Review of Reconciling All Things: A Christian Vision for Justice, Peace and Healing

Reconciling All Things: A Christian Vision for Justice, Peace, and Healing by Emmanuel Katongole & Chris Rice (Courtesy of IVP, thanks to Adrianna Wright)

Reconciling All Things: A Christian Vision for Justice, Peace and Healingby Emmanuel Katongole & Chris Rice. Downers Grove: IVP Books, 2008. pp. 165.

Foremost I have a confession to make Reconciling All Things is the best book I have read during the preceding course of twelve months. I call this book “true theology in practice.” Reconciling All Things won “The 2009 Christianity Today Book Awards.”  Someone wrote about the book, “I love this book for its range, the weave of the two writer’s voices, its deep appreciation of process, and its combination of spiritual groundedness, accessibility, and ecclesial, psychological, and political awareness. It retrieves the term reconciliation from the bussword bin, and offers hope and direction at the same time.” This is an adequate description of the book.

 

Emmanuel Kantongole is a research professor of Theology and world Christianity at Duke Divinity School. Chris Rice worked with the son (Spencer Perkins) of the late social activist and Minister John Perkins at the Voice of Calvary Ministries.  With Spencer Perkins, he published the influential “More Than Equals: Racial Healing for the Sake of the Gospel” (IVP, 2000).  Kantongole and Rice are the founding codirectors of the Center for Reconciliation at Duke Divinity School. Interestingly, Rice was Kantongole’s student when he was working on his M.Div. at Duke Divinity School. That makes the book more interesting to read!

 

The book is divided into eight succinct chapters. The chapter titles are very catchy and give you a sense of direction where the book is going. In fact, I dare to say each chapter’s title reinforces the thesis of the book.

 

Chapter 1: Prevailing Visions of Reconciliation

Chapter 2: Stepping Back: Reconciliation as the Goal of God’s

Chapter 3: Reconciliation Is a Journey with God

Chapter 4: How Scriptures Reshape US

Chapter 5:  The Discipline of Lament

Chapter 6: Hope in a Broken Word

Chapter 7: Why Reconciliation Needs the Church

Chapter 8: The Hearth, Spirit, and Life of Leadership

 

The book begins with the authors’ personal experiences and journeys , working among various groups of people toward one goal: “reconciliation.” It proceeds a critical query, yet one that is relevant for contemporaryChristian living: what does it mean to live faithfulness in a broken and divided world? or how do we as Christians bear witness of God’s story of “new creation”?

The basic thesis of the book maintains that reconciliation is a holistic divine project incorporating the need for universal justice, peace and healing. As a divine program reconciliation is comprehensive in scope and embodies the very heart of God, his mission in/for the world. Reconciliation is rooted in God’s story of new creation. Reconciliation is nothing short of a Christian vision and practice. Because it is God’s initiative, reconciliation begins with the people of God, the Chruch who are apostles and agents of peace and reconciliation. As agents of peace, the Church’s task is enormous, to the extent that it involves to bridging diverse worlds, in the process of rebuilding and remaking all things new. Hence in essence the Church should be and is “The bridge of Christ, drawn from every nation, tongue, tribe and denomination” (17). In other words, reconciliation, as a Christian vision, makes a claim on the life of every person, place and congregation—it is not the terrain of experts and professionals, but an “inherent” practice in the life of the believer (18). It is theology in practice. Reconciliation is the very life of the church. If reconciliation is both a journey and (divine) gift, it is also an invitation into a journey with God. Reconciliation is not a “solution” or an end product, but a process and an ongoing search, to fulfilling the divine grand narrative (ibid). Thus reconciliation is God’s final project for the world. The people of God are called specifically to be partners with God in this journey so to embody divine justice and promote relations between God and man,  men and men in various spheres of life. If that is the case, “the way things are is not the way things have to be.” Reconciliation presupposes fragmentation, disorientation, disenfranchisement, chaos, division, brokenness, misfortune, which are all inherent in this world. Human beings are the embodiement of these social and spiritual realities. However, God’s new creation vision for the world is not without hope. Because reconciliation is the mission of God, God will be successfully and attain his goals.

