The Dream of God: A Call to Return
By Verna J. Dozier
A Review by Dwight A. Moody
The “dream of God” is, according to Verna J. Dozier, “serving the world God loves.” Further, “the people of God … must be ambassadors … in every part of life” (113).
These words draw to a close this remarkable exposition of what “ministry” looks like from the vantage point of a lay woman, well-versed in the best of religious scholarship and well-traveled along the roads of her own profession (teaching). It is a timely word today just as it was when first articulated by Ms. Dozier as a series of lectures at her congregation in Washington DC (St. Mark’s Episcopal) and later published in book form (2006).
It came to my attention through long-time friend and now-retired minister Tom Wisdom of Texas. He responded when, in this weekly newsletter, I appealed to readers to help me “write this book”—my own late-in-life summary of what I believe, confess, and preach, using the title The Last Thing on My Mind. He responded by recommending this book, thus securing his name in the Acknowledgements that must attend to any such book.
“I believe Christianity has journeyed far from what Jesus of Nazareth was about,” she writes early in the book (3). God issued to the people of the Torah and to the people of the Resurrection an “awesome invitation to be something new in the world…. the possibility of living in the kingdom of God in the midst of the kingdoms of this world.” But again and again, this dream of God was undermined by human decisions and directions.
This dream of God, as expounded here by Dozier, has been continually sabotaged by those who claim to embrace and embody that dream: that is, by religious people. This is the story of the Bible, both the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Bible. Dozier traces three great “falls” in the history of biblical religion. First, there is the Fall presented in the book of Genesis, a “myth that describes for our tradition the existential nature of the human condition…. We are all Adam and Eve, and we repeat that proud rejection of God’s way, hour by hour, generation by generation” (45). Thus, we become “lonely, separated, fearful human beings” (47).
The second Fall was the failure of Israel to be the people God desired them to be, best expressed in the idea of the Jubilee Year (Leviticus 25). Instead of embracing that reality, Israel clamored for a king that they might be like the other nations. The third Fall came among the Christians centuries later, when they also went the way of world power. It happened under the leadership of Constantine and grew out of his decision to embrace the religion of Jesus as the religion of empire. While some contend that the church subdued the state, “I have always thought exactly the opposite—it was the state that subdued the church” (55).
Dozier uses both the temptations of Jesus as recounted in the gospels and the famous Russian novel The Brothers Karamazov (especially the story of The Grand Inquisitor) as platforms for describing “The Temptations of the Church” (chapter four, 65ff). While Jesus rejected “miracle, mystery, and authority” in favor of love as the avenue toward the dream, the church chose “institution” built precisely on those three things. It is this tension between religion as institution and religion as lived experience that is at the heart of Dozier’s thesis and exposition. “The church missed its high calling to be the new thing in the world when it decided to worship Jesus instead of follow him” (74). The mission of the dream gave way to the organization of the dreamers.
“I believe that the genius of Christianity is not creed or institution, but the vision of a new possibility for human life rooted in the ancient understanding of God and articulated and lived out by a Nazarene carpenter from that tradition” (94). For this vision, she gladly embraces the vocabulary of Jesus: the kingdom of God. But the institutionalization of Christianity gave way to the division between clergy and laity and “the exaltation of preaching and praying over cooking and serving” (107).
There is much in this interpretation of scripture and tradition that coheres with my own education and experience, and I find no fault in it. But it makes me ponder: was there any other way? Was there really the “third way” she mentions early in the book (11)? Or was this particular journey inevitable? Is this historical result the only way that things could have gone? Is it feasible to imagine any other way things could have worked out? Or is the Original Sin also the Always Sin, that which would have controlled any and every effort to move in a different way? In other words, wasn’t the crucifixion of Jesus always inevitable? Wasn’t Jesus “slain before the foundations of the world”?
