Maybe Tim Tebow has a point--I need/want to live with John 3:16 posted so closely to my eyes that it forces me to reimagine the world. I am not a fan of the one-verse trumps the whole Bible method of reading, interpreting and living Scripture, but that verse is certainly not a bad one. When I try to super-spiritualize (and even legalize) who the Church is, it is good for me to go back to this verse and note that God loved (not just me) but the whole world and that "whosoever believes in Him will have everlasting life"--emphasis on whosoever.
This verse forces us to ask the question of "who is the Church?" And, "where is the Church?" This question becomes increasingly difficult when they are applied to Christian ethics. For instance, I understand that "it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God." But what does this mean when only 1% of the world has a college education--a fact that immediately makes those of us with a degree automatically be considered part of the world's wealthy. What does this mean for Christian ministries who are committed to working with college students? Does this mean that these folks are really "not Christian?" I don't think so.
Another argument that has been posed to me is: "Every Christian should go to seminary to become a better Christian"--as if there is a connection with education and morality. Please don't think that I am dumping on seminary or education (you must remember that you are talking to an education guru), but the problem with that statement is that it assumes that the poor and the illiterate cannot operate well in the world to bring their discipleship to fruition. It assumes that we can only have good theology, good ethics or good interpretations of Scripture if we have become education--read become rich.
The implication of this might even be that if we as the "educated Christians" call for an ethic of marginality and downward mobility as a universal ethic, that this will have bizarre implications for the poor. Does this mean if I am poor that the only way to become more like Jesus or the become more Christian is to become "poor-er?" Or the other scholarly implication I have heard is that "the Church isn't about me and Jesus or me and my Bible, but it is about living in community." What does this mean for my brothers in Christ I met earlier this week who are incarcerated and not allowed to live in community? Are they not real Christians then?
These two paradigms seemed to clash in our class, the Nation-State and Theology of Africa. Our Professor eagerly tried to get us to see how locating or relocating the Church on the margins was a method for allowing our Christian identity to interrupt the way of the world as a means of creating communities and practices of resistance against the status quo. I noticed that the groups that were all-white tended to want to stick to the belief that our Gospel incarnation model shows us that we must be "centrally" located and not "marginally" located. I could almost hear our evangelical stories telling us: "You must put Jesus at the center of your life," "you must use and steward your gifts in a way that put you in the realms of power," "true humility is letting others take the credit for our hard efforts because Christ credits us righteousness."
I realized that our group was speaking of bastions of power and central locations, "development" and "partnership" in ways that our Professor was trying to get us to move away from, but it didn't really hit me until I saw one of the black students start to laugh while our group shared. It hit me. We were a group of all white people. We could not imagine a way for Christianity to interrupt the world in powerful ways that was not located from a central place of authority. We as white Americans (especially in the context of Africa) have always operated from a central location seeking change rather than trying to influence from the margins. We may think we are on the margins if we relocate ourselves to the middle of Africa, depriving ourselves of real luxuries and means of power that we have available to us in the U.S., but we can only imagine true change coming from the center and we forget that our very identity as Westerners automatically labels us not as "one on the margins who is replaceable or disposable." If the Church is meant to be at the margins, can we really become marginal by relocating?
What I think this means is that there must be something deeper than just seeing our Christian ethical lives by living through an idea of central location or marginality. I think what I am pushing toward is what does it mean to simply "become Christian?" I think it also means that we must be careful in how we speak "universally" about what Christianity should look like. We also must be aware of our context. But more importantly, we must become Christian, whatever that might be or mean.
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