By Prof. James Taylor Christie, Professor Emeritus of Theology at the University of Winnipeg and a longtime ally and Viewpoints contributor of the G20 Interfaith Forum
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In the final essay of a three-part series, Christie follows the thread of biblical universalism into the New Testament, through Matthew, Luke, Peter, and Paul, and closes with a charge, drawn from Deuteronomy, that speaks directly to the work of the G20 Interfaith Forum. Parts I and II introduced “cosmopiety” and traced its roots in the Hebrew Scriptures.
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Relentlessly Sacred, Relentlessly Jewish
The New Testament can only be understood in the realization that it is at once relentlessly sacred and relentlessly Jewish. This is inescapable from the very first verse of Matthew’s genealogy, the purpose of which is to locate Jesus firmly at the center of Jewish life and faith. He is not marginal, not revolutionary, not an innovator. He is a Jew, interpreting his faith and tradition through the lens of God’s reign and God’s ultimate ends. His underlying theme is that God reigns, and that humanity is to welcome that reality and to build for it. Unapologetically Jewish, Jesus’ message is nonetheless universal and radically inclusive.
Consider his genealogy. In the long list of distinguished forebears who connect Jesus to David there are four anomalies: Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and Bathsheba, the original beauty queen of Jerusalem. These four, along with Mary the mother of Jesus, are women in a roll call of men. Moreover, save Mary, none of them is a Jew. More still, every one of them carries a whiff of scandal.
Tamar employed her charm so as to, well, blackmail Judah, son of Jacob, into doing right by her in her widowhood. Rahab ran a cozy little bordello in Jericho. Ruth, at the urging of her mother-in-law Naomi, seduced Boaz, great-grandfather of King David, into welcoming her into the family and refreshing the line. And Bathsheba, arguably more sinned against than sinning, contributed her own thread to the lineage. Into the very ancestry of Jesus, Matthew deliberately weaves the outsider and the irregular. How delightfully universal is that?
Hark, Luke’s Herald Angels Sing
There are sound arguments that the author of the continuous Luke-Acts narrative was a Gentile follower of Jesus rather than a Jew; arguments grounded in style, in content, and in an evident appreciation of Greco-Roman antiquity. If so, “Luke,” as we shall call him for convenience’s sake, would certainly have been a God-fearer: a Gentile who, though persuaded by Jewish ethical monotheism to come to God, had not made the leap to full conversion.
And it is in Luke that we find the most lyrical declaration of a universalist worldview in the whole New Testament. “Do not be afraid,” says the angel to the shepherds abiding in their fields, “for see, I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people” (Luke 2:10). Not for some of the people. For all. And we have far from heard the last word from Luke, as we shall see in Acts.
Peter’s Dream
In Luke’s Acts 10 narrative, a Roman centurion named Cornelius is advised in a vision to seek out a certain Peter, a disciple of Jesus then residing with Simon the Tanner in the city of Joppa. Cornelius duly sends messengers to fetch him. Meanwhile, back on Simon’s rooftop:
About noon the next day… Peter went up on the roof to pray. He became hungry and wanted something to eat; and while it was being prepared, he fell into a trance. He saw the heaven opened and something like a large sheet coming down… In it were all kinds of four-footed creatures and reptiles and birds of the air. Then he heard a voice saying, ‘Get up, Peter; kill and eat.’ But Peter said, ‘By no means, Lord; for I have never eaten anything that is profane or unclean.’ The voice said to him again, a second time, ‘What God has made clean, you must not call profane.’ This happened three times.
The message could not be clearer. As in the Genesis creation, God has pronounced the world good—and what God has called clean, no human being may call profane. The barrier between insider and outsider, so carefully maintained, is dismantled from heaven itself.
