Season 6, Episode 14
In this final episode of season six, Nikki talks with Tony Deik. Tony is a Palestinian Christian from Bethlehem, Palestine. He is on faculty at Bethlehem Bible College and currently resides in Bolivia with his family. Tony talks about the centrality of justice in the Christian Scriptures and how Christians might begin to understand justice as an act of worship and witness. They also discuss Christian Zionism and how theologies have the potential to actualize either oppressive or just realities.
Catch us in early 2025 for our upcoming season.
You can learn more about Tony and his work here.
20 Minute Takes is a production of Christians for Social Action.
Host: Nikki Toyama-Szeto
Edited & Produced by: David de Leon
Music: Andre Henry
Transcript
[00:00:00] Nikki Toyama-Szeto: Hello, this is Nikki Toyama-Szeto, and I’m the executive director of Christians for Social Action and your host for today’s episode of 20 Minute Takes. Today, we speak with Tony Deik. He’s a professor at Bethlehem Bible College and is on the board of INFEMIT (International Fellowship for Mission as Transformation). Tony unpacks for us a scriptural understanding of justice and the fullness of what that means for Christian faithfulness. He also takes us into his journey as a Palestinian Christian living in exile in Bolivia and how it is that we can understand the activism that comes with Christian faith in ways that pursue peace and peace-building. Join us for this conversation.
Tony, thank you so much for joining us on this episode of 20 Minute Takes.
[00:01:03] Tony Deik: Thank you Nikki; thank you for having me.
[00:01:05] Nikki Toyama-Szeto: First of all, how is the weather in Bolivia these days? It’s snowing here.
[00:01:09] Tony Deik: It is summer, sunny, lovely weather. It is summer now in the global south, in Bolivia.
[00:01:17] Nikki Toyama-Szeto: And do you have something that is your new favorite thing? I know that you and your family have ties to Bolivia but are recently there for a longer period of time. Do you have something that is new and lovely that either speaks home to you or gives you great joy?
[00:01:34] Tony Deik: I mean, in a new culture, you always learn new things. I was in the process of issuing a new driving license, and that was a bit fun.
[00:01:44] Nikki Toyama-Szeto: Watch out, drivers in Bolivia! Fantastic. Well, I’m so grateful to have your voice here on 20 Minute Takes, because I know one of the areas that you focus on and that you study is this area of justice. What is it that Christians need to know or understand about justice, about God’s invitation to participate in the work of justice?
[00:02:10] Tony Deik: Yeah, thank you. Well, my work is in the Scriptures, really—this is my area. I’m a biblical researcher doing my PhD on the topic of wealth and poverty in particular, but through the lens of justice. To my surprise, when I started looking at texts in the New Testament, particularly in Luke and Acts, as you might expect, on wealth and poverty, I discovered that biblical scholars do not understand them as an expression of justice.
Very, very surprising. I sometimes wonder to myself, “Wow, I am getting a PhD for saying that this stuff is about justice.” So the title actually of my PhD thesis is “On Justice: A Study of the Wealth Ethics of the Acts of Apostles” in particular, in a conversation with the Old Testament, the Book of Deuteronomy in particular, and Greco Roman philosophical conceptions of justice.
Because what I’ve realized in my research, what I’m arguing, sort of my fresh contribution, is that the language that Luke, in particular, used to describe how the earliest Christians lived—how they shared possessions, how they distributed wealth, and so forth—that language is found in Greco Roman philosophical discussions of justice, and also found in the Mosaic conception of justice, in the Mosaic law, in the Book of Deuteronomy, in particular.
And I think what I’ve realized in my research is that I was struck in my study by the centrality of justice in the scripture. We are people of justice, and here I think people don’t realize that a word that we often use in our Christian life and doctrine—the word of righteousness—we often don’t link it with justice even in scholarly discussions.
In my last supervision meeting with my supervisors my second supervisor told me, “You know most people won’t understand you when you say that righteousness is justice,” because for us righteousness is something that is related to piety as something of the heart or something that is forensic. You know that we are justified, you know the doctrine of justification, there’s this court imagery that Paul uses to help us understand what Jesus did for us, that we are guilty, we are in a court, God is the judge, and the punishment that should have been on us is on Jesus, so we are justified, right?
So when we talk about all of this, we don’t link it with social justice, right? I think it’s something very related to what I am doing, but more theological, and I would love to explore it more and to write about it in depth—this notion of justification.
I think this is where the problem lies, to be honest. Because we have this image of justification that is very forensic and very pietistic. So justice is, especially as Protestants, we are justified. It’s done. Justice is finished. We have another name for the rest. We call it sanctification. It’s another thing.
