Kingdom of God Concepts

As I have wrestled with oppression and justice issues over the years, it has become clear to me that most American Christians have a shallow understanding of these essential biblical concepts.  These believers fail to comprehend how oppression and justice connect to concepts such as poverty, love, shalom, reconciliation and the kingdom of God.  Most do not grasp that to love one's neighbor biblically demands that one execute justice on the neighbors's behalf, not merely offer a warm feeling or charitable gift.  A number of my experiences have increasingly alarmed me and led me to these conclusions.

Over the past fifteen years, I have done informal polling of hundreds of people of all types of denominations.  I've asked if they have ever heard a full-fledged sermon on the biblical teaching on oppression.  Roughly one in twenty has ever heard such a sermon.

During the spring of 2007, I spoke with a number of mission teams from three different Christian liberal arts colleges.  Each college requires at least two or three Bible coursed for graduation; one requires thirty hours.  I asked a total of about forty students from these schools if any of their Bible professors had taken one class period to teach about oppression.  Not a single student raised a hand.

I have searched for a comprehensive book on what the Bible teaches about oppression by a white evangelical scholar.  So far I have found none.  There appears to be a dearth of preaching and theology on oppression in evangelical circles.

If oppression and justice were minor biblical motifs, these things would not disturb me so.  But one can see that justice issues pervade the whole Bible if given the opportunity.  Unfortunately, many Bible translations deny American Christians that opportunity.

I am stunned by the discrepancies between Bible translations of different language in the use of the word "justice."  A reader of the King James Bible never sees the word "justice" in the New Testament.  A reader of NIV will see it sixteen times.  Yet a reader of the RVR Spanish translation will see the word "justice" (justice) no less that 101 times.  (See Steven Voth's discussion of justice and righteousness in Chapter 14 of The Challenge of Bible Translation.)  In the NKJV, the RSV and the NIV, justice occurs between 125-134 times in the whole Bible.  In contrast, the Spanish NVI has justice 426 times, a French translation has justice 380 times, and the Latin Vulgate over 400 times.  It appears that the reader of an English Bible is being shortchanged on the biblical importance of justice.

In his Informing the Future: Social Justice in the New Testament, biblical scholar Joseph Grassi asserts that references to "righteousness" in the Sermon on the Mount should be translated as "justice."  If so, the Sermon would have two major themes: The kingdom of God and justice.  For this reason, Grassi calls Matthew, "The Gospel of Justice."

Consider the implications.  What if Matthew 5:6 were translated:

          "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after justice..."?

What if Matthew 6:33 were translated:

          "Seek first the kingdom of God and his justice..."?

As I have searched for reasons behind the widespread ignorance of these issues, I have developed the following hypothesis:

If a Christian has not developed a profound understanding of the horror of oppression, he or she is highly unlikely to develop a deep and sustained passion for Jubilee justice.

A person can gain the necessary understanding of the horror of oppression from either experience or the Scriptures [preferably from both].  My experience began as I heard the personal stories of John and Vera Mae Perkins and their struggles in the Civil Rights movement.  This led me to study the Bible's teachings on oppression.  I discovered in Thomas Hanks' God So Loved the Third World that the Hebrew roots translated as "oppression" in the Bible mean crush, humiliate, animalize, impoverish, enslave, and kill.  Learning sealed the deal for me.  Over the years, oppression has continued to horrify me and drive me toward a passion for justice.

To provide a backdrop for the rest of the essays in this book, I will now outline the three concepts that have anchored my search for a biblical-based theology of society.  Then we will turn to an introductory study of those concepts in American society.  On a continuum, oppression is at one end, shalom at the other.

     Oppression <--------------------------------------Justice---------------------------------------> Shalom

Oppression may be one of the worst words in human language; shalom is one of the most beautiful.  Justice stands in the middle.  As I have stated, oppression means to crush and animals persons created in the image of God.  Oppression is the misuse of power and authority, usually through social institutions, to crush individuals or communities.  Shalom is the opposite.  It creates peace, harmony, well-being, and flourishing in a community, benefitting all individual members.

Justice stands between oppression and shalom.  Biblical justice, what I call "Jubilee Justice," is two-pronged.  First it releases individuals and even communities of people from oppression.  Then it provides them with access to the resources of God's creation so that the released can provide themselves with the necessities of life.  In an agricultural society [such as ancient Israel's], justice would provide each family with its own plot of land.

To illustrate the need for both sides of justice, let us consider Lincoln's famous Emancipation Proclamation.  It promised freedom for millions of slaves--a release from oppression, the first step of justice.  But neither Lincoln nor Congress took the second step that Jubilee Justice would have required--giving the freemen the resources necessary to provide for themselves [in practical terms, a plot of land].  The "Forty Acres and a Mule" legislation never passed, leaving freed slaves landless and homeless.  Many died.  Those who survived were forced into sharecropping.  Freedom alone is not enough; freedom must be followed by redistributive justice.

We cannot study oppression, justice and shalom in isolation from each other.  We need to see these basic concepts in relationship to each other.  I remember a detailed essay from a well-respected scholar on the Hebrew words for poverty.  His conclusions were seemingly thoughtful but misguided because he did not surround his study of the poor with other related biblical concepts such as oppression and justice.

