Kingdom Come: Reflections in Honor of Jonathan R. Wilson

Kingdom Come

Reflections in Honor of Jonathan R. Wilson

Edited by Jason Byassee, Jeremy Kidwell, Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, and Leah Wilson-Hartgrove

Kingdom Come

Reflections in Honor of Jonathan R. Wilson

Copyright © 2022 Wipf and Stock Publishers. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

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An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

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paperback isbn: 978-1-6667-3142-2

hardcover isbn: 978-1-6667-2390-8

ebook isbn: 978-1-6667-2391-5

Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

Names: Byassee, Jason, editor. | Kidwell, Jeremy, 1980–, editor. | Wilson-Hartgrove, Jonathan, 1980–, editor. | Wilson-Hartgrove, Leah, editor.

Title: Kingdom come : reflections in honor of Jonathan R. Wilson / edited by Jason Byassee, Jeremy Kidwell, Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, and Leah Wilson-Hartgrove.

Description: Eugene, OR : Cascade Books, 2022 | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: isbn 978-1-6667-3142-2 (paperback) | isbn 978-1-6667-2390-8 (hardcover) | isbn 978-1-6667-2391-5 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Wilson, Jonathan R.

Classification: BX4827.W49 K56 2022 (print) | BX4827.W49 K56 (ebook)

09/06/22

Table of Contents

Title Page

Introduction

The Making of a Theologian

Artist Statement

Hot Cross Buns

Lament

The World Rises While We Wait

Groaning toward New Creation

Jesus as a Moral Stranger

New Monasticism in Our Secular Age47

Living Faithfully in a Neoliberal Age?

Ads as Moral Cultural Liturgies in Post-Secular Context107

Reflection

Plain, Literal, Real Narrative

Listen! This Is Not What You’re Expecting to Hear!

Reflections for an Irenic Spirit

Gospel Realism and the Epistle to Hebrews

A Christian Critique of Christian Britain230

Conversations with Jonathan

Toward a New Natural Theology

The Beatitudes

Seeing the Kingdom

Trinitarian

The Fact of Jesus

Speaking Words against Whiteness

Invitation

Slowing, Silence, and Solitude

Pursuing Theology’s Primary Mode

Earthing Heaven Now

Eating the Peaceable Kingdom

The Practice of Walking as Theological Knowing

A Gospel of Fukushima

An Intentionally Disciplined Way of Life and the Ministry of Spiritual Direction

Embracing Partnership

Rethinking Church and University

Equipping the Saints

Celebration

Dalit Christian Theology

For God So Loves the World

God’s Work Is to Redeem Creation

A Note of Thanks for the Scholar’s Gift

The Church as Embodied Witness

Learning to Be a Missional Church

Join with All Nature in Manifold Witness

Kingdom Realism

Church Matters

Response to Kingdom Come

Selected Bibliography of Jonathan R. Wilson’s Writing

List of Contributors

Permissions

Scripture quotations marked (NIV) are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com. The NIV and New International Version are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.™

Scripture quotations marked (NRSV) are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked (ESV®) are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®, copyright @ 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked (PME) are taken from the Phillips Modern English Bible, by J. B. Phillips, The New Testament in Modern English, Copyright© 1962 edition, published by HarperCollins.

Introduction

Whatever their particular back stories, the disciples who met Jesus on the road to Emmaus can be forgiven for being confused. They had, presumably, watched Jesus ride into Jerusalem as the leader of a popular movement that both exposed the corrupt authorities of his day and declared the reality of a different political order—God’s kingdom—present and accessible to the poor and the outcast. Indeed, Jesus had said this kingdom belonged to the likes of them.

It was, no doubt, an exhilarating time for a couple of everyday people who’d been pushed around by the powerful—people who’d likely never owned anything. The kingdom of heaven was theirs, Jesus was their King, and his movement’s power was so palpable that the religious and political authorities could do nothing to stop it. History had reached a tipping point, not unlike the Arab Spring or the nonviolent campaign in Montgomery, Alabama, that launched the civil rights movement. People who’d struggled to survive within horizons set by greedy men saw a dawn of new possibility. These two had sung their psalms of ascent on the walk up to Jerusalem, and the Lord, the maker of heaven and earth, had blessed them in Zion.

