PUBLIC THEOLOGY FOR GLOBAL WITNESS

Edited by Gregg Okesson & David ang Moe

9781648171406

Public theology for global witness : essays in public missiology

Edited by Gregg Okesson & David Thang Moe

Published in the U.S.A. by First Fruits Press, ©2023 Digital version at

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Public theology for global witness : essays in public missiology [electronic resource]/ edited by Gregg Okesson & David Thang Moe. – Wilmore, Kentucky : First Fruits Press, [2023].

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1. Public theology. 2. Christianity and culture. 3. Evangelistic work 4. Missions. 5. Church work. I. Okesson, Gregg A. II. Moe, David Thang.

BT83.63 .P82 2023eb 230

Cover design by April Hardman

Introduction

Gregg A. Okesson

This book is a collection of essays dealing with public missiology. The diferent chapters arise from a class I teach every other year. In the course, students are introduced to public theology yet write from within the discipline of missiology. One can think of the course (and thus this edited volume) as the marrying of the two (hence the mention of both disciplines within the title and subtitle). David Thang Moe was my teaching intern for this course, and we decided to publish the fnal papers in this edited volume. I think you will quickly see the high caliber of thought and writing that has gone into them. They are a wonderful contribution to the feld.

The frst reference to “public theology” dates back to Martin Marty in the 1960s, when he was writing about civil religion. Since that time, it has emerged as a discipline, yet with a diverse set of interlocutors from all around the world and no ofcial, agreed-upon defnition. We fnd public theologians within the felds of biblical studies, theological studies, ethics, missiology, as well as historians and practical theologians. What began as a small group of Western theologians writing largely within the context of secularity has now emerged into a diverse array of scholars from around the world engaging themes such as the environment, ethnicity, global confict, globalization, and migration, to mention just a few.

6 | Gregg A. Okesson

I’ve found public theology a helpful discipline for delving into the feld of development studies (which addresses poverty, disease, ecological decay, confict, and a host of other societal and environmental ills). Public theology is concerned with the common good, or human fourishing built upon biblical concepts such as shalom and the kingdom of God. Such theological resources provide helpful lenses for considering the plight of people trapped in poverty, as well as ecological fragility. “Public theology begins wit a theological reading of the cosmos, critiquing the ways publics become unfettered from God’s shalom, while doing so within specifc communities and especially by and for the people most afected by sin in public spaces.”1 While public theologians can be interested in any issue of public life, they are often at their best when dealing with poverty, marginalization, confict, political abuse, and environmental decay.

While I begin with public theology, I quickly bring missiology into the discussion. Missiology is a theological discipline which emphasizes the centrality of the gospel, a robust soteriology built upon the fullness of Jesus Christ, the church (even local congregations) as “the hermeneutic of the gospel,”2 and a predisposition for movement (sending and receiving) through the power of the Holy Spirit into all parts of life. I won’t take the time to unpack each of these. I did so in a previous book.3 I am not arguing that public theology is unconcerned with these areas, only that missiology in dialogue with theology makes both stronger. Is our task (dare I say, mission?) merely to engage the public realm, or does God call us to witness to it through the gospel of Jesus Christ, with the fullness of God’s salvation, and through local communities of witness?

3 Okesson, A Public Missiology, 104–15.

What is Public Missiology?

What then is public missiology? What do we mean by public witness? This book brings together two words customarily kept apart. We are well-accustomed to individual witness, and nothing we say in this book should in any way undermine the importance of sharing the gospel with persons. There is a fundamental “for me” feature of the gospel. However, does the gospel of Jesus Christ only pertain to individuals? What about larger aspects of life?

The word public tantalizes us with excitement and possibility. It’s where the cool kids hang out. The broad, plural, and “thick” nature of the public realm only accentuates the appeal. This is especially the case for Christians in the West who have spent an eternity of long nights relegated to a shadowy, privatized existence. Public ofers us the world.

Public titillates with a lurid, bedeviling attraction. At one level, it is where life happens, where we discover infnite possibilities. At another, the fascination with the public borders on the erotic like some forbidden fruit: we want it because we have been denied it. And thus our pathway to public faith is motivated less as a measured response to the privatization of religion and more as a justifcation for our deeper longings.

This fascination of the public has led to the rise of subdisciplines where public occupies a prominent role. In addition to felds of public theology and public missiology, we fnd public leadership, public advocacy, public anthropology, … and the list goes on. Public has become all the rage. And for good reasons.

