Category: Justice

In the Peacemaking Remnant, Zdravko Plantak pushes the church to have a more comprehensive view of what it means to be a prophetic people by seeking a clearer picture of the prophetic role in the Bible. In the chapter Plantak identifies four essential elements of the prophetic teachings. First the messages of the prophets “are a matter of life and death.” The second element is God’s care for the weak in the society. The third element is that “God seeks justice and obvedience rather than formal worship or scrifice.” The fourth element is that the message is “of eschatological-apocalyptic character.”

Plantak notes that often our understanding of being a prophetic movement means that we are often either “preoccupied with making predictions” and/or “a movement with a special interest in studying and interpreting predictive prophecy.” In contrast, Plantak agrees with Jack Provonsha in noting that we should “think of ourselves as a people with a [prophetic] mission to the world”

Will we be prophetic in the world is the question. Will we look at the whole prophetic utterance and not just Daniel and Revelation? If we do this then we will have to ask questions about God’s stated care for the poor and the oppressed? What does that mean for a prophetic church? We will have to ask questions of ourself, Do we as a church demonstrate the principles of the prophets in the life of our church? ?Let us move on to being a prophetic movement in the world demosntrating the Kingdom of God within itself.

In the first chapter of the book The Peacemaking Remnant Charles Scriven questions understanding mission as talk and spirtual life as escape. Scriven sees the dominant eschatology as simply teaching escape or resignation to the powers. Our end time scenario becomes simply telling people the important information that helps them leave the world that is destined to failure.

In contrast to this dominant eschatology, Scriven seeks to teach that the role of the church is to be the Peacemaking remnant in the world. Scriven identifies the group as “a faithful minority [that] bear[s] witness ot he victory of Christ in the midst of last-day crisis.”

Scriven pushes the church to demonstrate the kingdom of God in the world as the witness of the church and not simply to tell others some important words that will allow them to leave and wait. I was immediately struck by the correspondence of such a view with the Sabbath-keeping church ecclesiology that I have attempted to articulate on this blog. As a people we have been called to bear witness to the principles of the Sabbath to the world.

Is the church a demonstration of the principles of the Kingdom of God today? Is the church a demonstration of the principles of the Sabbath (Participation in the Coming Kingdom, Disengagement from the Present World for the purpose of Re-engagement, Celebration of Community).

As we study eschatology and the end time events, let us always ask the question “What difference will this teaching make in the real world?” Let us not have an eschatology that has the same issue that Jurgen Moltmann decries in his book Theology of Hope that robbs our eschtology “…of [its] directive, uplifting, and critical significance for all the days which are spent here, this side of the end, in history.”

Lest you think I attack our emphasis on end time events, instead I affirm and applaud our belief in the end time and ultimately in the Second Advent of Jesus Chirst. I just believe that our eschatology and ecclesiology (understanding of Church) should promote the church BEING God’s hands and feed in the world today.