But how quickly it all fell apart. Jesus was dead, the movement was fragmented into a thousand pieces, and the associations that had so recently offered the promise of possibility now presented the potential for arrest and execution. You had to be careful who you talked to in the aftermath of a crucifixion. The authorities had reasserted their power, and no one knew who their next target might be.

We can understand why Cleopas and his traveling companion would be confused in such a situation. By most any account, Christianity in North America has been in a confusing transition over the course of our lives (four decades and counting). We are the children of baby boomers who grew up in an America where church membership skyrocketed after World War II and the cultural influence of evangelical Christianity led many in our lives to imagine doing great things for God. Yet we came of age with a generation that has questioned the church’s intentions, exposed many of its abuses, and left the congregations many of us grew up in. We do not argue with those who observe that the Christian century wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.

Yet we have remained in the church. The daughter and son of Baptists from both sides of the Canadian border, we are now members of the St. John’s Missionary Baptist Church, raising our children on many of the same hymns we grew up singing, helping them learn the King James English that was long since outdated when we learned it. The kids are old enough now that they sometimes observe how few people our age are still part of the church (since grandparents still offer free babysitting, there are many more children than middle-aged adults in our particular congregation). Why do we still go to church? Like Cleopas and his companion, we have encountered the resurrected Jesus in the midst of our confusion and recognized him at our dinner table, in the breaking of the bread. We are Christians not because we’re certain of anything but because we know what it feels like for our hearts to burn within us, and the best language we have to describe that experience is the story passed down to us in church.

This is a Festschrift to celebrate Jonathan R. Wilson, our father and father-in-law; Papa to our children. Jonathan has spent his life pastoring, preaching, teaching and writing for the church. When Leah was growing up, he had an office full of books on the campus of Westmont College where she would sometimes sit in the corner and read after school while he finished his work for the day. Impressed by the floor-to-ceiling shelves filled with tomes on theology and biblical studies, students who stopped in would often ask, Wow, have you read all of these books?

Some of them more than once, was Jonathan’s standard reply. When Leah was ten or so, she noted after a student left the office that Jonathan hadn’t answered the question. But how many of them have you never read?

We aren’t sure how many of Jonathan’s books and articles we’ve never read, but we’re glad to have read and learned from some of them more than once. Still, our primary impetus for organizing this volume wasn’t the literature Jonathan has produced, but rather the steady stream of people who’ve sat at our dinner table over the years and shared how studying with Jonathan or reading his books helped them make sense of their own struggles with faith. We’ve always been struck by the incredible variety of these people and their vocations. They do not fit neatly into any denominational categories or schools of contemporary thought. Jonathan has not produced an army of Wilsonians. He has, instead, spent his career helping a wide range of people listen to what was burning within them and become the unique gifts they were made to be.

This volume is a celebration of the conversations and vocations Jonathan has helped to cultivate through his commitment to the gospel of Jesus. Joy Banks, who knew Jonathan and his teaching well when they were both members of Grandview Calvary Baptist Church in Vancouver, contributed the linocut on the cover that tells the road to Emmaus story. Her interpretation captures four scenes that trace a journey from lament to delight that feels familiar. The confused couple on the road to Emmaus is in mourning. They have lost something they cannot get back. But with their new partner on the road, their lament turns toward reflection, which leads in turn to a practical invitation. They ask Jesus to dinner. And when they know him in the fellowship at the dinner table, they know themselves and their own deepest hopes anew, celebrating that the kingdom promised to them is in fact present, even if not in the ways they had expected it to be.

Lament. Reflection. Invitation. Celebration. We do not always come to these stations on the journey toward healing and wholeness in the same order, but they sketch a pattern we have known and one that so many of Jonathan’s friends and former students have shared with us over the years. With the gift of Joy’s art, it seemed that these four stages along the way could help to organize the wonderful and diverse contributions that so many shared to make this book possible.

