptible to being deceived by ignorant or unscrupulous teachers. And you can warn others away from false and unhealthy teaching.

Next Time: I hope to return to this theme for more detailed advice about the best way to educate yourself in theology.

What Keeps You Up at Night?

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Interviewers often ask FBI directors, generals and diplomats the question, “What keeps you up at night?” It’s a simple way of asking about the most pressing dangers facing the nation or the world. Today I want to answer this question in my own case.

Interviewer: Professor Highfield, as a student of church history, Christian theology, and contemporary culture, what keeps you up at night? What dangers currently threatening the church do you see that less observant people may not see?

Highfield: Indeed, I have given much of my life to study and observation of all things Christian. Also, I have given much attention to the cultures with which Christianity has interacted for 2,000 years. However, despite all that study I still feel like I am groping in the dark. The world is far too complicated for one person to grasp. Nevertheless, I will give you my take on your question.

Interviewer: That is all my audience can ask.

Highfield: One more thing before I answer your question. I want to make it clear that I believe firmly in the comprehensive providential care of the infinitely wise and good God. Nothing can separate us from “the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:39).

Interviewer: Understood.

Highfield: What keeps me up at night? I am most alarmed by the rapidity with which the younger generations in the church are assimilating to the mind and behavior patterns of the surrounding culture and abandoning traditional Christianity. In the history of Christianity there have been many crises, defections, and heretical movements. From Judas who betrayed the Lord onward there has been a steady stream of traitors and deserters. I am aware of this. So, I am not claiming that this latest crisis is unprecedented. Only that it is different from anything I’ve seen during my life.

Interviewer: Could you unpack your thoughts for us. What exactly are these young generations finding in the surrounding culture that they are not finding in traditional Christianity? Why? And why now?

Highfield: I will state this as concisely as I can. The secular culture appeals primarily to our lower natures, as John says, “the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye, and the pride of life” (1 John 2:16). It offers an easy way to pleasure, excitement, freedom, and happiness. Just follow the inclinations of your desires. In an unflattering contrast, popular culture pictures traditional Christianity as unnatural, backward, and unhappy. Christianity’s ethic of obedience, humility, self-discipline, and prudence, contemporary culture sneers, is as boring as it is antiquated.

Interviewer: Is that all there is to it? Young people have always been tempted to “sow their wild oats” before they come to their senses later in life.

Highfield: I was just about to address that issue. The secular culture wraps its sensuality in appeals to youthful idealism. Secular culture was not created exclusively by its rebellion against Christianity’s strictures on sexual excess, drunkenness, and other modes of self-indulgence. It also inherited certain ideals that it combined with its pleasure-seeking core. Among these are freedom, tolerance, respect, and dignity. In Christianity, these ideals fit perfectly with faith, obedience, and self-discipline. Popular culture, however, uses the rhetoric of these ideals to construct a view of the self whose inherent freedom and dignity give it a kind of moral independence that supposedly deserves respect from others. We are told that each individual is unique and must be left free to seek happiness in their own way.

Interviewer: So, secular culture uses Christian ideals to lure young Christians away from their Christianity?

Highfield: Precisely! Well…almost. In Christianity, “freedom” is the God-empowered state of exemption from the destructive powers of sin and death. In popular culture, freedom is the ability to indulge your desires as you please. In Christianity, we are sometimes allowed to tolerate behaviors we condemn. In secular culture, to tolerate means to approve. In Christianity, dignity is rooted in our God-imaging nature. In secular culture, a sense of our dignity comes out in asserting our rights to self-determination.

Interviewer: And young people are fooled by this rhetoric?

Highfield: Sort of. When young people hear these ideals used to justify a life of self-indulgence and criticize traditional Christianity, I am not sure they are completely fooled. The human tendency toward self-deception is very strong. But invocation of these twisted virtues gives the impression of moral superiority. And that moral fig leaf combined with the pull of the flesh and desire for acceptance by the majority culture explains why so many are taken in.

Interviewer: But why are so many so vulnerable to such deception? And what can be done to make them less vulnerable?

