The book's subtitle suggests its theme: "How the gospel helps us reach across barriers such as race, culture, and gender." The author, now retired, has served the Seventh-day Adventist Church for years as pastor, seminary teacher, and college administrator. He is one of the church's most respected New Testament scholars.
After reading this fast-reading book, I was tempted to suggest that it is rather lightweight. But that would be a superficial assessment, for Dr. Kubo has mastered that rare gift of taking the complex and controversial and making it comprehensible.
Written for the general church audience, the book addresses what Kubo calls the programmatic statement of Galatians: "There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus" (Gal. 3:28, NIV). The book is divided into six parts, with a total of 21 chapters of varying lengths. The three most important sections are ones that address the socio-religious issues of race, gender, and class. Building on these three themes, Kubo widens the challenge with an inclusive, rather than exclusive, view of God, one that encompasses those in other churches and religions. The book ends with a discussion of the priesthood of believers, a theology of the laity, and with what Kubo hopes the church would become the rainbow church.
Chapters 3 and 4 are perhaps the strongest. Chapter 3 presents the story of the good Samaritan, with the emphasis on not who my neighbor is, but what it means to be a neighbor. Kubo dis cusses neighbor and love. The focus on the first is selective (I decide who my neighbor is) and on the second is unconditional. Such a distinction demands a shift from the object of one's love to the quality of that love toward whoever needs it.
Chapter 4 presents a theology of race relations, building on the unique doctrines of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, utilizing our conceptual schema from Eden lost to Eden restored. The chapter's seminal ideas could well form the basis for a more complete development of a theology of human relations.
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While the book has much to commend itself, I do have a wish list. I wish the author had dealt with the problem of racism, not just prejudice. Kubo defines prejudice as an "inflexible" attitude. But it is more than that: it is a rational attitude that, often in a disguised manner, defends privilege, and even after evidence to the contrary will not change, so that the postjudgment is the same as the prejudgment. Racism, however, goes deeper. Racism is the deliberate structuring of privilege, by means of an objective, differential, and unequal treatment of people, for the purpose of social advantage over scarce resources, resulting in an ideology of supremacy that justifies power of position by placing a negative meaning on perceived or actual biological/cultural differences. The church has not escaped such structural behavior. Kubo touches the problem, but then tacitly places the concern on the wrong party in his treatment of the controversial subject of regional conferences.
I also wish Kubo had given us a better grasp of sexism. What is it? How does it operate in structural as well as in domestic relations?
All this is not to minimize Kubo's excellent work. The concern here is to state that more is needed. But then one must realize that this book "is the first step in that direction and is foundational to other books on the subject."