Since we’ve already confessed that we didn’t know Jonathan’s scholarly work well enough to know where to begin this project, we must conclude by thanking Jonathan’s former student Jeremy Kidwell and Jonathan’s colleague Jason Byassee, both of whom enthusiastically embraced this project as editors and, in due course, helped us learn a great deal more than we knew about the theological conversations Jonathan has engaged over the course of his career. We have seen in another arena what we knew from dozens of conversations with the people whom Jonathan’s life and ministry have touched over the decades. Because of his willingness to face the reality of a fragmented world, Jonathan knows how to lament. But his lament doesn’t lead to despair. It inspires reflection. And within that reflection, always an invitation to practice. And in the practice of a way of life with Jesus, surprising celebrations.

For each person who has shared that journey with Jonathan—for each of the former students, colleagues, and mentors who’ve contributed to this volume, we are grateful. Gathering and editing their reflections has been an opportunity to see someone we’ve known and walked with for a long time in a new light. That in itself has been a delight.

Jonathan & Leah Wilson-Hartgrove

Rutba House, Ordinary Time, 2021

The Making of a Theologian

Becoming Jonathan Wilson

Jason Byassee

It was the early 1980s. A young pastor of a small but growing Baptist church in a Vancouver, BC, suburb stepped into a Christian bookstore in what we call East Van. He wasn’t looking for anything in particular, but did he ever find something. A yellowish-brown book by an author named Stanley Hauerwas. That discovery of Truthfulness and Tragedy would change Jonathan Wilson’s life. He would eventually attend Duke University to study with Hauerwas and write a dissertation with Stanley’s senior colleague Tom Langford on the theologian Julian Hartt.

A great theological career was born.

Jonathan’s wife Marti had recently made a life-changing announcement to him. Marti had a brash way about her. It would surprise none of the many friends who remember her with love to hear that she changed Jonathan’s life one day while they drove home from Regent College, his alma mater. She could change a life, with just a word. She warned him first that she’d been praying about this, and she worried it might hurt him. He had applied for PhD programs before, in Old Testament, and been turned down. The wound was still fresh. Would this hurt more or heal? A more cautious person would have said nothing. Marti, whatever else she was, was not cautious. She was Jonathan’s muse, who taught him to live with joy.

Her word to him that day: You’re a good pastor. I think you’d be an even better professor.

Jonathan Wilson is one of the leading post-liberal theological voices alive. And post-liberals know that the local matters. Story matters. The church matters. Friendship matters. Old books matter. The particular timbre of your beloved’s voice matters (as does spelling words with British English if you’re in Canada!). Where you were when your life changed matters, as does the color of the book cover. Where you go to church matters. Where you study matters. Medicine matters, both in how it can extend life despite ill health, as it did for Marti, and in how it can accidentally threaten life as well. Either way, it expresses our peculiar modern neuroses. Telling the truth matters. If you read much Hauerwas, you notice these themes recurring. He names names, mistrusting generalities, rendering specific faces, locations, difficulties and delights. All of it matters to God. It renders our particular and communal character, which presents anew the character of Jesus to others. That’s what saints do.

One of the glaring weaknesses in Hauerwas’s work has been inattention to the doctrine of creation. As a lover of Karl Barth, he emphasizes the christological so profoundly that creation can feel eclipsed. Jonathan’s magnum opus (so far!) is God’s Good World, on which he began work shortly after Marti’s death in 2010. She is lovingly remembered in its introduction.¹ The book would not have existed without all the particulars listed above and many more known only to God. I’ve had the blessed fortune to live and work in and love many of the same places and institutions as Jonathan. Hence this volume. In this essay I want to tell you a bit more about a few of them, in addition to the ones Jonathan tells us about himself throughout his work.

I remember the first time I saw Jonathan for who he is. Yale’s great Nicholas Wolterstorff had just lectured at Regent. Some of my friends from VST and I took the twenty-minute walk across the campus of the University of British Columbia to hear him. That’s a long way to go, existentially. Jesus may have broken down the dividing wall between Jews and gentiles, as Eph 2 argues, but he seems to still be working on the dividing wall between Regent and VST. We are Regent’s liberal frenemy. They began in our basement, soon outgrew those modest origins, bought their own property, and outgrew us. International students arrive at Regent and are surprised it’s only one building—it seems bigger when you’re farther away. One rare occasion that sees folks clamber over that dividing wall is a visit from a renowned figure from elsewhere.