8 | Gregg A. Okesson

Contemporary publics shape our lives (or at least that is their intention). They orient our identity, time,4 and telos. Particular domains want to claim our souls.

Politics wants to politicize everything, and demands people’s allegiance to particular ideologies. Economics desires to economize everything, often in ways reducible to monetary amounts (we see this in extreme forms where human trafcking reduces a person’s worth to their body, and assigns that person’s body a price tag). However, contemporary publics are not just the sum total of politics and economics but involve the mixing, overlap, or interpenetration of all domains within an integrated whole. We experience them thickly. This makes them more powerful.

The word missiology however tugs in the opposite direction. If public opens the world to us, missiology (to many) slams it shut with a resounding thud. Whereas the word public represents something open and accessible, missiology suggests a closed, archaic realm, like a dusty library with volumes of books stacked in every corner and nary a whisper to be heard. Missiology is for certain people, not for everyone. It suggests a private, super-spiritual domain set apart for the everyday world; or else an ancient era where agents of Western colonialism walked around with pith helmets. This is how the caricature goes.

Hence, public and missiology appear miles apart, with virtually nothing in common. The divide is only accentuated by how some Christians have interpreted the public realm. Public, for them, is ominous, powerful, and sinful, like some foreboding presence that continually threatens their existence.

4 For a good treatment of time, see Andrew Root, The Congregation in a Secular Age.

It’s like the Sirens calling out from the rocky clifs. This particular interpretation of the public realm began long ago but was given new meanings by the rise of the Enlightenment, where the public realm expanded with the rise of science and modern disciplines and religion was relegated to the private realm. Christians of diferent ilk were content to dwell in this privatized existence, far away from the stains of public life. Since that time, Christians continue to interpret the public realm in association with secularism, urbanism, modernity, politics, social media and globalization, and where, in diferent ways, each of these are interpreted as corrupt and corrupting. The public realm is necessary but evil according to this reading.

All of this infuences how Christians interpret the public realm. Some rush forward, wanting everything they feel deprived of. Others run in the opposite direction, worried that the public realm will contaminate their faith, families, and traditions. (I am hyperbolizing here to show the diferent tugs and pulls when dealing with this subject. I beg the reader’s indulgence to appreciate that I am not suggesting that everyone falls neatly within one of these camps.)

Meanwhile, what do we do with the myriad ways publics defne life (human and non-human)? And what do we do with sin in public spaces? If the public realm is experienced thickly, then sin in public places is also thickly interpenetrated. John Wesley hints at this when he speaks of “complicated wickedness” to describe how sin enters into public spaces.

What then is public missiology? Public missiology brings the fullness of the gospel, and the fullness of God’s salvation into the fullness of the world (which is always God’s world) through the fullness of God’s people. That’s a lot of fullness! The Apostle Paul uses similarly creative language when he

| Gregg A. Okesson says regarding Christ, “God placed all things under his feet and appointed him to be head over everything for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who flls everything in every way” (Eph 1:22–3).

When the words public and missiology are brought together, something happens: an explosion; a realization of something new; a crack in the cosmos that emits a brilliant ray of light into the darkness. We begin to see the really real through the lenses of the resurrection. God is, in Christ, reconciling all things to Himself (Eph 1:10). “All things” include more than the sum total of atomized individuals. “All things” take us into God’s created goodness (human and other) as well as everything that emerges from creation (work, family, institutions, etc.). God is in Christ reconciling “all things” to himself through the church, which David Bosch refers to as “the inseparable union of the divine and dusty.”5

I defne public missiology through the imagery of movement (or weaving) as “congregational witness that moves back and forth across all “spaces” of public life to weave a thickness of the persons of the Trinity for the fourishing of all of life.”6 I argue that even as public life is experienced thickly, the church can bring a thick witness through the resources of gospel and movement. Our public missiology working group describes it as the holding together of “two holistic, synoptic discourses—‘public’ and ‘missiology’—in a single frame and within a comprehensive thematic to examine their interaction and to guide (to the limit of its resources) a healthy interaction. This task includes reassessing (1) the aims and world-orientation of mission to the present crisis of public life, (2) the church’s role as sign and agent of God’s mission, (3) the ‘world,’ or ‘public,’ that mission engages, and (4) their intersection and interpenetration.”7

The juxtaposition of these two words serves important purposes. Each acts upon the other, calling it to something new. And by examining their relationship with each other, we may redefne each in the process. Let’s return to public and missiology and consider them in light of the other.

