Why do you call me “Lord, Lord,” and do not do what I tell you? I will show you what someone is like who comes to me, hears my words, and acts on them.
—Luke 6:46–47
I’ve decided,” I announced one night over dinner, “I’m going to go to a Christian college.”
My mother’s face turned red. “What about Duke? Smith? Or Lewis and Clark or the University of Arizona?” she asked, reciting all the schools where I had put in applications. She had not gone to college and wanted me to go somewhere prestigious, a “real” school, which would give me unlimited opportunity to succeed in the world. “What are you going to study? The Bible?”
“Well, yes,” I stammered. “There are other subjects too. It’s a real liberal arts college.”
I actually wanted to be safe and to attend a college of which my church approved. But I also hoped my family would be proud. I knew I needed to leave home, and yet I did not want to distance myself from my new faith that had offered me protection, rescue, and salvation. I was growing up, but I was afraid of the world.
I had found what I was looking for in Jesus, and I desired to know everything possible about who he was, what he taught, and his purpose for my life. Getting saved was partly an intellectual quest, partly a flight from fear, and partly a love affair. “As a deer longs for flowing streams, so my soul longs for you, O God,” wrote the Psalmist. “My soul thirsts for God, for the living God” (42:1–2). At eighteen, I could not get enough of God, Jesus, or the Bible. Sin, the cross, the Rapture—they were just the beginning. I wanted to study systematic theology, the scriptures, church history, and apologetics. I did not want to party; I wanted to pray. Had it been the Middle Ages instead of the late 1970s and had we been Catholics rather than Protestants, I am confident my parents, given my inclinations, would have packed me off to a convent.
Instead, in autumn 1977, I found myself at an evangelical liberal arts college in Santa Barbara, California. My parents’ worries eased when they saw the campus, hidden on a hillside in posh Montecito, more an elegant estate than a fundamentalist Bible camp. With its manicured gardens and magnificent views of the Pacific, the school embodied a mannered, maybe even vaguely worldly evangelical faith. In the parking lots, expensive foreign cars were marked as Jesus’s own with discreet fish stickers on their bumpers. Maybe one could have a piece of heaven here on earth; people joked about finding Eden.
When they dropped me off, Mom and Dad seemed relieved, perhaps understanding that depositing their daughter at a school with required chapel and religion classes might not be such a bad thing during the last days of the counterculture. My mother made me promise to major in political science and go to law school, or at the very least marry a lawyer or an aspiring politician. I agreed. He would have to be a Christian, though.
I dutifully signed up for courses in American government and international politics, but they were dull. The religion classes kept drawing my attention. Who really cared about the Cold War and nuclear policy when you could be learning about arguments between Catholics and Protestants and exegeting the gospel of Luke?
In religious studies classes, we explored the nature of salvation, the work of Jesus, and Christian ethics. We learned about martyrs and saints and great preachers and theologians. We plumbed the secret art of biblical exegesis and the mysteries of hermeneutics and demythologizing and had an entire course on how to argue someone into faith. My intellectual world was aflame with the Holy Spirit. It was heady to discuss things like double predestination and realized eschatology over dinner or converse about Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth as if they were my best friends. Challenging contemporary books joined the classics: Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger, by Ron Sider; The Politics of Jesus, by John Howard Yoder; Agenda for Biblical People, by Jim Wallis; and Let Justice Roll Down, by John Perkins.
One of those books, Your God Is Too Small, by J. B. Phillips, accused Christians of having “put God in a box,” of constructing a God in our own image and according to our own preferences. During that first year in college, that “box” phrase dogged me. Perhaps the Bible Church was too much of a box, and even if I had only put God there relatively recently, all these classes and books were convincing me that Jesus was far more than a personal savior who would rapture me at the end times and take me to heaven forever.
There was an entire underground industry of radical Christian literature in the 1970s, not only books, but magazines as well—Sojourners, The Other Side, and Radix. The college chaplain was a surprisingly hip guy who wore jeans and casual shirts and had posters of an unkempt Palestinian-looking Jesus on his wall. His office became a hangout for particularly precocious students, where we would sit on beanbag chairs and talk about the Bible, missions, and world Christianity. He invited speakers to chapel who challenged the evangelical establishment—which prompted my friends’ parents to write threatening letters to the school—preachers like Tony Campolo, who literally yelled at a full gymnasium about how evangelicals ignored poverty; John Perkins, who shared his experience of being a Black Christian, pretty much called us all racist, daring us to move to and minister in Mississippi; and Ched Myers, a biblical scholar whose Jesus-was-a-pacifist takedown of the American military caused a near riot among the students.
In the avalanche of words, someone in a class or at chapel remarked, “Jesus can’t just be your Savior; he must also be your Lord.” I was riveted by the idea—Lord, Master of all, a God who cared about justice and peace and things that happened here on earth. Admittedly, the Jesus I had encountered as a teenager could manage to save people from sin and death, but maybe there was more. Maybe Jesus could save the world.
* * *
Around 112 CE, a Roman governor named Pliny reported to Emperor Trajan about the activities of the new religious sect called Christians in his region. Wanting to contain increasing incidents involving those who followed Jesus, the governor sought more information about the group by “torturing two female slaves who were called deaconesses.”1 He told the emperor he had not discovered much, except their “depraved, excessive superstition.” Pliny was far more concerned about how the potential spread of Christianity might reflect poorly on him than he was, of course, about torturing a few slaves. The deaconesses, of whom we have no record after this, had most likely been found out through their customary Christian confession “Jesus is Lord.”
This sordid bit of history reveals something important between its lines. Early Christians often proclaimed their faith in three words: “Jesus is Lord.” Historians refer to it as an early creedal affirmation, but it was really more of a theological slogan. At its simplest level, the Greek term kyrios, meaning “lord” or “master,” quite literally meant the one who owns you. Slaves called their masters “lord”; students often referred to revered teachers as “master”; and workers might call their employers “lord.” In a world where millions were held in slavery and millions of others lived in poverty and powerlessness at the bottom of a rigid social hierarchy, claiming Jesus as “Lord” announced one’s liberation from oppression. “Jesus is Lord” made sense in an empire of slaves, as submitting to his lordship amounted to spiritual freedom, especially in the new community called the church where, apparently, female slaves held leadership positions and Roman social status was upended. Baptism was the rite of initiation into this egalitarian community. All Christians were baptized into their new master, Jesus, according to Paul, who includes an early baptismal creed in his letter to Galatians: “There is no longer slave or free . . . for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” (3:27–28).
Everything and everyone in the Roman Empire was, however, owned by a different master—the emperor, who had ultimate authority, power, and control over all. As New Testament scholar N. T. Wright makes clear, “The emperor was the kyrios, the lord of the world, the one who claimed the allegiance and loyalty of subjects throughout his wide empire.”2 When slaves and women said that Jesus was Lord, they surely meant that Jesus was now their master, the one who truly owned them, no matter the claims of earthly masters. But because Caesar was Lord of all, saying “Jesus is Lord” also carried political connotations. Especially when those who professed “Jesus is Lord” also refused to say “Caesar is Lord.”
