Virginia Ramey Mollenkott

An Open Letter...

An Open Letter to the Council of Bishops of the United Methodist Church [in response to their pastoral letter of Nov. 2, 2005]

As an elderly Christian lesbian and transgender activist, I am grateful to you for affirming salvation by grace (not merit), for asserting the sacred worth of all persons, and for rebuking the Judicial Council for upholding a pastor's refusal of church membership to an openly partnered gay man. My local newspaper carried a double headline about the defrocking of a lesbian pastor and the rejection of the gay man's request for membership, leaving the impression the United Methodist church is a very frosty place for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people and those who love them. During my many years as an English professor at a state university, it was this sort of news clipping, brought to me by students who knew of my Christian faith, that was deeply embarrassing and impossible to defend.

So I am thankful that as Bishops of the Church, you have declared your belief that all persons are eligible to be professing members and participants in programs in a "community of hospitality." But for me, all this raises a disturbing moral dissonance. Hospitality, membership, participation, and community are highly egalitarian concepts. And your affirmation of people's sacred worth certainly implies that everybody is to be respected equally and offered equal access to all privileges, responsibilities, and positions within the church. Yet in The United Methodist Church, openly lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender people are not eligible for either ordination or rituals of marriage, regardless of their qualifications and in many cases the stellar quality of their lives and relationships. How can such exclusion be justified within a "community of hospitality"?

Through the years I have met many deeply closeted lesbian and gay United Methodist pastors. The price they are forced to pay in order to maintain their credentials is stupendous. Why is the church the most egregiously unequal opportunity employer in an already unjust society? Wouldn't your concern for evangelism and social justice be enhanced by just behavior within your own sphere of influence?

Feminism and Evangelicalism

Note: What follows are Virginia Ramey Mollenkott's responses to questions prepared by Ann Braude, Women's Studies Director at Harvard Divinity School and editor of Transforming the Faiths of Our Fathers: Women Who Changed American Religion (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004). Most of Virginia Ramey Mollenkott's responses below were part of a panel held at the Jewish Community Center of Manhattan on May 16, 2005, entitled "Muslim, Christian and Jew: Women Who Changed American Religion."

Q: How in your personal experience did feminism interact with evangelicalism?

I was born into a working-class Philadelphia family of extremely conservative evangelicals. At that time, we right-wing evangelicals would have accepted the name fundamentalist, meaning that we clung to what we thought were the fundamental truths of the Bible. Today, almost nobody would claim to be fundamentalist because of the word's connections to terrorism. But since the evangelical right-wing still teaches the same doctrines I learned in my youth, the truth is that they are still fundamentalist.

I was taught at our storefront chapel that the deepest core of my being was evil, so that I could not trust any of my feelings or perceptions. From this shameful condition I could be saved only because Jesus had paid the price of God's anger by being crucified on my behalf. Combine this with very early physical and sexual abuse and the early realization that I was lesbian, and you can understand why I was well into my thirties before I was able to liberate myself from the fundamentalist belief system.

I earned my undergraduate degree at Bob Jones University and began to question fundamentalist doctrine while there, but especially during my M.A. studies at Temple University when I worked with a world-class literary scholar. But it was while working on my doctoral dissertation on John Milton that I gained the courage to read the Bible as carefully as I had been trained to read any other text. Feminism was just beginning to stir in the early sixties, and my dawning courage to trust myself was the point at which feminism and faith began to empower one another.

People may wonder why it would take courage to read the Bible as carefully as I would read, say, Chaucer or Emily Dickinson. Well, here's why: the evangelical right teaches that the Bible was virtually dictated by God and is without error or contradiction. But you can't read even the first two chapters of Genesis without noticing that there are two different time-lines for creation, with different tones and different plots. Those differences become perfectly understandable once they are placed in historical context, but fundamentalists tend to use the Bible as if it were all written on the same day and the same place, with little attention to cultural background unless it happens to be convenient. So I was wearing fundamentalist blinders when I read the Bible, and was afraid to take them off.

