Preface for a book I'm working on

The Prison Letters of Paul:                                                                                                                                Equipping God’s Subversive Counter-Revolutionary Movement (SCRM)

From the fall of Adam and Eve on God determined to win his wayward human creatures and creation careening toward chaos on their account back to him and his creational plan for them. That plan was for the creation to become home for God and humanity, a creational temple, as it were. Humans would serve as God’s royal priests in that temple administering his care for it in protecting it and nurturing it toward its full flourishing. God and humanity would live together in the closest communication, communion, and community. That plan dashed, and humanity no longer willingly responsive to his overtures, God had to make a fresh start. He needed to evoke from humanity their free and willing response to reclaim and restore them to his original intention for them.

God’s fresh start, his new plan, entailed God establishing a foothold in creation, a “beachhead” in what had become “enemy territory,” a people would be a living demonstration of God’s design for human life. Gerhard Lohfink explains:

“It can only be that God begins in a small way, at a single place in the world. There must be a place, visible, tangible, where the salvation of the world can begin: that is, where the world becomes what it is supposed to be according to God’s plan. Beginning at that place, the new thing can spread abroad, but not through persuasion, not through indoctrination, not through violence. Everyone must have the opportunity to come and see. All must have the chance to behold and test this new thing. Then, if they want to, they can allow themselves to be drawn into the history of salvation that God is creating. Only in that way can their freedom be preserved. What drives them to the new thing cannot be force, not even moral pressure, but only the fascination of a world that is changed.”[1] (Gerhard Lohfink, Does God Need the Church, 27).

That people, of course, that “place,” was the family God promised to raise up from Abraham and Sarah (Gen.12:1-3). They would be a foretaste, a prototype, and an instrument through which God would reclaim and restore humanity to its original status and vocation (Dt.4:56-8). Through this “beachhead” in enemy territory, God would conduct what I call a “subversive, counter-revolutionary movement”[2] to win back his creation.

-subversive, in that the people of Israel would live in such a way that the attitudes, actions, patterns, and institutions inscribed into the world through sin would be undone, and

-counter-revolutionary, in that Israel’s own life would counter the world’s revolt against God by erecting a way of life pointing to God’s intent for humankind. This counter-revolution, by the way, is not a look backwards to a “golden age” but rather a look forward to the world God promised to bring and of which this people is but an imperfect shadow. Thus this counter-revolution is intrinsically self-critical and provisional, not the “thing” that it should be uncritically honored.  

This calling to be a “subversive counter-revolutionary movement” I call the dna of God’s people. Whenever, in what form, and under whatever conditions it lives, this is what Israel and the church are to be about.  

The Bible, in addition to being the self-revelation of God is also the chief resource God’s people have for embracing and living out this dna. In all its many moods and modes we must ask of any passage what it reveals about God and how it helps us live as God’s SCRM. This includes the prison letters, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, and Philemon.

Therefore, I understand this set of letters from Paul as such equipping texts for this community of the church.

-Philemon: The Practice of God’s SCRM/What God’s SCRM does                                                                                       -Ephesians: The Propagating of God’s SCRM/How God’s SCRM is formed                                                                         -Philippians: The People of God’s SCRM/The quality of life in God’s SCRM                                                                      -Colossians:  The Potentate of God’s SCRM/The Ruler of God’s SCRM

I will expound them beginning with Philemon for it has pride of place in the Bible as the “show” to Colossians “tell” of how reconciliation impacts and transforms human life.  I will then take up Ephesians, Philippians, and Colossians. This will give us a concise look at the what, how, through whom, and who rule God’s SCRM this side of the cross and resurrection of Jesus.

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[1] Gerhard Lohfink, Does God Need the Church: Toward a Theology of the People of God (Michael Glazier Books, 1999), 27.

[2] I use two terms usually drawn from opposite sides of our political spectrum. I do this to indicate that this community cannot be mapped onto our spectrum or usual assumptions about political relations. It is to us an eclectic people whose support or loyalty cannot be presumed upon. They share God’s “preferential option for the poor” and his baseline for the health and wealth-beiug of a people is its care for the hopeless and powerless.