A Review of The Very Good Gospel By Lisa Sharon Harper: Part III

The Gospel of Social Justice and the Divide Between “Thick” and “Thin” Gospel

Welcome to the Conversation Stat Matter Podcast. My name is John Harris. This is the third and final episode of a three-part series where I've been reviewing the book The Very Good Gospel by Lisa Sharon Harper.

I thought that I was done, but I keep getting on different tracks and hopefully this is helpful for you all as I go through them somewhat slowly and also in some ways sometimes I try to repeat myself to make a point like five different ways so that it's more understandable.

I'm hoping that that's been helpful for you all. I want to finish up with an application here of what we've already gone over. Just to quickly review, we talked about how Lisa Sharon Harper adds law to grace, social justice infused law.

She combines man's actions with political activism, really political activist actions with the gospel and says that's the gospel. Then in that manipulative technique that she uses where Christians are now thinking they have to do some kind of BLM march or something to be truly Christians and have the gospel.

She then places blame and the original sin on the systemic impersonal hegemony of sorts that exists and is located in Western culture and in America in particular. That's where sin's coming from and that can be the disparities that exist, the problems that exist, even down to things like gaining weight in some scenarios and divorces and personal choices people make.

It's the result of this systemic sin that exists. She gives some biblical examples. She thinks supports that, but she has to take things out of context or impose things upon the text. What we're going to talk about today is getting more into the nitty gritty.

We're going to talk about how this works, how she takes the gospel and with specific different social issues, how she tries to compare and contrast the true gospel that she's promoting, the thick gospel she calls it, with the thin inadequate gospel.

Slavery, Abolitionism, and the Social Gospel

So here we go. The divided gospel. The inadequate gospel. To address the need for more free labor, slave owners began breeding their own slaves. The inadequate gospel would be okay with that. That's in her mind.

Now I would say Christian ethics is a different story here, but the inadequate gospel would be okay with this. This is the gospel response. She says, and when they wiped away their tears and opened their eyes, Phinney, the great really revivalist of the second great awakening, Charles Phinney, thrust a pen into their hands and pointed them to sign up sheets for the abolitionist movement.

This is what it meant to be an evangelical Christian in the 1800s. So what she's saying is that to be an evangelical Christian meant you would be against slavery. That's what you had to do. Now we just got done with this section last time talking about how she said, wait a minute, it was all these Christians who were supporting slavery.

So she blames them and says, that's America sin. But then she turns around and says, actually no evangelical Christians were against slavery. That's what it meant to be an evangelical Christian. Well, which is it, right?

And this is one of the contradictions you see in this book is she just goes back and forth, you know, which is it, which so, so that's authentic Christianity. So that's the thick gospel, I guess, those are the people who really had it, but the others must've had a deficient gospel.

So if you were a slave master, or if you put up with slavery, or if you just failed to join the abolitionist movement, then you didn't have the true gospel. She, the inadequate gospel workers were moving through a systemic assembly line that led to destitution.

What was the gospel response to this inadequate gospel would have said, that's fine. I guess the gospel response is to combat such widespread injustice. Rauschenbusch, this is the founder of the social gospel, Walter Rauschenbusch called the church to return to the scriptures.

The scriptures are not silent on structural and systemic sin. The Bible overflows with God's response to poverty, oppression, and governance. And then we have another inadequate gospel. Fundamentalist Christians argued that the gospel was about one thing only, Christ crucified as payment for our individual sins, thus began the church's own civil war, which notably took place within white American churches in the 1940s.

A subset of the fundamentalist movement became known as evangelicals, named after the 19th century movement. However, they didn't adopt the early movement's expansive call for personal and structural repentance.

Instead, they maintained a strict fundamentalist focus on personal repentance from personal imperfection, which led to personal salvation. So that's the problem, ultimately. You focus too much on that personal salvation, that repentance from sin by grace through faith in Christ alone, that distracts you from the other, the important things, which are joining the causes, social justice causes.