With its taken-for-granted nature, the public realm lulls us into passivity. We believe the lies of its enormity and desperately want to be shaped by its gaze. Like all truly powerful things, it acts upon us at a deeper, clandestine, culture-forming level: informing our identity and giving us a sense of the really real. But the public realm is neither separate from God, nor is it the realm of Satan. It represents large (and small), overlapping spaces in the world where people interact with each other to form common opinions about life. These spaces include domains emerging from human agency, including politics, communication, economics, and the like. Admittedly, some of these spaces get flled with messages laden with hate, lust, or envy. And each of these domains want to overstep their scope into the others. But public spaces are just that: spaces whose weave is open.

Missiology serves an important corrective to the idolatrizing tendencies found in the public realm, reminding it of its ultimate purpose.8 It calls the public realm into account,

7 Ibid., 260.

8 I am defning missiology similar to Stanley Skreslet, as an “integrative, multidisciplinary, academic feld” that attends to God’s mission in the world. See Comprehending Mission: The Questions, Methods, Themes, Problems, and Prospects of Missiology (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2012), 14. Skreslet further explains that mission theologians have sometimes shown a predisposition toward the abstract and thus require heightened dialogue with historians, anthropologists, and sociologists

| Gregg A. Okesson

forcing it to answer for its infuence upon human identity, or how it relates to the rest of God’s created world. Missiology witnesses to the public realm. But it doesn’t do it from a high podium with a shrill voice; rather, it enters the open weave in order to sow seeds of the gospel from the interior. This says something about the very nature of missiology. Contrary to the stereotype of the intrepid missionary with the pith helmet, carrying Western culture to the farthest lands, missiology is about translation: the translation of Christ into humanity, thereafter impacting the rest of the world.9 And if translation is going to do its work, it cannot reside merely on the surface of the publics, sitting atop the waters like a foating bottle, but must work its way deeper down into the open weave, where meanings, narratives, and myths lie.

But this is not how most people think of missiology. In the eyes of many, it represents a small, bounded, and obscure entity with a seedy past and a suspect future: something located within a small, demarcated arena (such as the academy or a distant land) and restricted to a set of highly trained persons (called missiologists). What is more, some people think of mission as a distinct, higher calling than what others might have and thus evokes the impression of separateness from others as well as separateness from material afairs (like some gnostic ghoul).

Missiology thus needs the public realm. The public realm helps move mission studies away from its stereotypical preoccupation with exotic, remote cultures10 to focus upon global fows of meaning within large open “spaces” within our to ensure their work is connected with actual realities, not just hypothetical musings (10).

9 Andrew Walls, The Missionary Movement in Christian History, Chapter 3: “The Translation Principle in Christian History.

10 David Bosch, Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1991), 492.

world. Public isn’t necessarily a replacement term for culture, but it helps us move beyond older, evolutionary ways of thinking of culture as highly bounded and discrete. Public culture, if we might speak this way, looks not just to the West, but also to how other contexts around the world daily negotiate their way within global fows of meaning. And to the extent that missiology is concerned with theological concepts such as the Trinity, deliverance, justice, incarnation, salvation, and ecclesiology, a focus on the public helps foreground the importance of these topics for the lived experiences of people around the world.

Hence, the two words public and missiology need each other.

In a sense, public missiology makes explicit what has always been the case. No part of the world exists apart from the gospel, despite historical, cultural, and even theological factors that attempt to obscure this reality. At the heart of this project lies the work of Lesslie Newbigin, who frst opened my eyes to the public realm. Through his writings, he consistently and passionately describes the gospel not as private, individual belief, but as public truth. And in those glorious words that frst grabbed me by the scruf of the neck so long ago, Newbigin says,

We are called, I think, to bring our faith into the public arena, to publish it, to put it at risk in the encounter with other faiths and ideologies in open debate and argument, and in the risk business of discovering what Christian obedience means in radically new circumstances and in radically diferent human cultures.11

11 Lesslie Newbigin, Truth To Tell: The Gospel as Public Truth (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991), 59–60.

| Gregg A. Okesson

This book is an extension of such a calling. It explores what Christian obedience looks like within many diferent contexts around the world. It is public missiology at its fnest.

