As I was preparing this review of David Kelsey’s provocative treatment of redemption, none other than Arnold Schwarzenegger, the governor of California, was already bandying about the word in the media. Explaining his refusal to commute the death sentence of Stanley “Tookie” Williams, the governor-cum-theologian said, “[Williams’] redemption may not be complete.”
It is clear that the governor was operating under a certain definition of redemption, clearly popular in our hyper-individualistic culture, bathed as we are in self-help. In our cultural milieu, redemption is a human act of will, something that Mr. Williams ought to be able to “do,” and, barring that redemptive accomplishment, he somehow forfeits his right to live. Lest any in the faith community believe that this understanding is remotely Christian, Kelsey’s book comes along and reminds us that redemption is not a self-help project or a human project at all; redemption is a gift of grace, an act of God, and we are simply invited to live into this redemptive space in response.
Kelsey recognizes that these various definitions of redemption are floating around in the culture. Redemption has gained wide currency in books, movies, plays, and, it seems, the politics of life and death. In a culture saturated in “redemption,” Kelsey asks us to consider what it might mean “Christianly speaking.”
But he is far from advocating a kind of Hauerwasian retreat from cultural engagement. Kelsey chooses to engage the various popular definitions of redemption and bring them into conversation with overarching Christian themes as they come to life in the three broad moments of Jesus’ ministry, passion, and resurrection.
This project alone, coming from the theologically rich mind of Kelsey, would be engaging and edifying. But Kelsey dares to take these reflections a step further. He plays with the genres of “systematic” versus “practical” theology, daring us to imagine redemption in relation to a concrete and horrifying set of circumstances befalling “Sam” and his family: “Sam’s total paralysis as a child, his disruptive emotional and behavioral problems, his removal from his family and placement in residential schools for nine years, his mother’s emotional illness, her suicide, and the family’s slow disintegration” (page 63).
Kelsey lays out this unspeakable suffering with such clarity, with one horror falling upon another in a wave of darkness, that the reader is left with a sense that this story is “inaccessible and unmanageably complex, darkened by evil and threatened with terminal meaninglessness” (104). It is a situation that would reduce this pastor to silence. Yet instead of staying silent, even pastorally silent, Kelsey makes the bold pastoral move of daring to speak into the hushed stillness of unspeakable suffering a simple question: “What earthly difference can Jesus make here?” The fact that he takes on this impossible challenge at all, and the way he chooses to engage it, makes this an engaging, thoughtful, courageous, and, in the end, beautiful piece of work.
Kelsey weaves three common ways of understanding redemption in the wider culture and then combines these understandings with corresponding contexts in the story of Jesus from the gospels in order to tease out concrete ways redemption might be said to occur for Sam and his family. In an act of imagination that approaches a dance, Kelsey moves in and out of the story of Jesus, dancing in concentric circles around popular understandings, Bible, theology, and a broken family, all with an eye to the ways people of faith might imagine redemption in their own lives.
The first move for Kelsey is redemption popularly understood as “making up for a bad performance.” We think about various movie reviews that might say something like, “It was only the performance of Harrison Ford that rescued (redeemed) what was an otherwise B-grade movie.” Kelsey brings this popular understanding into conversation with Jesus’ ministry, through which God makes up for the world’s bad performance in an act of promise-making in Jesus’ ministry. In the biblical stories, Jesus’ presence becomes the defining context in any moment, no matter how appalling. Jesus becomes a “liberating context.” The Kingdom arrives in the person of Jesus.
In his second move, Kelsey reflects on the understanding of redemption as “redemption from alien control.” We speak about regaining possession of something in exchange for a payment, like redeeming the collateral for a loan. Kelsey says that in this use, “redeeming something has the force of freeing it from control by some other power” (45). This corresponds for Kelsey with Jesus’ passion. In the suffering of Jesus we learn that suffering itself is not redemptive, but that it often accompanies the surrender of self, which is a component of redemption. We live our lives “mindlessly passive, inattentive to other realities and oblivious.” We see in Jesus’ suffering death a consequence of his other-directed attentiveness. We join in the suffering of Jesus when we are freed from the distortions of self-centeredness that entrap us.
Kelsey’s final move looks at redemption as “a promise made good.” We think of redeeming a coupon or a token, trading in the promise for its fulfillment. In Jesus’ resurrection we see the eschatological inbreaking of God’s realm, the first sign that God’s promises have come to pass. The promises revealed in Jesus’ ministry are now made good in the resurrection as the power of God’s imminent Kingdom is set loose in the world. Our lives are re-contextualized in light of this redeeming promise and we are free to live differently.
Kelsey’s short book is no easy read, but as you re-enter a world all too ready to embrace the shallow Schwarzenegger version of redemption you will be glad you spent the time with this theologian. For this textured, thoughtful, Christian rejoinder to that version, we can only say thanks.
Chris Joiner is pastor of First Church, Franklin, Tenn.
