Mobilizing for the Common Good: The Lived Theology of John M. Perkins

Between Two Gardens: An Organic Salvation for Community Development from the Biblical Narrative

93 Between Two Gardens An Organic Salvation for Community Development from the Biblical Narrative Michael Andres between two gardens lies a plantation; it is a cursed garden, a sharecropper’s field. Between Eden and the new earth, there is the cursed land of thorns, thistles, and cotton, marked by the pain, toil, and sweat of the oppressed. This is the ground from which John Perkins sprouted. He is son of a sharecropper scraping out a living from borrowed land, infant of a dying mother bequeathing her final drops of milk, sibling to a murdered brother seeping his last drops of blood. This is the earth out of which both his person and theology were formed.1 He himself bears the bodily wounds of a Brandon jail beating and the internal scars of racism. In Perkins we have an embodied grace, a lived theology, grown in communities of brokenness, suffering, and despair. He is a theologian with dirt under his fingernails. This is a clue to arguably his most enduring theological contribution : Perkins has passionately insisted on a transcendent faith and divine presence that will not be uprooted from the vicissitudes of earth and the cracked skin of poverty, an organic salvation that refuses to dislodge the grace of justification from the call to justice. On the eve of the social convulsions of the sixties, various Christian theological permutations awaited the ultimate test of their version of the gospel and the garden. In 1959, John Osteen founded Lakewood Church in Houston, eventually to become the largest church in America, enticing its customers with a steady diet of prosperity gospel. In 1959, Paul Tillich published his Theology of Culture, offering a method of correlation seeking the revelatory power of a culture that shifts according to the sands of time.2 Here and elsewhere we find the incipient Pelagianism of a therapeutic soteriology that looks towards the promise of an optimism-induced material attainment or looks inward towards the reunion of the existentially estranged 94 Michael Andres self. Here the garden looks suspiciously like a suburb, a gated community, and becomes a mere instrument to discover the human potential or selfactualization of the gardener. In 1959, the Cuban Revolution furrowed the ground preparing the way, along with the Second Vatican Council, for the germination of liberation theology.3 Here we have an over-realized eschatology of this-worldly political salvation. In this case, the garden is disputed territory that must be freed from those who rule it,not a place of regeneration and forgiveness for those who dwell in it. In 1959, one can detect a creeping cultural Docetism in many evangelicals ’ story of future salvation for individual souls detached from present human suffering.As one dispensationalist evangelical stated frankly, The premillennial view holds no prospect of a golden age before the Second Advent, and presents no commands to improve society as a whole. The apostles are notably silent on any program of political, social, moral, or physical improvement of the unsaved world. Paul made no effort to correct social abuses or to influence the political government for good. The program of the early church was one of evangelism and Bible teaching. It was a matter of saving souls out of the world rather than saving the world.4 In such a vision, there is no garden, only clouds. In 1959, John Perkins felt called by God to return from thriving California to the grinding poverty of Mississippi to preach the gospel of reconciliation and restoration.5 While liberal theologies offered a story of sociopolitical liberation hopelessly tied to human cultural flux, and many evangelicals offered the promise of pie-in-the-sky-when-you-die, Perkins offered another story.6 Perkins not only extended, but also embodied, a compelling model for viewing the organic nature of the“both/and”gospel.All too often salvation has become a variant of the “either/or” gospel, one that forces us to choose between either saving souls or doing justice, one that insists that the gospel is either about being made right with God or a call to live out God’s love, or one that promises either going to heaven in the future or redemption in this world now. We are at times given a deceptive dichotomy between a liberal social agenda and an evangelical spiritual quick fix. To be sure, some things are meant to be either/or: Scripture speaks of children of light or...