At the pub after Wolterstorff’s lecture, our group from VST asked for a table and looked around. And there was a table of Regent folks, seated with Wolterstorff. And who was right beside him, all up in his ear, but Jonathan Wilson, who was then teaching at neither place, but at Carey Theological College, a Baptist institution also on campus (we have too many seminaries for a place with so few churches!), successor to the chair previously held by the great Stanley Grenz, of blessed memory.

I knew Jonathan a little. We were both in the Duke doctoral student family tree. We’d met at the Ekklesia Project, a gathering of Hauerwas-influenced academics and activists in Chicago, where Jonathan had spoken and influenced me more than the great Hauerwas himself some years prior. This was the first moment I’d laid eyes on Jonathan in Vancouver, where I would later move and where we’d become friends. And where else would he be but sitting and listening to a great thinker, asking him questions, sifting answers, challenging his reading of Barth, connecting him with others? That man does not miss an opportunity to learn and grow. Jonathan invited me to join them, but we had our own table, where we repaired to grouse and gossip, on our side of the dividing wall. Jonathan is a better climber than most of us.

Jonathan is a theologian’s theologian. He has read everything, and he knows everyone. He can introduce you to them. He’ll tell you, charitably, of their gifts. He can also tell you what he sees as their flaws, but usually only if you ask (Stanley doesn’t wait for you to ask!). Jonathan is a connector. He loves introducing people. And he loves theology. His eyes light up when the conversation turns to God, whereas honestly, many of us forget that first love. Whether the theologian is living, beside him, downing a well-earned pint at the pub, or long dead, but still giving life through their work, Jonathan has a willing ear, a happy eagerness to introduce them. I remember his face as he saw me that day, waving me over to meet Nick. He was radiant. Hey, come over here, you two absolutely have to know one another. I hardly knew him yet. It didn’t matter. We were both about the adventure of Christian theology, not just with Hauerwas’s oft-imitated-never-bettered Texas twang, but in the Tennessee accents that mark both of our forebears. More modest. More churchly. Evangelical but recovering. Catholic but not Roman. Baptist but not Southern. Canadian but not originally. Biblical but not biblicist. Conversionist but not just once. Missional but wholistic and integral. In service to the whole church and the whole world.

Jonathan has something else that many of us lose along the way. He is still a curer of souls. He may no longer be a pastor, quite, though he loves the church, and is always serving on this or that board of deacons or missionaries or whatever. Though he has several stints as interim senior pastor and pastoral team leader on his nonexistent CV, he hasn’t been a full-time working pastor since his days as an interim chaplain at Westmont College in Santa Barbara. The late-night calls from some Bible-study-initiated crisis got him out of bed too many times for him to continue that. It made me realize I’m not a pastor anymore, he says now, still a little groggy. I didn’t have the heart to tell him: at least at an evangelical college he wasn’t dragged out of bed to hear about some sophomore’s forlorn love life quite as much as some. Evangelical undergrads have the good sense to know that discussing, say, predestination is a worthy reason to call the chaplain in the middle of the night, while a hookup you accidentally started crushing on is not. Jonathan might no longer make a paycheck from pastoring, but he can’t stop the habit. I have lost track of the number of friends who have found their way to his and his wife Soohwan’s home in Nanaimo, overlooking the Salish Sea, for retreat and repair. It is a place of hospitality and grace, where Soohwan cooks and gardens and prays and works crossword puzzles and oversees A Rocha International as its board chair, responsible for creation care in twenty-two countries and growing. The guest rooms fill with those who are out of sorts, struggling, in need of something, they may not know what. And Jonathan listens. And asks questions. And heals. Not always religiously.

COVID-19 scratched the NCAA basketball tournament in 2020, akin to cancelling Easter in our local idolatries in North Carolina. My sons and I came into Jonathan’s basement in Nanaimo and he hit play, without asking permission or giving warning, and up onto his screen flashed Duke’s 1991 basketball victory over UNLV, the most important win in our mutual alma mater’s storied sports history. We cheered like we didn’t know the outcome, emerging triumphant, victorious, all over again.

In the Roman Catholic Church, St. John Vianney is the patron saint of parish pastors. He is remembered, simply, as the Curé d’Ars, the parish pastor of a tiny village in France, beloved worldwide for his worldwide impact as a confessor, healer, and compassionate friend. Jonathan, no longer a paid pastor, is, nonetheless, the Curé de Nanaimo. He is the repairer of souls of Vancouver Island. Just a word and he’ll send you back ready to face life.