Highfield: I wish I knew the definitive answers to your questions. However, I do have some thoughts. First, I think most of us are unaware of how deeply embedded in the Western psyche the ideal of the independent, self-creating individual is, and how anti-Christian it is. Our political rhetoric and all our institutions—even many of our churches—idealize the individual’s freedom to choose their own path to happiness free from subservience to any lord. This pattern of thought is woven into every level of society and every social activity. So, when the time is ripe for secular society to use the rhetoric of freedom and individualized happiness to subvert traditional Christianity, young Christians fall by the millions.

Interviewer: Why now? Why was the time ripe?

Highfield: Again, you are asking a question to which only God knows the answer. I am sure it is much more complicated than this. But I believe this precipitous fall results from generations of ever more thorough assimilation to an ever more secular culture. It was not as precipitous as it seemed. The churches, the grandparents and parents of the current generation failed. They failed to understand and teach the true nature of the inner rot and godlessness of modern culture. They failed to understand and teach the true inner nature of the Christian faith and way of life. They failed to understand and teach the true nature of Christian freedom, dignity, and joy and how these ideals fit perfectly with faith, obedience, and self-discipline. They failed to understand and teach how to love God truly and keep ourselves from idols.

Interviewer: What can be done to slow or reverse this crisis?

Highfield: I dearly wish I knew. Until God visits us with revival on a large scale, all I know to do is repent and urge others to repent of our negligence. Church leaders need to repent of their superficiality, get educated, and grow a backbone. Parents need to repent of worldly ambition and childish self-centeredness, teach their children, and get their families involved in a like-minded group of believers.

Interviewer: So, that is what keeps you up at night?

Highfield: Yes. I pray I am wrong, but I don’t see it changing on a large scale until it gets much worse. But it can change for your church and your family. It starts with you and me. Who knows, God may yet surprise us with a great outpouring of his Spirit. Come Holy Spirit!

Without God, Without Soul, Without Heart

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The Postmodern University

In the previous essay we examined Julia Schleck’s defense* of the postmodern university. Though she admits that the postmodern university no longer believes in knowledge, truth, and virtue in the traditional senses of these terms, she nevertheless argues that society ought to grant professors academic freedom and tenure and generous financial support even though they engage in activities that seem destructive, useless or perverse to most people. My somewhat tongue in cheek paraphrase of her argument goes like this:

Trust us with your children and your money. Give us unfettered freedom, good pay, and lifetime employment. But don’t expect us to answer to you or explain why your investments are sound.

With Scheck’s argument in mind, I want to contrast the idea of a Christian college with her description of the postmodern university. As I observed in my former essay,

A university that no longer believes in knowledge, truth, or virtue no longer believes in itself. As far as I can tell, its driving purpose is maintenance of a system that provides faculty unfettered freedom, good pay, and lifetime employment in exchange for expressing their private opinions in esoteric vocabularies.

By rejecting all presupposed knowledge, truth, and virtue, the postmodern university loses its purpose, forfeits its prospects for progress, and gives up any measure by which we could judge its outcomes. To the casual observer, the postmodern university’s rejection of all “dogmas,” presuppositions, and time-honored truths, and its openness to strange and unpopular ideas may seem the epitome of enlightenment and a fine formula for uncovering new truth. But in this “the casual observer” is completely mistaken. For as described by Schleck, the postmodern university is not about discovering true and useful ideas. It’s about winning a struggle for power and money. The postmodern university replaces knowledge, truth, and virtue with ideology, power, and pretense.

The Christian College

A Christian college worthy of its name believes in knowledge, truth, and virtue; therefore, it believes in itself. Hence it can devote itself energetically to achieving its purpose. Its knowledge is faith, its truth is God and God’s creation, and its virtue is the way of Jesus Christ.

Faith Knowledge

The founding principle of the Christian college is faith, the apostolic faith preached and preserved for us in the New Testament. Far from viciously restricting our search for understanding and truth, faith points us toward truth and away from idols and ideologies. It protects us from evil, immoral, and superstitious paths. The knowledge of faith serves as a foundation on which to build our understanding of God, the world, and ourselves. Faith provides a language within which every discipline and every professor in the college can communicate with every other. Faith, sincerely held by every member of the college community, unifies the Christian college in a way the postmodern university can never achieve.