It’s not justice. Where we are, we are justified, we are made righteous. And this is maybe the image that we get from Paul. But then, when we turn to Luke, to Luke-Acts, I argue that Luke has a different view on justice that starts from the very beginning of his gospel, with Zechariah’s song. Luke portrays the advent of Jesus as enabling worship.
Zechariah says that a horn of salvation is given to us so that we are able to worship God in justice and holiness—so justification linked with worship as empowerment to do justice. Now to cut the long story short—Zechariah’s song, you know, the Benedictus is a prophecy, and Luke located it at the very head of his double volume work, Luke-Acts, for a purpose, right? He could have placed it anywhere. This song foretells—it’s a prophecy about the future that is fulfilled within the narrative. What this prophecy says is that through this horn of salvation—we understand it through the narrative of Jesus Christ, we understand the horn of salvation as Jesus Christ—through Jesus, we’ll be empowered, we’ll be enabled to worship God in justice. Now, the question that this triggers in the mind of the reader is Where?—since this is a prophecy, in the future tense, and the word says that, and Zechariah prophesied.
So the reader should ask, where is this prophecy fulfilled in the narrative? And I argue that it is fulfilled, the clearest fulfillment of this prophecy is seen in the book of Acts, in the life of the earliest Christians, how they lived and embodied social justice, how they distributed wealth according to need, for example, as opposed to distributed wealth according to merit, as it was practiced in the wider Greco Roman world.
So this is their worship, how they distributed wealth and mixed that with prayer and with fellowship and with breaking bread. So this is justification as empowerment and enablement to worship God in social justice. This is justification from the lens of Luke. So you don’t find this forensic image in Luke, right?
And this is fully compatible with Paul. Now, these are different ways to try to understand what Jesus did for us. But sometimes if we just cling to the forensic image of justification, we feel that, okay, justice is something done, and we have nothing to do with it, and we are justified, we are just now, we’re dikaios, we are just, and that’s it, and we have nothing to do, whereas when we paint the fuller picture, we are justified through Christ. It’s not by our works. But this means that we are empowered to do justice. So if we’re really justified, we need to show it. We need to demonstrate it. In our worship, in our life, we need to demonstrate this justice.
[00:08:48] Nikki Toyama-Szeto: That’s powerful. You talked about Advent and the anticipation of the birth of Jesus in a different kind of a way. I think it really also engages with this question that I hear in some circles that is justice sort of optional or only those for whom are gifted with that—it is a fruit of the Holy Spirit kind of expression—but what I hear you saying is it’s actually we who have been empowered and released in order to worship God through social justice.
[00:09:25] Tony Deik: Exactly. This is why Jesus came to justify us, to empower us, to do justice. Without him, we are not able to do justice. We are not able to love our neighbor as our self. And now here, if I want to enter into a bit of a technical discussion, and I think maybe this would interest people, is that in the original language, in Greek and in Hebrew, we have two words for justice.
One of them is dikaiosune in Greek—or it’s tzedakah in Hebrew—gets translated as righteousness. And the other one is krisis or mishpat that gets translated as justice. Now, even some scholars, when they hear justice, krisis, they think about court justice. Justice in the court rather than social justice. And righteousness, as we said, is something in our imagination that’s given to us, and that’s it, right? But if you look at the Old Testament, for example, the book of Deuteronomy, where you get the best conception of justice, that affects our lives and affects our doctrine.
If you want to understand justice, really, it’s in the Mosaic Law, in the book of Deuteronomy. The book of Deuteronomy is composed of sermons. And there is one sermon that starts in Deuteronomy 9 to 11. And this is central. This is a central sermon that comes before the Deuteronomic law, before all of the detailed laws, to summarize the essence of the law.
What is the essence of the law? How to live in righteousness and holiness. Okay, so how do we live in righteousness according to the Book of Deuteronomy? By loving God. So, all righteousness in Deuteronomy is summed up in one commandment, “Love God with all of your heart, soul, and strength.”
But then what does it mean? The Book of Deuteronomy, this sermon, explains what it means. It means imitating God. The Book of Deuteronomy uses many words to describe this relationship of love, that we should love God, cling to God, fear God, all of this. Why fear God, love God, cling to all of his ways? So that you imitate God.
This is Deuteronomy 10, verses 17-19, that you imitate God who does justice to the world. To the sojourner, to the orphan, and the widow, and God loves the sojourner to give him food and clothing. This is social justice, to give him food and clothing. This is not just court justice, not only defending the oppressed in the court, but also giving the oppressed food and clothing, right?