Or not even a word. Sometimes he just hits play, and Bobby Hurley slays the dragon all over again.

In Jonathan’s introduction to God’s Good World, he remembers a high school science teacher named Mr. Cox, at Glencliff High in Nashville, TN. Prior to that class, I had been an indifferent student, he writes.² But the class, Jonathan says, in an echo of Immanuel Kant of all people, woke me from my intellectual slumbers—the key metaphor for the entire philosophical turn to modernity that was the Enlightenment. For Jonathan it was to flora, fauna, and the then-new field of ecology. I was enchanted, Jonathan says, and anyone who has had a good teacher knows exactly what he means. His fundamentalist upbringing made studying science difficult, even had he been able to be a big-game biologist. His parents’ resistance wore him down and he went to the Free Will Baptist Bible college they preferred. It is remarkable to ponder what Mr. Cox would have thought of Jonathan’s career, and of his gratitude to him in God’s Good World.

In an interview with Jonathan I conducted for another project on mentoring, I asked him who his mentors had been. Who led him to faith, and then shaped his faith, to be the theologian he is? He began to tell me stories of powerful women, and being a good Baptist, they were fellow church members whom he called sister, not just of his biological family. For example, Miss Laura Bell Barnard, a retired missionary from south India, who never married and never learned to drive. Jonathan became her driver, and as I drove, she would talk. She was discipling me, he said. She taught him to play chess. To drink tea the English way. And she told stories. One was of a young woman in India coming to faith in Christ due to Miss Barnard’s ministry. The question was when to baptize her. Do it too soon, and they’ll fall away and get discouraged; wait too long, and they won’t feel accepted. Being Baptists, we took that very seriously, Jonathan said. This was rather different from a southern evangelical culture that would baptize anyone who came to the front with a weepy conversion.

In another story, a new Christian was threatened by her fellow villagers who were unhappy with her conversion. Miss Barnard tried to protect her, but the woman was gone one day. The missionary went to a Hindu temple and found her there, grabbed her by the hand, and marched her out. Miss Barnard felt a very clear nudge from God, wheeled around, and saw a priest come at her with a drawn sword. She objected with just a word: In the name of Jesus, I command you to stop! and he froze. The two women left together. The story got the attention of a young Tennessean Free Will Baptist! It’s more triumphalist than the sorts of stories we try to tell now about other faiths, with a danger of playing into Edward Said’s orientalism (look it up. Or call up Jonathan). But ponder this angle of the story: women standing up against men’s violence. A word being the only defence we have against a sword. And the name of Jesus is the only defense Christians should or need to call upon in the face of violence. Miss Barnard was hatching a pacifist, whether she meant to or not.

Another time Jonathan complained to Miss Barnard about the Pharisaical rules at the Bible college. She responded with one of those questions that changes your life: Jonathan, which one of those rules is keeping you from following Jesus? He was learning sensitivity to historical context, to local particulars, and to what matters amidst it all, what to fight and what not to. Aquinas called it practical wisdom. Baptists call it discipleship. He was becoming a theologian.

Another surprising mentor was a woman named Mrs. Cleo Purcell, an ordained FWB minister in the mid-twentieth century (really!). Her husband had been injured in a car accident and couldn’t continue to work, and the congregation chose her to replace him and ordained her. She led ably, preaching and teaching, until the denomination realized that liberals were ordaining women and forbade it (though local congregations had actually chosen women pastors for many years—being Baptists, there was no authority to tell them otherwise). Mrs. Purcell surrendered her credentials, and then became director of the women’s national auxiliary convention. After Jonathan mowed her lawn, Rev. Purcell invited Jonathan in and talked with him, fed him, served him tea. She’d talk to me. She was mentoring me, though I didn’t realize it till years later. He remembers her gravitas, the dignity with which she responded with grace to offense: You just knew you were in the presence of someone who knew God, he said. Mrs. Purcell became part of the Wilson family: Memories of her blur with memories around the family table. Like the Lord’s Supper in the Bible.