John Milton was a 17th century Puritan who loved Scripture. From studying his interpretive method, being challenged by feminist thinkers, and interpreting my dreams, I gradually began to trust my own experience. And I began to read the Bible with attention to literary formats, historical context, what words meant at the time the text was written, the use of imagery, analogy, symbol, and so forth. The text was transformed by these standard interpretive methods, and I in turn was radicalized by the Bible. I am now a member of the evangelical left, working with other Christian feminists toward a world in which all people are respected and cherished as made in God's image, and in which the natural environment is respected and cherished as being created and sustained by one Great Spirit. I guess you could call me and Evangelical Universalist.

Q: What is the spectrum of attitudes toward women in evangelicalism today?

Evangelicals come in a continuum that runs the political gamut from extreme left to extreme right. What Christian evangelicals have in common is that meaningful living requires a direct personal relationship with God, and that the Bible should be taken seriously. But what that means can differ widely, and our social attitudes differ tremendously.

I am a member of the evangelical left, a small but passionate minority. Our three most influential organizations are the Evangelical and Ecumenical Women's Caucus, the Evangelicals for Social Action, and the Sojourners ministry headed by Jim Wallis. Of these, the Evangelical and Ecumenical Women's Caucus is the most radical. We believe the Bible teaches the human dignity and equality of women along with men and all the in-betweens as well: intersexuals, transsexuals, homosexuals, bisexuals, nonconformist heterosexuals, and gender transgressors of every type. Although EEWC does not have an official position on reproductive rights, most EEWC members support women's moral agency in reproduction just as we support women's moral agency in every other sense, and we support human and civil rights for everyone, including the right to serve religion in an ordained capacity and to pursue happiness through marriage. We cannot support efforts toward passage of the Federal Marriage Amendment which says "Marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman." That would exclude not only same-sex couples, but also transsexual and intersexual couples, as several court cases have already demonstrated.

Members of the Evangelicals for Social Action tend to waffle about specifically women's issues because their focus is on combatting poverty and racism, reforming healthcare, and working toward world peace. But of course these efforts will inevitably help women to some degree. Sojourners Community, which describes itself as "a Christian ministry whose mission is to proclaim and practice the biblical call to integrate spiritual renewal and social justice," works for issues similar to those of Evangelicals for Social Action. Neither Evangelicals for Social Action nor Sojourners supports reproductive choice or gay marriage, although many in the Sojourners network, including founder Jim Wallis himself, believe that compassion and justice demand respect for gay human and civil rights, including the right to form civil unions (but not marriage in a religiously sanctioned or sacramental sense).

The evangelical center is represented by such organizations as Christians for Biblical Equality, the journal Christianity Today and the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. Some of them are mildly supportive of women's equality in marriage and church leadership. Christians for Biblical Equality is, in fact, strongly supportive of such equality. But each of these in the evangelical center are uniformly negative toward affirmation of lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender people.

The enormous evangelical right wing owns many radio stations and airs many television shows by which it has become the chief interpreter of the Bible for the American public. Their largest organization is the Southern Baptist Convention, which does not ordain women and has legislated that husbands must make the final decisions for their wives and children, and that wives must "contentendly yield" to these decisions. Another hugely influential organization is James Dobson's Focus on the Family, which teaches the importance of corporal punishment of children and broadcasts many lies about lesbian and gay people: that we all suffer from a mental disorder that can be cured by "reparative therapy"; that we want to destroy marriage and seek to hurt children; and that we are ungodly people who want special rights, not civil rights. Tim LaHaye, coauthor of the apocalyptic "Left Behind" novels, and his wife Beverly, founder of Concerned Women for America, are also highly influential leaders of the evangelical right wing. Their 1976 evangelical sex manual, The Act of Marriage, is still quoted, especially their assertion that, "God designed man to be the aggressor, provider, and leader of his family," claiming that such attributes are "somehow tied to his sex drive." (emphasis mine). They add, "The woman who resents her husband's sex drive while enjoying his aggressive leadership had better face the fact that she cannot have one without the other" (p.22). Although this statement directly contradicts the Bible's statement that husbands and wives are to "defer to one another," it reflects a typical attitude of the evangelical right. Another group, the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, attempts to soften their male dominance/female subordination model by calling it the complementarity of the sexes rather than inequality. They teach that male and female are each designed by God for distinctive roles in marriage and in life, based on gender alone.