Transcendent Truth

Because it believes in God the Creator of heaven and earth, the Christian college believes in an objective reality. For God is unchanging and eternal and is the Creator of all else. Truth is the conceptual form of reality and knowledge is the form of a mind in which dwells truth. In faith, the Christian college believes it possesses knowledge of God centrally and principally in Jesus Christ who is the living truth of God manifest in the world. And with respect to this knowledge, its purpose is twofold: (1) to pass this knowledge to the next generation unchanged and (2) to seek deeper understanding of the truth in all its dimensions. Every discipline and every professor is united in this purpose. All seek to know God and God’s works in truth.

True Virtue

A Christian college worthy of its name looks to Jesus Christ as the model for its conduct. There are not two systems of virtue, one for the church and one for the Christian college. Jesus Christ is the Lord of both. The way of Jesus is obedience to the Father; his is the way of humility, faith, love, hope, peace, and patience. The Christian college affirms the teaching of Jesus and his chosen apostles as the normative guide for our relationships to others and the use of our bodies. We are not allowed to do as we please with regard to money, power, sex, and honor. We must bring our words and deeds under the sanctifying and strengthening power of the Spirit. For the postmodern university “virtue” is a mere strategy for attaining power, a Darwinian struggle for money, control, and honor. It should not be so in a Christian college.

Freedom Versus Freedom

At first glance, the postmodern university seems to offer more freedom than does the Christian college. Professors have the freedom to reject Christian faith and traditional morality and to affirm atheism, immoralism, and perversity. They can blaspheme the holy, praise the profane, and parade the ugly without sanction. And they can teach their students to do the same. Christian colleges do not allow professors these freedoms, and true Christians do not want them. On the other hand, postmodern universities do not allow believing faculty to affirm Christian faith and interpret the world under the guidance of the Christian faith. And postmodern universities have their own dogmas, sacred cows, and lists of virtues and vices. They will not tolerate the blasphemies of sexism, homophobia, and transphobia; you may not speak against their sacraments: fornication, adultery, and abortion.

The Christian college holds a different view of freedom. There is no freedom in the power to do evil, only blindness and slavery to lust and pride. True freedom is God-given power to know the truth and do the good. Since Christian colleges believe in knowledge, truth, and virtue, they encourage believing faculty to teach and research under the guidance of their Christian faith. Students can learn from faculty who are so guided. Instructed by faith, Christian faculty can pursue the truth of God and creation with confidence, energy, and hope. And this is the freedom I cherish!

*Dirty Knowledge: Academic Freedom in the Age of Neoliberalism, University of Nebraska Press, 2022).

What is the Purpose of a University that No Longer Believes in Knowledge, Truth, or Virtue?

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Many of you know that I am very interested in the current state of higher education. Lately, I’ve been reading books about academic freedom. Most of my reading focuses on academic freedom in Christian colleges and universities. Today, however, I want to share my review of a book that sheds light on the present state of secular higher education:

Julia Schleck, Dirty Knowledge: Academic Freedom in the Age of Neoliberalism, University of Nebraska Press, 2022.

In this book, Julia Schleck attempts to defend the traditional practice of granting university faculty the special privileges of academic freedom and tenure, which employees in other lines of work do not enjoy. As her book title hints, she describes the challenges that the rise of the “neoliberal” model of the university poses to academic freedom. Her proposal for dealing with these challenges centers on the concept of “dirty knowledge.”

The Challenge

The term “neoliberalism” refers to a late 20th century political philosophy that argues that “a society’s political and economic institutions should be robustly liberal and capitalist, but supplemented by a constitutionally limited democracy and a modest welfare state” (See “Neoliberalism,” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). According to Schleck, neoliberalism subordinates social/moral goods to economic goods and reduces group rights to individual rights. Applied to the university, neoliberalism measures the worth of knowledge production and student learning by their direct and immediate economic impact on society in producing qualified workers, new technology, and goods for the market. The public, politicians, governing boards, and administrators increasingly view the university as a business that should produce a near-term return on investments made by donors, students, granting agencies, and tax payers. University boards and administrators act as CEOs and managers of this knowledge business.

