from my Theopoets Journal

I am not a Systematician nor am i a Constructive. I am a THEOPOET! The Theopoet works in fragments, ideas, stories, myths. We work in image and language, with the hungers and desires of our age.

Where the scholar pretends that they have no emotion, that the body can be removed from knowing and knowledge - that the reader and what the reader feels - is not important - the Theopoet knows better!

Inspired by Jan Zwicky and her idea of Lyric Philosophy, Witeensteins fragments and Rubem Alves Theopoetry I present the notes, fragments, corners of ideas and undeveloped Theopoetry from my Scholars Journal.

FILLED WITH THE SPIRIT:

To speak about the Kingdom of God is to speak about a non-kingdom. This is seen most clearly in our notions of the historic Christ, Jesus of Nazareth. In this person, in whom we say we encounter the passion and incarnation of God, we have named a reality we call 'prince of peace', 'king of kings' and 'Lord'. All these phrases offer up a reversal of expectation - princes, kings and lords are not born in mangers, nor do they die on crosses as politically scandalous/political subversives.

For Jesus to be prince is to be non-prince, to be King is to be non-king, to be Lord is to be non-lord. The non-kingdom of God as revolutionary ideal is a revolution that never fully arrives in our time, nor is it only a future event which can never be grasped.

The Revolution of God, a more fitting title than Kingdom, is a revolution of community and Incarnation. To say Jesus is Lord is to name the powers-that-be that are present in Ceaser as Lord have failed to incarnate the radical inclusiveness of Gods Revolution.

Cesar, or the Powers and Principalities present in every era of every age of every culture, will always be beholden to the pursuit and maintainance of his/her own power. Governments, even the best of them, will fall into that sin of selfishness - this could be war-making, human rights violating, environmental disaster or economic death. To name the non-kingdom present in Christ is to say that those communities that gather in the name of the Incarnate Passion of God (or Spirit, or Universe) are called to live out a radical communal life that challenges the powers-that-be.

For example - where cultures can not be inclusive, diverse, welcoming and peace making the communities of spirit (churches, community groups, social justice groups) have then a responsibility to live out a way of being that is 'the kingdom come' or 'the revolution present'.

The great sin of the churches is that where our culture has failed to include female, queer, minority and other voices the church should have been embodying these ways of being as a witness and testimony to the world which, by its idolatry to power and wealth, can never be Gods revolution.

To what end, then, does the non-kingdom of God function in the world? Are we to retreat from the world and set-up tiny, counter-cultural outposts on the margins of society?

Yes!

Are we to embody in widening circles the realities we live in our revolutionary lives? Do we embody another way of being and then enter into the public world as a call to conversion.

Yes!

Here we cut to the heart of what it may mean to be saved. For the conservative xtian it means a personal relationship with God which leads us to seek the salvation of another - to get their butts into heaven/out of hell.

For Liberals it means a communal salvation from poverty, injustice and war.

I am here suggesting a Integral Salvation. This is a conversion to Gods revolution that includes our MIND, BODY and SOUL. A spiritual conversion leads to mental conversion of my thoughts, focusing me on the incarnate other and their needs and the physical realities they live in.

To convert culture from a spirit of death, oppression and injustice is to convert the Spirit, but if we do not convert our mental systems then the realities we expierence bodily will never change. Salvation can beging with any one of these. But must also include the other.

If salvation is to be purley spiritual, or only of the soul, then we have no responsibility for our physical realities, how we treat our body or the wisdom of our bodies. This form of salvation only ever leads to post-world thinking.

To rely on a social gospel for salvation alone only ever suggests that salvation from physical realities is necessary but does not recognize the spirit of the age that allows for such a form of sin - societal oppression - to exist in the first place.

Integral Salvation insists that their can be no salvation that does not take all three into consideration. A mind/body/soul (integral) salvation seeks to engage with the whole human reality as it is revealed from these 3 positions. This then is a kosmocenteric salvation - respecting the interdependence of all systems on all levels of being.

To seek salvation of the world - kosmocentrically - is to work across the 3 positions in order to model ways of health for the whole of Creation. Salvation in this manner seeks the conversion of the war-mongering president as well as the health of our rivers and the lives - human and non-human - that rely on them.

When we speak of the Community of Spirit being the revolution that the world cannot be we are recognizing that we are doing this as part of the system and participants on multiple levels of the Kosmos and that our actions have ramifications even for those systems we cannot expierence directly.

Conversion then is not to only come into right relationship w/God but to come into right relationship w/humanity, the earth, our bodies and our famallies and our culture. It is to begin a process of mind, body, spirit that seeks to have a healthy way of being in the world. It is also to recognize that such a process is a never ending journey.

The non-kingdom of God is a kingdom of Kosmocenteric responsibility. It is to pray for - by contemplation, action, community - the breadth of relationships in the Kosmos and our place in them from atoms, molecules, to cells, to beings, to consciousnesses. Likewise it is to seek salvation that is true across all levels of relationship - the balance of natural and living systems.

TO BE CONTINUED