The Core Message of Christianity

Now after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.”
Mark 1:14-15

I grew up believing that when Jesus proclaimed the “Gospel,” he was talking about his life and death and resurrection. That was the “good news of God.”

Imagine my surprise when my New Testament professor said that the “good news” proclaimed by Jesus was actually about the Kingdom of God. (Of course if I had paid attention to what I was reading rather than just assuming I knew what it meant, I would have already known that.)

My first thought was that the professor must be wrong. My second thought was that this changed everything.

I thought about that transformational learning as I read a blogpost by Alisa Childers on “Five Signs Your Church Might Be HeadingToward Progressive Christianity.” She lists the five signs as: (1) A Lowered View of the Bible, (2) The Emphasis on Feelings Over Facts, (3) The Reinterpretation of Essential Christian Doctrines, (4) The Redefinition of Historic Terms, and (5) The Heart of the Christian Message Shifts from Sin and Redemption to Social Justice.

These “Five Signs” can be summarized in what she sees as the fatal flaw of Progressive Christianity: A failure to take the Bible literally.

And by literally, she means her understanding of the literal meaning of each story and verse in the Bible. It is, of course, a selective literalism which allows one to make the claim of literalism while ignoring, for example, significant sections of the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7). And making believe that there is only one Creation story, rather than two. And one account of Noah’s Ark, rather than two.

Biblical literalism claims to take a high view of the Bible, but in reality it denies central elements of the biblical witness. The symbolic language of the Bible is not less than literalism; it is more. Literalism limits the meaning of the text to the words on the paper. An ancient rabbinic teaching says that God is found in the white spaces that surround the black letters of the text. Biblical literalism sees only the letters. For the literalist, there is nothing beyond the text.

Paul said that the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life (II Corinthians 3:6).

But this isn’t just Biblical Literalism, this is Selective Biblical Literalism and the problem is most evident in her last complaint, that “The heart of the Christian message shifts from sin and redemption to Social Justice.”

Childers explains it this way:

“There is no doubt that the Bible commands us to take care of the unfortunate and defend those who are oppressed. This is a very real and profoundly important part of what it means to live out our Christian faith. However, the core message of Christianity—the gospel—is that Jesus died for our sins, was buried and resurrected, and thereby reconciled us to God. This is the message that will truly bring freedom to the oppressed.”

She is correct in saying that the Gospel is both personal and social, but she has the order and the priority reversed. And her assertion that the needs of the oppressed are primarily spiritual rather than material reminds one of the question posed in the First Letter of John, “How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help?” (I John 3:17)

Jesus’ preaching was focused on the Kingdom of God. That was the heart of his message. He proclaimed it as a present reality and a future hope. He said it was among us, around us, and within us.

The Romans crucified him for sedition. His invitation and challenge to his disciples was to “take up the cross and follow me.” He was inviting them to be part of the Kingdom of God rather than the Roman Empire. In this new reality, the poor are lifted up and the mighty are cast down. In this new reality the normalcy of violence is replaced by peace and justice. Everyone has a place at the table and everyone has enough.

Jesus stands in a prophetic tradition that sees sin and redemption primarily in social terms.

In Matthew 25, those who have failed to be faithful ask,

“Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not take care of you?”

And the Lord will answer them,

"Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.”

The final test is not about what we believe. It is about what we do. Specifically, it is about what we do for those who are on the margins. And so that there can be no mistake in the meaning of the parable, Jesus makes clear at the beginning that the nations will be judged. In other words, this final test is about social justice.

If your church is becoming more focused on Social Justice, then it is following more closely the life and teachings of Jesus.

Faith always begins with the personal and Jesus spoke to his disciples and his listeners in personal terms. He called them to a personal commitment to follow him. But for Jesus, as for the prophets before him, that commitment led to social justice. 

Micah declared God’s commandment to “do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with God.” And Jesus referenced Micah’s proclamation when he told his disciples that God desires “mercy and not sacrifice.” Without a commitment to social justice God is not moved by our worship.

Christians have always been tempted to reduce sin and redemption to personal issues. It is easier and less controversial. And no one was ever crucified just for being a good person.

By reducing sin and redemption to personal terms we also reduce the meaning of Jesus’ crucifixion. Walter Rauschenbusch was right when he observed that,

"Jesus did not in any real sense bear the sin of some ancient Briton who beat up his wife in B. C. 56, or of some mountaineer in Tennessee who got drunk in A. D. 1917. But he did in a very real sense bear the weight of the public sins of organized society, and they in turn are causally connected with all private sins."

If your church is focusing on social justice, that’s a good sign that they are trying to be more faithful.

Thank you for reading. Your thoughts and comments are always welcome. Please feel free to share on social media as you wish. 

Georgia on My Mind

Dr. Georgia E. Harkness

“Religion is perhaps its own worst enemy. For religion, masquerading under the guise of archaic creeds, and impossible literalisms, and ecclesiasticism indifferent to human needs, has brought about an inevitable and in many respects wholesome revulsion.”

