During the past month Christian nationalists have gotten lots of media attention in the persons of House Speaker Mike Johnson being anti-immigration, Georgia Supreme Court Justice Tom Parker being against In Vitro Fertilization, speakers at the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) conference, and a host of “evangelica l” preachers. They’ve brought so much chaos to society. Peoples’ understandings become jumbled. Judgment becomes impaired and darkness intensifies over the way forward. Their lust for power and control has become transparent as they restrict the power of women by controlling their wombs and, now, embryos outside of their wombs. They elevate their own authority by saying that God told them to take certain actions.
I am among many who believe their theologies and biblical views are not just slightly flawed, but wrong to the point of speaking the opposite of anything Jesus lived or that sacred texts teach. So this past month I have been describing a liberating theology for humanity. I’ve done so not by citing unfamiliar or esoteric biblical texts. Rather, I’ve been using the phrases of the “Our Father,” or Lord’s Prayer, widely familiar even among people who know little about the Bible as such. I invite you to recognize the strong contrast in the Lord’s Prayer to claims that any nation can or should be “Christian,” or any other tenants of Christian nationalism’s errors and dangers.
Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors (Matthew 6:12)
Praying “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors” translates for most people as a request to receive forgiveness for their personal sins. Because it is common for us humans not to be able to forgive ourselves, deeply believing that God is all-forgiving can bring liberation—a saving from sin’s captivity.
But the opening lines of the Lord’s Prayer take us into a paradigm well beyond personal sins and self-forgiveness. When Jesus tells us to pray for the kingdom of heaven, he tells us to pray for the capacities to think and act in a whole different worldview, different from the one ruling the world. He urged us to pray, “Our Father who is in heaven, … your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”
Where, then, in the kingdom of God does forgiving debtors fit in? Where and when does seeking to live the kingdom of God get us to where we need to forgive ourselves and others? This goes beyond personal sins into how we participate in the structures of the kingdoms of the world in ways that obstruct the kingdom of God. The two paradigms conflict.
Unpayable Debt #1— A glaring example happens when we seek to live the radical inclusiveness of the kingdom of God. Radical inclusivity of all ethnicities, religions, cultures, and species remains far outside current human experience. I do not know of any kingdom on earth today that is inclusive of all humans and species in accord with the kingdom of God. Rather, the economics and politics around the globe exclude some groups while privileging others. Nonhuman species and the environment remain outside of the ruling paradigm, often militantly so. Their exclusion brings enormous damage. It brings extinctions and crashes human and species habitats.
How can we pay for all the pain, destruction, and killing that exclusion inflicts? We cannot. The cost exceeds our capacities to pay. At this point, prayer made in humility and regret becomes the most powerful corrective available: “Forgive us the debts we have to all who we have excluded.”
This prayer takes us beyond praying. Human wills change. Changed wills save the lives of humans and species as the energies arise to include what has been excluded. Praying can change our worldviews, our paradigms. Some say that just the act of prayer puts us into a different paradigm. It’s that powerful. What was impossible becomes necessary. Acting on such prayer leads to amends and reparations, both economic and relational. As reparations show restorative justice in action we see conversion happening from the paradigm of exclusion to the paradigm of the kingdom of God. Born into a new paradigm makes radical inclusion possible. Earth community happens.
Unpayable Debt #2—In addition to needing deep forgiveness for exclusion, we also need it for debt incurred through unconscionable violence toward Creation. Civilization has continually developed structures that deeply wound our place in Nature, treating her as separate and as a wilderness needing to be tamed. Instead of the wholeness of being part of Nature, humans repeatedly opt for controlling Nature. That wound of separation has proved to be a way of delivering death to life on our planet. Civilization’s systems commit daily violence to Creation’s systems. As humans we have yet to face the reality that the wealth of Civilization, enormous as its trillions are, cannot pay the price of the damage done. The debt exceeds the budgets of nations, of corporations, and of financial institutions. Civilization has overdrawn the account. Accelerating climate change disasters send Civilization overdrawn notices. Ignored, Nature continues to exact her due. Can she forgive us our debt? Will her forgiveness evoke in us the wills to change from the worldviews of earthly kingdoms to the worldview of the kingdom of God?
Clearly, the kingdoms of the world are not designed to generate forgiving actions. These kingdoms have designed economies that grow through payment of debts not by forgiving them. Thinking how the kingdom of heave can work in today’s realities defies imaginations. Truth is, it can’t work. Conversion to a OneEarth paradigm is required in order for unpayble debts to be dealt with.
Forgiving Debt Has Always Been Radical and Essential—History needs a look at this point. Through the long span of Civilization, no economy or people have shaped life to forgive debts. All aim to collect debts. Biblical writings happen within this context. All of the efforts put forth in the Bible to forgive debts fly in the face of the culture today, but also all cultures of history. Forgiving debts in any form other than personal and relational forgiveness is revolutionary. The revolution disappears when we reduce the biblical scale of debt forgiveness to the personal and relational.
Undeterred by the challenges of dealing with structural debt, biblical authors proclaim that it is essential for the community of life to thrive. The year of Jubilee (Leviticus 25) proclaimed radical restructuring of the economy and society. So did the call for the forgiveness of all debts every seventh year (Deuteronomy 15). it is a call for a revolutionary alternative to Civilization. If we read that call any other way, we simply do not understand it and will regard it as a quaint idea and not relevant to reality today. But a system of forgiving structural debts understands that long term debt destroys the fabric of community and drags down an economy. Forgiving debts serves well a worldview in which community is essential to security and the correction of hierarchies of power and control that emerge through debt.
Jesus knew full well the import of debt as a destroyer of life and community. It was one of the reasons he boldly stated that he would live the “acceptable year of YHWH” (Jubilee) every day, every year (Luke 4:18-19). He was clear that the Jubilee worldview was one and the same with the kingdom of God. People who heard him in the synagogue that day were stunned by the boldness of his revolutionary declaration. Soon after he urged his followers to pray for the kingdom of heaven, not for incremental change in the current paradigm, but for an entirely different one.
“How do we get to systematic forgiveness of structural debt?” our rational minds want to know. After all we know something of how set in its ways Civilization is, ever reinforced by privileging some with power to control others and the wealth by which they implement their wishes. Jesus said “getting there” required opening the eyes of the blind, that is, to totally change consciousness from not seeing to seeing clearly that life cannot continue as before. In new and greater consciousness we embrace the worldview of the kingdom of God. That’s why Jesus taught his disciples to pray, not only for that consciousness, but to pray from within that consciousness. With that prayer, revolution happens.