And Pliny, like most Roman authorities of the day, found “Jesus is Lord” both confusing and threatening. How could a dead Jew be “Lord”? Proclaiming that precluded those who did so from making sacrifice or swearing loyalty to the emperor. Were they mocking Caesar? Plotting a revolt against the empire? Perhaps this Christian talk of resurrection deflected attention away from a political insurrection. “Jesus is Lord” meant far more than “Jesus is my personal master.” It meant, “If Jesus is Lord, Caesar is not.” Early Christians moved quickly from the spiritual freedoms they acquired by following Jesus to sedition and treason against the political order.
In addition, “Lord” appears in Jewish contexts of the time. Because the name for God in the Hebrew scriptures, YHWH, was considered too sacred to utter aloud, whenever that term appeared in the text, the word adonai, “Lord,” was used in its place. In the Greek version of the Hebrew scriptures, the Septuagint, kyrios was the translation of the Hebrew word adonai. Thus, Greek-speaking Jews referred to the Jewish God as Kyrios, “Lord.”
Thus, “Lord” held multiple meanings in the biblical world, meanings that were personal, political, and theological, and expanded as a term to include multiple ways in which believers experienced Jesus. Writers of the New Testament use kyrios more than seven hundred times, many to specifically refer to Jesus—making the word seem so common that contemporary readers seem to take it for granted. Yet kyrios was a startling word to describe a wandering miracle-working rabbi. “Lord,” “master,” “ruler,” “God”—all kyrios, each signifying one who holds dominion over the lives and fates of those under his sway. “Jesus is Lord” was subversive and empowering, a form of submission one could choose in a world of otherwise little choice, a way of life that resulted in finding oneself by giving oneself totally and unreservedly to this crucified Jewish peasant kyrios.
Master
A revival broke out during my sophomore year at college. It started small, with just a few students gathering to read the Bible, people who longed to live faith in a powerful way, but soon grew to over seventy of us meeting for study, worship, and prayer. We read the text and asked ourselves where we were in the story, attempting to remain open to all the voices and testimonies in the room. There were no trained leaders, no adult authorities. Together, we interpreted the Bible, free of oversight and constraint, attempting to make it make sense in our world. Although we did not know it at the time, we had started something that Latin American Christians would call a “base community,” a completely nonhierarchical, lay-led, experiential Bible-reading group. The conveners, Jimmy and John, called it “the radical Christian Bible study.” “Radical,” they explained, “means going to the root.”
Someone in the group had read Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s book The Cost of Discipleship and shared this quote: “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.”3 Following Jesus was costly, not easy; it meant surrendering everything to Christ’s lordship. Suddenly, those words were everywhere, overheard in conversations in dorms, spoken by preachers in chapel, even scribbled on bathroom doors. Cheap paperback editions of Bonhoeffer’s book sat atop Bibles in the cubbies outside the dining commons and fell out of backpacks or book bags as students scurried across campus. Hundreds of young Christians, mostly fundamentalist kids or newly converted Jesus freaks, became preoccupied with the idea of dying to self in the here and now. Maybe following Jesus was not about the afterlife. We needed to follow Jesus, to go where he called, to give up our lives for him here and now. More than Savior, Jesus is Lord! Jesus bids us come and die!
Jimmy and John were roommates, both religious studies majors. They had been reading the gospel of Luke together when Jesus’s words, on the heels of Bonhoeffer’s quote, struck them with fresh urgency: “Then he said to them all, ‘If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will save it’” (Luke 9:23–24). They shared with others how our home churches had largely ignored this truth—that few were willing to die for Christ—having accommodated to middle-class southern California values instead.
The pair began the Bible study centered on that verse and, within a few weeks, dozens of classmates crowded in the dorm lounge in a quest to become radical Christians, “rooted” in the confession that Jesus was Lord. Soon it was the buzz of campus. It was, indeed, a revival. But there was no Billy Graham–style altar call, no insistence on being born again. We were already born again, but most of us felt something was missing. It was about following Jesus, really following him, being disciples.
“What would it look like,” Jimmy asked me as we walked to class one day, “if we picked up the cross every day? If we died to self? If Jesus was Lord of all?”
I did not know.
By sophomore year, however, I knew I had become equally disenchanted with political science courses and the future lawyers in my classes. I switched to an education major because I wanted to help people—and perhaps become a missionary.4 On the path, when Jimmy asked the question, I felt in a quandary. I had known the cross as a part of church architecture or as the place called Calvary, where salvation was accomplished. But to pick it up? Every day? An evangelist named Arthur Blessitt was carrying a giant cross around the world, but that did not seem to be what either Jimmy pondered or Jesus meant.
We might not have known, but a group of us realized we would not know until we tried to put it into action. Instead of hauling a cross around, we started a street ministry intended to serve people the way we imagined Jesus might. Santa Barbara had a large homeless population, and many people lived under bridges, on benches, at the beach, and in parks and plazas. Each weekend, our idealistic band, dressed in clothes we had bought at a thrift store—in order to “identify” with the street people—walked about in the city’s poorer neighborhoods. We fed people, sat and talked, and took “the poor” to shelters or hospitals as needed. It was not a turn-or-burn type of evangelism. We had no motives to make converts, no tracts to pass out. Instead, we wanted to do what we thought Jesus demanded of us—serve those at the margins of society, following the call of our Master.
We met and befriended a godly and boisterous Black woman named Queenie, who ran a café on lower State Street. We were never quite sure how she made any money, as she gave away more coffee and sandwiches than she ever seemed to sell. When we came in, she would shout, “Praise Jesus!” She let us host Bible studies at her tables and play Christian music to entertain her customers; in return, we often did her dishes and cleaned her floors. Queenie’s became the hub of our radical Christian community, and she taught us what she knew of both the Bible and the streets. Under her guidance, we got braver and learned everything from how to get someone who had overdosed to the local rehab to the art of protesting against real-estate developers who were trying to close her café down.
Jimmy, John, and the other male leaders thought it was a bad idea for their sisters in Christ—like me—to haunt the mean streets of Santa Barbara. Except for one thing. We were allowed to minister to other women, and that meant those whom we politely called “ladies of the evening.” None of us would have ever thought of referring to these women as “sex workers,” for the word “sex” was generally avoided, and it would have appalled us to think of what they did as “work.” They were tragic women, victims of men’s lust, who, we believed, like Mary Magdalene would jump at the chance to be saved when introduced to Jesus. Thus, I was deployed with a few female classmates to talk with the ladies, whom we would offer to take back to our dorms (that was until college authorities discovered that we were putting up prostitutes on spare sofas on campus) to await transport to a place of moral and physical safety.