Jonathan was not unwilling to be tutored by men! When Jonathan’s first car, a 1952 MG TD, broke down, a member of his church towed the car to his home and spent many evenings and Saturdays teaching him how to repair the car. The Curé de Nanaimo is now again repairing an old car in his retirement (plus ça change . . .). The car was a pretext—to talk about the life of faith, and how to follow Jesus in a place that liked church on Sunday but not too much Jesus talk the rest of the week. For reasons unclear, men seem to need something else to talk around, to then slip in the important stuff indirectly. Cars, sports, exercise, cigars, lots of plausibly manly things will do. He wanted help, not cussing. But he also wanted help not thinking of women in sexually aggressive ways that his coworkers often did. Those of us in university or other liberal settings often mock piety. Then we create new ones. At least a piety based on the gospel has mercy baked into it. Who wouldn’t give up cussing in a hot second if it could take a dent out of purity culture and its close twin, sexualized hostility toward women?

A Bible school professor named Dan Cronk, another retired missionary to India, was intent on raising up new leaders for the FWB. Here Jonathan’s eyes were opened to the cultural complexities of cross-cultural mission. Professor Cronk asked students if they were new to a village in India, a place far from any plumbing, and the newly hired villager prepares a sandwich and serves it to them with a brown greasy smudge on it, what do they do? He’s their connection to the village. He didn’t answer it for us, he just got us thinking. Jonathan’s work now in places as far flung as Amsterdam, Lebanon, India, and elsewhere had its origins in the missionary anthropology of Mr. Cronk’s classroom. The youth group I traveled with said eat whatever is put before you. But I think they got that from someone else.

And then there is Leroy Forlines, who washed Jonathan’s feet (that’s what Free Will Baptists do) when he was a teenager, taught theology for more than fifty years at the Bible college, and showed Jonathan that theology is for life. In many ways, Jonathan’s theology is an unfolding of that conviction in a larger arena.

It would surprise some on my side of the liberal/evangelical dividing wall to learn that Regent is not perceived as conservative everywhere. In communities like the FWBC in Tennessee, it’s a dangerously liberal place. But one faculty member, Douglas Simpson, knew of Regent and directed Jonathan there. Jonathan was stepping out to risk coming here, and to find another vision of Baptist life, one more catholic and ecumenical, than he’d known possible. That was made possible partly by faculty welcoming him into their homes and lives. Dr. Jim Houston, founding president of Regent, responded to an impatient young Jonathan’s frustration with arid, linear systematic theology this way: ‘My dear boy, if you want to think differently, then I suggest you learn Hebrew’. He was right. And that led to a lifelong delight in the Old Testament, begun by Carl Armerding and brought to full flower by Bruce Waltke.

Another, a Canadian church historian, Ian Rennie, shook Jonathan’s hand and exclaimed, The first Free Will Baptist I’ve met in the flesh! I want to know all about FWBs! The exotic gaze can run in multiple directions.

But, of course, mentoring is usually much more mundane than that. Pastor Roy Bell, late beloved leader of First Baptist Vancouver, would walk with Jonathan around the West End of Vancouver every other week, and talk to him about pastoring. He would push him through rigorous analysis of, say, the business meeting: what was the emotional tone? What were the psychological dimensions? How could theology help us? The Irishman was famous for his seventy-hour workweeks. He even wrote a book on the possible impact of The Five-Minute Conversation—he gave open-ended time to few. In fact, Jonathan now says, I don’t know who else he gave that kind of time to.

But the strongest mentoring voices in Jonathan’s life have tended to be women. First his mother, Jean Wilson, who according to Jonathan is the clearest communicator and best teacher he’s ever had. Then his wife, Marti, who never had a guarded moment in her life. I’ve never had an unguarded moment in my life. The Nova Scotian helped Jonathan to see the spiritual danger in his family, his church, and in southern US culture writ large, a place that has birthed so much glory and beauty, and also slavery, Jim Crow, and one Donald J. Trump. A few years, after Marti’s early death, Loren Wilkinson introduced Jonathan to Soohwan Park. To their surprise God called them to marriage. Soohwan’s contemplative center is a powerful example to Jonathan, and her worldwide leadership as board chair of ARI is just the latest in a legendary career in international mission. And perhaps, above all, Leah Wilson-Hartgrove, who has been involved with this project to honor her father from the start. He describes Leah this way: she takes seriously what Jesus says and she does it. She doesn’t calculate. When Leah and her husband, Jonathan (same name, different person), moved to Walltown in Durham, NC, to start an intentional Christian community, they had their naysayers who said the idealistic kids would pull up stakes as soon as things got hard. I heard those questions, and asked a few myself. Leah’s father would respond, You got that exactly wrong. Jonathan knows well what his daughter is made of. Once, in the early nineties, Marti traveled to Ottawa for her parents’ anniversary. Back in California, Jonathan had a medical emergency, and could have died. Marti flew home to be with her husband, and then got word that her father, whom she’d just left, had died. She sat in the kitchen of their house in a love seat next to the window, and eleven-year-old Leah crawled up into her lap and said, Mom, everything is going to be OK, God is going to take care of us, whatever happens.