As a result of the university’s assimilation to neoliberalism, academic freedom is no longer understood as a privilege necessary for practicing the profession of professor. It is reconceived, rather, as a right of the individual citizen-professor almost totally assimilated to the constitutional right to free speech. In Schleck’s estimation, the focus on the individual professor weakens the idea of the professorate as a self-governing community of experts. Instead, professors become employees with employee and citizen rights. The turn to individual rights disperses the collective power the professorate traditionally used to protect the professorial vocation against violations of academic freedom. Not only so, in this new environment academic disciplines experience greater difficulty defending competent colleagues from censorship and disciplining incompetent or rogue professors.

Moreover, according to Schleck, one of the greatest threats to academic freedom in the neoliberal university is the division of professors into the tenured elite and the mass of contingent faculty. In theory, the contingent faculty (nearly 70% of all university teachers!) have “academic freedom” conceived along the lines of freedom of speech. But they have limited contracts that expire at designated dates. Hence not only are they underpaid and overworked; they are vulnerable to contract nonrenewal without recourse to the juridical procedures afforded to tenured professors. This practice allows boards and administrators to work around academic freedom rules in these cases. Increasingly, then, academic freedom is reserved for an elite few, not for all who engage in the profession. And sometimes, the elite tenured professors are the greatest threats to the academic freedom of the untenured and contingent faculty.

Two Proposed Solutions

What can be done to protect academic freedom today? Some urge a return to the original 1915 AAUP rationale for giving professors special privileges (academic freedom and tenure) not given to other employees, that is, society needs a professorate devoted to the public good. To devote themselves to the public good wholeheartedly, professors need to be free from the narrow interests of donors and board members and the fear of losing their livelihoods. Schleck warns, however, against getting too nostalgic about the good ole days. First, the idea of the “public good” will most likely be assimilated to neoliberal culture with its focus on productivity and economic value. Second, the “public good” as understood in 1915 was neither public nor good; it left out women, the poor, people of color, and other “invisible” groups.

A second proposal urges unionizing the faculty and engaging in hard-hitting collective bargaining. Schleck admits that unions can negotiate better pay, benefits and working conditions for professors. But unions still work within the neoliberal framework, treating professors as “labor” and the administration and board as “management.” The unionized professorate falls short of a self-governing profession that can justify its traditional privileges, that is academic freedom and tenure.

Schleck’s “Dirty Knowledge” Solution

Schleck proposes a model of academic freedom fitted to the university as it exists today. According to Schleck, the university of today is thoroughly postmodern. The university does not recognize any viewpoint as “true” or “good” or any one method of creating knowledge as superior to others. Hence academic freedom can no longer be defended with the rhetoric of the disinterested pursuit of truth or service to the highest good. These qualities no longer (if they ever did) describe the work of the professorate. The professors and disciplines of the postmodern university are overtly political, combative, and activist. They are warriors fighting for power to advance their causes.

Hence Schleck proposes that we reconceive academic freedom as “agonistic academic freedom,” that is, freedom to fight for your truth, your good and your knowledge, that is, for whatever helps your cause to achieve power. The university must not be expected to serve any one vision of “the public good.” It is only out of the refereed clash of ideas that society will be shaped and moved into the future. She states succinctly her vision of the postmodern university in her last paragraph:

“The knowledge produced and disseminated at universities has always been and will always be dirty, shot through with the politics and material inequities that characterize our society at large. Providing a special space for those contentions and an especially strong set of contenders is what the university offers to our democracy, and it is why it should continue to be funded by our communities. Like a wild profusion of plants, professors compete for the resources they need to generate the intellectual seeds specific to their form of life, seeds that universities will continue to store in the expectation that someday we as a society will need them to maintain and improve our quality of life, or even to perpetuate our species on earth. Universities should be sure to foster with a deliberate distribution of material resources the strangest, least useful, and most contrarian of these plants to ensure that we have the diversity we need to survive the coming storms. This new grounding for academic freedom gives us a better rationale for the renewal of the special employment protections under which previous generations of faculty have flourished. Such a renewal will enable us once again to reach for the heavens in our pursuit of knowledge, without forgetting that we are firmly rooted in the dirt” (pp. 116-117).