Georgia Harkness

I think I first heard the name of Georgia Harkness when I was in elementary Sunday School. Maybe it came up because we were singing her hymn, “Hope of the World.” Maybe we were looking at contemporary Methodism. Maybe I saw a book that my mother was reading. I knew about Georgia Harkness before I knew anything about Tillich or Barth or Bonhoeffer or the Niebuhrs.

But the truth is that her name was almost all I knew, and across the years I did not pay much attention. She was one of the lesser lights of twentieth century theology and I was focused on the stars.

She is on my mind now because I referenced her in a blog post about covenant. I listed her as a part of the church I was joining when I was ordained. In truth, I listed her because she was the only female Methodist theologian I could think of.

Georgia Harkness.

Just saying her name brings me a certain comfort.

In our current precipitous and disastrous tilt toward literalism, doctrinal Puritanism, and worship of the Book of Discipline, I find it comforting to remember a time when we were not like that.

Georgia Harkness reminds me of my Methodist home, a place of openness, hope and grace. She reminds me of the family, the faith, and the church in which I grew up.

In her 1957 book, “Understanding the Christian Faith,” her chapter on “Understanding the Bible” lays out the perspective I grew up with, that the Bible is a sacred book, written over a period of about a thousand years. It is “heavenly treasure in earthen vessels.” It was not written for scientific or historical accuracy, but to convey the timeless message of God’s love and care. Some of it is time bound by the culture in which it was written, but at its heart it holds timeless truths about God and humanity. It is up to us, as we read the Bible, to separate the heavenly treasure from the earthen vessels.

Writing about “Jesus Christ Our Lord,” she states, “The question as to whether Jesus was born of a virgin is one on which the opinion of Christians differ, and the biblical accounts do not throw clear light upon it.” And on the resurrection, she declares, “We cannot be sure of the details of what happened that first Easter morning, but the central fact is certain. To the disciples . . . their Leader was not dead but present with them.” 

If she were alive today, we might call her a Progressive Christian. But in her own time, for a Methodist, her theology was predictably orthodox.

After forty years of relentless attacks by the IRD (Institute on Religion and Democracy) and Good News, and their allies, the United Methodist Church has become an institution that Georgia Harkness would barely recognize. We have become “our own worst enemy.” Although she passed away more than forty years ago, her description of the direction in which we are heading is prophetic in the biblical sense of that word. 

"Under the guise of following archaic creeds and impossible literalisms," we have engaged in an "ecclesiasticism" that is "indifferent to human needs." And there are consequences. This has brought about “an inevitable and in many respects wholesome revulsion.”

We have replaced the hope of the world with a rigid religiosity that values creeds over human beings. And on the fundamental issue that divides us as a church, the inclusion of LGBTQ persons, we have chosen ecclesiasticism over human needs.

Though I believe that the church today needs to hear her voice, her time was hardly a golden age. It is important to recognize that she grew up in an age of intense racial and gender discrimination. 

After graduating from Cornell in 1912 she was not able to attend seminary and train for the ministry. She taught high school for six years but that was not her calling. She wanted to pursue a theological education and enrolled at Boston University. She was denied entrance to the School of Theology because she was a woman, but she was accepted in the School of Religious Education and eventually in Department of Religion of the Graduate School, where she studied with Edgar Brightman and earned a Ph.D.

She taught religion and philosophy at Elmira College (which was a women’s college at the time) and then was Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Mount Holyoke. In 1940 she was appointed Professor of Applied Theology at what is now Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary, becoming the first woman to teach theology at any seminary in the U.S. Today Garrett honors her with the Georgia Harkness Chair of Applied Theology. She retired in 1960 from The Pacific School of Religion.

In 1948 she attended a meeting of the World Council of Churches where she had an iconic interchange with Karl Barth.

Barth, along with a few other men, participated in a section on the “Life and Work of Women in Churches.” Just before the discussion began, the chairperson surprised Harkness by asking her to state the theological basis for the work. She recalls, “I said briefly that in the Old Testament it is stated that both male and female are created in the image of God; in the New Testament Jesus assumed always that men and women were equal before God, and in our Christian faith is the chief foundation of sex equality.”

She reports that as soon as she finished, Barth addressed the group and said that she was “completely wrong, that the Old Testament conception of woman is that she was made from Adam’s rib and the New Testament that of Ephesians 5, that as Christ is the head of the Church, so man is the head of woman.”

After that they had a lively interchange in which, as she recalls, “I did little more than quote Galatians 3:28 (“There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”) Her judgment was that “Barth convinced nobody.” And she concludes her recollection of the event this way: “A year later when a friend of mine asked him if he recalled meeting a woman theologian from America, his cryptic reply was, ‘Remember me not of that woman.’”

Barth did not want to remember her, but I do.