Finding shalom

What dimensions of our lives are presently oppressed by the captivity of powerful and destructive principalities and powers? I suspect that the answer to that question is literally, every dimension suffers under such oppression. Consequently, it is in every dimension of life that we need to engage in radical, and sometimes symbolic acts of a hope for life beyond captivity, beyond the present crisis. We need to find ways to experience God's shalom, God's redemptive presence, in all the dimensions of our lives, from the marketplace to the bedroom, from the board room to the classroom, from the theatre to the dining room. In fact, there are many rooms to our lives, and it is in all of these rooms that we need to struggle together, in community, and with the healing presence of the Holy Spirit, to have a foretaste of a creationally restoring kingdom that is yet to come in all of its fullness.

Brian Walsh in Subversive Christianity

Teaching for Shalom

So we can and should discuss among each other effective and sensitive ways of teaching for justice. We can and should discuss among each other effective ways of opening up our students to the wounds of the world. We can and should discuss among each other effective and sensitive ways of handling the controversies that will arise when we teach for justice. But the God whom believers acknowledge in their lives and celebrate in their worship asks that we teach for justice-in-shalom. For that God is the God revealed in Jesus Christ, the Prince of Shalom. The graduate who prays and struggles for the incursion of justice and shalom into our glorious but fallen world, celebrating its presence and mourning its absence -- that is the graduate the Christian college must seek to produce.

Nicholas Wolterstorff

"Teaching for Shalom" in Educating for Shalom

Being present

The church, as it exists within the wide range of individual vocations in every sphere of social life (commerce, philanthropy, education, etc.), must be present in the world in ways that work toward the constructive subversion of all frameworks of social life that are incompatible with the shalom for which we were made and to which we are called. As a natural expression of its passion to honour God in all things and to love our neighbour as ourselves, the church and its people will challenge all structures that dishonour God, dehumanize people, and neglect or do harm to the creation.

James Davison Hunter
To Change the World

Justice

When I say that the moral wounds of the world must find a place in our curricula, what I mean is not just that we must teach about justice--though we must; I mean that we must teach for justice. The graduate whom we seek to produce must be one who practices justice.

Nicholas Wolterstorff
Educating for Shalom

Shalom

Shalom incorporates delight in one’s relationships. To dwell in shalom is to find delight in living rightly before God, to find delight in living rightly in one’s physical surroundings, to find delight in living rightly with one’s fellow human beings, to find delight even in living rightly with oneself.

Nicholas P. Wolterstorff
Educating for Shalom

Shalom and covenant

“Shalom and berith (“covenant”) are practically synonymous. Shalom refers to the state of those who participate in the harmonious society. Berith refers to the community and all the privileges and obligations that community implies. Covenant and shalom go hand in hand; God’s community must have one to experience the other.”

Jon Stock in Inhabiting the Church (“Stability”, pg 112)

The impracticality of pacificism

[Some say,] "But pacifism is so impractical!" As if Christian ethics were utilitarian, as if there were a calculus for shalom! ... In any case, it is not as if the whole church has tried pacifism and found it wanting, the fact is that the whole church has not tried pacifism at all.

- Kim Fabricius, from his book, Propositions on Christian Theology: A Pilgrim Walks the Plank