You also should love the sojourner, for you were also sojourners in Egypt. So this is the summation of all righteousness. All righteousness is summed up in the commandment to love God so that we can imitate God in doing justice and love to the oppressed and the needy and the marginalized.
[00:12:37] Nikki Toyama-Szeto: That’s powerful. And it really helps to illustrate the centrality of justice and the outpouring that is Christian faithfulness. Now for you, a Palestinian Christian living in exile in Bolivia, what does this mean for you, this understanding of justice? How does that get lived out? What are the things that you notice and pay attention to?
[00:13:10] Tony Deik: As an Evangelical Palestinian, I still describe myself maybe as an evangelical—it saddens me that we neglect the work of justice… we relegate it, and I think it does come from our piety and our understanding of piety of…
[00:13:29] Nikki Toyama-Szeto: …kind of Christian faith is only between me and God and it’s very private, very personal. Yeah.
[00:13:37] Tony Deik: …personal, private, there’s no social dimension there. Our understanding of justification is very linked to the court imagery, to the forensic imagery.
[00:13:46] Nikki Toyama-Szeto: Okay. So kind of a courtroom justice. And law.
[00:13:51] Tony Deik: I think it comes from there, our neglect of justice and relegated. And it is striking that we emphasize in evangelical circles the Great Commission, for instance, and we neglect the great commandment, you know, and the word great does not occur in Matthew 28.
It occurs in Luke 10, and other scriptures, the Great Commandment, right? So we saw this in the big conference that happened in Korea, the Lausanne conference—on evangelism and mission and our understanding of mission. This is a big conference that brought together more than 10,000 people online and in person, very global. And it shows you it’s an indicative of where we are as evangelicals in understanding our task. Why God left us in the world, why we exist in the world. And still many evangelicals believe that we are only here to convert people. And in that huge conference, the topic of justice was given 15 minutes.
So this is also indicative, right? What is the mission of God’s people in the book of Deuteronomy? This is how people are attracted to God. I don’t go out just to convert people, but I live out the commandment of loving God, clinging to God so that I can …
[00:15:30] Nikki Toyama-Szeto: …testify to God, right?
[00:15:32] Tony Deik: …I witness to God by living God’s righteousness, God’s conception of justice. I embody God’s conception of justice.
I show another way of living and being that contradicts the ways of the world and the empires of the world. When I live in a different way, a way that embodies God’s conception of justice, people will be attracted to God. So as evangelicals, we neglected this as part of our task, and we emphasize a lot our evangelism and converting people, and this was clearly demonstrated in this big gathering of Lausanne 4.
So this is something that strikes me and saddens me as an idea, and I struggle as a Palestinian. The other thing that I struggle with as a Palestinian is how can we witness to God’s justice? How can we embody God’s justice when we defend injustice? When we legitimize injustice, as you might know, what is happening in Palestine, Palestinian people are oppressed people.
For almost 80 years now, we’ve been living under oppression. My family at a personal level, my grandfather was kicked out from his village, Shefa-Amr, near Nazareth in 1948. My wife and I were forced to leave Bethlehem in 2017; we live under apartheid, under occupation.
Israel, I mean, read human rights reports, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch. Israel maintains an apartheid discriminatory system against the Palestinians. Israel has been holding us with an iron fist for decades. And the question is, How do Christians react to this? There are many Christians among evangelicals who justify this; they legitimize this. You know, Pew Research a couple of years ago showed that 70 percent of white evangelicals in the U. S. believe that God gave the land to Israel. So a premise that portrays God as a real estate agent, as a racist God, frankly, who discriminates against people, one people against another, gives the land of some people to another tribe—it’s a very distorted concept of God that such statements carry…
[00:17:53] Nikki Toyama-Szeto: …I will say, that’s what I grew up believing and understanding in our church. Oh, God has given the land to Israel. Unpack for us, where is that misunderstanding coming from, or what props up or holds that?
[00:18:10] Tony Deik: I think, in all honesty, and let me say something strong here: I think this is a form of idolatry that we have in evangelical churches, that we replace Jesus with Israel. We center Israel. Now, Jesus came, fulfilled all of the promises. He is the Alpha and Omega. In him, like Paul says, whatever God’s promises are, they are yes and amen in Jesus. That’s Christian faith.
[00:18:39] Nikki Toyama-Szeto: In Jesus. Mm-hmm.