The essays in this edited collection give solidity to what I’ve been describing in this Introduction. Though the authors will interchangeably use the language of “public theology” and “public missiology” you will see they move fuidly between the two disciplines. The essays in this edited volume are trying to bring the two disciplines together, especially in relation to global development.

The next thing that stands out is the incredible diversity of perspectives in this volume. We have scholars writing on Burmese, Romanian, Australian, Czech, as well as Indian and American contexts. We further have multiple perspectives on public issues within India and the United States. The diversity of essays strengthens the missiological nature of public theology, and guards us from associating either discipline from a singular vantage point. Though public theology and public missiology initially emerged as ofcial disciplines from within Western scholarship, this volume serves to broaden the feld of discourse to other parts of the globe.

Finally, one will see a wide variety of topics being discussed. Rob Lim confronts the banking industry in Australia (and around the world); Myra Watkins looks at secularism in post-Christian Czech Republic; John Karankaran explores the dynamics of populism and how it infuences leadership in India; Alexandra Swink delves into music concerts and how they ofer an alternative form of spirituality for American “nones;” Hkun Ja looks at the coup in Myanmar and what this means for Christian political engagement in the country; Jijo Rajan explores what public theology means for the Indian University; Priya Santhakumar Leela engages the incredibly complex and despicable sex trade in India; Allan Varguese Meloottu approaches public theology through Pentecostalism and spiritual warfare; David Chronic looks at migration in Romania through the lens of ascetic practices; Faith Alexander entertains the prospects of using theater as a means of public witness; and Reinaldo Gracia Figueroa explores what it looks like for a Latino/a Pentecostal Pastor in the US to be a public theologian.

I hope you are as amazed by this list of chapters as I am. I have purposely not arranged the chapters by theme or region, since they are irreducible to simplistic categories. You can either pick-and-choose which to read; or, more preferably, dive right into them in sequential order. David Thang Moe provides a helpful summary at the conclusion of this book.

I welcome you to this volume and hope you will enjoy the essays as much as I have.

Robin Lim

“Going once, going twice, SOLD!” My wife, Ruth and I looked at each other in despair. We had been unsuccessful in yet another auction, exorbitantly outbid as we continued our chronic search to buy our frst home. The winning bidder was dressed in a designer suit, power tie, and pulling out a checkbook whilst on his cell. “Another investor,” I said to Ruth as we walked away.

Despite this taking place in Australia ffteen years ago, this scene is common across the developed world. Soaring house values break records on a metronomic basis as warnings of economic bubbles fall on deaf ears. However, it is not only an issue of excessive prices, but the efect it has on dividing society along socioeconomic lines between the haves and have-nots. Bloomberg declares the global housing market broken, the “perennial issue of housing costs has become one of acute housing inequality, and an entire generation is at risk of being left behind.”

Rob Lim is currently Assistant Professor of Business, and Director of Strategic Partnerships at Asbury University (KY, USA). He is a founding director of MATES for Change, an Australian organization that champions multicultural social entrepreneurship. Previously, he was an industry leader in mortgages as Global Head of Home Lending products at one of the world’s largest banks, accountable for over $300 billion worth of assets. He holds a Masters of Divinity from Asbury Theological Seminary (2023).

1 In the last decade, the IMF observed global housing prices increase by ~25%, exacerbating afordability.2 The OECD has warned of housing being “very stretched” and vulnerable.3 Despite warnings and government intervention, values still rise, defying logic, as people clamor to achieve a dream. Further, it is not only an issue for buyers, but the entire ecosystem: central banks, commercial banks, and brokers are obsessed with this ethereal ideal, placing faith in the old adage, “safe as houses,” as if it had soteriological meaning. It begs the question, perhaps this is not simply an issue of economics, solvable via mechanisms alone. Rather, has the developed world’s obsession with housing become an idol? What worldviews are driving this issue? Specifcally, is public theology capable of informing the church’s engagement with this dilemma, and reorienting it toward human fourishing? To approach these questions, I will frst analyze the housing market for marks of religion, and, if evident, identify both the economic and spiritual role that each stakeholder plays in this public realm. Next, I will review common doctrine-like mantras associated with the housing market and examine their spiritual implications. Finally, once I have identifed the spiritual realities inherent in this public realm, I will suggest

1 Alan Crawford, “The Global Housing Market Is Broken, and It’s Dividing Entire Countries.” in Bloomberg News, September 19, 2021. https://www.bloomberg.com/ news/features/2021-09-19/global-housing-markets-are-hurting-and-it-s-gettingpolitical

2 IMF, Global House Price Index Data, 2020 Q4. November 2021. Distributed by IMF Data, https://www.imf.org/external/research/housing/data/ GlobalHousePriceIndex.csv theologically informed solutions to reorient it toward human fourishing.