And so to her, Charles Finney's a hero, Walter Rauschenbusch is a hero. These are the good guys, the guys that got Christianity right. And it's those fundamentalists and evangelicals who have gotten Christianity wrong.

So this is how she applies it. Now here's some other examples that she gives later in the book that I thought I wanted to incorporate here as well. When it comes to the environment, she says that the United States has failed to take a leading role to curb global practices that cause climate change.

Another great indicator of the presence of unjust environmental policies is the presence of racial and economic inequity with regard to land use, air and water quality, and food distribution. The gospel response, what would that be?

Well, the kingdom of God will bring the restoration of all creation. The first requirement of reconciliation with the land is humility. We must support the Paris climate agreement and press our federal, state, and local legislators to find innovative ways to abide by it.

She quotes someone named Woodley, who describes the Native American harmony way, a practice of respect for all creation and a web of relationships that connects us. So who gets it right? The Native Americans get it right.

The Paris climate agreements gets it right. We have to, this is part of bringing the kingdom of God in. This is her idea of what the kingdom of God is. The kingdom of God will bring restoration to creation.

How? Well, the Paris climate agreement. Well, that means, I guess, the people who crafted that, are they part of the kingdom of God? See, this is where it gets really awkward. This is where there's all this tension, and it doesn't make any sense.

How in the world can you have pagans, people who aren't Christians at all, in any way, shape, or form, now they're part of somehow bringing in the kingdom of God. They're part of bringing in the gospel.

This is the very good gospel, supporting the Paris climate agreement. The Native American harmony way, apparently, pagan religions, part of the good gospel somehow. Do you see the problem here? Can you see how this is syncretizing with other religions?

Can you see how this is ecumenicizing? Maybe I'm inventing my own word, ecumenicizing? Making things more ecumenical. So on the environment, that would be the gospel response. So if you're a Christian, and you want to apply the gospel, you want to believe the very good gospel and support it in this endeavor, that's what you're going to do.

Gender Roles, Patriarchy, and the Authority of Scripture

How about on gender roles? Here's the inadequate gospel. She says, I served on a worship team leader for weekly chapters, meetings in a conservative evangelical college ministry, a male staff member insisted that I needed to follow him.

She said, tears trickled down my face as I sang backup that night and for the rest of my senior year because I'm a woman. That was my first direct personal encounter with the theology of male dominance.

Patriarchal interpretations of scripture fail to start at the beginning. They start after the fall in Genesis 3. The text tells us that rather than creating a man first, God created a human being who in the beginning had no distinct gender.

On the first point, God did not give the command to a guy named Adam. God gave the command to a human being who comprised both male and female. Perhaps she says again, it's a symptom of the culture of patriarchy that thrives within church cultures and structures, a male dominated staff teams, male dominated pastoral teams and structural hierarchies that find few, if any women in public leadership perpetuated male dominated perspectives.

She says, again, the problem with lifting these quotes out of context and making them serve as a doctrinal tenant of the church. And she's talking about Paul's admonition, the apostle Paul, when he said he did not permit a woman to teach.

She says, the problem with, with taking that is that Paul did not write them as doctrine. He wrote the statements as context specific advice to help two churches deal with issues arising with their communities.

He drew on his own leadership traditions shaped by culture and personal preference. So here we have the destruction of all scripture, because basically Paul is just also a victim of the hegemony in which he lived, which hated women apparently and oppressed them.

And so Paul is in the holy scripture, which is inspired by God. Apparently Paul is committing errors. He's giving context specific advice that arise from his own personal preference. So this isn't, you can see the attack on the word of God now.

And what other things can we do that with? How about that whole thing about the 10 commandments saying, thou shalt not steal. Maybe that was just context specific, shaped by culture and personal preference.

I mean, why not? I mean, this is just your blank check to destroy all of scripture right here. But the inadequate gospel is a gospel that doesn't challenge these things, that is okay with these hierarchies and even might think they're biblical.