[00:18:42] Tony Deik: If you remove Jesus from the center of your theology, this is where we get false teachings. Heresies are measured by the distance between our theological center and Jesus, to be honest.
[00:18:58] Nikki Toyama-Szeto: Wow.
[00:19:00] Tony Deik: So, when people say God gave the land to Israel, to unpack it a little bit, normally such premises are based on a misinterpretation of the Old Testament, of particularly the Abrahamic Covenant.
You know that God came to Abraham and told him, “To your offspring I give this land.” Right? Now the book of Deuteronomy says that all of God’s ways are justice and righteousness. So God is just. So if God does this, he did not do it because he’s a racist God. There is a purpose. What is the purpose? This is the ABC of our faith.
The purpose is God’s salvation, God’s salvific act, God’s plan to rescue the world from the mess that we are in. Right? It starts in particular with Genesis 12. God turns to a person of faith called Abraham, as if God was looking for someone that can partner with him in this plan to rescue this messed up world.
He found Abraham, and he told Abraham, Look, from your seed will come the salvation for all the world. And I give you this land, from the Nile to the Euphrates. Now, a very quick response to this theology that says that God gave our land now to Israel, to a nation-state, a quick response would be “just look at the borders of the land.”
So God gave Abraham the land from the Nile to the Euphrates. So there are two ways to understand this. You understand them as Ben Kfir and as the Israeli government now are trying to misappropriate this text and weaponize this text to say, “We need to expand.” And one minister in the Israeli cabinet—this is not some periphery or marginal voice—said, “This is our land, and we want to expand from the Nile to the Euphrates.” This is one way of understanding it. Or, you go to the Biblical scholars, and the question that we as Biblical scholars ask is, Okay, what did this mean to its original audience, in its original context? And “from the Nile to the Euphrates” is a reference to the whole world at that time.
This is the world that they knew at that time. From the Nile to the Euphrates, that was the world, the whole world that they knew. So God was giving Abraham the whole world. And this is what Paul says in Romans 4, that God gave Abraham, he uses the Greek word Kosmos, the whole Kosmos. Why?
Because God wants Abraham and his seed to be a blessing for the whole world. So it makes sense. So God gave the land, not for, not because he’s racist, not because he’s a real estate agent, not because he favors one tribe against the other. God did not give Abraham a slice of land, a small piece of land. God gave him the whole world to be a blessing for the whole world.
So, such texts that are so beautiful, so core to our gospel, to the good news of Jesus, they are weaponized for political agendas for a settler colonial project. And the result is, you know, and we’re talking about justice. I mean, we’re supposed as Christians to embody God’s justice, and yet we hold doctrines and interpretations, misinterpretations, bad interpretations that portray God as a racist God, as a God of injustice.
[00:22:35] Nikki Toyama-Szeto: Mm-hmm.
[00:22:36] Tony Deik: This is, for me as a Palestinian Christian, something that I deeply struggle with, deeply fight against, because it should not be in our churches.
We should remove Christian Zionism; this theology that legitimizes Israel’s wars against us should be removed from the church. The church is the salt and light in the world, called to embody God’s justice and be a force of light in the world. Not to stand against an oppressed people, not to stand with the oppressor against the oppressed.
We are called to do the opposite, to stand with the oppressed against the oppressor.
[00:23:09] Nikki Toyama-Szeto: Tony, that’s really helpful to understand some of the places where people are misunderstanding what God is saying in the Scriptures. Can you tell us a little bit of what is some of the real world impact or what is it that you are seeing that is the impact or the implication from some of these ideas?
[00:23:33] Tony Deik: I mean for us this kind of theology, as my friend from Gaza Yousef Khoury—he’s a wonderful Palestinian theologian and thinker—he says that for us theology and biblical interpretation is a matter of life and death. As Christians, central to our being is the Gospel, and any harm or distortion to the gospel should shake us. And this theology that pushes Jesus aside, that marginalizes Jesus, is a distortion of the Gospel and distortion of God’s name, and that should shake us. Add to that that this theology justifies death and killing and war and ethnic cleansing. So Christian Zionism, yes, is a theology. You know, there are doctrinal bases. I mean people believe that Israel is still God’s chosen people. That’s why they’re there. They should be there. God gave them the land. They have a divine right to my house, to my city, to my village, right?
So there is this theological presupposition or underpinning, but it has implications. It has political implications, and here we need to remember that as evangelicals, we are people of action, right?
The Bebbington Quadrilateral, right? One of them is activism. So if evangelicals believe in something, they should act upon it.
[00:25:01] Nikki Toyama-Szeto: Uhhuh. Yes.