Critical Comments and Questions

Schleck’s book deserves thorough analysis and critique. But I will limit myself to a few observations.

(1) Her analysis of the challenges to academic freedom and the goals of higher education deserves thoughtful consideration: the commodification and monetization of the university’s contribution to society; the use of contingent employees for 70% of the faculty, and the assimilation of profession-based academic freedom to individual freedom of speech.

(2) I agree that unionization may be needed to secure better treatment for faculty and graduate student teaching assistants, and I agree that unionization falls short of the ideal of a self-governing profession. For it fails to ground its claim to the special privileges of academic freedom and tenure in publicly acknowledge values.

(3) Schleck is correct that there is no social consensus about the public good—at least not a very detailed consensus.

(4) But I am not clear how her proposal differentiates the university space from the public square where everyone is free to say whatever they wish. In her summary paragraph quoted above in full, she urges,

Providing a special space for those contentions and an especially strong set of contenders is what the university offers to our democracy, and it is why it should continue to be funded by our communities.

She attempts here to justify funding a “special place” for a “strong set of contenders” to engage in the clash of interests and ideas and the struggle for power. By what standards are the combatants (professors) deemed “strong,” that is competent? And who decides? Why can’t these functions be carried out in other places and by other people? Why pay and give people job security to do what every citizen is free to do?

Notice that she offers a public-good like rationale for granting a privileged space to the university. In the quote above, she hinted that the university offers something “to our democracy.” Apparently, then, promoting “democracy” is a foundational value she presupposes. And the traditional privileges granted to the professorate is valuable because it supports democracy. I am not sure how this works, because “democracy” itself is a contested concept in the postmodern university.

Using an ecological metaphor in which genetic diversity is of survival value, she outlines the postmodern university’s contributions in greater detail a bit later in these words:

Like a wild profusion of plants, professors compete for the resources they need to generate the intellectual seeds specific to their form of life, seeds that universities will continue to store in the expectation that someday we as a society will need them to maintain and improve our quality of life, or even to perpetuate our species on earth.

Society should support the contentious and seemingly useless discussions in the postmodern university because of their potential utility in the future. Again, Schleck appeals to a vague notion of public good. She urges society to tolerate what may seem to most people useless, ideological, destructive, godless, profane, extreme, angry, and racist discussions in view of the possibility that some of the ideas thus formulated will contribute to our future “quality of life.” One might ask about the scale on which a “quality of life” is measured.

Scheck seems particularly worried that the neoliberal university may not see the social value of such disciplines as her own. She is Professor of English at the University of Nebraska, specializing in Woman’s and Gender Studies. She says,

Universities should be sure to foster with a deliberate distribution of material resources the strangest, least useful, and most contrarian of these plants to ensure that we have the diversity we need to survive the coming storms. This new grounding for academic freedom gives us a better rationale for the renewal of the special employment protections under which previous generations of faculty have flourished.

Perhaps Scheck stretches the ecological metaphor beyond its applicability. For it makes sense to assume that nature never produces the useless, redundant and wrong, but human beings often produce nonsense and evil. She here urges toleration and even fostering of strange, useless, and contrarian studies in the postmodern university. I don’t think she thinks these studies are truly strange, useless, and contrary to all that is good and true. She speaks, rather, of the public’s untrained perceptions. But we must ask her this question: might not some ideas, theories, and fields of study generated by the postmodern university be truly strange, useless and contrary to all that is good and true? Should the university tolerate anything and everything? If she answers “Yes,” I return to my previous question about what distinguishes the university from the public square. If she answers “No,” I’d like to know how we judge between the tolerable and the intolerable.

