Friday, July 5, 2013

J.K Smith on "Naturalizing Shalom"

Read this article by J.K smith, recommended by my friend Jay Werner and written by a scholar I have appreciated for a long time. I like this so much, because i feel like his theological story and background parallels my own that I am going through right now. And a story shared by many others of this generation. He warns of how growing up in a "dualistic" fundamentalist conservative church background that is heavy on "getting saved and going to heaven" and light on "praying for the kingdom to come now" can lead people to go to the other extreme of working for heaven on earth so much that they forget about heaven and the spiritual. I really appreciate his wisdom and thoughts in this area as well as this final quote:


"The holistic affirmation of the goodness of creation and the importance of "this worldly" justice is not a substitute for heaven, as if the holistic gospel was a sanctified way to learn to be a naturalist. To the contrary, it is the very transcendence of God—in the ascension of the Son who now reigns from heaven, and in the futurity of the coming kingdom for which we pray—that disciplines and disrupts and haunts our tendency to settle for "this world." It is the call of the Son from heaven, and the vision of the New Jerusalem descending from heaven, that pushes back on our illusions that we could figure this all out, that we could bring this about. Shalom is not biblical language for progressivist social amelioration. Shalom is a Christ-haunted call to long for kingdom come."
J.K Smith

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