Obviously, the word evangelical involves a wide spectrum of attitudes toward women and other groups. As a result, evangelicals on the left may feel more comfortable with progressive Mainline Protestants, Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Wiccans, or secular humanists than we do with right-wing evangelicals. And the Evangelical and Ecumenical Women's Caucus sees as one of its primary missions the empowerment of women and men from the Religious Right who have become fed up with androcentrism and are ready for liberation.

Q: To what extent is the evangelical feminist movement political, and to what extent religious?

One of the things I have appreciated about my evangelical upbringing was that preachers told us everybody was expected to act with absolute conviction, throwing themselves fully into whatever they believed in. Although the evangelists really meant men when they talked like that, some of us women didn't get the message that it wasn't intended for women, too, or eventually refused to accept such exclusion.

Now the thing about going all out to embody what you believe is that it becomes difficult if not impossible to compartmentalize religion as something distinct from politics. And that can lead to positive or negative results. If a person's religious convictions do not include respect for the full human and civil rights of those who hold different convictions, going all out for one's beliefs can lead to oppression of others, brutality, and the undermining of democratic practice. Many right-wing evangelical congregations would deny that they are political at all, because in seeking to "reclaim America for Christ" and to restrict the civil and human rights of those they regard as dangerous, they feel they are simply fulfilling their religious duty. Extremists of every religion feel that God is on their side and nobody else's - which is why our world is so close to self-immolation.

On the other hand, because feminism is about respecting the otherness of the other while trying to correct injustices toward women, children, and other marginalized people, its political impact is in line with the best insights of the world's major religions. All of them call for treating others in ways we ourselves would appreciate if we were on the receiving end.

Within Christian feminism, Roman Catholic scholars have been especially brilliant in describing the seamless religious and political impact of the Jesus Movement. I'm thinking of Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, who showed us why women, slaves, and social outcasts were so drawn to Jesus (see In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins.) And also the work of Elizabeth A. Johnson, a nun who manages to correct the patriarchal errors of the Christian tradition with so much tact, compassion and biblical accuracy that I doubt the Vatican realizes how radically feminist she is. (Start with her book She Who Is, but read anything she writes. Her appreciation of other religions as necessary to a fuller understanding of God certainly reflects my own experience of what occurs in inter-religious worship services.)

For evangelical feminists, feminism means working toward a peaceful, egalitarian, humane world. Being a follower of Jesus means the same thing. So for us, feminism is both a religious and a political expression of our convictions.

Q: How do you respond to evangelical reactions against feminism?

Before I answer this question, I need to provide a context in order to show just how powerful the anti-feminist anti-humanist Religious Right has become. Bestseller lists for several years have been featuring novels about the Rapture of "born again" believers and about those who will be "left behind." I remember learning that same scenario as a girl, with the help of huge charts that covered the front of the chapel. The political implication was clear: no point in supporting the United Nations, working for world peace, or preserving the environment, because we were in the "last days." We'd soon be "out of here," while atheists, agnostics, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Roman Catholics, and even many liberal Protestants would be "left behind."

Why is this important? Because as Bill Moyers pointed out at Harvard recently, our President, 45 Senators, 186 members of Congress, and millions of American voters believe in the fundamentalist scenario of the "left behind" novels. This explains why President Bush's policies have been so cavalier about the United Nations, the environment, and seeking peaceful resolutions to conflict.

To the evangelical right, moral issues tend to be privatized; sin is personal, not collective or institutional. Matters of social justice and civil liberty, such as exploiting women and undocumented immigrants as cheap labor, are downplayed or ignored, while controlling women's sexuality through anti-abortion statutes, or opposing same-sex marriage, are regarded as "life-and-death" moral issues. Killing thousands of civilians in Iraq is not perceived as a moral issue. It should be obvious why the evangelical right is the perfect theological ally for Bush's administration.

Concerning women specifically: in the 1980's a book called The Total Woman praised female subordination and was studied in hundreds of evangelical churches. I was asked to write a response to it. What I discovered while writing Women, Men, and the Bible was that it was very easy to defend patriarchal status quo. You don't have to be particularly rational or thorough because most folks already assume that you're correct. But to challenge the dominant paradigm, you have to weave an airtight argument. Furthermore, in confrontation with right-wing evangelicals I found that what is evidence to me is not evidence to them. People tend to see what they want to see, and if they do not govern themselves by standard rules for interpreting texts, what they see can become quite astonishing. So eventually I learned to refuse debates.

