Abstract
The term ‘kingdom of God’ can be problematic for many people of faith. Although at the very core of Jesus’ message, and anticipating a profoundly different way of being, its connotations of monarchy, power and maleness belie its radical difference from earthly kingdoms. For Graham Adams – as for Andrew Shanks, from whom he borrows the term – ‘Holy Anarchy’ is a preferable rendering, underlining the extent to which God’s kingdom excludes all notions of domination and empire.
For Adams, there’s a certain kind of truth that leads to a will to dominate – truth in the sense of something being held as correct. In contrast, ‘Holy Anarchy’ focuses on the ‘uncontainability’ of truth, the appreciation that what is held cannot be the whole story (p. 41). So we have ‘truth-in-hand’ versus ‘truth-in-process’, ‘the clenched fist over the open palm’, the neat and tidy house against a wilder space where occupants come and go and tension, insecurity and risk prevail.
Adams’ project is to take the image of ‘Holy Anarchy’ and explore its implications for our understanding of the world as it is and as it may become. He takes us on a lively journey, sharing intriguing insights and challenging conclusions along the way. We learn how ‘Holy Anarchy’ confronts the ways in which patterns of domination are manifest in our relationships – race and class, gender and sexuality, disability and age, our exploitation of the planet – and how Jesus disrupted the dynamics of social norms and practices, making possible a new form of community, embodied in and among the least.
There’s some powerful and imaginative commentary on gospel passages, including the possessed man Legion, the children not dancing to their piping peers, and Mary taking the risen Jesus to be the gardener. The portrayal of resurrection as ‘the crack in the world of order … the earthquake-event, destabilizing life as we know it’ (p. 207) is especially striking.
The author also shares some of his recent hymns, and there are other worship materials at the end. The former are original, thought-provoking and edgy, although probably better suited to quiet reflection than community singing, despite tunes being suggested.
The book should be enjoyed by those already convinced of its thesis, but it may prove less convincing to the sceptical. The assertion that, when reading Scripture, we accentuate those voices that affirm the priority of ‘truth-in-process’, while ‘seeking to understand what experiences have given rise to … voices located in the systems of domination’ (p. 143), might be seen to rather give the game away. The selectiveness of this approach is defended, though not very fully, and we also discover God to be both ‘truth-in-process’ and ‘truth-in-hand’, holding ‘values of justice, peace and healing’ (p. 104). Perhaps some engagement with Paul, whose understanding of truth is surely more akin to the ‘closed hand’ or ‘tidy house’ of Adams’ schema, would have made the argument stronger.
A more trivial absentee from the book is Leonard Cohen, whose famous lines from ‘Anthem’ so aptly sum up its thesis: ‘Ring the bells that still can ring, forget your perfect offering, there’s a crack, a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.’