After SVS: Orion Edgar, Justice and the Kingdom of God: Atonement and New Creation
After SVS 2010 is an extended dialogue with presenters from the first annual Society of Vineyard Scholars conference, held Feb 11-13, 2010. Monday through Friday until March 26th we’ll profile an SVS presenter and dialogue with them around their paper. Click here for a brief intro and link directory of the series. Full text of papers are available to SVS members.
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Orion Edgar, Justice and the Kingdom of God: Atonement and New Creation
In this paper, I take up George Eldon Ladd’s The Gospel of the Kingdom, a founding text of Kingdom Theology. Drawing out some key insights from Ladd, I propose to address two key questions: first, what is the kingdom of God? And second, how do we enter it? I show how Jesus’ conception of the kingdom of God holds together the eschatological and the ethical, proposing that Jesus is drawing on a vision of God’s rule with ancient precedent in Jewish thought, associated with the rule of the priestly Davidic kings. I introduce and outline the work of Old Testament theologian Margaret Barker, which shows how an understanding of Christ’s work of atonement can be deeply enriched by seeing it in terms of the ancient temple rites of the Jewish day of atonement, confirming the author of Hebrews’ view that Jesus is the culmination and perfection of the Jewish tradition. This ancient understanding of atonement involves making good of the effects of sin, which restores human beings to relationship with God, one another, and the earth by which God sustains all life, and involves a vision of the rule of God is always informed by man’s original calling in Genesis, to till and to keep the garden. These words have complex resonances in their Hebrew form which allude to serving God in worship, and serving humanity and all creation by maintaining a just order. The work of atonement, in the ancient ritual which prefigures Christ, depends on the priests’ transformation in the presence of God, which leads to the priests’ being sent out as a representative of God to lovingly govern the creation.
I relate this understanding of the kingdom of God to the comprehensive vision of justice given in Isaiah, drawing briefly on the work of N.T. Wright on eschatology. I conclude by drawing together these insights to show that Jesus’ conception of the kingdom involved a comprehensive transformation of human life, and that as such our understanding of entering the kingdom involves both being transformed, and joining in the work of transformation to which this vision calls us, of restoring human relationships with God, with each other, and with the rest of the created world. All this is participation in the vision of a kingdom whose fulfillment is the final creation of a new heavens and a new earth announced in Isaiah and Revelation.
Interview with Orion:
Q: How did you become interested in your topic?
A: In my philosophical work I have been thinking through the implications of a recovery of the deeply embodied point of view which is at work in the Hebrew background to Christian thought, and which remains a crucial aspect of a view of the world that allows that God could become a human being. I came across the work of Margaret Barker on the implicit theology of the Jerusalem temple, in which she sees ancient roots of many Christian ideas (the trinity, atonement, incarnation) which she argues were suppressed by later Judaism. Her work depends on very detailed investigation of many ancient extra-biblical texts, but it also seems to be fundamentally in accord with many of the canonical sources which are important for kingdom theology, especially second and third Isaiah, so I decided to research the kingdom motif in Barker’s temple theology and attempt to explain the significance of the ancient Jewish tradition with the help of the viewpoint represented in Isaiah, which understands justice and worship as fundamentally intertwined with one another.
Q: How do you think your paper is relevant to the Vineyard movement at large?
A: What I hoped to draw out of it is an appreciation how deeply liturgy and church structures embody a world view. I have a feeling that we have to ask what sort of thing we think a human being is and what a human being is for, and how we provide implicit answers to those questions in the way we do church. To go a bit deeper than that, I think several global problems at the moment (the credit crisis, climate change, our vulnerability to oil prices / availability, and persistent global economic imbalances) are results of our inability to correctly understand what a human being is. Consumerism has become ontological, as it were, and I think that we need to learn to tell a story about God transforming human beings into what human beings really are and are meant to be, which is not consumers but something like priestly guardians of creation.
Q: What do you think might be the practical implications of what you’re exploring?
A: Hmm… I’m not sure. I take seriously the thought that theology of this kind should be exploratory without always needing to look for ‘practical applications’ – partly because thought is often most honest and so most fruitful in the long term when it is driven by a desire for truth rather than by a practical goal. In many ways I hope theology is an exercise in allowing God to question and change our practical agendas, rather than finding solutions to our problems. If there are any practical applications of what I have said someone who has experience of running a church would probably be better positioned to speak about that than me. But, if I need to have a stab, I think a practical implication is that we need to work hard on making our liturgy (for example our songs, and the words we use to explain our celebration of the eucharist) really speak out of a deep and comprehensive understanding of what it means for human beings to be priests, to govern the creation. Barker speaks of the ‘high priesthood of all believers’, because in Christ our calling is to enter the holy of holies, to be transformed, but we have to participate in the work of atonement by going out into the world and making peace, doing justice, bringing life where there is death. I’m afraid I’m not really answering your question very well!
Orion will be available for further questions and dialogue in the comments
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Orion Edgar is a PhD student in Philosophical Theology at the University of Nottingham, investigating the theological significance of philosophical approaches to embodiment, with a particular interest in theological approaches to food and eating. He joined the Vineyard thirteen years ago, and has recently moved from Nottingham to the mountains of North Wales with his wife, Sharon.
