Emily Swan - Solus Jesus: A Theology of Resistance

(Emily)

Rachel, the love of my life

Andrea, a true friend who suffered alongside me

Audrey, Gwendolyn, Kinley, Maggie, Vivianmy five nieces, in hopes that our Christian faith will find new life in your generation

(Ken)

Julia, my love

Jesse, Maa, Amy, Judy, Grace and Oceanayou taught me more than I taught you (granted, there are more of you)

The memory of Nancy and Phyllis

All the people Ive upset along the way, in hopes of a future reconciliation

(Both)

The people of Blue Ocean Faith Ann Arbor, whose beauty and spiritual maturity is awe-inspiring, and who gave us space to write this book, especially our co-workers, Caroline, Diane, Cassie and Penny

All who bear the marks of the scapegoat

Author ofRescuing Jesus: How People of Color, Women and Queer Christians are Reclaiming Evangelicalism

When I was a child, my grandmother would visit my family for weeks at a time. She had raised me as a baby, so even though I later lost my native Cantonese and she spoke very little English, we shared a deep connection. I loved her so deeply that when she would leave, Id return to the room in which she slept and look for traces of her essence left behindher smell, a forgotten bobby pin, the soft indentation in her pillow. Sometimes I would cry from missing her.

My grandmother used to live on a farm in Southern China and never received a formal education. She practiced Buddhism and cared deeply for her children and grandchildren.

She was also one of my greatest spiritual teachers. She surrounded me with a bounty of her love, the most powerful spiritual gift you can offer a child.

After I became a Christian in my teens, it baffled me to hear Christians invalidate my grandmothers love as a form of spiritual teaching. They asked if I worried that she, along with my non-Christian family members, would go to hell.

The deeper I got into evangelicalism, the more I saw the theological framework driving this belief, how it hurt the most vulnerable and dismissed their perspectives and theologies. I saw how it cut us off from experiencing the divinity, or the image of God, standing before us in different human beings. I remember sitting in countless seminars about converting non-believers to our absolute truth and sensing the smallness of our collective imagination.

In Solus Jesus, Emily Swan and Ken Wilson subvert that theological paradigm. Their words validate the theology and spirituality that rises from experience, from the marginalized, from the least of these. Their proposed paradigm, Solus Jesus, argues for the authority of the living Jesus in us all. Drawing from personal experience and those who have long carved out theologies far from power, Swan and Wilson show how Solus Jesus can open a portal to the divine communion that is possible between all people.

Solus Jesus also maps out the damage done by theologies formed in enclaves of power and invites us to examine our own complicity and vulnerability to those harmful teachings. It speaks to those raised with a weaponized theology and works to disarm them by offering up Scripture through a different lens, demanding love, dismantling of harmful systems and collective action. For some, Solus Jesus will affirm and amplify the message theyve known within themselves for so long. For others, this will challenge and disrupt their faith, but hopefully lead to a desire to claim theology as a tool for our collective liberation.

This is an important text for our time. We live in a culture that prizes ideas from people with access, power and the right education. From the stages of multi-million dollar church stadiums, we uplift spiritual leaders with fancy degrees, book deals and sizeable social media followings. Once again, we suffocate our souls by limiting whom we learn from. Solus Jesus points us to the edges of society, where vulnerability and experience breed spiritual vitality. It invites us to receive spiritual teaching in all its manifestations, even in the form of a grandmother's love.

Read Solus Jesus with an open heart, and prepare to be challenged and transformed.

Author ofChanging Our Mind

Beginning around 2010, a small number of U.S. evangelicals started publishing books that, in one way or another, dissented from the predominant anti-LGBTQ+ opinion in our religious community. Some of these books were by LGBTQ+ evangelicals themselves, like Matthew Vines and Justin Lee. Others were by people like Ken Wilson and myselfstraight, white Christian men taking a stand for substantial reconsideration of the traditionalist position and its associated practices in church life.

In response to such books, as well as to a growing pressure for reconsideration (or for campus support groups, space to ask questions in denominations, or for a temporary freeze on exclusion in churches), the diffuse but very real evangelical power structure clamped down. Holding on to some version of the traditionalist position became even more non-negotiable in evangelical publishing, higher education, denominational service, and church life. Dissenters were pushed outoften brutallyand left communally, and even theologically, homeless. Painful exclusion was especially doled out to LGBTQ+ evangelicals.

A new trend has become apparent among some of these now-post-evangelical dissenters. They (we) have begun to theologizehave begun developing versions of post-evangelical theology. These post-evangelical theologies are deeply, self-consciously, and explicitly affected by the scalding experiences of their authors. As with much of the most creative theology in Christian history, this new post-evangelical theology is emerging from a context of personal and communal crisis, conflict, and loss.