Must the public blindly trust the community of scholars in a specialized area to judge between bad and good academic projects? Can we rule out the possibility that whole disciplines, subdisciplines and communities of scholars may be engaged in that which is truly “strange, useless, and contrary to all that is good and true”? Might not some disciplines simply be manifestations of mass kookiness? I don’t see in Schleck any rules for what counts as sound academic teaching, learning, and research and what does not. She seems to be saying to the public something like this: “Trust us with your children and your money. Give us unfettered freedom, good pay, and lifetime employment. But don’t expect us to answer to you or explain why your investments are sound.”

What, then, is the purpose of a university that no longer believes in knowledge, truth, or virtue? Julia Schleck tries valiantly to answer this question. She fails. And I am not convinced that anyone else could do a better job. Because, a “university” that no longer believes in knowledge, truth, or virtue no longer believes in itself. As far as I can tell, its driving purpose is maintenance of a system that provides faculty unfettered freedom, good pay, and lifetime employment in exchange for expressing their private opinions in esoteric vocabularies.

Is God Always on the Side of the Oppressed?

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In my previous essay I recounted my failed search for the Social-Justice Jesus. In reading through the Gospel of Matthew, I did not find a social revolutionary protesting systemic injustices or an advocate of the economic interests of one class in preference to another. Jesus was not a royalist, democrat, republican, anarchist, or a libertarian. In fact, I did not find Jesus preaching a worldly sociopolitical order at all. What I found was Jesus’s indictment of the greed, envy, lust, pride, and idolatry that corrupt every world order. And these vices find their home in every human heart.

Superficial Plausibility

Before I subject the assertion that “God is always on the side of the oppressed” to criticism, let’s consider its superficial plausibility. Interpreted in the most generous way I can imagine, the statement could be saying that God judges justly between the victims of injustice and their persecutors. God always rules in favor of the victim and against the perpetrator. Or, just as in a natural disaster, first responders help the worst injured before attending to the walking wounded and unscathed, God attends to those with the greatest need before he turns to those who need less. The former act embodies the principle of equal justice and the latter the principle of just proportionality or equity.

Liberation Theology

Unfortunately, those who assert that “God is always on the side of the oppressed” cannot be interpreted as merely asserting God’s justice and equity. That God favors the oppressed was a central claim of Latin American Liberation Theology, a creative fusion of Christianity and Marxism that became popular in North America in the 1970s. In the form I see it most often today, it replaces the economic categories of Karl Marx with those of race and gender.

“God [is]”

In the assertion that “God is always on the side of the oppressed,” we find at least four significant components that need to be clarified: (1) “God,” (2) “always,” (3) “on the side of,” and (4) “the oppressed.” Let’s assume that the “God” spoken of here is the God of the Bible, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. We must not, then, derive our picture of God from our own subjective ideals or a cultural image of a liberating power. We must, instead, examine the narratives and teaching of the Old and New Testaments. I do not have space here to construct a complete picture of the God of the Bible. But I think such a study would conclude that God is faithful, just, knowing, and merciful. God judges justly between the victim and the perpetrator of injustice. But there is more to consider.

“Always”

To say that God is always on the side of the oppressed is a bold claim, and I think it goes too far. Does “always” mean under all conditions, thoroughly, and in every respect? Even if an individual is treated unjustly in one respect might they not in other respects be guilty of sin, of injustice, greed, hatred, envy, lust, etc.? Is God a mere partisan who overlooks the sins of his friends because they are mistreated in some respects by individuals whom he does not favor? This “always” obscures the perfect unity of God’s judgment and mercy. Perhaps in human courts we must distinguish starkly between innocent and guilty parties, pure victims and pure perpetrators. But God judges the human heart, and no one is purely innocent.