There are many more mentors who have made Jonathan the theologian he is. Many of these are his students, some writing in this volume. Others have been colleagues at Duke, Westmont, Acadia Divinity College, Carey, Regent, International Baptist Theological Seminary in Amsterdam, and elsewhere. Every great teacher, and Jonathan is certainly that, knows about reverse mentoring, by which those whom we teach make us new. Many of his mentors have been friends, with whom he has approached life as a fellow conspirator. But the hardest teacher has been illness. Flannery O’Connor famously said of her struggle with lupus,

In a sense, sickness is a place, more instructive than a long trip to Europe, and it’s always a place where there’s no company, where nobody can follow. Sickness before death is a very appropriate thing and I think those who don’t have it miss one of God’s mercies.

A severe mercy, that. Jonathan has faced down illness in the death of his beloved first wife. He faced it in his own brush with death in the early nineties. And he has faced it more recently in his prostate cancer, which for a time seemed to have metastasized and so about to endanger his own life. As a theological ethicist, Jonathan writes about death as one who has faced it too often, and also seen it defeated. Jonathan and Soohwan see his cancer as having been miraculously defeated—helped along by Soohwan’s disciplined diet and caring for his condition, and more than a few answered prayers. To spend time with the Curé de Nanaimo is to be with a man who knows he might not have been here. But here he is. He knows life is a gift, not to be assumed. He is, as gamblers say, playing with house money. Or as Christians say, he is savoring life as altogether gift, none of it earned. It might not have been. But here it is. How can our life then not be altogether hallelujah?

1

. Jonathan R. Wilson, God’s Good World: Reclaiming the Doctrine of Creation. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic,

2013

), xviii.

2

. Wilson, God’s Good World, xv.

Artist Statement

On the Road and at the Table

Joy Banks

Every Easter at my church, where Jonathan worshiped for a season, we sing a song with the refrain, You’ll find Him on the road. You’ll find Him at your table. The lines of the song, like the book cover art piece here, are inspired by the Emmaus resurrection story in Luke 24. Maybe it’s because of that song or maybe it’s because of the wisdom shared by other disciples, like Jonathan, that I have always thought of this story as an invitation to watch for the breaking in of Christ’s resurrection reign in surprising places, through unexpected strangers. Where might I meet Jesus on the road this day? If I invited this stranger home for a meal, would I discover that I am the one being hosted and fed instead? This story is one that plays out over and over with possibilities for every generation and context, which is why I’ve depicted the scenes unfolding around a circle in a contemporary setting.

I discovered last year that there are some good arguments, with historic backing, for the possibility that the two disciples Jesus encountered on the road to Emmaus were a married couple, Cleopas and his wife, who could have been one of the Marys at the crucifixion. However, most artistic renditions of this story, not surprisingly, include only men around this resurrection table. I have found Jonathan to be someone who not only welcomes women to the table, but enthusiastically supports and equips women for leadership and ministry. I think he would be in favor of going with the Cleopas and Mary tradition for this piece.

Hot Cross Buns

Loren Wilkinson

12 months past

On the morning

Of Good Friday

Past daffodils

In rain-light,

Before the day’s traffic woke the town,

Through Newnham Garden to Newnham Croft

I walked down aisles of bursting willow

And alleys by houses of weathered stone

To the fragrant, shuttered bakery shop:

To buy a dozen

Buns, hot (cut

With a cross &

Round as time)

For my family.