Paul in the Areopagus
Paul, the self-described and church-affirmed apostle to the Gentiles, was arguably the most peripatetic of the apostles, and a Roman citizen who enjoyed a kind of passe-partout to travel wherever he felt called. Among the most celebrated of his sojourns was Athens, where he addressed the gathered sages and philosophers in the Athenian forum known as the Areopagus, a low hill northwest of the Acropolis where a meeting place stood for the exchange of ideas, and where the Areopagite Council once advised the king. According to Luke, in the Book of Acts, this was the substance of Paul’s address:
Athenians, I see how extremely religious you are in every way. For as I went through the city and looked carefully at the objects of your worship, I found among them an altar with the inscription, ‘To an unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you… From one ancestor he made all nations to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live, so that they would search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him, though indeed he is not far from each one of us. For ‘In him we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your own poets have said, ‘For we too are his offspring.’
Here we see Paul as both apostle and cosmopietist: respecting his audience’s beliefs and worldviews, and then, upon the invitation of the gathered Athenians, offering his own.
Nearly twenty centuries later, Paul remains the model. And nearly twenty centuries later, the G20 Interfaith Forum, under Cole Durham’s leadership, carries something of the Areopagus into our own time—not as an exercise in conversion, but as the mutual exchange of conviction among people who hold, across all their differences, to a single universal truth: that there is but one tribe on earth, and it is us.
The Book of Revelation
John Calvin was of the mind that the Book of Revelation ought to be excised from the New Testament altogether. Calvin apparently deemed it incomprehensible, and of little use in the pursuit of Protestant life and faith. Permit me to suggest that the Great Reformer missed the mark.
Revelation was written to Christian communities suffering stress and persecution. It is complicated and hardly transparent, written in a sort of code. It was composed not to inform the future, but to give hope to people long since passed. One might say that reading Revelation is rather like reading other people’s mail. And yet it still may speak to us, nowhere more clearly than in Revelation 21:1-5.
Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth… And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God… ‘See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.’ And the one who was seated on the throne said, ‘See, I am making all things new.’
Note the wording. God does not say, “I am making all new things.” The promise is not replacement but renewal—reconciliation, restitution, redemption. It is the very vision Isaiah saw: the mending of the world. This is what the Jewish tradition calls tikkun olam, and it names, as well as any phrase can, what the interfaith movement is finally for.
To Choose Life: Not a Conclusion, but Our Mission
Which brings me to the charge on which I want to end. Deuteronomy 28 sets two visions before the people of Israel, and before all of humanity. The first (verses 1–14) describes the blessing of a life lived with God; the second (verses 28–68) is the stuff of nightmares, a catalogue of the consequences of turning away. But these are less prediction than description: they name what actually follows from the paths we choose. For we are granted the nearly unbearable privilege of agency: a genuine, if junior, partnership with God. And so, in Deuteronomy 30:19, the whole of scripture narrows to a single imperative:
“I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life.” (Deuteronomy 30:19)
I have worked alongside Cole Durham for more than a decade, since our first meeting at Sundance, Utah. In law, in religion, and in the manner of his leadership of the G20 Interfaith Forum, his choice has always been apparent: he has chosen life. His cosmopiety, sometimes spoken, more often simply lived, is the plain evidence of that choice.
And it is the choice the Forum sets before all of us. To choose life is to choose the mending of the world, and to believe, against a great deal of evidence, that the world’s faiths were made not to wound one another but to heal. That is a hope worth a lifetime. Spero contra spem—I hope against hope.
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James Taylor Christie is Professor Emeritus of Theology at the University of Winnipeg, where he served for some fifteen years as Dean of the Faculty of Theology, founding Dean of the Global College, and Director of the Ridd Institute for Religion and Global Policy. An ordained minister of The United Church of Canada and a past president of the Canadian Council of Churches, he is a pioneer of dialogue theology and “whole world ecumenism,” and the inaugural Ambassador-at-Large for the Canadian Multifaith Federation. A longtime ally of the G20 Interfaith Forum and a frequent contributor to its Viewpoints blog, he writes at the intersection of faith, scripture, and global policy, in the conviction that the world’s religions are called to speak, and to work, with one another.