Recently I was drawn into discussing same-sex marriage on Minnesota Public Radio, only to discover that the moderator permitted my opponent to set the parameters of the discussion. We were given approximately equal time, but all he had to do with his time was appeal to common assumptions, while I had to construct a cogent counter-argument and do it concerning the factors he had chosen. Nothing level about that playing field!

So this is my current policy in dealing with andocentric or misogynistic evangelicals: I try to show them human love in the hope that sooner or later life will teach them more open and humane attitudes. I write books and articles and give lectures embodying liberation theology, in the hope that those who are open to a different paradigm will find my interpretations helpful. I vote; I try to persuade anyone who shows an interest. And I keep hope alive in myself by trusting that when God's will is done "on earth as it is in heaven," women will be equal and honored partners in every aspect of that benign society. And yes, I do believe that some day God's will will be done "on earth as it is in heaven." Why? Because Jesus told us to pray for that - and I do not believe that he would have assigned to us an exercise in futility.

Q: Do you have a summary statement you'd like to share with an audience of Jews, Christians, and Muslims?

Yes, I do. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are all "religions of the book" - the Jewish Bible, the Christian Scriptures, and Islam's Qur'an. So it is essential that we teach people how to read texts accurately and how to apply them in the most humane possible fashion. It seems to me that Judaism has succeeded better than Christianity in this regard, probably because for centuries rabbis have persistently surrounded the text with narratives that call for the gentlest admissible interpretations. Unfortunately, progressive Christians have allowed the evangelical right to take over the public interpretation of the Bible for most Americans (who on average read at the 8th grade level.)

For example: right-wing evangelicals point to the text that says "the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church" (Ephesians 5:23) as proof that the husband should decide what his family should do. But this interpretation ignores several verifiable facts. First, when that text was written (first century of the Common Era), nobody thought decisions were made by the head; it was the heart that decided the issues of life. Second, Christ as head of the church never makes decisions for the church. The word head means source, as in fountainhead. So the analogy "husband is to wife as Christ is to church" is an exclusively non-coercive analogy. Third, the author of Ephesians recognized that husbands held all the power in that time and place. So if the marriage relationship were to become egalitarian because of mutual deference (Ephesians 5:21), the husband would have to be the head or source of that deference by voluntarily abandoning his partriarchally privileged position.

When read with attention to verifiable facts, the analogy of "husband is to wife as Christ is to church" subverts or undermines male supremacy, in precise opposition to the way the text is being used by the Religious Right.

My point: "religions of the book" can either oppress women or liberate and empower us, depending on how the text is interpreted and applied. Even more importantly, "religions of the book" can support bitter warfare or peaceful coexistence, depending on how the text is interpreted. Whether we're reading the Hebrew Scriptures, the Christian Scriptures, or the Islamic Qur'an, we will always tend to see what we want to see. But surely we ought to consider verifiable facts when we make our interpretations, and human kindness when we apply the texts to contemporary life.

Fear and Wonder

Fear and Wonder

The French Jesuit Scientist Pierre, Teilhard de Chardin once said, "We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience." While growing up as a fundamentalist, I would have thought such a statement to be impossibly radical. I knew that God is Spirit, and that Spirit is eternal. But how could I, a mere mortal and a sinner, dare to think of myself as a being that came from eternity and would eventually return to eternity? I'd been taught that this was a claim that only Jesus the Christ could truthfully make.

How I wish that someone then had drawn me to Psalm 139, the beautiful Scripture that praises our Creator because we human beings are “fearfully and wonderfully made.” The psalmist celebrates God who knew each of us before our birth, whose eyes beheld our unformed substance. Speaking to the Creator, the psalmist declares, “In your book were written all the days that were formed for me, when none of them as yet existed” (139:16). It is as if a sacred contract has been made between us and God, an agreement written in eternity before we were born into this world to learn what we need to learn here and now.