One night, I was standing on a corner with some of the ladies when a police van pulled up. I do not remember who my teammate was that evening, but when I looked around, I realized she was gone. It was just the women from the streets and me. The police rounded us up and opened the door of the paddy wagon, when it suddenly dawned on me that I was going to be arrested with everyone else. My heart skipped a beat: I was going to jail. Jesus went to jail. Paul went to jail. Was this what it meant to die to self? To pick up the cross? I wondered how I would explain this to my parents.
Just as I was considering the cost of this particular discipleship, one of the women spoke up. “She’s not one of us, fellas,” she said as she pushed me away from the back of the van. “Leave her be. She’s a Jesus girl.”
The cops did as directed, driving off with the women and abandoning me on the street corner with passersby who had watched the whole episode. I walked back to Queenie’s.
She’s not one of us. She’s a Jesus girl.
I felt strangely conflicted. No jail. But maybe this radical Christian thing was not for me. This going to the root of things, this lordship business, scared me, the Jesus girl. Jesus hung out with sinners, tax collectors, and prostitutes. He would have gotten in the van, even if someone tried to push him away. Some people would have said I made the right choice to stay on the street corner while the others were rounded up. But it made me feel terrible, sending women off to the police station while I was safe, and I remembered the words of judgment uttered by Jesus: “I was in prison and you visited me” (Matt. 25:36). I wanted to serve, and yet a huge rift opened between them and me. “Lord,” asked his disciples, “when was it that we saw you . . . sick or in prison and visited you?” Jesus replied, “Truly, I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these . . . you did it to me” (25:37–40). The Jesus girl had failed her master.
These words—and the idea that Jesus was my “master”—make me wince now. Indeed, about a dozen years later, I was in a church Bible study at my Episcopal church, and our group read Romans 6:22: “But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the benefit you reap leads to holiness, and the result is eternal life” (NIV).
Slaves to God? I felt queasy. I begged the others and the pastor to think about how these words had been used throughout history as justification for racism and chattel slavery and how offensive they were to those who had been held in slavery. I confessed that the verse upset me, and I wished for different language to describe what Paul was saying. Could we not call ourselves slaves? And, more important, could we not think of either God or Jesus as a slaveholder?
“If Jesus were a slaveholder,” I insisted, “he would set everyone free.”
“But he’s a good slaveholder,” the pastor insisted. “We are slaves. That’s what it says, what it means.”
I got flustered. “You don’t understand. It’s oppressive. It makes everything . . . worse. No thoughtful woman, no Black person . . .”
He interrupted, “We are all enslaved to something. Either God or the devil.”
The pastor, a charismatic (as in “Pentecostal,” not “personable”) Episcopalian, then called me a heretic and tried to speak over me in tongues to cast out my demon of confusion. I excused myself to the bathroom to wait out his attempted exorcism.
By the time I was thirty, I had learned that when Paul spoke of slavery, it was far from clear what he meant, what one scholar calls a “study in diplomatic obfuscation.”5 The apostle seems to have drawn analogies from what was a social reality of his day (and for whatever reason, it was difficult for him to clearly criticize slavery, the “third rail of ancient society”) rather than a vision of what should be.6 And despite the givenness of slavery in the ancient Roman world, in the century after Paul some of the next generation of Christians began to subvert enslavement with stories like the one found of the Shepherd of Hermas, where a slave is made “joint heir” with a son.7 It would take a very, very long time for the words “no longer slave or free” to become more than a spiritual metaphor in my own life, but, more important, for the world.
At nineteen, however, I was completely comfortable with the idea that Jesus was my master and that, in some fashion, Jesus owned me. I would serve my Lord as loyally and faithfully as was possible. I was very sincere, even if naive.
Ruler
If Jesus was Lord, that also meant he was in authority, like a king or ruler, here on the earth.
A favorite passage of our radical Christian group came from Jeremiah 18, where the prophet visits a potter’s house. Jeremiah sees a craftsman working at the wheel: “The vessel he was making of clay was spoiled in the potter’s hand, and he reworked it into another vessel, as seemed good to him. Then the word of the Lord came to me: . . . ‘Just like the clay in the potter’s hand, so are you in my hand’” (18:4–6). Jeremiah’s words are directed to the people of Israel, but never mind that. We personalized the story to mean that whenever we failed to live up to the Master’s expectations, the softened clay of our hearts could be reworked until it became the vessel God intended.
A popular song, often sung in chapel, summed up the kind of tenderness we hoped would keep us spiritually malleable and so of use to Jesus:
Spirit of the Living God, fall fresh on me.
Spirit of the Living God, fall fresh on me.
Melt me, mold me,
Fill me, use me.
Spirit of the Living God, fall fresh on me.
“O Lord, you are our Father; we are the clay,” we prayed using words from Isaiah, “and you are our potter; we are all the work of your hand” (64:8). What did it mean to be the potter’s clay?
A group of students began to go to Ensenada, Mexico, in search of more challenging ministry opportunities and cross-cultural experiences. Impoverished Baja villages provided plenty of both. Thus was born Potter’s Clay, a week of mission work during spring break south of the border, which mostly involved building an orphanage and repairing churches as well as preaching, leading revivals, and teaching Bible classes for children.
The first time I went, as we crossed the border from San Diego to Tijuana, I was unprepared for the poverty of the people and the economic distress of the city. We drove southward, and my friends pointed out villages that had welcomed our group. We navigated up a dirt road to one hamlet where the pastor awaited our arrival. After we parked, I looked around. Much of the tiny community was built out of old tires! Foundations of houses, walls that held back hillsides, and raised garden beds—tires. Tires everywhere—little kids crawling over them, food grown in them. The shock must have registered on my face. Tires were toxic, subject to special handling and recycling as hazardous waste.
“Yes,” my friend Gordon whispered to me. “Americans dump tires over the border. And these people live in our garbage.” He shook his head, saying angrily, “At least they have a place to live.”
As Gordon chatted with the pastor, it was hard to follow in Spanish and I became lost in my own thoughts. What did “Jesus is Lord” mean here, living in a village made from American trash? And what were we doing polluting this country and poisoning these children? As the dust blew in my face, almost as the Spirit, it dawned on me that Jesus’s lordship was far more than surrendering control of my own life to God. It had something to do with this place, bringing this under his lordship too. “Jesus is Lord” was not just a personal confession; the implications of the proclamation edged toward politics, toward a reordering of economics, of environment, of power.
Recently, the youngest theology professor at the college had begun to teach us about liberation theology, a relatively new and radical idea from Latin America. A Dominican scholar, Gustavo Gutiérrez, had shaken up the field of religion by asserting that European theology was complicit with unjust social structures, conquest, and colonization. He called for new attention to the dictum to love one’s neighbor, and he argued the only way to do so in the now-globalized world was to privilege the poor as God did. Although the young professor in our department was most assuredly evangelical, he was willing to poke the status quo, and soon enough we were reading Gutiérrez, who, like Bonhoeffer, taught about dying to self. For him, dying to self meant being raised to liberation and then liberating others.