3 OECD (2021), OECD Economic Outlook, Volume 2021 Issue 2: Preliminary version, OECD Publishing, Paris. December 1, 2021: 55, https://doi.org/10.1787/66c5ac2cen.

A Forbes journalist wooed, “Doesn’t everyone want to own their own home? That sense of belonging, the feeling that you and your place have somehow adapted to each other.”4 It is this alluring sentiment that I believe has fueled the world’s obsession with housing, as real estate is no longer a practical need but has become a hedonistic desire. Even the notion of the owner and property adapting to one another has pantheistic undertones, as humans are reduced to a piece of furniture to justify the existence of the house. Why is this important to recognize? There is an overwhelming consensus among various observers that the global housing market is fractured. This problem is not new: warnings have been present for decades, failures have been experienced (e.g., the 2008 Financial Crisis), and yet the situation has not changed. What I suggest is there is a deeper force beneath the surface possessing all its stakeholders. Walter Wink comprehends there to be spiritual realities behind everything, and before being addressed they need to be comprehended:

Evil is not just personal, but structural and spiritual. It is not simply the result of human actions, but the consequence of huge systems over which no individual has full control. Only by confronting the spirituality of an institution and its physical manifestations can the total structure be transformed. Any attempt to transform a social system without addressing both its spirituality and its outer forms is doomed to failure.5

4 Frederick Peters, “The American Dream of Homeownership Is Still Very Much Alive.” in Forbes, April 8, 2019. https://www.forbes.com/sites/ fredpeters/2019/04/08/the-american-dream-of-homeownership-is-still-verymuch-alive/?sh=2f80e8103e80.

Thus, I begin by identifying the system and institutions in the market, their outer economic form and their spiritual form: (1) the housing market, (2) banks, (3) brokers and (4) homeowners.

According to philosopher Emile Durkheim, religions are a social phenomenon, a matrix of inter-social tendencies attempting to provide meaning to gods that afect a society. Deifying a cosmic force which has collective interest for society.6 To a great degree, the housing market is such a force, transcendent over every nation and omnipotent over every economy, a utilitarian complex matrix of competitive relationships that stretches from the Federal Reserve to the local builder. Global property advisory frm, Savills, captures the colossal size of the market:

The value of all the world’s real estate reached $326.5 trillion in 2020 . . . [it is] the world’s most signifcant store of wealth, real estate is more valuable than all global equities and debt securities combined, and almost four times that of global GDP. The value of all gold ever mined pales by comparison at $12.1 trillion, at just 4% the value of global property.7

5 Walter Wink, The Powers That Be – Theology for a New Millennium (New York: Doubleday, 1998), 31.

6 Emile Durkheim, “Religion as a Social Phenomenon” in Philosophy of Religion, Michael Peterson, Williams Hasker, Bruce Reichenbach and David Basinger eds. 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 9.

7 Paul Tostevin, “The Total Value of Global Real Estate” in Savills Market Trends, September 2021. https://www.savills.com/impacts/market-trends/the-totalvalue-of-global-real-estate.html.

It is difcult to comprehend the totality of this behemoth and all of its intricacies. Yet, it is also immanent. Everyone can testify to its existence through their own personal experience, as it permeates our everyday lives, interwoven into daily conversations. We even reside in it, and it is arguably one of the major reasons why people work—to pay of their mortgage. Like a deity, the housing market is revered, wanted, and provides fulflment. Like a deity, it is perceived to never fail and provides shelter for our family. Like a deity, it saves us from the humiliation of being left out, giving us community among other owners. Like a deity, it is given tithes via mortgage repayments. These cultural rhythms have liturgical power that disciple us into a belief system. James Smith explains, these “liturgies work afectively and aesthetically—they grab hold of our guts through the power of image, story, and metaphor.”8 Thus, without even using religious language, these rhythms indoctrinate us with housing creeds, and we are oblivious to it, sucked into its hedonistic belief that everything is done to maximize pleasure even at the exclusion of others. In the process, we advocate for its dominion, since the more property we have and the more it increases in value, the happier we are, thus achieving the purpose of the housing market to ruthlessly dominate culture. What I propose is that society has deifed the housing market.

