Racial Injustice

The beneficiaries of oppression and injustice have difficulty understanding its impact on its victims. These effects don’t just disappear when the injustice is removed.

In the 1980s, I was asked to attend a small conference at Moerewa about the links between the gospel and the Treaty of Waitangi. This was the covenant between the British governor and the Maori chiefs gathered at Waitangi that opened the way for the colonisation of New Zealand. Despite the promises made in the treaty, the Maori were quickly lost their land in a series of illegal political and military manoeuvres. My talk is here.

On the first morning of the conference, a young Maori Christian leader spent two hours recounting the history of Maori dealings with European colonists. For many of the Maori people listening, this was the first time they had heard a detailed account of the injustices that previous generations had experienced. As they listened, they all began to weep.

This experience was an eye-opener for me (When I talk about the experience I still feel like weeping). The reason that these people wept was that their hearts still carried the pain of the injustices their forefathers had experienced. They did not know what had happened, but they still carried the emotional scars from the injustices experienced by previous generations. As they listened, I saw the lights coming on for them. They got an understanding of the pain that they knew they still carried (despite their faith in Jesus).

When the injustices occurred, the people who lost their land felt terrible pain. Their children picked up that pain. Because their pain was real they passed the hurt on to their children. The history of the injustice was gradually lost, but the spiritual and emotional pain was passed on from generation to generation.

Hearing the history explained the pain, but it did not heal it. That would require repentance and restitution by the descendants of European colonists who benefited from the injustices. I hope that my talk contributed a little to making that happen.

When injustice and oppression occur, emotional and spiritual pain is passed on to subsequent generations. As time passes, the reason for the pain is forgotten, but it remains with the victims' descendants, crippling their lives. Those hurts need to be healed before they can live in true freedom.

I can see the same pattern in the United States. Many Christians assume that because slavery has been abolished and the Jim Crow laws have been repealed that blacks should just get on with becoming as prosperous as they are. They simply don’t understand the emotional and spiritual scars that slavery left behind, and how these are passed on from generation to generation. These need to be healed and the pattern broken. But that will not happen if the injustices are minimised and excused by its beneficiaries, because that just creates anger that deepens the scars.

Tom Skinner

In the early 1970s, a friend asked me to go and listen to the American evangelist Tom Skinner when he visited Christchurch. This was before I became a Christian. I was really impressed with the integrity of his message. I did not respond to his altar call, but this was probably the first time that I heard a clear statement of the gospel, so it was an important part of my coming to faith a few months later.

I recently came across a recording of the message he gave at Urbana 1970 called The U.S. Racial Crisis and World Evangelism. I gather that this message was not well received in some quarters, but he speaks boldly and shares the gospel clearly. It is a message that still needs to be heard.

No Staff

When Jesus sent out the twelve apostles, he told them not to take any staff with them. He was not telling them to leave their personal assistants and media teams behind.

He told them: “Take nothing for the journey—no staff, no bag, no bread, no money, no extra shirt” (Luke 9:3).

In Jesus time, people often carried a wooden staff as a defensive in case they were attacked while on a journey. Jesus told them to go into the world without any means of defence. Instead they were to trust in God for their safety and everything that they needed.

Gospel of Kingdom

Jesus went around announcing the good news of the Kingdom of God.

After this, Jesus travelled about from one town and village to another, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom of God (Luke 8:1).

I am sure that many followers of Jesus can explain in a few sentences why Jesus death on the cross is good news. How many can explain in a few sentences how the Kingdom of God is good news?

Yet this is what Jesus did. Huge numbers of people followed him, so they obviously understood what he meant. And it brought change. In the subsequent verses, Luke explains that rich women were giving away some of their wealth to support poor disciples (Luke 8:2-3).

How can a new kingdom with a new king be good news? A kingdom is the people in a place ruled by a king? Even if the king is top class, the place and the people must be pretty special for the people to be attracted to the Kingdom.

Could you give a description of the Kingdom in a few sentences that would get people so excited that rich women would start giving away their wealth?

Body Love

Followers of Jesus were baptised into one body.

Even so the body is not made up of one part but of many (1 Cor 12:14).

The members of the body of Jesus are dependent on each other.

Now if the foot should say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” it would not for that reason stop being part of the body (1 Cor 12:15).

The hand cannot say to the foot, your pain does not affect me, so I do not care about it.

If one part suffers, every part suffers with it (1 Cor 12:26).

If the foot is suffering, every member of the body should be feeling its pain.

The eye who has a professional salary, cannot say to the hand that has lost its income, your suffering does not affect me.

This is why John said,

If anyone has material possessions and sees a brother or sister in need but has no pity on them, how can the love of God be in that person (1 John 3:17)?

In one member of a body of believers has worldly wealth, and another is suffering in poverty, the love that Jesus requires is missing.

This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters (1 John 3:16)?

If love is working, there will be caring and sharing with one another. People will not be able to stay in poverty for long.

Luxury Prophets

Jesus said that prophets who are splendidly clothed and live in luxury are in the houses of kings and political leaders (Luke 7:25). Leaders like to have these prophets around because they build up their power and authority.

Most are not in the king's house physically, but to many are there spiritually.

Liberated

In Paul’s letter to the Colossians, he describes what Jesus has done for us. Those who have been buried with him in baptism and raised with him, have been given full life in him. While we were dead in our sin and controlled by our sinful nature, he did the following for us.

• He forgave all our sins.
• The ordinances that held us captive were cancelled by the cross.
• The spiritual rulers and powers that controlled us were stripped of their power.

(Colossians 2:13-15).

Community and Culture

In an article called Will Loss of Religious Liberty Doom Evangelicalism? George Yancy has some interesting comments.

