Leveling and horizontalization: Top two things I have been taught in 2016 and the three most important books I read in 2016

Yes, I posted the set of most influential books I read in 2016. Yet, there are three books that have significantly moved me to rethink my gospelology (how come that’s not a word). Granted I’ve been heading this way, but in God’s gracious providence, he allowed or choose these three books to enter publication and find their way to me.

The books underscored the things God has been teaching me this year. Two words can sum up what has been taught: horizontalization and leveling.
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 The three books are:

• Making Room: Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Tradition (1999) by Christine D. Pohl

 

• The Patient Ferment of the Early Church: The Improbable Rise of Christianity in the Roman Empire (2016) by Alan Kreider

 

• Subversive Jesus: An Adventure in Justice, Mercy, and Faithfulness in a Broken World (2016) by Craig Greenfield.

 
These three books, more than anything, taught me about the two words--horizontalization and leveling--and their importance for a better, more proper understanding of the gospel and church.

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I am sure I will post something soon on “horizontalization” and “leveling,” but for now, it is enough to say that God has taught me that the uniqueness of the gospel is leveling, that is, there is a leveling among believers unlike anything else upon earth. The table or the partaking of the Lord’s Supper is a leveling event (or should be). Our fellowship, i.e., our church life and worship, is a leveling of our social status’s. Whereas “leveling” is what should occur among believers and through its events of worship, the Table, baptism, and living in the world, “horizontalization” is the effects of the gospel that are displayed to the world; what outsiders, nonChristians, the unchurched, and the powers should see in and through our behavior, our habits, and our systems (i.e., the way we worship, the way we facilitate the Table, the way we do baptisms, and the way we live among people and together as a church). In other words, where such social leveling occurs, the church is displaying the horizontalization of the gospel.
 
This is what I have been taught this year. Now, let’s see if I have learned anything.

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Check out my sermon on John 13, Jesus’s Community of Footwashers: His Public Presence in Caesar’s Arena of Death, that offers some of the insights on what I have been taught about "leveling" and "horizontalization." There is a link on that page for downloading the sermon and for listening to it as well (if you have the time).