new creation

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.

This is an attempt, in response to some perceptive comments by Chris Tilling and samlcarr on the recent ‘NT Wright and the confusion of kingdom and new creation’ post, to clarify how I understand the relation between ‘kingdom of God’ and ‘new creation’. These two themes have become central to the thinking of the emerging church, but I’m not sure that the tendency to treat them as broadly synonymous does justice to their biblical provenance.

I came across a curious paragraph in Tom Wright’s Simply Christian, in which he highlights a ‘mystery’ in the social organization of God’s ‘new world’. He argues that the end of all things is not the emigration of the righteous to heaven but the reintegration of heaven and earth, when God will remake the world and ‘raise all his people to new bodily life to live in it’. I have a bit of a problem with the way he characterizes resurrection as ‘life after life after death’, but the basic assertion that we are summoned ‘to live in the present as people called to that future’, in the light of the believed in renewal of creation, is surely a good one.

This is a chapter from a series of essays, perhaps a book, called “Which Art in Heaven”. I wrote most of it three or four years ago (apart from an obvious updated reference) and have been exploring its meaning with hungry artists since then.

For some time now I have been fairly convinced that God has much to say to artists because there is much that we can say, and do, that cannot be done in other ways.

This essay was originally written for Restoring Eden, a Christian environmental network, as an attempt to ‘outline a narrative eschatology… that would validate a positive creational theology’. In the interests of cross-pollination they have kindly allowed me to post it here in advance of its publication on www.restoringeden.org. So please buzz over there and sprinkle the pollen of Open Source Theology on the sexy anthers of Restoring Eden. And vice versa.

The essay is written from inside the emerging church conversation. It does not presume to represent an emerging church consensus, but it shares two key concerns: that the ‘mission’ of the church should in some way embrace the whole of creation, and that our theology should be constructed in the first place as narrative. It attempts, therefore, to explain the relation between the church and creation simply by means of a retelling of the biblical story.