This was heady stuff, not the typical curriculum of evangelical colleges at the time (nor probably at this time either), but it made sense of the tire village and the other injustices and inequities we witnessed in Ensenada. We argued mightily about God’s preferential option for the poor, and found it increasingly hard to defend its detractors while playing with homeless orphans and cleaning up poisoned streams in Baja.
In California in the late 1970s, we increasingly looked southward to the radical Christian politics being proclaimed mostly by Catholic priests, sisters, and missionaries to try and understand the injustices beyond our ken. Those Christians were standing against oppressive, militarist regimes, especially the one violently controlling El Salvador. That such evil was being perpetrated in the “Republic of the Savior,” that a country named for Jesus the Savior was so far from living as if Jesus was Lord, was painful to fathom. The words of El Salvador’s Archbishop Óscar Romero wended northward, and even we, students at an evangelical college, eagerly listened as he courageously stood with the suffering:
The church would betray its own love for God and its fidelity to the gospel if it stopped being . . . a defender of the rights of the poor . . . a humanizer of every legitimate struggle to achieve a more just society . . . that prepares the way for the true reign of God in history.8
We were not stupid. This was not just a problem for the Catholic Church in El Salvador. We knew that our own churches had not defended the rights of the poor, had failed to work for a more just society in our own communities.
To be fair, the Methodist church of my childhood had, in many ways, attempted to raise some of these concerns and certainly tried to teach a vision of justice to its members, however imperfectly. Indeed, my Confirmation class had traveled to Watts to teach us about racism and brought Latino missionaries to speak. But Scottsdale Bible had eschewed worldly politics in favor of heavenly salvation, preaching imminent escape from the evils of the day. Most of the students at the college came from churches like Scottsdale Bible. Conventional political theology for evangelicals amounted to quoting Romans 13:1: “Let every person be subject to the governing authorities; for there is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God.” This was often paraphrased as “obey the government” and trust that God has ordained the social order. To hear voices like Óscar Romero challenge the church for its complicity with injustice and a plea for the poorest of the poor—to imagine the “true reign of God in history”—was an epiphany.
The true reign of God in history. Was that possible? Could Jesus be Lord in history? We discovered what the early Christians had known—“Jesus is Lord” was a political proclamation. Not only was Jesus Lord of our hearts; he was Lord of the whole earth, active in history, working toward liberation and love, and willing to take down empires in doing so.
Although these theological questions excited me, much went on as before, especially with classes and chapel. But I began to see things differently. Despite the growing popularity of worship choruses, we often still sang traditional hymns in chapel, some of which I remembered from my Methodist childhood. One old favorite was “Crown Him with Many Crowns,” with its grand vision of Jesus on the heavenly throne in the first verse. The fourth verse, however, one I had never really noticed before, now jumped out at me:
Crown Him the Lord of peace,
Whose power a scepter sways
From pole to pole, that wars may cease,
And all be prayer and praise.
His reign shall know no end,
And round His pierced feet
Fair flowers of glory now extend,
Their fragrance ever sweet.
Jesus was not just Lord in heaven; he reigns as Lord over the entire earth.
The world was less than a decade beyond 1968, a time of chaotic politics and challenging social movements, followed by Watergate and the scandal of a president who lied to the American people. The new president, Jimmy Carter, was an evangelical and seemed a good person, but new crises erupted in the Middle East, there was not enough fuel for cars or heat, the American government supported all sorts of bad political actors around the world, unemployment was through the roof, and interest rates on things like student loans and mortgages soared. Singing “crown him the Lord of peace” about a Jesus who ruled the earth and ended all wars felt more like a protest anthem than a praise song. Jesus as a Christian Caesar seemed a pretty good idea over against Exxon and the American military ruling the world.
Of course, Satan had once tempted Jesus with that very thing, to make him ruler of all the world’s kingdoms. “To you I will give their glory and all this authority,” he hissed into Jesus’s ear, “for it has been given over to me, and I give it to anyone I please” (Luke 4:5–6). The trade was that Jesus had to worship him in order to rule the earth. This text is full of oddities, not least of which is the idea that Satan owns the realms of the world and can distribute them at will, a devilish claim that was not theologically true according to other parts of scripture. The kingdoms were not his to give.
Jesus said no. Even though Jesus resisted this devilish offer, he did not eschew earthly kingdoms for a purely spiritual one. Indeed, Jesus went from Satan’s temptation to Galilee, where he proclaimed that the kingdom of God was at hand: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news!” (Mark 1:15).
For centuries, the Jews had looked for the kingdom they called the “age to come,” when God’s dream of peace and justice would fill the earth. Captives would be released, the blind would see, the oppressed would be set free—the Lord’s jubilee would be upon the people of Israel. That kingdom would be real, not a metaphor or some spiritual place in the clouds. Rather, the whole of creation would be transformed and God would rule that dominion, a kingdom that stretched through the heavens and renewed the earth. Jesus taught about it, describing the kingdom in parables, and modeled it by healing the sick and performing miracles. If you hung around with Jesus, it was easy to believe that some sort of political revolution was at hand.
It was not only hymns that sounded different now, but Jesus’s words as well, like his own prayer: “Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name; thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” When his first followers asked him how to pray, he directed them to pray not for a heavenly kingdom, but for an earthly one where all would be fed, there would be no more debt, and peace would reign. Here and now, not there and then. How had I never noticed this before? Jesus was Lord, a kind of alternative Caesar, not one who gave in to Satan’s taunting offer of power, but the One who embodied divine authority and had arrived on earth to take back the planet for the Father.
The priorities of Jesus’s kingdom would be exactly opposite of those in the world we knew—there holy generosity and true peace would replace capitalism and militarism. “God’s Word teaches a very hard, disturbing truth,” wrote Ron Sider, an evangelical theologian who also spoke in our chapel. “Those who neglect the poor and the oppressed are really not God’s people at all—no matter how frequently they practice their religious rituals or how orthodox are their creeds and confessions.”9 What we did mattered more than right belief? Right treatment of the poor mattered more than doctrine? No one imagined this would go down well with the trustees.
Nor would the week in chapel when a relatively unknown young theologian named Ched Myers debated a military officer on Just War theory. Myers flatly declared that Jesus was a pacifist and that the church had betrayed him. No Christian should ever participate in the military, and no Christian could support a “peace” based on nuclear superiority. Students sat stunned as Myers reeled off verse after verse, quoted both ancient and modern theologians, and criticized the United States’s dealings in Latin America. After chapel, dozens of students surrounded him, wanting to hear more. For the three days of his campus visit, Myers was like a pacifist pied piper, sitting in the middle of students teaching peace. Nobody could even remember the army officer’s name.