Paul put hierarchies in there. Only men can be pastors. Well, she's saying that that's wrong. And she's upset when she couldn't be the, she cries about not being able to be the head person in leading worship music because of the group that she was in and how, I guess, their theology was, you need a male leader.

And that reflects more on her, I think, than it does the scripture. And so her thing is that the gospel needs to somehow answer this, create a remedy for this, change the scenario, challenge the hegemony, deconstruct, reconstruct so that we won't have these inadequacies and disparities.

So here's the gospel response. Let me read for you a few quotes. She says, at the heart of very good news of the gospel is the reversal of the fall. With that reversal, Jesus' death and resurrection paved the way for patriarchy to be crushed.

She says, listen to the stories of women. A few months ago, I sat in a room with evangelical men and women leaders of color aware of the male-dominated cultures of both evangelicalism and communities of color.

The leaders in the group set aside time for the women to share stories of subjugation and healing within the evangelical church. Each of us took three minutes to share our story. After each woman had spoken, the men asked clarifying questions.

Men's mouths dropped as they realized they had witnessed subjugation and not been aware of it. They had systemically or structurally participated in the dismissal of the image of God in their sisters, and they had been a party to injustice, even while looking for justice.

She says, men should listen to stories of women, lament, confess, and repent. And she also says that someone had given her good advice, which was, Lisa, you will flourish when you stop apologizing for your power and live fully into the woman God created you to be.

So here's the deal. Women should celebrate their power. Women should not apologize for it. Women should have power. Men need to be brought down a few rungs. Men need to sit down, shut up, and listen. There's the standpoint theory.

They don't have access into the information on oppression that a woman will be able to share because a woman is experiencing that oppression. And it's not about opening your Bible and thinking through what does God want us to do in these situations.

It's instead about platforming women and making them the authority on how they ought to be treated and platformed and whether or not hierarchies ought to exist within the church or in marriages, perhaps, even for that matter, or in worship leading or any of that.

Women become the authority. It's the idea that the victim, in this case, according to the sociologist, the one who's the victim is going to be the one to have the solution for solving that victimhood.

So this is total attack on the sufficiency and the inerrancy of Scripture. The Word of God is not sufficient, and it's not even true, necessarily, because it could just be arising from personal preference with the authors of Scripture.

So why even be a Christian? That's one of my questions I have. Why even be a Christian? If this is the way that the gospel is supposed to handle things, is we just knock down men a few rungs, and they just have to shut up and listen, and women should celebrate their power, then if that's what the gospel is about, if that's what the kingdom of God is about, and Scripture can't be a guide for us on these things, why even go to church?

Why even open the Scripture? What's the point of any of it? It sounds like the gospel is just something you can totally have without any knowledge of the Bible or God. I mean, there's plenty of people that will give you that same advice who have no knowledge of Christianity.

So this is how the very good gospel applies to gender roles. How about on the issue of racial disparities? The inadequate gospel. Let's read a few quotes. The outcomes of America's drug wars on African American men were well documented by Michelle Alexander's groundbreaking book, The New Jim Crow, which I've talked about this before, which is a critical race theory book and relies on critical race theorists to make the arguments that it makes.

I write about this in my response to Phil Vischer in Christianity and Social Justice, Religions and Conflict, which you can get on worldviewconversation .com. She also says the race is about power in biblical terms.

Dominion as a political construct race was created by humans to determine who can exercise power within a governing structure and to guide decisions regarding how to allocate resources. Racial categories do change over time, but only as governments refine language.

That's just not true. It's overly simplistic. It is. She's making it out like the very term race was this categorization invented for the purpose of oppressing people. It's true that people have been oppressed along racial lines, but it's not true that the very term and the designation was in the age of exploration was created for that purpose.

It was just a way of looking at another people group and saying they're different. They come from a different place. They practice. They have different customs. They look differently. Their genetics are different.

