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taking the political passion of the Bible seriously would mean advocacy of God’s justice. In a democratic society, this means politics in the narrower sense of the word, namely, participation in the political process in loyalty to the dream of God.
examples of what taking the Kingdom of God seriously might mean for us in our time as Christians and residents of the United States.
Health Care: Taking seriously God’s passion for the marginalized would mean enacting a system of health care for the uninsured.
The Environment: Concern for the environment and the nonhuman world is important both for the long-term self-interest of human beings and because of the biblical understanding of creation.
Economic Justice: “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof” also requires economic justice. We not only treat the earth as if it belongs to us as a species, but as if it belongs to some of us much more than to others. Economic justice is about the just distribution of God’s earth.27 “Just” does not mean absolutely equal. Differentials can remain, but how great they are matters; they can be more or less just.
The Use of Imperial Power: For Christians in the United States, taking the Kingdom of God seriously means critical thinking about what it means to be an imperial power.
Seeing the political passion of the Bible calls us to a politically engaged spirituality.29This phrase combines the two transformations, personal and political, at the center of the Christian vision of life as we see it in the Bible and in Jesus. If we emphasize only one, we miss half of the biblical message, half of the gospel.
A politically engaged spirituality affirms both spiritual transformation and political transformation. The message of Jesus, and the Bible as a whole, is about both. What we see in Jesus and the Bible answers our deepest personal longing, to be born again, and the world’s greatest need, the Kingdom of God.
The heart is an image for the self at a deep level, deeper than our perception, intellect, emotion, and volition. As the spiritual center of the total self, it affects all of these: our sight, thought, feelings, and will.
The condition of the heart matters. The heart, the self at its deepest level, can be turned toward God or away from God, open to God or closed to God.
the qualities of a closed heart,
Blindness and limited vision go with a closed heart. We do not see clearly when our hearts are closed.
A closed heart affects the mind, the reasoning process itself. Rather than the mind being in charge of this deeper layer of the self, the heart controls the mind.
A closed heart and bondage go together.
A closed heart lacks gratitude.
A closed heart is insensitive to wonder and awe.
A closed heart forgets God.
A closed heart and exile go together.
A closed heart lacks compassion.
For the same reason, a closed heart is insensitive to injustice.
How do hearts become open? The biblical answer: the Spirit of God does it. And the Spirit of God operates through thin places.
Thin Places
there are minimally two layers or dimensions of reality, the visible world of our ordinary experience and God, the sacred, Spirit.
“Thin places” are places where these two levels of reality meet or intersect. They are places where the boundary between the two levels becomes very soft, porous, permeable. Thin places are places where the veil momentarily lifts, and we behold God, experience the one in whom we live, all around us and within us.
To use sacramental language, a thin place is a sacrament of the sacred, a mediator of the sacred, a means whereby the sacred becomes present to us. A thin place is a means of grace.
In addition to the collective practices of the church, individual practices can also become thin places. This is one of the central functions of prayer: to become a thin place in which our hearts are opened.
In a comprehensive sense, the opening of the heart is the purpose of spirituality, of both our collective and individual practices. The Christian life is about the “hatching of the heart,” the opening of the self to the Spirit of God by spending time in “thin places”—those places and practices through which we become open to and nourished by the Mystery in whom we live and move and have our being.
What Is Sin?
the first thing that comes to mind is that sin is “disobeying God’s laws,” “breaking the rules,” “being bad,” even though it may also mean more than that. This isn’t surprising, of course. We learn about keeping rules early in life. And rules matter.
sin has also been thought of in more “root ways”—not so much in the plural as specific behaviors, but as a “state” or “condition” that produces the more specific behaviors that we commonly call sins. This is “sin” in the singular.
For Reinhold Niebuhr, heir to a school of thought reaching back at least to Augustine, the “root sin” is “pride,” hubris, to use the Greek term. Hubris is self-centeredness. It names the primal self-concern that flows inevitably out of our nature as finite creatures who are also aware of our finitude and vulnerability. The result is we become anxious, very early in life, and in this state of primal anxiety become self-centered.