No, the trustees were not going to like this at all. But it did not really matter to us. This theological door had been pushed open, and we barged through as if storming heaven. Blessed are the poor! Blessed are the peacemakers! This was the kingdom of God come among us. Give away everything you have and follow me. Turn the other cheek. It was all so clear, so simple, so . . . so literal.
Jesus is Lord! I had picked up that cross and my Bible and found a very different Jesus from the one who saved me. Years later, my friend actor John Fugelsang described that Jesus as:
a radical, nonviolent revolutionary who hung around with lepers, hookers, and crooks; wasn’t American and never spoke English; was anti-wealth, anti–death penalty, and anti–public prayer (Matt. 6:5); who was never anti-gay; who never mentioned abortion or birth control, never called the poor lazy, never justified torture, never fought for tax cuts for the wealthiest Nazarenes, never asked a leper for a co-pay; and who was a long-haired, brown-skinned, homeless community-organizing, anti-slut-shaming Middle Eastern Jew.10
Jesus was all that, and I found him in the least likely of places, a small evangelical college in a ritzy suburb of Santa Barbara. And in a village made of cast-off tires in Mexico.
God
The same theology professor who introduced us to liberation theology also handled more mundane subjects, like the required course Introduction to Christian Doctrine.
“The doctrine of the Trinity is the subject today,” he announced. “And the truth of the matter is that this doctrine is not found in the New Testament.”
Wait, what?
“Early Christians were Jews, and Jews were strict monotheists,” he explained. “Yet they also worshipped Jesus. So either Christians were bi-theists, or they had to figure out how Jesus and God the Father were related.”
I looked around the room. Most students were just taking notes. A couple of others, however, seemed to realize this was important.
“Thus, early Christian writers and theologians had to extrapolate the doctrine of the Trinity from a few scriptures and from their experience.”
Extrapolate?
“There are only a few texts in the New Testament where Jesus seems to claim he is God.” This was getting serious, and I began to feel a little panicked. “Those references,” he went on, “are mostly found in the gospel of John.”
The professor listed those verses on the board, taking them as literal sayings of Jesus (adding nothing, of course, about the historical context or literary sources of John’s gospel), and quickly moved to the heart of his lecture—a creed that appeared nearly three hundred years after Jesus had died in which Christians had “extrapolated” the ideas from stories about Jesus, memories of his message lingering in community, engagement with Greek and Latin philosophy, and new interpretations of Jewish scriptures in an effort to quash heresies that threatened the young church.
I had never given much thought to “Jesus is Lord” meaning Jesus is God. That is one of those things that Christians take for granted. It had never occurred to me that once—a very long time ago—this idea did not exist and that someone, or some group of someones, wrestled to invent it. Christian children do not consider Jesus-Lord-God as weird or strange in any way, having grown up reciting creeds about how Jesus is one with the Father and singing songs praising his divinity. Indeed, in some churches, “Jesus, Lord God” is used as a title in prayer.
If you paid attention in Sunday school, you heard the mysterious word “Trinity.” Hardly any Sunday school teacher I ever knew could explain how Christians were monotheists and yet worshipped a God who existed as three, but explaining was not the point. Nearly everybody had a relative who scoffed at the idea, but who served on the local church board anyway. And everyone had a friend, perhaps even one on the playground, who said Trinitarian math did not add up. Nevertheless, it just was. As the Father was God, the Lord of all, so Jesus, the Son, was also Lord. And God.
Caesar: Kaisar Kyrios. Jesus: Christos Kyrios. To the Romans, but not to the Jews, kings were gods. For the Romans, this was not a big deal, as they divinized human beings all the time. But, as John Dominic Crossan points out, the problem arose with divinizing this particular person: Jesus of Nazareth. A Jewish peasant rabbi was God? Pilate scoffed, “Are you the king of the Jews?” Jesus replied, “You say so” (Luke 23:3). For a Roman governor, the Jewish king could have been divine, but if so, he was both a sacred and a political rival to the emperor and therefore a traitor. Pilate took Jesus’s nonanswer as an answer and had him whipped for treason.
Jesus may not have claimed to be God (except for those few verses in John), but he certainly believed he was the Anointed One, the Messiah, in Greek Christos, who had come to save the Jews and establish the reign of God here on earth. But God himself? Jews had kings, but none were divine. In Judaism, there was no real expectation that the Jewish messiah would be divine either. This was one of the reasons the Jews hated Rome, and why they would not and could not participate in its religion. Caesar, the Roman emperor, the Lord, was not God. The Lord God, Adonai, YHWH, is God alone. Anything else, any other claim, violated the First Commandment: “You shall have no other gods before me.”
Yet in the years after Jesus was murdered by Rome and as Christians believed in his resurrection, they followed a Jesus kyrios who was as their master, they proclaimed a Jesus kyrios as the ruler of this world, and they came to worship Jesus kyrios as Adonai, the Lord, who forgave sins, was eternally God, and was one with the Father. As my doctrine professor taught that day, this was a bit of a theological process, as one realization led to the next; but, sure enough, in about three or four centuries, this was the theological foundation of Christianity.
When I was in college, I was not terribly worried about the historical or theological implications of what was presented in Introduction to Christian Doctrine (even if I would be later) that day. I took the theological struggle of the early Christians at face value, trusting that the Holy Spirit had guided them to the truth. What occurred to me was that “Lord” with its multiple meanings demanded something of me—“Jesus is Lord” called me to personal submission of my life and will to God’s; “Jesus is Lord” pushed me to see the whole earth as the kingdom of God; and “Jesus is Lord” meant Jesus was God and King whose kingdom needed to be filled with worshipful subjects. It did no good to have a king if there was nobody around the throne.
As it says in Philippians 2:10–11:
At the name of Jesus
every knee should bend,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
And every tongue should confess
that Jesus Christ is Lord
to the glory of God the Father.
The New Testament professor said this was an early Christian hymn inserted into the text by Paul, the letter’s author. In rather dramatic fashion, the professor explained how these words echoed what happened at Caesar’s throne. There, terrified supplicants entered the royal room backward, their faces away from the emperor’s glory. As they approached the throne in this posture, they would periodically bow, fall to their knees, or even go prostrate, as they recited their creed: Kaisar Kyrios.
“Paul is saying that Jesus is Caesar, not the Roman Caesar,” he said, his voice becoming more insistent, “and one day every knee shall bow before him. Every knee, whether willingly or not. People will either fall on their knees or be forced to them, because Jesus is the true Lord.”
His description was terrifying.
I did not want anyone to be forced. No one should fear Jesus, or face eternal damnation. I hoped for a happy throne-room scene at the end of history, one in which people from all races, tribes, and nations sang joyful praise to the Lord. Our job seemed to be to make plain the kingdom here by engaging in acts of justice, while at the same time ensuring that its eternal subject population was willing and joyful. I would become a missionary.