So that was all it was. But she's buying into the critical race theory definition of race here. The newly formed United States of America, she says, enacted the racialization of power. Congress passed the Three-Fifths Compromise, which increased the number of members in the House of Representatives who represented districts in the slave states.

Well, it didn't necessarily increase them. It just didn't decrease them to not counting slaves at all in their representation. And this was at a time, of course, when women could not vote in many areas, at least.

And then also, obviously, children can't vote. And so it was for purposes of representation. She's oversimplifying it once again. But let's go to the next one. She says, why does the federal government ask for the nations of origin for Asian and Latino people?

And she goes through a whole list of different minority groups. And she says, why do they ask on the national census whether or not you're white? And she says, the reason is because in the United States, whiteness is the centerpiece around which all else revolves.

That was and is intentional. She says, in 1975, Benjamin Franklin argued to the British that due to shrinking percentage of white people on Earth, America should be kept an exclusively Anglo-Saxon colony to protect the race.

Now, I will just point out, if he's saying Anglo-Saxon colony, that means that he wanted to prevent a bunch of white people from coming here to the United States. And there were issues when Italians came over, when a lot of Germans came over, when Irish people came over.

There were issues. So don't give me this, oh, it's always the whole time the United States has been around, it's just whiteness has been the centerpiece. And the whole project, the whole purpose of the United States is to protect white people.

No, I mean, you're using a quote from Benjamin Franklin about Anglo-Saxon people specifically. And Washington even writes in his farewell address, he talks about the commonalities Americans share. And one of those things is this Anglo heritage that they have, which presents itself in the common law, in Christianity, the religion, and in the language.

And these things are the glue that binds Americans together. They have enough in common that they're able to function. Multiculturalism, there are some blessings. You get different cuisines, you have different strengths and weaknesses.

But ultimately, it's going, it's ruining the country in a way. It's one of the things that's contributing to instability and mistrust. And if you have a rate of immigration that is able to assimilate, assimilation is really the big key thing in my mind.

But when it's open borders, when it's culture doesn't matter, you're going to have problems. And that's what we're in. So the gospel response to all this, what is it? Well, Paul pointed to Jesus' power to reconcile Jews and Gentiles, bitter ethnic enemies as well as an example of the power of the resurrection for he is our peace.

And she quotes Ephesians 2 .14. It was made both groups into one, breaking down the dividing wall. Of course, this is about the laws contained in ordinances. This is not about bitter ethnic enemies. This is about a group of people who had the law, the Jews, and then the Gentiles without the law, the Mosaic law, the ritualistic laws.

So that's what that's about. So she's taking that out of context. That's the gospel response. She says, listen to the stories of people who do not share your ethnicity, read books and articles written by them, watch movies about them, place ourselves in another shoes.

And she says, by doing that, it lowers the presence of unconscious bias. So that's the implicit bias training stuff coming out. That's apparently the gospel response. That's the thing that bothers me about this book the whole time is that this is part of, this is the gospel.

This is the gospel is doing your implicit bias training. Well, you get that on just about every job site. So I don't think those people are giving it to you because they just love Jesus and they're giving you the gospel.

Black Lives Matter, Immigration, LGBTQ Norms, and Secular Public Policy

Black Lives Matter. On Black Lives Matter, she supports them. And I'm not going to give you all the quotes here. You can download this in the info section. I'm putting the link. If you're a patron, you get this free, all the references to this.

But she says, I'll give you this. While the Black Lives Matter movement is secular in origin, I find its organizing principles quite biblical. And some of the stuff is quite, I mean, I'll give you this one.

She talks about this church, Metro Hope. And the night there was a decision made not to indict the officer who killed Eric Garner. Metro Hope's community leadership team hosted a transformative group dialogue on race and justice.

And they sponsored an event. Let's see. She says that, okay. So they sponsored an event in the church's community garden. Hang out at a local coffee shop to help support indigenous businesses or start dialogue among the members of the church's intentional living community.

