When Christians confess that salvation comes through Christ, we are saying something very hard: that God’s salvation comes through a creation which bears the marks of sin. The salvation of the world does not happen by fiat, or by a pure act of will, but by God becoming incarnate in the same flesh through which the sin of the world came. All that God makes use of in the restoration of the world—the Scriptures, church tradition, the people of God—bear the marks of this damage. The question is thus not whether damaged goods are used by Christians, but what use they can be.
We are in an era in which what use we can make of damaged goods is a leading question, catching up art, music, historical figures, theologians. Consider a more recent example, and one closer to home for Christians. When Wendell Berry’s The Need to Be Whole—a substantial treatment of patriotism and racial prejudice—arrived in 2022, it was greeted with a mixture of appreciation and puzzlement. Readers quickly realized that the unspoken theme of the book was how to reckon with the most diabolical of American institutions: chattel slavery. Across this work of Berry’s, slavery and racism are treated as a complex wound, a wound both damaging to body and soul and also creating possibilities, alternately distancing whites and blacks while creating opportunities for cooperation and friendship between whites and blacks because of the proximity slavery created.
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