Kingdoms and Neighbors? (UPDATED)
Jun 16th, 2008 by Micah Tillman | 9 Comments |
Yesterday’s sermon was on the Kingdom of God/Heaven. Which was almost guaranteed to be interesting, since I get the feeling that our church members are primarily progressive and pacifist. (The non-pacifist, non-progressive part of me grins. Wait, that would be all of me. Or almost all?)
But after expressing his (I think legitimate) concerns over the negative connotations the word “kingdom” has taken on — for some people — our associate pastor Adam talked about an issue that concerns all Christians:
How exactly is the Kingdom of God/Heaven supposed to be understood?
This question concerns all Christians because the coming of the Kingdom was the good news (”gospel”) Jesus was preaching. But Jesus, as was typical of Him, created some mystery on this point.
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Adam said there have been two dominant understandings of what Jesus meant, both of which assume a dichotomy: There is the Kingdom of God/Heaven, and there is something else (often called “the World,” or “the Kingdom of the World”).
Adam didn’t critique the dichotomy, and I think he was right not to. To give a fully-meaningful definition of a thing you have to distinguish it from what it is not. If “the Kingdom of Heaven” is going to be meaningful for us, we’re going to have to also understand what is not the Kingdom of Heaven.
The question becomes, therefore, how to understand the difference between the Kingdom of Heaven and whatever is not the Kingdom of Heaven.
Adam discussed, as I said, the two main views of this difference: The first claims the Kingdom of Heaven and the Not-Kingdom-of-Heaven are different (separate) in time. The second essentially claims the two are separate in space.
The first view is that the Kingdom of Heaven is coming, but hasn’t arrived yet. It isn’t here now. “This present age” is the age before the arriving of the Kingdom.
The second view is that the Kingdom of Heaven is here now, but isn’t necessarily over there now. It’s within the walls of your local church, it’s in your home, it’s in your business. But it’s not necessarily in the local courthouse, or the local pubs, or the local gentlemen’s club, etc.
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Adam said that your view of the Kingdom can determine your view of Jesus’ teachings. If Jesus’ teachings describe what it is like to be in the Kingdom, but the Kingdom isn’t here yet, then those teachings are Kantian Ideals (or “regulative ideas”), but not actually attainable. Yet.
But if the Kingdom is here, just not there, then you take Jesus’ teachings as actually applying to yourself here and now. Problems occur, however, because spatial metaphors can lead one to withdraw from the not-Kingdom part of the world, and to become legalistic within one’s own spatial domain.
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Adam suggested a third possibility was to start from Christ’s teachings about how to live rather than to start from the understanding of the difference between the Kingdom and the not-Kingdom. If you follow Adam’s suggestion, you take Jesus’ teachings as a description of how to live the Kingdom, and how to recognize Kingdom activities (no matter who is doing them) wherever you are.
If you take this approach, you might discover that even people you don’t think of as Christian are doing Kingdom work (e.g., taking care of God’s Creation in general). And you might find ways to be about your Father’s business in places you hadn’t thought of before.
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As I was listening, I was reminded of the parable of the Good Samaritan. Jesus tells it in response to the question, “Who is my neighbor?” But the parable doesn’t answer the question. Instead, the parable tells you how to be a neighbor.
Jesus was deliciously weird.
“Neighbor,” like “Kingdom,” seems to be a spatial term. And it’s something you can become or cease to be in time. But Jesus approaches the issue not from the question of where or when a person is your neighbor, but from the question of how you can act like a neighbor.
Of course, you’ll want to read the actual text of the sermon (PDF), to see how much of this report o’ mine is accurate. *grin* You know how we conservative types like to twist the words of our progressive enemies. I mean, “neighbors.”
UPDATE Link to sermon text now included above!
Sounds like a great sermon; wish I coulda been there, listening…. :D
I’m enjoying toying with your ‘temporal’ vs. ’spacial’ descriptions of the traditional kingdom interpretations. It might be more accurate to say ’sociological’ rather than ’spacial.’ It is really more about ‘us’ vs. ‘them’ rather than ‘here’ vs. ‘there.’
What do you think?
Adam
Amanda–
That would have been awesome.
Adam–
Yeah, I was thinking about that too. Reminds one of the question of what America is. (Is it the land, or the people who live on the land? Or both somehow?)
The “us vs. them” distinction does get at something very relevant which the “here vs. there” one doesn’t. So what if you spoke of the “insider/outsider” distinction which (I think) you referred to in the sermon?
The “insider”/”outsider” distinction is a spatial metaphor, even though it refers to people. And the dominant narrative in postmodernism of “marginalization” is likewise a spatial metaphor. So we Anglophones (sp?) do sometimes use spatial terms when referring to persons.