And she said, this is subverting Babel. To Metro Hope, subverting Babel looks like planting seeds of shalom in the lives of its parishioners through radical community hospitality. So this is all what the gospel should look like.

This is what you ought to do. She talks about how she herself went to Ferguson and she helped build a bridge between white and multiethnic churches and the movements for justice in Ferguson. And so this is marching with BLM.

This is part of, I guess, this part of the gospel is probably the very good gospel. We should do these things. Other social issues, illegal migration. I'll just read for you some of these quotes. One after another, immigrants share their stories of family separation due to either to the migrant experience or to loved ones having been detained during a routine traffic stop, thrown in jail and deported.

Oppression rears its head in different forms in each generation, but in every instance, it attacks families. It wasn't supposed to be this way. On LGBTQ normalization, she says, regardless of what one thinks of LGBTQ relationships, the US Supreme Court's five to four ruling in the case of Obergefell has legalized a new family structure across the country.

Still, men, women, and transgender people face the same separation from families and faith communities that they faced before the high court ruling. In my book, Forgive Us, Confessions of a Compromised Faith, coauthored with Soon-Chan Ra, we discern the single greatest sin of the church against LGBTQ people is the lack of recognition of the image of God within them.

On the free market, she says, regardless of one's stature within a social hierarchy, the inherent dignity of all humanity and the rest of creation should be protected, served, and cultivated in a public policy.

And then she says that regulation is not a bad thing. It is a way governments place limits on the amount of injury to the image of God they're willing to allow while also accommodating economic wealth.

So businesses need to be kind of curtailed. Multiculturalism, she says, in a pluralistic democracy, we cannot impose our conceptions of God on our neighbors through the imposition of any sacred text or, listen to this one, we cannot impose our conceptions of God on our neighbors through the imposition of any sacred text on domestic reform policy.

In other words, what she's saying here is we need to have secularism. You can't, the Bible cannot inform decisions made by governments. She says, it is though necessary for all people of faith to draw from our principles to help us engage the world in a way that moves our nation and world towards God's very goodness.

Well, I'm sorry, that's just a contradiction. If she's saying that you can't impose any sacred text on domestic reform policy, but then we have to draw principles from our faith to help us engage the world, then, I mean, that's just literally a refutation.

And that's where mainline denominations are living right now. Like, oh, I have such a deep faith. Yeah, I don't think it applies to you or anything else, but it motivates me. It makes me a good person.

That's all it is. And then on ecumenicism, she basically says that St. Francis, the current pope, has embodied the values and priorities of Jesus more than any other pope, I guess, since St. Francis of Assisi.

So these are just giving you a flavor for the kinds of issues that Lisa Sharon Harper cares about, and her solutions are baked into her analysis. And so the gospel to Lisa Sharon Harper is a mechanism for revolutionary, egalitarian social change.

It's a Marxist revolution. That's what she wants. She wants stuff to be flatlined, hierarchies to be ripped down, America to be brought down a few notches, men to be brought down a few notches. She wants disparities amended and destroyed that exist between racial groups.

She wants, and all of this, this is the big problem with all this, is it's in the name of the gospel. Even if you agree with all her analysis, which you shouldn't, but even if you did, this is all the gospel somehow to Lisa Sharon Harper, because the gospel is about transforming society, and this is what that social transformation should look like.

So there are other issues with this book that I want to go over. One is some of the blatant kind of heresies that come out of this book, but another is the way that she handles scripture, and then we'll finish up.

So let me just do that. First, there seems to be some weird, I don't know if it's panentheism, I don't know what it is, but there's a weird view she has, and I'll read for you some quotes. She says, Among the poorest California farm workers have borne the brunt of the fallout from the state's struggle with climate change.

Short-term effects of climate change, such as landslides, floods, et cetera, exert a profound impact on the lives and livelihoods of women. She says, In Syria, they suffered a drought, a bad drought, and that triggered an increase in heat, and those conditions caused by climate change made the rise of ISIS possible in the region.