Further,Rice and Kantogole argue that reconciliation is a gift (43), a process, not an event. New creation is the ground for reconciliation (45). This reconciliation is in essence “transformation,” and “recreation.” Christians are called by God to be part of the process.  The authors call us to observe God’s seeds of hope in the world. For God is always at work within the spheres of human believers and unbelievers. If reconciliation is not an achievement but a process (57), a gift of the new creation, then we are called to persevere in hope, and dispel all despair and false hopes.  The hope that works hand in hand with the rehabilitation of “all things in Christ” is a glorious journey. It personfies both joy sorrows, achievements and disappointments. The journey of reconciliation also requires the discipline of lament.  The church is called to lament over the broken world: for those who are spiritually bankrupt,  socially and economically disoriented and fragmented, and whose status in life continues to be an existential challenge. Genuine reconciliation involves genuine repentance, but we prefer reconciliation without repentance (86). Repentance embraces the memory of the past, and does not disregard its hurt.  For true reconciliation is impossible unless the past is revisited, reimagined and healed. Toward this end, the church is  called to “bear witness” to the gift of reconciliation (72), we’re also summoned by Christ to embody justice, forgiveness, unity and love.  The reconciliation that is provided to us has a divine antecedence: “The story of God’s “new creation,” which in essence involves the promise of restoration and  “new life” in Christ.

 

What makes this book an invaluable resource is its message of reconciliation, the wisdom it embodies, and the fact that both Rice and Kantongole have been actively involved in this journey!  For example, Kantogole grew up in a small village of Malube; Uganda (Africa) has personally witnessed incessant tribal unrest among African brothers and sisters. He writes, “In all my teaching I find myself in search of something better tan the tribalization that divides so much of Africa, or categories such as North and South, black and white. Here I am, pressing the question as I teach, “But what does this theology mean for my mother?” What does it mean back in Malube, where trees are being cut down by powerful businesses, where roads are in disrepair, where clean water is not available, where the priest lives in a faraway town? What does it mean for our conversations about God and peace never to be disconnected from the challenges of real, local places, from digging wells, organizing education and planting trees”? (14). Rice, however, experienced intense racial animosity while attempting to improved race relations between white and black in Mississippi.  He asserts, “Then Spencer and I nearly split apart in 1997—a bitter relational crisis. Yet somehow, with the help of friends, we learned to give each other enough grace to go on to trust God for the lack. Just trying to live peacefully in one neighborhood, in one church and with one person named Spencer taught me that reconciliation is a long and fragile journey (13). Let me close with the “Ten Theses” of reconciliation as the mission of God, which recapitulate the content of the book and its central message (pp. 147-151).

1. Reconciliation is God’s gift to the new world. Healing of the world’s deep brokenness does not begin with us and our action, but with God and God’s gift of new creation.
2. Reconciliation is not a theory, achievement, technique. It is a journey
3. The end toward which the journey of reconciliation leads is the shalom of God’s new creation—a future not yet fully realized, but holistic in its transformation of the personal, social and structural dimensions of life.
4. The journey of reconciliation requires the discipline of lament.
5. In a broken world God is always planting seeds of hope, though often in the places we expect or even desire.
6. There is no reconciliation without memory, because there is no hope for a peaceful tomorrow that does not seriously engage both the pain of the past and the call to forgive.
7. Reconciliation needs the church, but not as just another social agency.
8. The ministry of reconciliation requires and calls forth a specific type of leadership that is able to unite a deep vision with the concrete skills, virtues and habits necessary for the long and often lonesome journey of reconciliation.
9. There is no reconciliation without conversion, the constant journey with God into a future of new people and new loyalties.
10. Imagination and conversion are the very heart and soul of reconciliation

* A podcast is made available at the Urban ministry.ORG.  There you can listen to Rice and Kantagole talk about their own journeys and the book. The Book sounds like the paper I will be presenting at the SBL annual meeting (New Orleans, 2009), is rightly entitled “The Ethics of Justification, New Creation and the question of Race.” Do plan to be there to hear my paper.