Emerging Evangelicals: Faith, Modernity, and the Desire for Authenticity

6. Missional II: Kingdom Theologies

138 | 6 Missional II Kingdom Theologies I reviewed the diagram once more before holding it up to show everyone . For several minutes I had been sketching it in my field notebook. In the middle of the page was one word, in capital letters, “KINGDOM.” Curved and straight lines extended in all directions from this centerpiece. Capping the lines was a series of words: “Identity,” “Worship,” “Missional,” “Theology,” “Environment,” “Place,” “Politics.” I wanted to convey (however inartistically) the idea that so much of Evangelical thought and practice is connected to, if not derived from, kingdom theology: understandings about the nature—the what, when, where, why, how, and who—of “God’s kingdom.” This diagram was sketched during the plenary session of the May 2009 Subversion /TruthvoiceconferenceorganizedbyVirgil(whosestoryofsimplicitywe heard earlier). Because of my research with Emerging Evangelicals, Virgil asked metoparticipateinaninety-minutepublicquestionandanswersessiontoclose the opening day of the conference. This plenary session, “The Church, Emergent Christianity, and Its Future,” featured Virgil asking questions and facilitating audience inquiries about the Emerging Church to myself and Fred, a pastor and real estate agent from Atlanta, Georgia. The conference was in a suburban HolidayInneastofDayton.Oursessionwasinalecture-styleroomwithslanted seatingandanopenfrontstagewherewesatinthreeside-by-sidechairs. Midway through the session I was ready to share my sketch with Virgil, Fred, and the roughly sixty-person audience. Virgil had asked what kinds of observations I was making in my research. In response, I held up the diagram and explained its intent: the kingdom theology one advocates can impact virtually every element of religious life. It was a very brief moment altogether, and the remainder of the session continued uneventfully. Afterwards , Virgil thanked me for participating and asked to see the diagram again. He assessed it briefly, smiled, and exclaimed that it was strikingly similar to a diagram he planned to use for his conference presentation the next Missional II | 139 Virgil, thinking as a theologian, and I, thinking as an ethnographer, were convinced of the same conclusion: kingdom theology is central to Emerging Evangelical processes of identity construction, everyday interpretations, and institution making. We will consider several questions here. Where do kingdom theologies fit in the cultural logic of being missional? How do kingdom theologies offer adherents models of temporality, religious subjectivity, and agency? Why should we distinguish between different kingdom theologies? And how might the cultural work performed through kingdom theology capture a tension that confronts all Christianities? Kingdom, Time, Action The anthropologist Jon Bialecki (2009) provides a helpful framework for understanding how kingdom theology operates in Christians’ social and religious lives. Writing from the vantage of his ethnographic work with Vineday . Honestly, I thought he was being polite, trying to express some appreciation for my agreeing to be on the panel. I was wrong. When Virgil sent me a copy of his presentation PowerPoint the last slide more than resembled my ad hoc creation (Figure 6.1). Figure 6.1. Closing PowerPoint slide from Virgil’s May 2009 conference presentation. 140 | Missional II yard neo-charismatics in southern California, Bialecki argues that kingdom theology provides a clear view of the sociopolitical motivations and mobilizations of his consultants: theologically conservative, politically left-leaning Progressive Evangelicals. He explains that kingdom theologies address issues of temporality, “the phenomenological and cultural sense of and models for time’s immediate passing” (35), and eschatology, models for understanding God’s interventions in humanity’s future. The eschatological event of Christ’s Second Coming—much like other major events in Christian theology (creation , incarnation, resurrection, conversion) —reveals Christianity as a religion of rupture and discontinuity (Robbins 2007). In turn, the attention devoted to “God’s Kingdom” by Evangelicals reveals them as religious subjects preoccupied with ontological change, and the interplay of pasts, presents , and futures. The kingdom theology promoted by Vineyard charismatics is traced to George Eldon Ladd, an Evangelical professor at Fuller Theological Seminary (Pasadena, California) who wrote during the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s. Vineyard members believe that “‘the kingdom of God’ is suspended in its existence, as ‘already’ and ‘not yet’ at the same time” (Bialecki 2009: 116). This now, not yet view of the kingdom reckons that: Although Jesus’ death on the cross—and the advent of the Holy Spirit— has opened up an interstitial moment in which divine justice is imaginable and supernatural healing is possible, justice and healing are conceived of not as consistent with the present order but as moments out of time, part of an alien future whose only relationship with...