Of course, scholarship must also pay special attention to Jesus' teaching on these subject.  In Luke4, Jesus identifies two social evils that trouble him deeply while preaching at a synagogue in Nazareth.  He addressed the first, oppression/poverty, in what we will call "Sermon A" [Luke 4:18].  In
"Sermon B" [4:25-30], he speaks to ethnocentrism--the Jews' belief that they were superior to the Gentiles.  At the end of Sermon A, the Jews applaud Jesus when he proclaims Jubilee Justice.  At the end of Sermon B, they literally try to kill him.  Why this abrupt reversal?

In Sermon A, Jesus introduces the concept of oppression from Isaiah 58:6.  One must read all of Isaiah 58 to grasp the importance of the themes he is invoking.  In Sermon B [vv.4:25-30], he introduces the social evil of a religiously-based ethnocentrism.  Originally the children of Israel were chosen by God to be a humble servant people who were to bring the Messiah into the world.  The Messiah would bless all peoples, Jew and Gentile.  Somewhere along the way, many Jews perverted their originally high calling, turning their closeness into superiority.  God became their own private deity, not accessible to the supposedly unclean, inferior Gentiles.

Jesus teaches about two familiar Old Testament prophets, Elijah and Elisha.  God sent Elijah to minister to a starving Gentile widow, bypassing starving Hebrew widows in the process.  God sent Elisha to minister to a Gentile leper, bypassing needy Hebrew lepers in the process.

The Nazareth Jews are enraged when Jesus implies that God is equally available to and compassionate toward the "inferior and unclean" Gentiles.  They regard this teaching as heresy and try toil Jesus on the spot.

Now we fast forward to American history, bringing the two social evils that Jesus identified to aid our understanding.  I am indebted to Ronald Takaki's A Different Mirror for some of the following historical information.

Just prior to the British establishing colonies in the New World, they were conquering and colonizing Ireland.  Led by English Protestants/Puritans, who saw themselves as chosen and superior, the British invaded Catholic Ireland.  This was ethnocentrism in its most deadly form-religioiulsy-based.  Although of the same race, the British viewed the Irish as subhuman.

Once ethnocentrism has dehumanized a people, it is easy to move to the next stop-acts of oppression against these "inferior" people.  The British were as ruthless as a Hitler or a Stalin as they invaded and conquered Ireland.  They perfected their ethnocentrism/oppression there.  Then they brought these two social evils with them lock-stock-and-barrel to American invading, conquering, and colonizing.  At first, the British even called the Native Americans "Irish."

It wasn't ling before the Puritans, who saw themselves as God's chosen people to establish a Christian nation in New England, were stealing land from Native American tribes and scalping them as well.  An extremely dangerous mix of religion, ethnocentrism and oppression began the destruction of Native Americans and their cultures.  Over the years near genocide occurred.

It wasn't long before the British colonists at Jamestown, after they had won the battle for survival, turned their brand of ethnocentrism and oppression on Afro Americans.  The colonists needed abundant cheap labor to grow and export tobacco to England.  Afro Americans were enslaved for this purpose.

The twin social evils of ethnocentrism and oppression, too often legitimated by a warped brand of Christianity, have pervaded and corrupted much of American history.  From time to time a few brave souls have stood for justice and reconciliation.  Looking at this and the rest of history, I am haunted by a continuing nightmare, but I am inspired by a beautiful dream.  At this point in history, my mind and spirit are dominated by the nightmare of oppression.  I see multiplied millions of people being crushed, humiliated, annualized, enslaved, and killed by White racism in the United States and
South Africa, by political and economic oppression in much of the Third World.  There seems to be no end in sight.  To this crushing of persons created in the image of the almighty God.  The oppressed cry out, "Who will deliver us from this massive and pervasive social evil?"  The answer that echoes is thundering silence.

By faith I see the answer in my dream.  The kingdom of God is hovering on the horizon, waiting for the people of God to see it and to bring it nigh to the oppressed.  The kingdom of God could lift up the crushed, give dignity to the humiliated, humanize the annualized, liberate the enslaved and stop the killing of the innocent.

The answer is at hand.  Why is it delayed?  The people of God need the power of the Spirit to incarnate the kingdom of God among the poor and oppressed.  By faith I see the answer in my dream.  By love and power that answer can become activated through works of grace.

          "The Spirit of the Lord is on me; therefore he has anointed me to preach good news to the
           poor . . . . to release the oppressed." [Luke 4:18]

          "For the kingdom of God is . . . . righteousness [justice], peace [shalom] and joy in the
           Holy Spirit." [Romans 14:17]

Combined, these two verses--one from Jesus and one from Paul--capture the essence of the ministry of the Holy Spirit through the kingdom of God here on earth.  Peter Heltzel expresses hope that we may carry that ministry forward in the last sentence of his Jesus and Justice.  After a careful, theologically-informed historical analysis of the white evangelical church and its massive failure to address racism and justice issues, Heltzel ends on this positive note [p. 218]: "Evangelicalism is moving, and moving quickly, to embody justice around the world."  If this is true, evangelicals will need help so they can execute quality justice which will be sustained for the long haul.

Now listen to the experts as they speak not only to the issue of biblical justice, but also to the related concepts of poverty, oppression, reconciliation, shalom and the kingdom of God.  May the church be enlightened and empowered by the Holy Spirit to do justice.