The author of Psalm 139 apparently saw himself (or herself) as a spiritual being having a human experience - living with God in eternity before this life, walking with God’s constant presence during this human life, and certain of returning to God when this life has ended. Wherever the psalmist goes, the Creator is: “If I ascend to heaven, you are there,” reads verse 8. “If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.” In verse 18, the psalmist asserts, “I come to the end - I am still with you.”

Similar thoughts are present in the Christian Scriptures. The author of Ephesians tells us we were “chosen in Christ before the foundation of the world” (1:4), and that “we are what God has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life” (2:10). The writer further asserts that one day all things in heaven and earth, including ourselves, will be gathered up into Christ (1:10).

All of this seems to me astonishing, magnificent, awe-inspiring. News this good should be shouted from the rooftops! Unfortunately, when we are trying to make ends meet financially, or when we get bad news from our doctor, or when we travel through other tough times, eternity can seem remote and frighteningly abstract, too metaphysical to do us much earthly good. It is all too easy to be caught up in the fearfulness that surrounds our sojourn in this world, and lose all sense of the wonder of our own creation.

Truly, humanity is a paradox: Each of us is a timeless entity who currently lives within time, a being created both fearfully and wonderfully. But what does it mean to live out this paradoxical reality of time and timelessness, of fear and wonder? How can a better understanding of our true nature lead us toward life more abundant? How can it deepen our understanding of our purpose for living, of human diversity, and of our interconnectedness - the mystery of ourselves-in-community?

The author of Ephesians suggests we have a single reason for being here: To grow up in every way into the One who is the head, into Christ (4:10). We are given life on this earth in order to incorporate consciously the timeless into our mortal flesh, to learn to live as wisely and compassionately as Jesus lived, to grow up in every way into the perfect image of the Source, the nature of Christ. The goal of our sojourn here in time is to learn to live with the guidance of God’s deep wisdom at the center of our beings.

The challenge begins the day we are born. In “Ode: Intimations of Immortality,” the great English poet William Wordsworth writes that “our birth is but a sleep and forgetting,” and that we come from God, “trailing clouds of glory.” But as we are socialized, “shades of the prison-house” begin to close around us. Thereafter, it is only in rare moments that we catch glimpses of our own sacredness - and many of us have been trained to deny these glimpses as heretical or delusional.

Not so! The same Christ who proclaims “I am the light of the world” (John 8:12, 9:5) declares to the multitudes in the Sermon on the Mount, “You are the light of the world” (Matt. 5:14). No less than for Jesus, the point of living for each of us is to “let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to God in heaven” (Matt. 5:16).

Yet this high calling to grow up in every way into Christ can be terrifying when we think of God as intentionally putting Jesus to death for others’ sins. T.S. Eliot once referred to the prayer “Thy will be done” as “a hardly, barely prayable prayer/costing not less than everything.” And, in a sense, he is right: The cost to our sense of ourselves as disconnected, body-identified egos is everything. We must die to our ego separation in order to live into our larger all-inclusive Christedness. But many of us have been taught such a ferocious concept of God that we are afraid to say “Thy will be done.” We thing God is waiting to zap us.

I remember kneeling next to my son’s bed when he had a high fever and finding the words “Thy will be done” to be “hardly, barely prayable.” At that moment, I did not really believe that God is love. I did not believe that God’s will for me is perfect happiness. I did not believe that all things work together for good for those who love God. Furthermore, I did not believe that my son had his own sacred contract with God, and that God would bring him safely home only at the right time for himself and everyone concerned. At some level, I still imagined that God was hungry to make me sacrifice my happiness.

I still occasionally struggle to trust God’s loving-kindness utterly and completely. I still sometimes find myself viewing other people as walled off inside their own bodies instead of seeing them as timeless beings who are spiritually one with me and God. And in those moments I become afraid. I lose the sense of myself as an eternal being and am fooled into seeing myself as an ego caught in a dying body. But when I can remember that my own true and eternal nature is not me, but Christ within me, then there is nothing to be afraid of.

In every moment, we choose whether to live fearfully and wonderfully. Every instant is either a hellish moment or a sacred one. When I identify with my own body as separate from your body, I feel separated not only from others but from God, and life becomes hellish. The incest and abuse damage I’ve experienced floods in upon me, and life turns dark and cold. But if I identify instead with the timeless and sacred Spirit of Christ within me, that darkness clears, and I am reminded that, in the words of William Blake, “everything that lives is holy.”