For Paul Tillich, the root meaning of “sin” is separation, to be put asunder. Tillich’s term for this state is “estrangement,” very deliberately chosen to suggest being separated from that to which we belong.
Is “sin” the best comprehensive term for naming our problem? Or would we understand our problem (and its solution) better if we used multiple images to speak about it?
I raise the question because the Bible has many rich images for naming our problem, one of which is sin. It is a major image. In the Hebrew Bible, the three most common words translated “sin” appear almost a thousand times.8 But there are other images for the human condition.
So also “sin” has a correlative image in the Bible and in the Christian imagination—“forgiveness.” Thus, when sin is named as the issue, the logic of the image suggests that the solution is forgiveness. When sin becomes the one-size-fits-all designator of the human condition, then forgiveness becomes the one-size-fits-all remedy. And this is the problem. If the issue is blindness, what we need is not forgiveness, but sight. If the issue is bondage, what we need is not forgiveness, but liberation, and so forth.
The story of Israel’s bondage in Egypt is particularly instructive here. There is no suggestion in the story that the Hebrews’ enslavement was their own fault. What they needed in Egypt was not forgiveness, but liberation. I have sometimes remarked that if Moses had gone into Egypt and said to the Hebrew slaves, “My children, your sins are forgiven,” they would have said, “Well, that’s nice, but you see, our problem is bondage.”
I am persuaded that our understanding of the heart of the Christian vision of life is enriched by using multiple biblical images for the human problem and its remedy. The problem is not simply that we have been bad and have rebelled against God (though that may be true), but that we are blind, estranged, lost, in exile, self-centered, wounded, sick, paralyzed, in bondage, grasping, and so forth. Forgiveness doesn’t speak to these issues. But the central images of the Christian life as a “way” do: it is a way of return from exile, of reconnection; it is way of liberation from bondage; a way in
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Like the word “sin,” “salvation” is loaded and multilayered. And like the word “sin,” its most common association hides rather than illuminates the rich meanings of the term in the Bible and the Christian tradition. Salvation is most often associated with “heaven” or “going to heaven.”
Whenever the afterlife is emphasized, the almost invariable result is that it turns Christianity into a religion of requirements.
such an emphasis creates a distinction between an in-group and an out-group: there are those who are saved and those who aren’t.
emphasizing the afterlife focuses our attention on the next world rather than on transformation in this world.
The biblical understandings of salvation are focused on this world, not the next. Though salvation is central to the Bible, heaven as life after death is not.
By the time of Jesus’ public activity, two centuries after Daniel, a majority of the Jewish people did believe in an afterlife. A major reason for growth in the belief was the continuing experience of oppression and persecution. Indeed, belief in an afterlife within Judaism originated in the context of martyrdom, beginning in the time of Daniel.
it’s clear that his message was not really about how to get to heaven. It was about a way of transformation in this world and the Kingdom of God on earth. If he also believed in heaven, it would not be remarkable. But Jesus wasn’t very much concerned with life beyond death, either his own or that of others.
salvation in the Bible is primarily a this-worldly phenomenon. It happens here. But what is it? The root of the English word is helpful. It comes from a Latin word that means “wholeness” or “healing” (the same root from which we get the word “salve,” a healing agent). In its broadest sense, salvation thus means becoming whole and being healed. The language of “wholeness” suggests movement beyond fragmentation, and the language of “healing” suggests being healed of the wounds of existence.
The biblical meanings of salvation are also suggested by what I have elsewhere called the “macro-stories” of scripture.18 These stories shape the Hebrew Bible as a whole and, because of the centrality of the Hebrew Bible for early Christianity, the New Testament as well.
The first of these is the story of the exodus from Egypt. It images the human problem as bondage and slavery.
The second is the story of exile in Babylon, which images the human problem as exile.
The third is what I call the temple story.19 It images the human problem as sin and impurity.
What does need emphasis is that salvation in the Bible is also social. Ancient Israel’s story is a story of the creation of a new people, a nation, a community. Salvation is about life together. Salvation is about peace and justice within community and beyond community. It is about shalom, a word connoting not simply peace as the absence of war, but peace as the wholeness of a community living together in peace and justice. Salvation is never only an individual affair in the Hebrew Bible.