The Mission
It is hard to explain to outsiders what it means when a young person in the evangelical world feels a call to become a missionary. Missionaries are to evangelicals as saints are to Catholics—heroes of faith to be emulated. There is no real equivalent to this in liberal Protestantism; the closest my childhood Methodism came to spiritual hero worship was revering either social justice activists like Martin Luther King Jr. or theologians like Reinhold Niebuhr. Theologians generally won the day; we swooned when our men in tweed graced the covers of TIME magazine. But those pipe-smoking intellectuals could not compete with evangelical missionaries.
Pictures of missionaries hung in classrooms and halls of evangelical churches, often accompanied by maps with pins pointing to the countries where they served. Great evangelical churches had big maps with lots of pins, showing the “reach” of the Good News from its pews to around the world; “Our Missionaries” read the sign above the maps. The pictures in those days were often the same: either single women, whose prettiness was muted by tautly pulled-back hair and high-necked blouses, or happy family groups, showing a studious-looking, clean-cut father and a smiling mother balancing two or three children on her lap.
Single evangelical men generally did not become missionaries; rather, they became pastors. It was deemed too dangerous to send them alone to places where, it was feared, an unsaved woman might seduce them. Single women were stronger, more spiritually resilient. Women, after all, could not preach or teach here in America, but they were allowed to do so in nations where most of the population were heathens.
Although there were plenty of evangelicals who thought that Catholics were not Christians and were fair game for missionary work, the people in my circles eschewed that. Our experiences in Latin America taught us that true Christianity came in many guises (even if we did not particularly approve of certain doctrines). Instead, we focused on two groups we thought most needed the gospel: secular humanists and Muslims. Europe, we fretted, had lost its faith and must be reevangelized. And the great mass of Muslims, who lived in predominately Islamic-governed nations in Africa and the Middle East, had never heard the Good News because they were beyond the reach of conventional mission strategies. Surely, Jesus wanted Europe back and desired that those who had not heard should come to know him.
Of the two choices, Europe sounded like a far better option to me. I set myself to learning German, struggled with French, and spent one summer working with a mission agency in the Netherlands. The mission was called International Crusades, an increasingly awkward moniker in the days of the Iran hostage crisis. We mostly did door-to-door evangelism, passed out Bibles, and invited the skeptical Dutch back to church. A few took Bibles, none came to worship, and most slammed doors in our faces. (Having doors slammed in one’s face is surprisingly good preparation for life, by the way.) We also ran a Bible school for little ones at a seaside resort, a strategy to get weary parents back to religion. No takers there either.
The long-term missionaries knew that the summer teams would not have much success with traditional evangelism, so they had come up with a unique plan to make us feel useful. The Dutch government sponsored workers to go into the homes of the elderly and disabled to do projects and cleaning for those unable to do so. The mission coordinator thought this was a great “opening” to serve and, perhaps, talk with the clients about Jesus.
I was first sent, along with a male partner, to the home of a disabled widower who needed two things—his kitchen cleaned and some windows repaired. I got kitchen duty. I imagined that this work would be like the kind I had read about in a small devotional, Practicing the Presence of God, written by the medieval monk Brother Lawrence, who had found his Lord amid the washing up of pots and pans. When I walked into the kitchen, however, I was sorely disappointed. There were no pots and pans. Instead, there was what looked to be a layer of grease and grime over all the counters, the floors, and the appliances, which seemed to date from the Middle Ages. I had never seen anything so horrid in my life.
The man, in a wheelchair, pointed me to a closet with a bucket, brushes, and bleach. I did not spend the time in holy contemplation. I scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed, desperately trying to uncover the surface of, well, anything. It was a gruesome archeological expedition. This was not what I imagined when I thought of being a missionary—I had envisioned people coming forward to accept Christ as their Savior, surrendering all to Jesus, and worshipping their sovereign Lord. I could manage a few pots and pans like the cheerful Brother Lawrence, but not scraping grease from a kitchen that was at least twenty years older than I was.
The elderly man wheeled back into the kitchen while I worked. I wondered how I could witness to him. He spoke little English; I spoke little Dutch. Instead, he sat nearby and watched, occasionally saying, Dank je wel, dank je wel. At one point, he pulled out a Bible and started reading aloud from the New Testament, and I could pick out a few words and phrases.
And so the day went, me covered with grease and him offering grace. Although I had been angry, there developed an odd companionableness to it all, this harmony of work and words. The counters began to gleam; shoes no longer stuck to the floor. I wanted the room to shine, sparkling like a mansion in heaven. When I left a few hours later, he smiled and handed me a half dozen tulips as a kindness, and it became obvious that I was the one who had been evangelized by his gratitude. Jesus had shown up in an odd reversal of roles, for my heart was probably changed more than that of my host. I knew I had done better work that day than any other in those weeks.
I wrote about it in my journal, reflecting on the tension I felt. Jesus was King and Lord of the whole earth, as I loved to sing in my favorite Isaac Watts hymn:
Jesus shall reign where’er the sun
Doth his successive journeys run;
His Kingdom stretch from shore to shore,
Till moons shall wax and wane no more.
To Him shall endless prayer be made.
And princes throng to crown His head,
His name like sweet perfume shall rise
With every morning sacrifice.
Let every creature rise and bring
Peculiar honors to our King;
Angels descend with songs again,
And earth repeat the loud Amen.
This was the Jesus of my mission hopes, the One to whom all the people of the earth would bow, knowing him as God and King. I got chills singing these words, and my heart would nearly break with longing before this vision of Jesus on the throne of heaven. Mission work meant making sure the King had a kingdom. Yet the most meaningful day of my summer mission had had nothing to do with this. Instead, it was grimy and inglorious, smelling of bleach and rancid grease, in a state-supported elder program. The only knees that had bent were my own, as I reached into filthy corners of that kitchen. What kind of kingdom was this?
I had not brought Jesus to anyone. Instead, my host had brought Jesus to me as he welcomed me and invited my heart to be cleansed along with the kitchen. There was something of me that got saved that day, not the other way around.
None of this matched any theology of missions that I had studied. As a Protestant, I could not tell anyone that I felt I had gotten somehow saved—at least more saved than before—through scrubbing floors. Nothing had to do with proclaiming Christ as Lord, extending his kingdom throughout the world, or worshipping the Lord in glory. The magisterial words, “I believe in God, the Father Almighty . . .” were never uttered. Whatever happened that day, it had more to do with the kindness found in a kitchen than cringing in a throne room.
The Kin-dom of God
Just recently, I saw a thread on Twitter ridiculing the contemporary switch in theological terminology from “kingdom” to “kin-dom.” When I first encountered a prayer using “kin-dom,” I remember thinking that it was a sort of liberal watering down of the robust vision of Christ the King in glory, diminishing the power of his lordship. The noted theologian Ada María Isasi-Díaz recalls originally hearing “kin-dom” from a friend who was a nun as an alternative to the language of “kingdom,” a word fraught with colonial oppression and imperial violence. “Jesus,” she wrote, “used ‘kingdom of God’ to evoke . . . an alternative ‘order of things’” over and against the political context of the Roman Empire and its Caesar, the actual kingdom and king at the time.11
“Kingdom” is a corrupted metaphor, one misused by the church throughout history to make itself into the image of an earthly kingdom. Indeed, Christians have often failed to recognize that “kingdom” was an inadequate and incomplete way of speaking of God’s governance, not a call to set up their own empire. Isasi-Díaz argues that “kin-dom,” an image of la familia, the liberating family of God working together for love and justice, is a metaphor closer to what Jesus intended.