(This solstice

Again, violets

Push and splay

And deep trees

All luxuriate:

Their roots reach out in soil and time

Past Roman, Saxon, Norman bones placed

Past standing, horizontal under stone;

The rains pour down; the trees grow up

Round and round in the season’s cycle.

The year turns

And it returns

Wet time; dry;

Cold time; hot

Bright, dark.)

The baker shop

In chilly dawn

Pulled people

Like a centre

From the town:

Old women, and men, like trees walking

And one who spread arms to his child,

In body’s shape, the shape of a cross:

This upward axis, from earth to heaven,

This outward axis through which we act.

This hot bread

Holds the crux,

This centre in

The cycles where

All ways start.

(Cambridge, 1986;

Vancouver, 1987)

Hot Cross Buns

Easter, 2020

This time I bake

them by myself

masked & gloved

here in isolation

on Galiano island

and take them in the brightening spring, through the gate

up the stone steps, and the rocky path, past cedar & arbutus

to my friends where they sit, on their sun-blessed deck

6 feet apart on Easter morning around a bottle of red wine

each with their own cup, reading about the Resurrection,

waiting for bread

still oven-warm,

filled with ginger

lemon and orange,

glazed with honey.

(In the Duomo in

Its empty square

A blind tenor sings

Panis Angelicus

To empty chairs;

In the Vatican, Francis the vicar of Rome is prostrate and alone

before the altar in the crossing of that cross-shaped space, and

in Paris, the island at the city’s heart is empty where weeping folk

once sang around the burning church, and Notre Dame waits

roofless and bare within its scaffolding to be built and filled again,

and in Vancouver,

London & Madrid,

Berlin, New York &

All around the world

The altars are empty.

Linked by gnostic nets

All people are islands

Within walls, who wait

Or walk and wonder

Six feet apart under

Skies made blue again on this planet’s Holy Saturday, where

autobahns and cruise ships, planes & mines & power plants,

are stilled. And hospitals are filled, the morgues and crematoria,

and people walk, 6 feet apart (an arm’s span, or a grave’s depth),

And wonder: Can these bones live? What is the Maker doing?:

The crown-shaped virus

Is a lovely thing, eager

To live and reproduce.

Very good, God sees it,

Knowing all he makes:

Exploding stars,

colliding continents;

tornadoes, volcanoes;

Creation red with death

& we apes in His image,

Who, raised from stardust into consciousness and conscience,

crucify our Maker here at the center of all things, on our cross and His:

through which He gives His self to things, gives to things their selves:

crowned viruses, and weeds and people: who wait to be released:

We are treaded grapes and broken wheat waiting for their yeast.

These crossed buns say:

You are islanded no longer,

Lifted from the dead: by

Christ, the bread of life

God, the life of bread.

Lament

The World Rises While We Wait

Towards a Theology of Kingdom Patience

Matt Humphrey

If what you have written is the case, which we agree that it is, it begs the question—why hasn’t the church embodied this kingdom ethic in its care for creation? I was uncharacteristically moved to silence. I had come prepared to defend my key sources, my writing style, and to shore up the lines of argumentation that together built what I still hoped were a coherent case for a distinctly Christian ecological ethic. I sat staring out the window of Loren Wilkinson’s office, while he and Jonathan Wilson sat quietly. In the window’s reflection, I caught a broad smile slowly growing on Jonathan’s face. This was the one question I had not come ready to respond to.

That’s probably not fair, Loren finally quipped as Jonathan’s smile expanded into open laughter. I’ve been pondering that for almost forty years and haven’t answered it yet and neither has Jonathan. I breathed a deep sigh of relief. Like any graduate student, I had begun to quickly assemble a list of relevant sources to marshal to my defense: the problem lies within the social imaginaries of late modernity à la Charles Taylor; the cultural captivity of the church à la Hauerwas; the rampant individualism and the loss of teleology as a basis for ethical discernment à la MacIntyre. Fast forward to the years that followed, as I took up full-time work for A Rocha Canada, engaging a broad array of Christians and church traditions, and my list went on to include other pernicious factors—a church set on empire building rather than kingdom building; a world where it is easy to live as though our relationship to creation (one of the four primary relationships entrusted to us in creation, as Jonathan would