To one degree or another, all of us must constantly choose between joyous connectedness and isolated, angry despair. Our purpose in life is so simple: just to be in the presence of God’s lovingkindness wherever we are, as Jesus was. But all of us have been damaged to one degree or another, and that damage breeds fear in us. So it is a constant challenge to grow up into the Christ-likeness, to offer to the Spirit in each moment our little willingness to see as God sees. Then and only then can we look through the terrors and pangs of embodiment and see the sacred movement of God’s self through human experience. This is the way we grow up into the head, the source, the eternal Christ, the light that enlightens everyone who is born into the world (John 1:9). This is the way we learn to live, like Jesus, right at the intersection of timelessness and time.

While our embodiment can too easily lead us to separate ourselves from others and from God, there is also, paradoxically, something very good about being fearfully made. In fact, the Hebrew word that is translated “fearfully” in Psalm 139 is not the word for sheer terror, nor even a cowering before God, but actually means both fearsome and worthy of reverence, which is quite a paradox in itself. As long as we are not defining ourselves by our bodily limitations and using them to wall ourselves by our bodily limitations and using them to wall ourselves off from others, our incarnation in these physical bodies is important and good. Our embodiment grounds us, enables us to communicate with and care for one another, and equips us to do justice, love mercy and walk humbly in communion with God.

Which brings me to my second point: We are fearfully and wonderfully made in all our diversities. The secret of mature Christian living is to celebrate our differences and particularities without elevating any of them into idolatry.

For instance, it is important for a transgender lesbian like me to claim and be grateful for these elements of my identity. Although I did not choose and cannot change these aspects of my humanity, although some in society and even in my own family devalue these aspects, I am happy to be all of who I am. I know that God, my Source, who apparently loves diversity, chose to create me in her image to carry her love and light into the world in just this particular fashion. And this is true for every individual, whatever a person’s race, ethnicity, gender, marital status, abilities, or other particularites. None of these aspects is all that a person is, yet all of these aspects should be valued.

Valued, yes - but not overvalued or undervalued. Herein lies the fearfulness of our wonderful diversities: The separated human ego seizes on diversity and difference as a means of alienating us from one another. All of society’s divisive “isms” use bodies as walls of separation: Racism uses the color of skin; sexism, the shape of our skin; classism, the possessions each body can claim; nationalism, the location of our bodies; heterosexism, the nature of our bodily expression of love; gender rigidity, the insistence that our roles, clothes, and behavior must match our bodies’ genitalia; ageism, discrimination based on bodily age; ableism, discrimination based on how our bodies and brains function; and on and on.

Whether we overvalue or undervalue our particularities doesn’t really matter - either way we are using our differences from others to judge them and push them away. As a lesbian, I’ve met many heterosexuals who believe themselves better than me because they are certain heterosexuality is God’s will for everyone. But I’ve also met heterosexuals who feel guilty about their more priviledged status in society and seem to wish they shared my oppression. I understand that emotion; I call it “liberal guilt,” and I have experienced how my own similar guilt around issues of race and social class affects my relationships with persons of a different ethnicity or economic status. Unfortunately, liberal guilt throws up a wall of imagined inferiority just as surely as self-righteousness throws up a wall of imagined superiority.

From the perspective of time, our particularities matter a great deal. To be sure, I have expended tremendous energy learning to value myself as a transgender lesbian woman. I expend lots of time and energy every day coping with the pain and limitations of my disability of arthritis. But from the standpoint of eternity, our bodily particularities are not much more than a tiny blip on a huge radar screen. All of us come from God into this world trailing clouds of glory; all of us have to liberate ourselves from the various prison-houses that close around us in this world; all of us have to train our minds to focus on the sacred ground that undergirds forms and appearances; and all of us need one another’s help to grow into the fullness of the One who perfectly mirrors our Source.