In contrast, the Triune Godhead, Father, Son and Holy Spirit operate as the three unique persons of God, or hypostases, as evident throughout Scripture. Although there are three hypostases, it is not tritheism, since there is still one God. The early church reconciled this via the concept of homoousias, or one substance, later afrmed at the Council of Nicaea (325). Further, despite being three distinct persons, they share an interpenetrating communion, or περιχώρησις, conveying their intimate relationship. As Shirley Guthrie describes, “the oneness of God is not the oneness of a distinct, self-contained individual; it is the unity of a community of persons who love each other and live together in harmony,”9 not utilitarian or fueled by competition like the housing market but working together in unity. Further, unlike the housing market, which seeks to dominate the world economy irrespective of the harm it does to others, the Trinity has a unifed agenda, emanating the redemptive economy of salvation (οἰκονομία). There is one outward salvifc plan of one God, yet we recognize the ordered unique work of each of the three distinct God-head persons in the redemption of humanity into the περιχώρησις of the divine embrace of the Trinity.

8 James K. A. Smith, You Are What You Love. (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2016), 46.

Religions have their embodied saviors. For the housing market, I postulate that this is enacted by the banks, who regulate and facilitate credit in the economy. Banks come in two forms: central banks (e.g., the Federal Reserve), and commercial banks (e.g., JP Morgan Chase).

Central banks sit at the apex of a nation’s money supply. They set monetary policy as it pertains to the economy as a whole for the purpose of ensuring its fnancial stability. As such, they are also seen as the lender of last resort, meaning that when there is risk of instability they will help alleviate fnancial collapse (for example, the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, which saw the US banking system on the precipice of failure due to a myriad of issues centered on greed). In response the government approved a $700 billion economic stabilization program,10 portraying the Federal Reserve and specifcally its chairperson at the time, Ben Bernanke, as “the economic redeemer of choice”11 for the Wall Street banks. Yet, this bailout had economic shortcomings, while it appeared redemptive, it simply increased the debt bill for a future generation to solve, whether that be paid back via taxes or issues with infation. In sum, it was limited and temporal.

9 Shirley Guthrie, quoted in Beth Felker Jones, Practicing Christian Doctrine (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2014), 70.

Commercial banks are the face of the fnancial economy, providing fnancial solutions to the public. For example, while people may desire housing, few have the fnancial means, so they seek out banks for lending to enable their dreams. Thus, banks play the role of savior, aiding the buyer in their time of need. In 2018, the Bank of America released a television commercial where an anonymous man asks, “What would you like the power to do?”12 Against the backdrop of this question, it portrays what appears to be an ordinary, middle-class man, who wakes up, dons his tie, sips his cofee while reading a newspaper, and commutes to work. Personifying a wise sage, he says, “Listening to people answer that question, is how we fnd out what matters most to them,”13 while travelling unnoticed, amid a diverse urban sprawl. Yet, the normality of this image contrasts with who he is, the CEO of Bank of America, an institution with $2.3 trillion assets under management.14 He is positioned as an embodied god-like fgure, omnipotent, yet at the same time Immanuel, humbly walking beside the people

10 US Congress. Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008. HR 1424, 110th Cong, Public Law 110-343. https://www.congress.gov/110/plaws/publ343/PLAW110publ343.htm

11 WSJ Opinion, “The False Fed Savior” in Wall Street Journal, August 10, 2010.

12 Bank of America, “Listening to What Matters Most.” Television advertisement. Hill Holliday, 2018.

13 Ibid.

14 Johnson Damian, “America’s 10 Biggest Banks,” MPA Magazine, August 9, 2021. https://www.mpamag.com/us/mortgage-industry/guides/americas-10-biggestbanks/301707 as a shepherd guides their sheep, empowering them to achieve what matters most, akin to an enabling spiritual force, a pneuma. However, what is not stated but implied is the kind of power the banks ofer: money, or, more precisely, debt. Recently, total US household debt grew to the frightening new record of $14.96 trillion.15 Banks like to convey that this equates to gargantuan power; however, it is simply household indebtedness, a greater stress on households. The great unsaid in the commercial is that this power needs to be returned with interest. It is not a free gift. Rather, it is paid back via the liturgical rhythm of making regular mortgage repayments, akin to an ofering made to a deity.

