{"id":35345,"date":"2024-01-29T22:42:16","date_gmt":"2024-01-30T06:42:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/?p=35345"},"modified":"2024-02-01T04:35:51","modified_gmt":"2024-02-01T12:35:51","slug":"your-kingdom-come","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/your-kingdom-come\/","title":{"rendered":"Your Kingdom Come"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n

I\u2019ve prayed the Lord\u2019s prayer since childhood. Along with \u201cNow I lay me down to sleep\u201d it was probably one of the only prayers I had learned by heart. Simple and theologically rich at the same time, it deserves to be prayed again and again across denominational boundaries. It even bridges the Catholic-Protestant divide\u2026although let me tell you, I learned that lesson the hard way. Attending my brother-in-law\u2019s graduation from Notre Dame, all was going along swimmingly. We prayed the Our Father, but no one had told me that Catholics end the prayer with lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. So of course I belted out, \u201cFor thine is the Kingdom\u2026\u201d before I realized I was performing a solo. Newbie mistake.

What does my little anecdote have to do with this week\u2019s reading? The answer is that it all comes down to the Kingdom of God. In Evangelization and Ideology: How to Understand and Respond to the Political Culture<\/em>, Matthew Petrusek dives into the deep end of political and moral argumentation. Their end goal, however, is not simply to win an argument or even to persuade others. Their ultimate goal is to open the door to effective evangelism, and their well-constructed arguments are a vehicle to do that. \u201cIn sum, if evangelists can make a convincing case that the Church has a good vision of politics, a vision grounded in objective truth, then we at least open the door for considering whether the Church might have a good vision of religion as well\u2014a vision founded in objective love.\u201d [1]

I admit that this recent season (which feels like it has been going on for ages now) of political divisiveness, I\u2019ve really lost hope of having any meaningful discourse with people who see things differently. It seems impossible to engage in a civil exchange of ideas, let alone possibly change someone\u2019s opinion. For this reason, Petrusek’s book was a breath of fresh air that left me feeling hopeful.

I indeed ended the book feeling optimistic, but it took me a while to get there. Throughout Petrusek\u2019s discussions of various political ideologies and epistemological approaches, I kept returning to a question that we corporately encountered last semester: Who gets to decide what values we pursue? Who makes the final call when we disagree on what is right and wrong? As a Christian, I believe that right and wrong is determined by God, but how do I engage with my friends and neighbors who don\u2019t accept the premise of God\u2019s existence? Incidentally, just yesterday, I tried to reason with a couple of friends using Petrusek\u2019s line of thought: the Christian worldview is logically coherent and without the existence of God we can\u2019t establish any objective right and wrong. [2] Let\u2019s just say my friends were not convinced.

Despite feeling a bit overwhelmed by the daunting argumentation, the hope model started to bring things into perspective for me. The hope model allows for a standard of right and wrong, in other words an objective ideal to move toward. Petrusek puts it this way: \u201cThere is an underlying assumption that it is indeed possible to identify an objective standard of perfection, which, in turn, provides a means for determining whether any given society (or even humanity as a whole) is moving closer or further away from that standard. In other words, the hope model provides both a definition of moral progress and the possibility of moving toward that definition in history.\u201d [3] But here\u2019s what I really love about the hope model: \u201cAgainst the utopian-optimist model, it denies that establishing a secular heaven on earth is or ever will be possible; against the pessimist model, it denies with equal vehemence that the fallen state of human beings means that we can never approximate a higher standard of justice and hold onto it.\u201d [4] That sounds a lot like our prayer, \u201cYour Kingdom come, Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.\u201d (Matthew 6:10 NIV) When we pray this, we don\u2019t imagine that our neighborhood, our city, our world will suddenly become perfect like heaven. However, we do pray in faith that greater moral progress can be made; a higher standard of justice can exist.

I\u2019ve come to look at my ministry primarily through this lens. If I can live out God\u2019s Kingdom, if His Kingdom can be manifest in my neighborhood through me and my family, what better way to introduce my neighbors to Jesus. This approach does not resolve all the ethical and political questions I face, but it provides the foundation I need to engage in further conversation with those around me.

<\/p>\r\n

______________________________________________________________<\/p>\r\n

1 Petrusek, Matthew.\u00a0Evangelisation and Ideology: How to Understand and Respond to the Political Culture.\u00a0<\/em>IL: Word on Fire, 2023. 17.\u00a0<\/p>\r\n

2 Ibid., 70.\u00a0<\/p>\r\n

3 Ibid., 97-98.\u00a0<\/p>\r\n

4 Ibid., 98.\u00a0<\/p>\r\n

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I\u2019ve prayed the Lord\u2019s prayer since childhood. Along with \u201cNow I lay me down to sleep\u201d it was probably one of the only prayers I had learned by heart. Simple and theologically rich at the same time, it deserves to be prayed again and again across denominational boundaries. It even bridges the Catholic-Protestant divide\u2026although let […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":186,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2310],"tags":[2489,2997],"class_list":["post-35345","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-doctor-of-leadership-3","tag-dlgp02","tag-petrusek","cohort-dlgp02"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35345","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/186"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35345"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35345\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35412,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35345\/revisions\/35412"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35345"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35345"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35345"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}