Part 2: Encountering Empire with a Christ Shaped Imagination for the World
Written by Daniel Tidwell : December 4, 2007
I was born and raised in a certain subculture of Christianity that has generally understood the work of Christ as being particularly attached to the time frame of the arrest, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus. And while this is an important part of my faith, when I talk about letting Christ be the center and shaper of how we live our lives, this is not what I am talking about.
Jesus Christ was born as an infant; he lived among us; God shared in our humanity.
While Christianity has been fraught with debates as to how this works, it is central to the faith that in some way, God took on the human condition, entering humanity in the person of Jesus Christ. This incarnation is the central revelation of God that scriptures attest to.
This is the central lens of which I speak when I talk about a Christ centered imagination for the world.
The Incarnation—God fully entering humanity—is an act distinctly in keeping with God’s character as creator. So much of the consistency of who God is comes in God’s creativity and love. God desires to create and recreate relationship with humanity.
When we talk about following Jesus, being like Christ, and seeking to know God, we are in the realm of interacting with the God who incarnates. God takes on flesh. God creates. God is wildly creative and imaginative in the lengths to which God will go in order to reach a single human being (check out the parables).
Not only is Jesus interested in individual humans being restored, but he proclaims the message of the Kingdom of God. This is a broader imaginative vision that Jesus articulates. It is an invitation to creatively and imaginatively live the categories of the parables and the Lord’s prayer. As it is in heaven, so let it be also on earth.
When Jesus talks about the Kingdom of God (also sometimes as the kingdom of heaven) he is declaring it as being created and perpetuated here in our midst. It is not a kingdom like the empires of this world; instead, it is alive in the hearts and actions of those who live into it by faith in the restoring relationship we have with Jesus.
Learning to live by the kingdom of God means allowing our imaginations and our vision for the world to be shaped by Christ. This means that our imagination, and thus our vision for ethics and interaction with others are shaped by the categories of creation, incarnation, and resurrection.
What happens when we approach people with the hope of these categories being worked out in their lives? What happens when we believe and live in the hope of our relationship with the God who becomes like us in order to know and transform us? How does this impact the way we see the church at work in the beauty and depravity of the lives of people all around us?
As we enter the Advent season, I hope that we will allow Emmanuel to continue to incarnate in our lives and our vision for ourselves and the world. Allowing Christ to shape our imagination for the world helps us to live in the space between what is already and what we strain toward that is not yet manifest among us.
Come quickly Lord Jesus, as you have come, and you are here with us today. Continue to incarnate yourself among us through our hearts and lives being shaped to extend your love and create your kingdom, on earth as it is in heaven.
for further reading . . .
- None Found
Is “the kingdom” something spiritual, like an invisible system, a vision, an ideal or an attitude? Or do you believe in an coming, visible rule of God on earth. The reason I am asking is because of this fuzz about preterism in Emerging Church-circles. It seems that quite a few prominent people believe that the kingdom has already come and maybe Jesus too… You put it in a way that seemed to be in line with how preterist-oriented people would put it…
Jonas,
I would have to say that I don’t draw very clear distinctions between the spiritual reality of the Kingdom of God and the physical and social realities of the world we live in. I tend to take Jesus pretty seriously when he proclaims His Kingdom as here among us. I’m not talking about a future theocracy when God will return to reign over us all, though I don’t discount that such a thing can be read in the scriptures.
I tend to lean more toward not wasting my time pining for the some sweet day of the future when there will be no more for us to worry about. I think that Jesus has introduced plenty for me to deal with right now without having to put the promise of resurrection and restoration entirely in a future eschatology.
My position of the kingdom of God as operative now among us is based solidly on the hope of complete restoration and resurrection in Christ. Because of this hope I choose to follow Christ into the restored life that he promised for us right now. This is the already and not yet category that I talk about above.
The spiritual reign of God in individual hearts constitutes the physical reign of God among us as we work out the Kingdom of God, living by Kingdom ethics, economics, social systems, and relationships.
This is all rooted in a very trinitarian understanding of God existing in and inviting us into community. God is at work past, present, and future to reconcile us to relationship with God and one another. This is a glimpse of my limited understanding of the Kingdom of God.
I hope that may clarify as much as it muddies the waters.
Peace,
daniel.t
To Jews, who were after all the people Jesus was addressing, “the Kingdom of God” was Israel!
That kingdom had come under the sway of pagan foreigners. So people wanted to know, When will God re-establish His rule (and our possession) of this land where He brought our ancestors?
That wasn’t a pressing problem for upper-class Jews, who could tell themselves that their prosperity–and the rule of the Romans, why not?–must be the will of God, because, after all, it was The Way Things Are.
For the poor, as for the more devout, there were discrepancies. The poor were, themselves, discrepancies–For didn’t Deuteronomy say: “If you follow my Way there will be no poor among you”?
Do I mean that Jesus was being “merely political”? As Crossan likes to say, “100% political and 100% religious.” For people of that time, as for the followers of Islam, there was no question of “separation of church and state” or any thought that there could be a religion without political implications. (Given that they were inextricably intertwined, the way a person connected the two was the main point: “Does he use his religion to support his political interests?–or does loyalty to God motivate his political position?” In Jesus’ terms, is a person’s actual religion the worship of God, or the worship of Satan?–who at least claimed to rule all the kingdoms of the Earth, in that story of Jesus’ temptation!)
To go out in a crowd of poor (pious village) people, in 1st Century Israel, and talk about “the Kingdom of God” was to raise horrendous political issues. One could stir up hopes, and where would it end?! This was not a misunderstanding; this was a direct implication of his message as they heard it! “We had hoped he would be the one to redeem Israel!”
And yet God has always ruled the world, rules it, always will. And yet Jesus was caught by the authorities, tormented, humiliated, killed.
The tension of this paradox demands our hope for a future in which God rules openly! But the kingdom is also here, in full force, “spread out upon the earth though men do not see it!”
So how can we better come to see it? What do we need to help us recognize that it is here, and live in it?
Forrest,
I love the questions you raise at the end here. It is my belief that this is why we need a “Christ shaped imagination.” We can only see it by learning to live into it in the way we think, act, speak, and create. I know for certain that we need community, we need to read the scriptures with an imaginative hope for how they intersect our world, and we desperately need the regeneration that comes from communion with God. I would love to hear other folks respond to this question from Forrest.
Peace,
daniel.t
Daniel. I am not sure that Jesus “proclaims His Kingdom as here among us” in such a clear way that you suppose. There are actually more sayings of Jesus that puts the kingdom in the future than as something present. And I am not sure anyway that I am in the exact same situation as those who originally heard Jesus say that the kingdom was near. I am all for living out the values of the kingdom right here and now, but I also think that this will be done better in the long run if we “put” God´s kingdom mainly in the future and accept the church “only” as a fore-taste or fore-runner of the kingdom. This would make us more humble, I think. Groups in the history of the church that has thought that they had complete access to the kingdom or that confused the lines between the church and the kingdom, has tended to end up in either trusting force and violence to spread this kingdom or to isolate themselves in order to protect the kingdom.
2.000 years has soon gone, and if I have to believe that the kingdom of God has come, this to me seems to be not a very convincing new world, New Jerusalem etc.