Evangelicals have gotten used to being the most powerful religious group in our society. That is not going to be the case for the foreseeable future, if ever again...

So beyond politics, it is also important that we think about protecting ourselves by building up our community. If there are fewer of us, but those of us who are left are more committed, then we can make demands on each other that will strengthen our larger community. Groups that do not have majority group power do well to have a strong notion of community so that their subculture can thrive.

What are some of the implications of building up our vision of being a Christian community inside a larger secular society? We can develop a powerful in-group loyalty that allows us to help each other. We can develop supportive economic structures that serve our subculture. We can focus on socializing our children to be ready for the struggles of a post-Christian world. These are only some of the important ways having a community mindset can provide us with the social means to persist in a society that wants to remove us from the public square.

It can be as a community that we can renew a focus on reaching out to the marginalized. A powerful group tends to ignore those who struggle in our society. In a society where we no longer have majority group power, we can humbly use our in-group loyalty to work together so that we can better minister to those society left behind. Such efforts not only enlarge our community by bringing some of the marginalized into our community but also provides a powerful witness of love for the least of these.

Ultimately, it is going to be these acts of love and a true demonstration of the values we say we hold to help us deal with the threat to our religious liberty. Since the threat comes from a change of cultural values, we can begin to neutralize it by impacting the culture. And the best way to impact the culture is to have a Christian community where we are encouraged to live with integrity, transparency and to love those around us. Building the right type of Christian community is vital for what we need today.

Misleading Models

In Debunking Economics, Steve Keen gives two reasons why mainstream economists did not see the global financial crisis coming.

• The economic models of these economists assume that economies always move towards equilibrium. External shocks may push an economy away from equilibrium for a short time, but it will quickly adjust back towards equilibrium. A long-term economic depression cannot exist in these models, because they are always trending back to equilibrium.

  Keen quotes Robert Solow.
  

  I start from the presumption that we want macroeconomics to account for the occasional aggregative pathologies that beset modern capitalist economies, like recession, intervals of stagnation, inflation, ‘stagflation’... A model that rules out pathologies by definition is unlikely to help (p. 259).

  Keen also quotes Minsky
  

  Can ‘It’—a great Depression—happen again: And if ‘It’ can happen, why didn’t it occur in the years since World War II? These are questions that naturally follow from both the historical record and the comparative success of the past thirty-five years. To answer these question, it is necessary to have an economic theory, which makes a great depression one of the possible states in which our type of capitalist economy can find itself (p. 381).

  Mainstream economists could not foresee the global financial crisis because their models could not forecast a crisis.

• The models of the mainstream economists did not include debt. They assume that money is neutral and does not affect the real economy. Likewise, debt is left out of their models, because they assume that it just shifts purchasing power from one person to another. They assume that debt does not affect the real economy.

  Keen quotes Paul Krugman as confirmation.
  

  Given both the prominence of debt in popular discussion of economic difficulties and the long tradition of invoking debt as a key factor in major economic contractions, one might have expected debt to be at the heart of most mainstream macroeconomic models—especially the analysis at the hear of monetary and fiscal policy. Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, however it is quite common to abstract altogether from this feature of the economy (p.321).

  Unfortunately, by leaving debt out of their models, they could not explain or foresee the effects of debt deflation.

Cross and Power

Brian Zahnd writes that we need to understand how the preacher of the Sermon on the Mount ends up condemned by the Sanhedrin and executed by the Roman Empire.

Jesus was not preaching his sermons and working his miracles as “random acts of kindness” but as announcements and enactments of the arrival of the kingdom of God. By the kingdom of God we mean the government of God, the politics of God, the alternative arrangement of the world that comes from God. In his practice of radical hospitality Jesus was announcing the arrival of a new way of arranging human society. Jesus was proclaiming to the principalities and powers (the very rich, the very powerful, the very religious, the institutions they represent, and the malevolent spirits that energize it all) that their time was up because the alternative from heaven was now within reach.

Jesus called upon all who heard him to rethink everything (repent) and believe that a radical rearrangement of the world was good news. But...
The empire always strikes back.

The principalities and powers had a vested interest in keeping the world as it had always been arranged — an arrangement that benefits the elite. So Caiaphas (the very religious), Herod (the very rich), and Pilate (the very powerful) colluded together to execute this Galilean disrupter who threatened their preferred social order. A mere five days after arriving in Jerusalem, Jesus is betrayed, arrested, tried, condemned, spit upon, beaten, scourged, and crucified.

Prophets and Power

When prophets become puppets of political power and war,
lies justify murder and violence.

If a ruler listens to lies,
all his officials become wicked (Prov 29:12).

When the prophets of a nation believe a lie,
evil is at the door.

A prophet can be a trumpet that sounds a clear call to a nation (1 Cor 14:8).
A prophet who is a trump-pet leads the people astray.

Bullies rarely generate peace.

Too many prophets trust the power of a gun more than the power of the Holy Spirit.

A prophet carrying a gun will corrupt God's word with violence and war.

Ministry of the Prophet.

Debunking Economics

I have just read Debunking Economics by Steve Keen, an Australian economist. He is no slug, because he is one of the few economists who warned of the GFC before it happened.

In this book, he goes through the development of economics and exposes all the false assumptions and illogical foundations that plague neoclassical economics.

It is many years since I formally studied economics, so I had forgotten how bad the experience was. Reading this book reminded of how frustrating it is working with assumptions about economic and personal behaviour that are totally unrealistic. No wonder economic predictions are usually wrong and that policy recommendations fail to achieve the results they promised.

Everyone studying economics formally should read this book.