A great post and thread of comments started by James KA Smith over on
Generous Orthodoxy ThinkTank: Between Hauerwas and Constantine, cont’d.
we do well to remember that the kinds of differences and tensions we’re highlighting here are finer-point distinctions within a larger agreement and concern.
Because we have an eschatological hope like that you describe, we bear the burden to constitute an alternative, worldwide kingdom that shows how this could be possible. I see no reason to hope that this is possible apart from a community of the Cross and outside the operation of the Spirit.
Most certainly. Most importantly and more pointed, I think, it is ALWAYS , IMHO, a matter of priority that the envisioning we do not be tied to the success or failure of some such vision via state-directed means. The only scenario in which I believe the state “participates” legitimately is in support of communities of the spirit; as Jamie put it, those which are “inahabited”, and provide a way in which the world knows it is the world, and perhaps opens eyes to the deeper and truthful justice of the KIngdom of God; and also knowing that this is but a glimpse (eschatalogical) What I’m trying to emphasize is that we don’t see “state politics” and its corrupt priorities as any kind of impetus or neccessary to “getting things done”; thier support in the work of the People of God via the church is not unwelcome, but it is not dependent upon them, nor upon their structures. To many, this sounds like “theocracy” (it IS , sort of, but of a different variety—mostly becuase it’s NOT government/state, it’s directed by what Clarence Jordan called “The God Movement” – his Cotton Patch translation of the phrase “The Kingdom of God”. I suppose saying such things will make all kinds of people nervous)
I must say that, having been first discipled under an apolitical version of the faith which thought the only hope for the world was evangelism, and then moving to embrace a liberation-like commitment to structural transformation, I’m starting to come back to having a significant place for personal conversion as the condition of possibility for the achievement of justice. This would be a necessary but not sufficient condition: we still need just structures. But those just structures also need to be inhabited by agents whose desires and loves are being transformed by Christ.
Amen! I particularly resonate with the final phrase : those just structures also need to be inhabited by agents whose desires and loves are being transformed by Christ
Which calls upon the church to be” insanely” focused on re-forming of our desires and loves. This was talked about at some length in Hauerwas and Willimon’s Where Resident Aliens Live, which I just read this weekend. I hoping to read much more of this in Does God Need the Church? Toward a Theology of the People of God which I am just beginning. In all of this, I am praying for a breakthrough in what has seemed like an interminably long period of feeling I am without a home in this sense. It’s not just SEEMED like it. It HAS BEEN and IS an interminably long time. It seems as if the desire to find a place is itself almost eschatalogical; I am at a stage of HOPING for some place in which I can HOPE with a gathered people.
