I have been rather bothered recently by the way in which the emerging church - though not only the emerging church - makes use of the concept of the ‘kingdom of God’ to define its mission, the idea being that the task of the church is to extend or build the kingdom of God on earth. Very often there is an implicit polemical aspect to the usage: we build the kingdom of God rather than merely convert people; or we are more concerned about the concrete social dimension of the kingdom on earth than the rarefied - if not mind-numbing - prospect of an eternity in heaven. The phrase ‘kingdom of God’ appears to capture for us something of the down-to-earth political and moral relevance of the gospel that we are so anxious to reintroduce into Christian discourse; and it gives substantial theological justification for this shift in missional focus. But I am not at all sure that this is how the term works biblically.

A set of lectures that Michel Foucault gave at the College de France during the late 1970s was recently published under the title, Security, Territory and Population. They trace out the genealogy of what Foucault calles “governmentality,” which is a snazzy way of talking about the development of the practice of governing men. An important part of that genealogy is what I’m writing about in this essay: the pastorate.

I’ve been reading N. T. Wright’s, Surprised by Hope and I’ve found myself frustrated by N. T. Wright. As one example, in part 13 ‘Building for the Kingdom’, Wright engages rhetoric that is overly reactionary and I think it mitigates the points he wants to make. Under redemption, Jesus’ resurrection and the new creation of salvation, Wright places the work of garden keeping in the world of space, time and matter. Fair enough (carefully understood). Evidently, however, he wants to build his case for ”garden keeping” on God’s ultimate intention to redeem even creation itself (something that God will do in the end).  Because of God’s ultimate intention, he insists that we cannot picture God looking at the fallen world (and we might add, groaning world, Romans eight) and saying, “Oh, well, nice try, good while it lasted but obviously gone bad, so let’s drop it and go for a non-spatiotemporal, nonmaterial world instead.” He then argues that since God intends to redeem rather than reject His created world (would ”rejecting” be the worng word for what the apostle desribes God doing in II Peter 3), we should celebrate that redemption (what he calls healing and transformation) in the present as a means of anticipating what is to come. Along these lines, he pictures the Church as called to “implementing Jesus resurrection and thereby anticipating the final new creation.”

Eschatology is usually understood in theology to be the interpretation of things that happen at the end of time, and tends to occupy a separate section, somewhat detached from other theological concerns, at the end of systematic theologies. This divorce of ‘the end of time’ from the rest of theological history is a striking feature of theology, for which I wish to propose an alternative not so far offered on this site.

I don’t think I’m grossly misrepresenting the book if I say that Shane Claiborne’s The Irresistible Revolution is basically an impassioned, iconoclastic, mischievous challenge to the modern church to do what the rich young ruler (Luke 18:18-30) so famously failed to do - sell everything it has, give the money to the poor, and follow Jesus into life-changing solidarity with the disenfranchised and destitute. So Claiborne’s is another powerful and increasngly fashionable voice calling the church to be a radical Jesus movement again (see also ‘Being a disciple of Jesus is not enough’). But it still seems to me that this desire to revert to the pattern of Jesus-discipleship arises essentially as a reaction against the excesses, hypocrisy, idolatry or ineffectiveness of the modern American church; it is of only limited value for the larger task of reconstituting the people of God following the collapse of the Christendom paradigm.

The question of whether by historically contextualizing the Gospel story we make Jesus largely irrelevant to the church and the world today has been a recurrent one - indeed, for me something of a thorn in the flesh. It was recently posed rather articulately and forcefully by samlcarr and shiert on the ‘New creation and the kingdom of God’ thread. I realize that I appear to belabour the point far too much, and the impression is easily given that I think that Jesus is of no more than antiquarian interest to us today. That is not the case, and I will try again to explain, too briefly, what I’m getting at and why, because I think we have a lot more to gain than lose by learning to trust the narrative shape of our theology.

I have voiced some reservations in a couple of recent posts about the appropriateness of modelling the life and mission of the church on the form of discipleship found in the Gospels (see ‘Alan Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways, and the future of the church in Europe’ and ‘We have to go back, but not to square one’).

There is a fully understandable desire abroad - as a reaction against big church, as a reaction to the distintegation of the Christendom mentality - to recover the immediacy and humanity manifested in the community of followers that Jesus gathered around himself. Sometimes this is expressed as a strong preference for this model of radical, itinerant, liminal community against the seemingly more institutional form of the Pauline churches.

Tonight was the last instalment of four of BBC’s The Passion, showing on television over holy week. It was an unusual departure for the normally resolutely secular BBC, and much talked up by faith communities. I had decided to give it a miss, having been disappointed by previous efforts to represent Jesus on screen or in drama. But I got drawn in – mainly because I wanted to know what people would be talking about.

The suffering servant poem of Isaiah 52:13-53:12 is set in the middle of prophecies about the restoration of oppressed and disgraced Israel. Immediately preceding it is the announcement to Zion that ‘your God reigns’, that the wretched exiles will be brought back, that God has acted to redeem Jerusalem ‘before the eyes of all the nations’, that there will be singing and rejoicing because God has comforted his people (52:7-10). Immediately after is the exultant address to the barren, desolate wife: the time of suffering, shame, reproach, when God in his anger hid his face from her, is over, and her many children ‘will possess the nations and will people the desolate cities’ (54:3). In both instances the promise is that desolate, humiliated Israel will be restored and will prosper.

I suggested in my review of Alan Hirsch’s book The Forgotten Ways that, in our search for a new paradigm to replace the now more or less defunct Christendom worldview, the historical moment which we should revisit for inspiration is not the beginning of the narrow path of suffering that the radical Jesus movement took in pursuit of its Lord but the end, when the faithful community, having finally overcome the opposition of Greek-Roman paganism, was in a position to ask far-reaching questions about how it should organize and define itself as God’s ‘new creation’.