(If one were to decide to take the “Two-Kingdoms” conception (I think that was the term you used) as being a primarily person-al distinction ["us" vs. "them"] then would one also be deciding against the suggestion [by {Insert Name I Can't Remember Here}] after the sermon that one could strike the “g” from “Kingdom” to get a word with fewer negative connotations? )
Furthermore, since the primary temporal relation is before-after, and the primary spatial metaphor is inside-outside, I think such a spatial metaphor works for describing the sociological distinction.
*grin* This is too much fun.
Interesting stuff, Mr. Tillman… as expected. I wanted to react to this statement “As I was listening, I was reminded of the parable of the Good Samaritan. Jesus tells it in response to the question, “Who is my neighbor?” But the parable doesn’t answer the question. Instead, the parable tells you how to be a neighbor.”
It always seemed to me that the parable did both. As he often does, he makes it bigger than the initial question, he widens to the question of how to be a neighbor…
But his choice of a Samaritan, of all people, is relevant. I think they would have said “Well, if a Samaritan counts an Israelite as a neighbor, then I guess I better count pretty much everybody.”
In todays terms, it might be marginally more provacative to substitute “Samaritan” for jihadist… but only marginally. If somebody told me a story where a jihadist takes incredible, loving care of an injured Christian, I’d be likely to say “Well, if that hate-filled jihadist can treat me like a nieghbor, than I guess I better do the same too.”
You are right about ‘insider/outsider.’ That clarifies things.
And you’re also right about ‘kindom’ and ‘community’ and ‘family’ as problematic in nearly the same way that ‘kingdom’ is–they all carry some marker or distinction about who is ‘in’ and who is ‘out.’ Perhaps we can’t get away from that entirely (and perhaps it isn’t entirely desirable to do so) but I’d love some word that recognizes that the ‘kingdom’ is greater than the sum of the individuals involved.
Let’s take it towards another love of mine–what if God is a choir director? We can be choir members, but the ‘kingdom of God’ is the sound that the choir produces along with God. The sound fills a temporal and geographical space much larger than the individuals involved, and many other people hear it. They can appreciate the resonance, hum along, and even join in the singing. There are lovely sounds happening places where the choir isn’t singing as well, because God is also a prolific composer. When choir members wander about and discover those songs, they can join in singing there, too.
Hmm, I’m going to have to copy that to my computer and make another sermon out of it…
Adam
Jeff–
Good point about the importance of the character’s being Samaritan (and the neighboring positions of Samaria and the rest of Israel which this brings to mind).
And that’s a good question about who would be the fitting analogue for Samaritan today. I suppose it would depend on which group one belonged to, for one thing.
“Illegal immigrant” might work? “Jihadist” gets a lot of the emotional reactions one assumes would be associated with the “Samaritans” for most Jews of that day, but it reminds me more of “Roman soldier” (what with the militarism and all) than “Samaritan.” But that may be because I don’t know enough about the relationship between the Jews and Samaritans of Jesus’ day.
Then the question becomes, once I’ve learned to see Samaritans as my neighbor, who’s the Samaritan to me then? (It always annoyed me when people would talk about how we “have to get outside our comfort zones.” They were just so comfortable with getting out of their comfort zones, I got the feeling what they meant was, “You get out of your comfort zone. I’m fine with mine.”)
Adam–
I like the musical metaphor. Reminds me of Tolkien’s creation myth in the Silmarillion. (For CS Lewis, the grand scheme of things is a dance [I think he talks about this in one of the books in the Space Trilogy], for Tolkien it’s a song).
But it also reminds me of Husserl’s understanding of “meaning.” A meaning is a non-spatial, non-temporal object, since you can mean the same thing in different places, and at different times.
The meaning is the same, but the spatial and temporal locations are different. (Which is what makes communication possible. I can experience the same meaning over right now as you can over there and later. It’s also what makes translation [more or less] possible.)
Each spoken phrase, then, gives expression to some extra-spatiotemporal meaning. Or, we might say, each expression creates a “thin place” through which the meaning becomes (more or less) present.
Husserl actually used the term “constitution.” Each act of expression “constitutes” the identically same meaning which anyone else can constitute for themselves through the same (or equivalent) expression.
(To “constitute” something for Husserl means to undertake the activities and attitudes necessary for it to be present to you. It’s like designing a good stained-glass window so that the thing which you want to see through it is perfectly outlined and accurately colored [or not].)
Which reminds one of “building” the Kingdom, but taken to a new metaphorical level.
Yeah, interesting stuff. Dr. Chris Hall describes our current existence as being “between the times,” which is another way to think about the temporal difference between kingdom and not-kingdom. Which is off the topic a bit. The theology teacher at my school seems to concur, describing Christ as “reaching forward into our time” to “bring back the garden,” although he locates the recreation of the garden in spatial ways, such as in the liturgy and eucharist. So that deals with both spatial and temporal, I suppose.
FYI, the sermon is now posted–I added in a footnote responding to the response time and this discussion.
Adam
Sweet. I’ve added the link above. :-)