[00:25:03] Tony Deik: So, if serious evangelicals, serious about their faith, believe that God gave the land to Israel, they will, you know, actualize that. They will act upon it.
And when it comes to Christian Zionism, I mean, you have, first, the Christian Zionists lobby. Christians who support Israel, they lobby in Washington. And they are a much stronger force, even stronger than the Jewish lobby in the US, organizations like AIPAC, for example, that are very strong.
The Christian Zionist lobby is stronger. For example, you have in the US a coalition by the name of Christians United for Israel (CUFI). They claim to have 10 million in membership; 80, 000 churches. These people send money to the Israeli military, they support Israeli settlements, they oppose Palestinian human rights, they push the sending of more and more and more weapons, that the US send more weapons to Israel. So all of that, you know, under the premise that this is God’s people, and they have the divine right to the land…
[00:26:22] Nikki Toyama-Szeto: …this is that application of…
[00:26:26] Tony Deik: …this is the application. So imagine, as Christians, God called us to embody his righteousness and justice, and some in our midst are holding to this distorted theology that pushes them to send weapons that kill people to support wars.
This is God’s justice? This is God’s righteousness? This is our witness? To lobby in Washington, DC? I mean, from their actions, you know who they are. And they can claim to be justified from now until next year. Are they empowered to do justice? For us, this has nothing to do with the gospel, frankly.
This has nothing to do with our Christianity. We don’t recognize this religion, in honesty, because our religion has a constitution, the constitution is the Sermon on the Mount. You know, our religion has, a very clear conception of righteousness summarized in two commandments: love God and your neighbor.
This is our Christianity. You have people opposing human rights, and you have the most respectable human rights organizations—Human Rights Watch, Amnesty—saying that these people are crushed. There is injustice there. There is apartheid. There is discrimination there, and as Christians what do we do?
What do we do when serious, respectable human rights organizations publish thick reports about what’s happening around the world—what do we do vis-a-vis that?
[00:28:09] Nikki Toyama-Szeto: One of the things I appreciate is you calling out how Christians, their faith compels them to action. I think that’s a distinctive to us. And I appreciate, even as you’ve called out how distorted theologies empower certain kinds of actions, that you’re part of a community of people whose actions are being expressed in a peace-building summit, a gathering that’s going to be happening next year, which I think is such a prophetic response to the violence that’s happening on the ground in Gaza among the Palestinian people.
And this peace-building summit is really focused on what is happening in that place and calling Christians for this response of peace-building. Can you say more about what brought you all to that place and a little bit of what it is that you’re hoping will be true about that summit?
[00:29:04] Tony Deik: Yes. This Peace-building Summit is one of our responses to what is happening in Gaza and the genocidal war against us. We are called to be peacemakers, right? Even now, the question is, how do you build peace in the midst of apartheid and discrimination and injustice and genocidal war?
And this is the main question that we want to address in this Peace-building Summit. How do we go about living out our calling to be peacemakers in this particular context? So what we are doing is not just for us Palestinian Christians, but we’re bringing other Christians, other disciples of Jesus, followers of Jesus from across the world, especially from the global South —people who share our experience of injustice and apartheid and settler colonialism, for example, communities in North America, indigenous communities, African Americans. We have a strong group from South America, Memoria Indígena with us. We have a group from South Africa. We have some people also from India and hopefully Dalits.
So faithful followers of Jesus. How do they witness faithfully in the midst of the oppression and the injustice that historically their communities have been going through and still are going through now? So the Peace-building Summit title is “Palestine in Comparative Perspective.” So we want to dialogue. We need each other as a global church. We can’t do it alone.
[00:30:49] Nikki Toyama-Szeto: I really appreciate that. And I do hope you’ll come back after the summit to share some of the learnings with us here on 20 Minute Takes. Because sometimes people say that the call for peace and peace-building is an appeasement that doesn’t make space for justice. And I feel like you all are compelled by justice to pursue peace-building.
This is not abandoning the space for a cheapened peace, but this is a hard fought peace, and that to me feels like the way of Jesus. So Tony, thank you so much for your faithfulness, for sharing a bit of your journey with us.
[00:31:40] Tony Deik: Thank you so much. Thank you.
[00:31:48] Nikki Toyama-Szeto: 20 Minute Takes is a production of Christians for Social Action. We’re produced and edited by David de Leon. I’m your host, Nikki Toyama-Szeto, and the music is done by Andre Henry. You can find us on the web at christiansforsocialaction. org. Give us five stars, write a review, and share about the podcast with your friends.