And then she says, When we deprive people of the ability to exercise dominion, and then we exploit the land, the image of God is crushed on the earth. That's pretty serious. So basically, when we contribute to global warming, we're causing the rise of ISIS and the oppression of women in California, and we're exploiting the land, and what's happening is the image of God is crushed.

We're just crushing the image of God, because God does not reign in that place, and the damage to creation stands as a witness to our rebellion. So God does not reign in that place. If we pollute somewhere, God doesn't reign there.

It's interesting. I mean, his reign, he's reigning right now. It's going to take a different form in the eternal realm, but he's reigning right now. She says, After Cain committed the first murder on earth, the ground opened up to receive Abel's blood.

What a moment. The land itself stood in solidarity against injustice and served as a witness before God against Cain's oppression of Abel. Cain did not care for his brother, but the land cared. And like his parents before him, Cain's relationship with the ground was cursed.

So the ground, this is this sort of personification of the ground, of the earth. She says, Injustice to any part of creation affects the whole. Likewise, there is no peace for the whole unless there is peace for each part.

So the wellness of each family member benefits the whole. The same is true across generations. So here's what I'm seeing in these quotes. God is limited somehow. He doesn't reign in the place where the land, where there's pollution.

We also find here that the land has this personification. It cares about things. And then we have that any part of creation, injustice there affects every other part of creation, which just isn't quite true in every circumstance.

And so what I'm wondering is why, why is, does she raise up the creation to a level of power and importance that seems to go beyond the creator? The creator is helpless. It doesn't, can't reign in a place where his creation is being so destroyed.

That, that the creation is almost like a human. It has this caring thing going on. In that, that it's this like one kind of being you, I guess, do something bad in one area, it's going to affect everything.

It sounds like something a panentheist would write. It sounds like something you would hear from an Eastern religion. Then you have the higher criticism, and this is just throughout it. She talks about there was the Babylon creation story before Genesis 1.

And she says, most scholars believe that Genesis 1 was the last of four sections of the Pentateuch to be written down. Genesis is the youngest of the first five books of the Bible, likely written just after the fall of the Babylon empire.

At the time, the Hebrew people have been utterly conquered there. They were about to establish the nation of Israel reestablished in this context. The priest wrote Genesis 1 and listen to this. The priest who wrote Genesis 1 were likely attempting to wash off the cultural and spiritual rags of 70 years of captivity by reinterpreting the Hebrew creation story while commenting on their oppressors narrative.

Well, why even read Genesis then? Who cares? I mean, this is this is what she's saying is that they're there that that Genesis was basically it's propaganda. That's what it is. It's propaganda to the people.

It's not based in objective reality. I mean, this just destroys the text, and she so much of what she does is based on Genesis, but then she just destroys the text. Genesis 2, she says, offers an intimate narrative narrative of creation.

This is no sweeping epic poem. Instead, we see God get down in the muck with God's hands in the mud. God is ultimately involved in the creation of humanity. This text comes from a different writer than Genesis 1.

The Genesis 2 writer is known as the Yahwehist, and this is the theory that the different names for God in the books of Moses were different editors who later came back and wrote different sections depending on the different eras, and this is a theory that's been debunked, the JEDP theory, but there's a book called Before Abraham Was that debunks this, but this is higher criticism.

It just destroys the text. There's no reason to believe it, that it's history. It's just simply propaganda written by priests much later for political purposes or social purposes. So you could try to save the text by saying, well, there's a higher meaning.

Well, where does that meaning come from? These propagandist priests? I mean, not a very compelling argument. So then she bases most of her book. The spine of the book is on the book. It's the book of Genesis.

She uses the book of Genesis to show, to give an example of what the very good gospel should look like, and so I'll read for you a few quotes. She says, so if the point of Genesis 2 is not to provide a strictly factual account of exactly how the universe was made, then what is it?

