As co-founder of the Home Foundation Group, Israel Cooper has been working to alleviate New Zealand's housing crisis for almost two decades. He has hands-on experience with the practical, political, and social problems around housing. But what concerns him most is a theological problem.
In this article for Plough magazine, Israel argues that
Christians do not have an adequate theology of housing. . . . Without a theological vision for housing, the church cannot explain why housing matters. And if we cannot explain that, we will keep treating our unhoused neighbors as someone else’s problem that we feel moved to help with occasionally.
Drawing on creedal affirmations of Jesus's full humanity and Bonhoeffer's discussion of the penultimate, Israel insists that an adequate understanding of the gospel cannot “divide our humanity in two, assigning the body to the state or market and the soul to the church.” Drawing on his awareness of housing needs and experience building houses, he offers a hopeful vision for participating in God's good news by opening spaces for people and communities to flourish.
This article summarizes an argument Israel developed as part of a Capstone Project for Regent College's Master of Arts in Leadership, Theology & Society (MALTS) program. To learn more this program and other opportunities to study marketplace theology, we invite you to contact Regent's Admissions team.