If that sounds more like contemporary political correctness than biblical theology, it is worth noting that Isasi-Díaz’s “kin-dom” metaphor echoes an older understanding, one found in medieval theology in the work of the mystic Julian of Norwich. Julian wrote of “our kinde Lord,” a poetic title, certainly, summoning images of a gentle Jesus. But it was not that. Rather, it was a radical one, for the word “kinde” in medieval English did not mean “nice” or “pleasant.” Instead, in the words of theologian Janet Soskice:
In Middle English the words “kind” and “kin” were the same—to say that Christ is “our kinde Lord” is not to say that Christ is tender and gentle, although that may be implied, but to say that he is kin—our kind. This fact, and not emotional disposition, is the rock which is our salvation.12
To say “our kinde Lord” was to say “our kin Lord.” Jesus the Lord is our kin. The kind Lord is kin to me, you, all of us—making us one. This is a subversive deconstruction of the image of kingdom and kings, replacing forever the pretensions and politics of earthly kingdoms with Jesus’s calling forth a kin-dom. King, kind, kin.
My experience of Jesus as Lord had taught me of this kinship in my enthusiasm to love and serve others and in my hopes that his liberating rule mattered to the poor and oppressed. I had listened to Jesus when he taught that the kingdom was like a pearl, a mustard seed, and the yeast in bread. But these parables slipped away as the word “kingdom” slowly resumed its original meaning. Like millions of other white European Christians before me, I did not understand that “kingdom” was a metaphor, one that needed to be tempered and understood in the context of Jesus’s koanlike pronouncements, an oppositional vision of Rome’s empire intended to remind early believers what they were not supposed to be. Slowly, my youthful imitation of Jesus as Lord on the streets of Santa Barbara gave way to an exalted vision of Jesus as Caesar demanding allegiance of all humankind, a real kingdom with a real king. And I wanted to be both faithful subject and herald.
The kitchen in the Netherlands may well have been the closest I have ever been to the kingdom Jesus preached. There, the Spirit revealed the meaning of kin, of a “kingdom” with a “kinde Lord,” of simplicity, solidarity, and service, things I knew but was on the verge of forgetting. Like the night on the street with the sex workers. I was sad to be separated from them, left on the sidewalk instead of being tossed into the paddy wagon together. Or perhaps the day in the tire village. I did not have the language of kin-dom then, or words to put around these experiences.
But they stayed with me, eroding my theological certainty for years to come. The kin-dom of God is like being rounded up with prostitutes . . . The kin-dom is like a house built on tires . . . The kin-dom of heaven is like a woman scrubbing grease from a kitchen counter . . .
The Orderly Lord
Pursuing Jesus as Lord took me beyond the theological box of the Bible Church. Jesus was much more than I had imagined, and his concerns reached from the most intimate places of my own heart, to Mexican villages and American politics, to a vision of divinity that animated the entire cosmos with its glory. Although I still called myself an evangelical, I was increasingly disenchanted with evangelical churches whose worship seemed stuck on Jesus the Savior as the sum total of Christian theology. What I experienced in church—which in college had become a mash-up of a charismatic worship service that met in a warehouse, a somewhat traditional Baptist service with good preaching, and the school’s chapel services—seemed spiritually out of sync with the Jesus I was coming to know. Whenever I went to church, I walked away fuming at either shallow praise choruses or thin theology in the sermons.
The same young professor who taught liberation theology and doctrine also offered courses in early Christianity and Reformation history. Thus, ideas from the church fathers and Protestant thinkers became part of theological conversation with friends. It was not uncommon to sit at dinner and hear, “But Augustine said . . .” or “Luther insisted . . .” in a completely casual and familiar way. We learned to read both sides of any theological argument, but we also learned that our professors had favorites, and those favorites were heavily weighted toward Western Christian beliefs, ideas that had been given the imprimatur “orthodox” by creeds, councils, and clerics over the centuries.
A subtle change kicked in, somewhere in our senior year, from exploring what was interesting and challenging toward getting the answers right in accordance with the church’s larger authority. The books on our shelves shifted; the radical Christian authors were slowly displaced by the likes of Karl Barth, C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Dorothy Sayers. Although our political views continued to lean left, responsive to the voices of Óscar Romero and Dorothy Day, our theological views began to take on both more romantic and more orderly forms, displaying an interest in tradition. I think we were searching for a justice-oriented politics and an authority-laden religion at the same time. Somehow, we wanted a Jesus who could be both a radical and the divine head of an ordered church.
This was about as far out of the Bible Church box as could be imagined. Jesus as Savior did not take sides in political arguments, because it just was not worth trying to change a world that was doomed. And Jesus as Savior opposed the sorts of theologies that wound up with practices like infant baptism or hinted at anything like works righteousness. At the Bible Church, the word “tradition” was thought to be a death knell to true faith, to the immediate experience of being born again. Sure, they said they liked Martin Luther and John Wesley (never, however, John Calvin), but other than saying the two believed in salvation by faith alone, even these two Protestant heroes were relegated to lesser status in favor of more contemporary Bible preachers like Chuck Smith or Tim LaHaye.
When reading Luther for class, I realized that the great Reformer would probably not actually be welcome in most of the evangelical congregations where I had worshipped. And I could not help but think that Luther would find praise choruses cringeworthy and the low-key, hip California Jesus not much like the suffering Lord described in scripture. Maybe I needed to find a different church.
I wandered into a Methodist church in Santa Barbara, only to find its pews occupied mostly by people decades older than myself. The following week, it was the Lutherans, who talked social justice but seemed shy of prayer. Then came the Presbyterians, who, as was true in much of southern California, were mostly well-dressed brainy evangelicals.
After my six weeks of mission work in the Netherlands, I spent time in England. There, I had gone to a small Church of England worship service at Westminster Abbey led by a clergyperson who seemed straight from BBC central casting. I knelt for the Eucharist and recited words from the Book of Common Prayer. I felt as if heaven had descended to earth—it was quite unlike anything I had experienced, except perhaps for a couple of astonishing charismatic prayer services. Same spirit, but orderly—and with good theology! Martin Luther would, I suspected, have approved.
Back in the United States, the Church of England’s daughter church is the Episcopal Church. When my search recommenced upon returning to school that fall, I visited All Saints-by-the-Sea Episcopal, a congregation down the hill from the college, and was swept off my spiritual feet. I had found home.