It is this need for one another that leads to my third point: Fear and wonder surround our interconnectedness. We live in a society that overvalues individualism and undervalues community. Growing up in a Protestant fundamentalist environment, I always heard salvation defined as a purely individualistic matter between oneself and God. I never heard anything about the social dimensions of salvation, despite Jesus’ lifetime of eating with tax collectors and sex workers and challenging the politics of hierarchy and colonial occupation not only through his words and deeds, but through his execution and resurrection from the dead.

Furthermore, partly because U.S. churches have not taken a prophetic stance, our society has become more and more individualistic and less and less concerned about the common good. And the gap between the “haves” and “have nots,” both within our nation and across the globe, continues to widen.

In such a society, it can be hard to remember that we were created for community, and that our full humanity requires relatedness within community. We cannot know who we are until we see what we do and say in relationship to others. Although our capitalist society values autonomy and self-reliance as the fullest realization of personhood, in actuality a person is someone who acts in relation to others, and the person’s character is disclosed by the quality of her or his words and actions.

Whereas U.S. society views family as a closed-system nesting of one male and one female and any children they may engender, the Christian Scriptures depict the marriage relationship in terms of the church, the corporate and universal body of Christ in whom “all things hold together” (Col. 1:17). Love of one other person is intended to build a foundation for universal communion.

As biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann has stressed, one of our critical tasks as Christians in community is reconciliation (2 Cor. 5:17-18). This task must include actions of solidarity with all the “little ones” - not only children, but everyone who for any reason is weak, poor, and powerless in society. Most of our churches would rather practice charity toward little ones than solidarity with them, because charity does not disturb the power structures. To the degree that the church and governments refuse to redistribute power by sharing it with the little ones, our job is to speak truth to those in power. And Brueggemann reminds us that, to the degree that we possess power - our ministry is the empowerment of those who until now have been denied power.

All of this to me seems quite wonderful. As ourselves-in-community, doing the work of reconciliation, we are most wonderfully made. But as a reconciling community, are we also fearfully made?

I think the answer is a resounding yes. It isn’t enough just to learn how to include others without coopting them to our agenda; nor is it enough to learn to connect with others without merging so completely that we lose our own authenticity. We also face the fearsome job of behaving in a reconciling manner toward our political and religious opponents. We know that Jesus told us to love friends and enemies alike, but when we consider the brutal policies of heteropatriarchy, how is it humanly possible to seek reconciliation with those who think things are just fine exactly as they are?

Theologian Carter Heyward gives us some help in her wonderful book, Saving Jesus from Those Who Are Right. Heyward makes it clear that “those who are right” refers not only to the political and religious right-wing, but also to our own tendency to forget that our perceptions are always partial, imperfect, and limited. She goes further, asserting that “We are all deeply implicated in the evil that is being done every day.” For instance, she explains that, whether we want or not, White people inevitably profit from the monopoly of culture by Whites, so the best we can ever hope to be is “anti-racist racists.” And most of us in the United States profit to one degree or another from the starvation of a segment of the human race, and from slavery and sweatshop conditions around the world. She contends, “No one born into this world is untouched by wrong relation and the evil we do in it.”

We cannot approach our opponents as if we are innocent and they alone are guilty. Instead of distancing evil from ourselves by projecting it onto others, Heyward urges us to learn to “transform it into a different kind of energy, a force for healing and liberation.” I think this is what Jesus was suggesting when he told us to love our enemies (Luke 6:27,35). We are not asked to agree with unjust policies, but to recognize and work with our common humanity, including the various unjust privileges we have in common.

Having to acknowledge our corporate complicity in the world’s evil systems brings home the fact that we are fearfully made. Fortunately, however, viewing ourselves as in community lifts up even more the fact that we are also wonderfully made. As Heyward puts it, “We are all divine together, in mutual relation with our sisters and brothers. No one of us alone is ‘God.’ God is the Holy Spirit (that connects) our lives, moving with us and through us.”

Indeed, we are fearfully and wonderfully made. Let us rejoice together in this gift of our common humanity. For while our passage through time has damaged our bodies and personalities, nevertheless our inner timeless Self remains as fresh and loving as God’s own universal nature, revealed to us in the personhood of Jesus. May we continue to engage in the struggle for justice, secure in the knowledge that it is a joyous struggle, because eventually the will of God will be done on earth as it is in heaven.