Subversives and Priests

For the last time, I need to go back to Newbigin’s “Truth to Tell” as a lens through which to see what we are about on campus.

When Christians lack influence, one way they “speak truth to power” is simply by continuing to worship. Newbigin cites the example of the Orthodox Church under Soviet Communism and the Confessing Church in Nazi Germany. He could also have drawn on the Biblical example of Daniel when he and his people were deported to Babylon. Daniel, recognized as a young man with great potential, was relocated to the major university where he was to learn the language and the culture of the Babylonians, and, by implication, leave behind his Jewish ways. Of course, that’s not the way the story goes as it turns out that the king of Babylon himself ends up worshiping Daniel’s God!

However, Christian faculty and students in U.S. universities, while they may feel marginalized at times, are not in a situation where they have no voice or influence. Instead, as participants in the university we are all partly responsible for shaping the cultural environment of the institution just as all US citizens share in the responsibility of shaping the national agenda.

Newbigin says that one role of God’s people in a pluralistic environment like our nation or our universities is to affirm our identity as “subversive agents” of God’s kingdom (p. 82). By this he means that we do not accept that the structures and forces of the day that seem to be dominant (e.g. academic and professional success regardless of the relational price to one’s health or family, endless productivity as the chief measure of identity) are “some sort of eternal order that cannot be changed” (p.82). The goal of such an agent is not to deny the value of success, hard work or productivity, but to “bring them back under the allegiance of their true Lord.” (p. 82). For instance, the ideology of unlimited individual freedom needs to be subverted by the duty to love our neighbor. The demand of productivity needs to be subverted by the practice of Sabbath rest. The “bottom line” of economic gain needs to be subverted by the “bottom line” of what makes for human flourishing. Changing metaphors, he says that this is what it means to serve as a “royal priesthood” proclaiming God’s reign in all dimensions of life.

What caught my attention is that he says that figuring out how to do this in the context of the various disciplines “cannot be done by the clergy” but by “the vigorous development of … programs in which those in specific areas of secular work can explore together the possibilities of subversion” (p.83).

I am thankful that this is precisely the work we are about in GFM. I saw it this past semester as doctors led medical students in conversations about living out their faith in their work and at the Believers in Business conference where new visions of how the skills developed in business schools can serve God’s purposes in the world. I see it this summer in the Friday gatherings where students talk about the issues they are dealing with and finding insight from one another.

This brings me to the end of Newbigin’s book. He packs a lot more into the four lectures and 90 pages, but I have appreciated how he has given language to the aspirations of our ministry!