Similarly, the Son of God, Jesus Christ, is incarnational amongst the people. However, unlike the CEO, who is only made available to those who pass regulatory checks, have sustainable income levels, and are deemed low risk, Jesus is Immanuel to all. Similarly, while the CEO may attempt to portray himself as a working-class man, in reality he sits in another class of both net worth and power. In contrast, the God-man is the union of two natures in one person. He is both fully divine, with power far greater than the CEO, and fully man, born in a manger to refugees, the son of a carpenter. In His incarnation we see true power embodied, not as defned by Bloomberg’s Billionaire Index, but power that is able to “empty Himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men” Phil. 2:7 (RSV). As Thomas Aquinas states, “Christ’s personhood is as singularly unifed as any one person can be, yet in a profound, mysterious union of humanness and deity.”16 This hypostatic union was necessary to gracefully ofer truly free, grace-flled salvation to all. “Therefore, it was necessary for him to be made in every respect like us, so that he could be our merciful and faithful High Priest before God. Then he could ofer a sacrifce that would take away the sins of the people” Heb. 2:17 (NLT). In contrast, the Federal Reserve and the CEO’s salvifc power is a guise, providing no salvation but rather indebtedness. While it is true that debt enables economic development, it is a temporal and limited resource that is not free but repayable with interest, unlike the salvifc blood of Christ which is eternal and infnite, unable to be earned but given free through grace.

15 Federal Bank of NY, Household Debt Report, Q2 2021. https://www.newyorkfed. org/microeconomics/hhdc.

16 Thomas Aquinas quoted in Thomas Oden, Classic Christianity (New York: Harper One, 1992), 302.

While the banks play a salvifc role, enabling people to buy their properties, it is the brokers who teach and propagate to the lenders rules and standards. Brokers are specifcally instituted by the banks and are intermediaries between them and the prospective borrower, a responsible agent to provide information and guide the home buyer through the process. This can be likened to the way ordained priests act as an intermediary between God and His people, agents of catechesis for converts via doctrine and the issuance of sacraments. Both ofces have trust vested to them via those they guide, whether it be for the right home loan or their personal salvation. Thus, this equates to power, which history teaches us risks malpractice. For brokers, the most prominent example is the 2008 Financial Crisis, where broker fraud was one of the leading causes of this collapse, estimated to cause $137 billion in fraud related settlements against the banks.17 Similarly, in church history there are instances where the ecclesial ofce took advantage of the laity for fnancial gain. For example, Martin Luther’s infamous nailing of the 95 theses at Wittenberg castle in 1517 was against the corrupt practice of simony, and the selling of indulgences. In both examples, malpractice was clear; however, it is also evident that the peoples who were victims of their crimes were overly credulous, and, some would say lacking reason.

17 John Grifen, “Ten Years of Evidence: Was Fraud a Force in the Financial Crisis?” in American Economic Association, July 29, 2020. https://www.aeaweb.org/content/ fle?id=13538, 13.

In his sermon, The Case of Reason Impartially Considered, John Wesley addresses the issue over being overly credulous, referring to the circumstances where people were not using reason to discern the things they hear, noting that humanity is ultimately fallible. For example, he condemns those who blindly follow the views of the Antinomians, who believed in a hyper grace and did not follow moral guidelines. Instead, he champions reason as a gift from God:

Reason is much the same with understanding. It means a faculty of the human soul; that faculty which exerts itself in three ways;—by simple apprehension, by judgement, and by discourse . . . the faculty of the soul which includes these three operations I here mean by the term reason.18

This reminder to leverage one’s reason is urgent today, as people are overly accepting of charismatic pastors, appealing mortgage brokers, charming politicians, attractive social media, or alarmist news without using reason to discern their claims. Ultimately, we need to recognize that we are fallible, thus desperately needing the Holy Spirit and the community of believers.

18 John Wesley, “Sermon LXX. The Case of Reason Impartially Considered” in The Works of John Wesley 3rd ed. Vol. VI (Peabody: Hendrickson Publishers, 1984), 353.