“On the side of”

What does it mean to say that God is “on the side of” the oppressed? In the preceding paragraph I raised the possibility that this assertion makes God a mere partisan, motivated not by justice but by favoritism. What does the assertion say about the speaker? It sounds high-minded at first, but then you realize that implicit in the statement is a claim about the speaker: “I too am on the side of the oppressed. God and I are on the same side!” This claim does not place you in good company. During the American Civil War both the North and the South claimed that God was on their side as they slaughtered their brothers, sisters, and cousins. The present Russian Patriarch claims that God is on Putin’s side in “liberating” Ukraine. Iran, ISIS, Hezbollah, and Hamas cry “God is great!” as they slit the throats of pregnant Jewish women. For some, God is white. For others, God is black, or gay, or lesbian.

Sadly, history shows that when people claim that God is on their side, they often do so to justify using extralegal and immoral means to achieve their ends: violence, theft, genocide, betrayal, murder, rape, lying, and deception. In the Bible, God is the judge of all the earth; it is spiritually safer, then, to assume that God is not on anyone’s side! Perhaps we should focus on striving to be on God’s side, without, however, presuming that we actually are!

“The Oppressed”

Who are the “oppressed”? What does it mean to be oppressed or to be an oppressor? Each of the other terms in the sentence, “God is always on the side of the oppressed,” opens the door to mischief. But the concept of “the oppressed’ blows a hole in the wall. In contemporary progressive culture, the official list of the oppressed grows longer every day. It seems that everyone wants to be oppressed. People of color, black women, black lesbians, white lesbians, gay people of all colors, trans and bi, questioning, nonbinary, fat people, short people, indigenous people, differently abled…God is on your side always! In the case of these groups, what does oppression mean? Are they legally proscribed or stripped of civil rights? Have they had their goods confiscated unjustly? Are they prohibited from pursuing the professions or attending university? What makes a black, lesbian professor of law at Harvard or a gay Secretary of Transportation one of the world’s oppressed?

Again, what does it mean to be oppressed? What do all these people and groups listed above have in common that makes them oppressed? Of course, you can find instances, past and present, wherein members of these groups have been treated unfairly. But you can also find among these “oppressed” people rich, famous, powerful, and glamorous individuals. It seems that what they all have in common is that they are not white, straight, and male. Perhaps I am oversimplifying matters, but it seems to me that the ideology that determines who gets recognized as oppressed has been designed with one purpose in mind; to dethrone the group it views as having at the beginning of Western civilization illegitimately acquired hegemonic power to which it still clings.

What does it mean to be an oppressor in contemporary social theory? It does not mean that you cheat widows out of their houses and orphans out of their inheritances. Nor does it mean that you enslave people on the official list of oppressed groups. In fact, you may be a benefactor to widows, orphans, the homeless, and the poor. Or, indeed, you may be among the poor yourself. Nonetheless, if you are white, male, and straight you are an oppressor. And if God is on the side of the oppressed, God is not on your side. The only option for you is to engage in perpetual confession and continual penance for being born into privilege. And one of those penitential exercises is to repeat the assertion, “God is always on the side of the oppressed.”

Tear Down this Wall (Ephesians 2:14)

The New Testament envisions a community of brothers and sisters under Jesus Christ, indwelt, transformed, and made one by the Holy Spirit, forgiven, reconciled, and directed to the Father from whom all good things flow.

As a prisoner for the Lord, then, I urge you to live a life worthy of the calling you have received. 2 Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with one another in love. 3 Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace. 4 There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to one hope when you were called; 5 one Lord, one faith, one baptism; 6 one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all (Ephesians 4:1-5).

Judged by this standard, the assertion “God is always on the side of the oppressed,” as it is used by contemporary liberationist theologians is profoundly heretical; for dividing the church into oppressors and the oppressed is a grave sin against the unity of the body of Christ.

In Search of the Social-Justice Jesus

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I heard a fine sermon Sunday (9/22/24) about the subtle dangers of hypocrisy and the temptation to judge others by standards we cannot meet (Matthew 7:1-5). With our x-ray moral vision, we can detect microscopic faults in others but are blind to the huge train of sins we drag behind us! Ouch! It was a time for self-examination! I was struck with how comprehensive Jesus’s demand for individual conversion is; each of us must change from head to toe, inside and out, body and soul, act, being, and affections!

