God's Redemption and Ours

A list that is circulating among my fellow mainline clergy comes from Jim Palmer. I won't address the whole list but a few claims struck me.

1. That his vision for a transformed society, got twisted into an afterlife fantasy about heaven.
8. That people are waiting on Jesus to return to save the world and end suffering, rather than taking responsibility for saving the world and solving suffering ourselves.
9. That people think there is magical potency in uttering the name of Jesus, rather than accessing our own natural powers and capabilities to effect change.

I want to propose that what Palmer critiques is bad news. What Palmer proposes instead is also bad news. And that is because there is a division made between this life and eternal life, between our work and the work of God. And that division can't hold in human experience. ​

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Schubert Ogden makes a distinction in his work, Faith and Freedom: Toward a Theology of Liberation, between God’s redemptive work and God’s emancipatory work. 

God’s redemptive work focuses on the question of meaning for the individual, their contribution and development of a self which is received into God’s internal life.

God’s emancipatory work is our participation in the work of creating social orders by which other people are free to develop themselves. What we receive by God through love we are obligated to respond to our neighbor in kind.

​A further distinction is made, by Ogden, between salvation and redemption

Whereas redemption as such, as distinct from salvation, is God’s work alone, in which we can participate only by bearing witness to it, emancipation is the work of God in which God is dependent on the co-operation of God’s creatures if the intention lying behind it is to be fully realized. (75)

In such an account salvation is divorced from the question of one’s individual standing before God and is removed from the question of eternal life.

Salvation is restored to the original meaning found in Luke 4: 18-19 that was brought to the forefront by the Social Gospel and the Civil Rights movement. Or to quote Gordon Kaufman in his book, Theology for a Nuclear Age:

Salvation comprises all the activities and processes which are helping to overcome the violence and disruptions and alienations, the various forms of oppression and exploitation, and all the other historical and institutional momentums today promoting personal and social deterioration and disintegration. (57)

But like all distinctions, the two categories of the redemptive work of God and the cooperative emancipatory work of God are mutually implied. Trust in God’s redemptive work authorizes us to do the work of emancipation.

Meaning can be found in work of emancipation, in that our individuality can find expression is the social world where emancipation for others is possible to realize.

But it’s hard to divorce these two categories if only because the efforts at emancipation, of salvation, may be frustrated, by the social forces at place in the social world one finds oneself in.

If you are a trans teenager in the south, all the sources of political, religious, and cultural power, are arrayed against you as you work to live out your authentic existence. You might have to flee the area to do so. Or imagine a college student facing down law enforcement and quasi military forces. Will the war in Gaza end because of your protest? Do you need to know it will end because of your work?
What does it mean to be involved in work that may not receive validation in your time and context? Why struggle for emancipation for self and others if you are subject to losing?

For William Ernest Hocking, this throws you back to the religious question, which is to say the question of redemption. Who or what redeems our work in the long haul? God in process thought, takes in the work we do and objectifies it, as a source of raw material, that can be used in building a more just future, even if it is not something we will fully see.

Or to quote William James from the Will to Believe

What then do we now mean by the religious hypothesis? First, she says that the best things are the more eternal things, the overlapping things, the things in the universe that throw the last stone, so to speak, and say the final word.

The discussion of lost causes, by Josiah Royce in the Philosophy of Loyalty, bears on this issue. A lost cause may suffer defeats, but it’s worth throwing yourself into, because there is a metaphysics that redeems the work of justice, which is longer than one’s own time frame and context. Thus, trust in our lives being redeemed, gives us courage to be engaged in the work of emancipation.

It matters in the long haul. It matters to God, who treasures the life of freedom you are living into which is God's call for our lives. You are adding to God's internal life through your work. It matters for the raw material that God will use to build a future, one which can take your work and carry it forward. It can inspire, it can establish facts on the ground that somebody else will take up. There's a reason folks are looking to 1968 to make sense of the campus protests today. And there's a reason Stonewall matters for LGBT people today.

A liberal faith requires attention to both the emancipatory of work with God which we
are called to join wand the redemptive work that is God’s work for us. The work of justice requires a grounding for justice in the long haul. 

The temptation in evangelicalism, before Christian nationalism, is a political quietism that is only interested in redemption dependent on church and Christian identity. Believe such and such and you are saved as the world is falling apart. If it was just quietism, it may not be subject to a post. But because its a breeding ground for Christian supremacy, it is poisoning our common life as a democracy. 

The social gospel of liberal religion is primarily interested in justice but not always on the personal and existential side of religion. The kind that gives us rest, gives us meaning. To use William James' image, the gospel gives us perches to land before we take flight again. That rhythm between doing the work and knowing it's not all up to us, that it's worth the struggle whether we win or lose gives us a whole Gospel, not a half a Gospel.

​Maybe that is why we need Paul and Jesus. 

1 Corinthians 4:16 So we do not lose heart. Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day. 17 For our slight, momentary affliction is producing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all measure, 18 because we look not at what can be seen but at what cannot be seen, for what can be seen is temporary, but what cannot be seen is eternal.

To believe that salvation is this worldly does not remove the felt needs of redemption in the internal framework of things. But both can be affirmed and because of this, the mainline does indeed have good news for our world.

​Dwight Welch is the campus minister at United Campus Ministry at Montana State University Billings

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