It is a sign of how voguish eschatology has become that the third ‘conversation’ in Tom Sine’s The New Conspirators is entitled ‘Taking the Future of God Seriously’.
He wants to suggest that ‘the Bible’s imagery of coming home to the kingdom of God is not simply a theology we salute on Sunday but a new reason to get out of bed on Monday — a new “cultural” vision of the good life and better future that reflects God’s loving purposes for a people and a world’.
That pretty much encapsulates his argument. Christians should find their ultimate ‘home’ not in heaven – he quotes N.T. Wright’s provocative ‘Heaven is not our home!’ – but in the kingdom of God. The kingdom of God is God’s future ‘restored creation’ breaking into the world, which must have ‘implications for spiritual, social, economic and political transformation of our world today’. The immediate challenge for Christians, then, is to re-imagine what this means in a way that directly connects with human experience, to give fresh expression to the ancient images. To this end Sine offers his own slightly mawkish but still powerful reworking of Isaiah’s vision of the mountain on which God will ‘prepare a feast of rich food for all peoples’ and will ‘swallow up death forever’ (Is. 25:6-9). ‘Clearly God intends to bring us safely home as a great resurrected, multicultural community to a restored creation.’
I think Sine gets the tension about right between this vision of an ultimate future and the calling of the followers of Jesus to live that renewed life in the present:
When we join this movement, we are not building God’s new order on earth through our own efforts. Through the life, death and resurrection of Christ, God is actively at work in our world today, using our ordinary lives in ways we have never imagined to give expression to God’s new order, in anticipation of that great homecoming day when all things will be made new.
But it is a serious business. We cannot avoid confronting the powers of darkness in both their personal and their systemic forms; the realization of God’s new order in the present must entail a judgment on injustice; and we must take the political and social activism of God in the world seriously. And on a lighter note, we must take the ‘good life of God’ seriously.
This has probably been the best conversation so far. Sine has more or less achieved what he set out to do – a re-imagining of the concrete social and political existence of the church in the light of a biblical eschatology of new creation. My only real problem with his approach – and with a lot of current emerging theology – is that it collapses into one what I think are in fact two distinct eschatological narratives in the New Testament. The first narrative has to do with the process by which Israel moves from judgment to vindication in the ancient world; the second has to do with an ultimate renewal of creation that is anticipated in the existence of the people of God.
Traditionally theology has given priority to the first narrative but has universalized it, finalized it, and assimilated the new creation theme into it. So being with God in heaven has become an ultimate destiny for Christians rather than a consequence of the vindication of the faithful suffering community.
Sine rightly objects to the traditional approach on the grounds that it provides a too restrictive vision and motivation for mission. But he has still not understood the force of the narrative structure, and has in effect simply reversed the error, subsuming Israel’s immediate eschatological narrative into the larger but more remote narrative about the renewal of creation.
One particular consequence of this conflation, I think, is a misuse of the ‘kingdom of God’ motif. Sine makes the same point that Brian McLaren does in The Secret Message of Jesus that kingdom language ‘doesn’t connect well to life in the twenty-first century’. But ‘kingdom of God’ was never meant to capture the hope of social transformation that both Sine and McLaren, in their different ways, aim at. It refers to the foreseen event of God acting to liberate his people from oppression and become king over his people in place of various corrupt rulers, including satan. There is a transformation of Israel that goes along with that, but it is a transformation entirely centred around the renewal of worship and obedience to YHWH. That event and transformation then makes it possible through the power of the Spirit for the people to be an effective sign of new creation.
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