I think it's something more. Okay, so now it's not giving us history, and the gospel is not about redeeming souls. Genesis isn't about giving us history. What's it about? I believe that the point is to teach us a higher truth about our relationship with God and one another.

Okay, what's that? It's important to note that God does not obliterate darkness. Rather, God names it and limits it, puts boundaries on it. The boundary is the light. This is the promise of Genesis 1.

The darkness is limited by the light. Suffering is not in perpetuity. The light may take generations to come, but it will come. There is always hope. So she starts allegorizing Genesis. We are not subject to the worst the deep has to offer.

Rather, the waters and every creature in them are subject to God. The Hebrew people knew from experience that even Babylon was subject to God. They had been set free from the sea monsters of the Babylonian empire.

So it's just all allegory. It's just a creative imagination can make Genesis whatever Genesis needs to be. And then her creative imagination makes Genesis revolutionary. She says, in direct opposition to the prevailing view, the writers of Genesis 1 democratized dignity by redistributing it to all humanity.

So there's a redistribution going on, apparently. Did you know that? Genesis 1, there's a redistribution going on where dignity is being redistributed to everyone because everyone's made in God's image.

And she talks about Radah. Radah is not a call to exercise imperial power. This is, she's talking about dominion. Radah equalizes power. No one is too low to exercise agency to steward God's creation.

Women bear the image of God equally with no distinction in the way that image is manifest. They share equally in the call to exercise dominion. So because mankind is given the charge to exercise dominion over creation, even though women are called to be man's helper, that doesn't seem to matter much.

We'll get into that in a minute. I think we went into that if I'm not mistaken. But that, she just focuses on, well, because a charge was given to exercise dominion, that's an egalitarian call for egalitarian equality.

That's what that is. This is a creative reading of Genesis. This is a revolutionary reading of Genesis. This isn't a reading that, I mean, point to the Bible scholar, the Christian mainstream Orthodox Bible scholar within the past 2000 years, before the feminist movement, let's say, that had this reading.

You're not gonna find it. I'm just saying. And love shares power, she says. The Genesis 2 writer doesn't use, she's not even saying Moses, it's the Genesis 2 writer, doesn't use the word dominion, but clarifies what dominion looks like.

The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to till and keep it. And the words there are abad and shemar. The Hebrew word for till is abad, which means to serve. The Hebrew word for shemar is to protect.

So dominion looks like serving and protecting the rest of creation. Here, the writer of Genesis 2 reveals humanity's essential calling. Okay, listen, this is humanity's essential calling, to serve and protect the needs, boundaries, and wellbeing of the rest of creation.

Now, abad and shemar has, there's actually a pretty wide range with the way those words are used. In fact, I was taught at Southeastern that it meant to worship and obey. That tells you how wide of a range these words can mean.

But I'm fine with keeping and cultivating the garden. That man was put into the Garden of Eden to manage it, to exercise dominion. The man was actually, there's a separation between man and the rest of creation at this point.

And so she sees this as, instead of seeing this as man is the top in this hierarchy, she looks at it as man's existence is to serve creation, which becomes like the top. If there is a hierarchy, it's creation.

And she says Genesis 1 and 2 offer a clear picture of the kingdom of God. So this is what the kingdom of God is, apparently. It's what we're trying to get back to, is man keeping and cultivating the garden, serving and protecting the garden.

And that's what the good gospel is. That's what the whole point of Jesus coming was. That's what we're supposed to be doing, is getting back to this point. That's the effort. This is something man can't do, though.

This is something that God has to step in. God has to step in and do something to reverse the curse. That's the whole point of the gospel. She says, though, that, another quote here, what is the substance of shalom?

Peace, the word peace in Hebrew. It is fundamentally refers, it fundamentally refers to the wholeness and health and to a world in which the outcome of law is social justice. Direct quote. Fundamentally refers to the wholeness and health and to a world in which the outcome of law is social justice.