The funniest thing was that it felt like such a personal discovery, a private journey. But several classmates had similar longings. Soon, we had a VW minibus full of evangelical students who, at All Saints every Sunday, stumbled over words of ancient prayers and struggled to learn when to sit, stand, or kneel. We were the world’s most enthusiastic converts, more Anglican than the archbishop of Canterbury himself, wanting to know every rule (called “rubrics” in the Episcopal Church), every detail of what it meant to be Episcopalian.
Then we found out that we were not alone. At other evangelical colleges, in places like Wheaton, Illinois, and Wenham, Massachusetts, students and faculty were joining Episcopal churches near their campuses. A group of them wrote a little book about it—Evangelicals on the Canterbury Trail. We had a name, and we had a mission. We could hold the radical, egalitarian, justice Lord together with the Lord described and known through common prayer and priestly order. Jesus could be master, ruler, and God and embodied in an ancient church renewed, as Christian orthodoxy and liturgy became our new utopianism.
We were not, however, the only evangelicals to be searching for a Jesus beyond the boxes we had known. We were longing for a deeper experience of Jesus as Lord, something that led us to a Christ who demanded a riskier understanding of obedience; a more politically relevant Jesus whose dominion could be built here and now. The revivals of the 1970s, with their emphasis on otherworldliness and getting saved, had given way to something else. The counterculture slowly morphed into a culture of narcissism and political pragmatism, creating a kind of spiritual vacuum for those seeking alternatives to the new self-centeredness in both religion and politics. With the election of Jimmy Carter, and his Christian concerns for policy and community, evangelicalism emerged from the shadows of American culture newly energized by the revivals, but also dissatisfied with the liberal idealism of the 1960s and 1970s.
In hindsight, it seems obvious that for significant numbers of Americans those two tumultuous decades birthed a rage for order and authority. It was no longer enough that Jesus saved us from the world; we wanted Jesus to fix it. We did not want to go up to the kingdom of heaven after we died (or at the Rapture). Instead, we wanted the kingdom to come down to us. We could build the kingdom here on earth. Thus, Jesus as Savior gave way to a powerful vision of Jesus as Lord, the One to whom our hearts, the earth, and the heavens bowed: Master, Ruler, and God of the New Jerusalem. He would put everything aright, put everything in order, and reward us for our faithfulness.
However much we shared these longings with other Christians, my college friends and I came to opposite conclusions about how Jesus would go about this than millions of others who also called themselves evangelical.
* * *
The photo appeared to have been taken in the 1950s. A smiling man, one of some girth, dressed in a suit and tie, stood in front of a crowd of people waving flags in bleachers decorated with bunting. Other than his dark suit, it was a study in red, white, and blue. The picture captured enthusiastic cheers from an audience led by a patriotic choir, their expressions edging toward a sort of religious ecstasy. Not terribly unusual in an election year, one would suppose, except for two things. First, this was 1980, not 1950, and such old-fashioned displays were not particularly in vogue (at least in California!). Second, the crowd had gathered at a town hall, and the flags were accompanied by the cross—on signs they carried, embossed on Bibles they carried, and as a noticeable pin on the man’s lapel. The snapshot was not a conventional political rally; it was a gathering of Christians—and the man was the Reverend Jerry Falwell. He had started a political-religious crusade, the Moral Majority, to restore Christ’s lordship in America.
A fellow student brought the picture to our religious studies class, a course in the theology and history of American evangelicalism. Most of our classmates laughed—the pastor seemed part buffoon, part charlatan. Some worried. One said that the image bore a resemblance to pictures of Fascist rallies of an earlier time. A few simply could not believe that anyone could take this seriously; the world had moved on.
“These fundamentalists,” one said, “are a throwback to the 1920s. I bet they still don’t believe in evolution!”
Another said, “Time for a new Scopes monkey trial!” referring to the 1925 Tennessee court case that had discredited conservative Christianity for a half century.
The professor explained that not all evangelicals liked Sojourners, some would never entertain listening to Ched Myers, and others thought Óscar Romero was a Communist and heretic. Most, he insisted, were like those in the picture—Southerners, Baptists, politically conservative with nostalgic ideas of God and country. Their Jesus embodied a traditional vision of the nuclear family and sexual purity, and their Jesus leaned right toward retributive justice and anti-Communism. They believed Jesus’s lordship must be restored through New Testament church order, based in hierarchy, right belief, and male authority: obey the government (Rom. 13:1); wives, submit to your husbands (Eph. 5:22); and women, learn in silence (1 Tim. 2:11–12). What we knew as evangelicalism, here on the edge of the continent, where the beach was still fertile ground for the Jesus movement and the last of countercultural Christianity flourished, was the exception, not the rule.
I wondered if he was right—that we were the outliers in the evangelical world. I had been home a few weeks earlier. Scottsdale Bible had sold its building and moved to a giant property in North Scottsdale, where it planned a massive new campus for worship, education, and mission. A multipurpose space (really a fancy gym) had recently opened as the first of many buildings to come.
When I drove up to the new campus, the three crosses stood out front—the same three crosses that once marked the entrance to the old, more modest church. But something new had been added: next to the three crosses had been planted a flagpole. In a strong desert wind, Old Glory was fully unfurled and formed a patriotic backdrop to the crosses. As I walked through the parking lot, I noticed that dozens of cars were adorned with REAGAN bumper stickers next to the fish magnets and fading “I Found It” decals. At the door, someone was registering church members to vote.
Had it always been that way? And I just had not noticed? The church that had introduced me to Jesus as Savior had embraced him as Lord—with a political vengeance. And they were busy building his kingdom in the desert. Literally.
Back in class, the professor had us read a new book called Fundamentalism and American Culture, by George Marsden, who would go on to become one of America’s best historians of religion. The book explained how evangelicalism had emerged in fights over evolution, biblical interpretation, and doctrine.13 Apparently, evangelicals thought liberals, like my childhood Methodist friends and family, were bad, evil really, not just that our churches were boring. America was in a battle between true and false religion; “real Christians” had been persecuted for the better part of the century, while secular humanism and immorality had spread across the land. America was no longer a Christian nation, and evangelicals were mad.
This seemed far removed from us, from our radical California evangelicalism, where the golden glow of peace and liberation seemed the very light of God’s kingdom. We were new wine; they old wineskins. As the Spirit poured itself out, the old wineskins would surely burst, and Jerry Falwell’s movement would go with them. We felt confident this would be so.
In November, Ronald Reagan was elected president. Jerry Falwell and his Moral Majority took the credit. A flag-draped cross paraded into Washington, DC, that Jesus might claim lordship over America. Meanwhile, a small band of seniors at an evangelical college in California were left bewildered, devastated. We had not signed up for this. Somehow, Óscar Romero had been martyred, and Pat Robertson was attending the inaugural ball. We had wanted a Jesus Caesar, and he had arrived. Just not as we expected. We did not understand how this had happened. Ask for a king, and you just might get one.