My Search for the Progressive Jesus

Now, don’t tell the preacher, but after reading Matthew 7:1-5, I turned back to Matthew 5 & 6 and forward all the way to the end of the Gospel of Matthew, looking for the social-justice Jesus progressive and liberal Christians keep talking about. I kept thinking: could it be that looking for systemic injustices perpetrated by “society” instead of examining our own lives is another way of evading Jesus’s demand for personal repentance? Is our obsession with systemic sins a modern form of the hypocrisy against which Jesus warned?

When I got home after church, I looked through the Gospels of Mark and Luke also. Still, no sign of a first-century Che Guevara, Angela Davis, or Ibram Kendi. Nor did I find a Democrat or Republican or Libertarian Jesus. He’s not American or Brazilian or Chinese or Indian. He’s not even Jewish in the political sense.

The Politics of Heaven

In the Gospels of Matthew and Mark, Jesus’s first public words were, “Repent, for the Kingdom of heaven has come near” (Matt 4:17; cf. Mark 1:15). There is not a single place where Jesus addresses impersonal “systems of privilege and oppression.” Not even one! Impersonal systems cannot repent or believe. In every case in which Jesus addresses the “poor,” “rich,” “self-righteous, “powerful,” “outcasts,” or the “oppressed” he speaks directly to individuals. Jesus proclaimed something much more radical, much more comprehensive than political reform or revolution. He proclaimed that the Kingdom of God is just around the corner. His requirements for entry to the Kingdom and his demands for life within the Kingdom are completely unrealistic for any worldly political order. His is a heavenly politics, and in that sense stands in judgment on every earthly kingdom. Read the Sermon on the Mount! Very few people in any nation would even try to live up to it. And even fewer would come close to success.

The Mustard Seed Kingdom

What, then, was Jesus up to? In reading the Gospel of Matthew it becomes clear that Jesus never expected the entire nation to respond favorably to the gospel of the Kingdom:

 Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it (7:13-14).

Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the Kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven (7:21).

Think about the parables of the Kingdom in Matthew 13: The Sower, The Weeds, The Hidden Treasure, and The Net. Each of these parables assumes that the Kingdom will be much smaller than the whole people. The Kingdom message will sort (13:1-58) and divide people, even families (10:34-39).

The Church and the Kingdom

Again, what is Jesus up to? In response to Peter’s confession of Jesus as the Messiah, Jesus said,

Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by flesh and blood, but by my Father in heaven. And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven (Matt 16:17-18).

Jesus plans to set up his own community within the world, and this community will be made up of serious disciples of Jesus. In their way of life as individuals and together in community they will be “salt” and “light” in the world (Matt 5:13-16). They will shine into the world a ray of light that anticipates the bright dawn of God’s comprehensive reign over his creation. They will honor God in humility, faith and obedience and love each other from the heart. They will do justice to all people and even love their enemies. As need arises, just as Jesus did, they will do good to everyone. They will feed the hungry, visit the sick and those in prison, befriend the abandoned, and they will speak up for those suffering injustice. They will establish hospitals and educational institutions. The Spirit of Jesus will drive them to do all sorts of good works…in his name!

But will they do all these things without abandoning the message Jesus preached, “Repent for the Kingdom of heaven is near.” For they know that reforming systems apart from reforming hearts will simply substitute one system of injustice, greed and envy for another! They know that “man shall not live by bread alone,” that loaves and fishes will not by themselves satisfy but merely anesthetize the soul.

My search failed!

There is no social-justice Jesus in the New Testament. He is a figment of progressive and liberal Christians’ imaginations, a composite character constructed of elements drawn from Amos, Spartacus, and Che Guevara. Back to Matthew 7:1-5. It is much easier for the modern social justice Christian to curse the injustices of the world than to do justice in their own families and to their neighbors and enemies. As long as we focus on the sins of others or systems of privilege, we do not have to repent and prepare ourselves for the Kingdom of heaven.

Next Time: We will examine this progressive assertion. “In the Bible, God is always on the side of the oppressed.”