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| Image text: "Every valley shall be raised up, every mountain and hill made low. Isaiah 40:4A" Image source. |
I've been reading "The Kingdom of Children: A Liberation Theology" by R. L. Stollar. Here's a section about "eschatology."
From pages 113-114:
In this chapter, we will look at what theologians call eschatology. This is the study of the future, the study of how the kingdom of God breaks into our right-here and right-now and creates profound changes to our lives. In liberation theology, eschatology is the focus on how powers around us-- our churches, our government, our economic order-- need to be redeemed. They need to be redeemed because they are set up in a way that makes it harder for us to love our neighbors as ourselves. They need to be redeemed because they do not place the first last and the last first. Liberation theologians want us to think about how the kingdom of God should disrupt these powers around us. "Hope in the future seeks roots in the present."
Child liberation theology raises the same issues, but with regard to children. Child liberation theology also engages eschatology by asking how we can better realize the kingdom of God in the right-here and right-now for children. The path to doing this involves taking Jesus seriously when he said in Mark 9:37, "Whoever welcomes one of these little children in my name welcomes me; and whoever welcomes me does not welcome me but the one who sent me." What I am going to argue might seem too audacious or maybe even sacrilegious. Part of realizing the kingdom of God in the right-here and right-now is seeing children as God-to-us. Children are not simply representatives or servants or mouthpieces of God. They are, in a profound and real sense, God's chosen and royal substitutes. They serve as God-to-us in our right-here and right-now.
Now before you discard this book, let me tell you what I am not saying: I am not saying that children are gods. I am not saying that we should worship children. And I am not saying that children are substitutes for God in the sense that we no longer need God. What I am saying is that Jesus called us to see children as God-to-us in our right-here and right-now. They are the neighbors who we are supposed to love as ourselves. And just as the commandment to love our neighbors is rooted in the greatest commandment to love God (Matt. 22:36-40), loving children is similarly rooted in loving God. This makes loving children an act of worship.
Eschatology? As far as I know, eschatology is about heaven and hell and the end of the world- the complete opposite of the "right-here and right-now" Stollar is talking about. He says, "This is the study of the future, the study of how the kingdom of God breaks into our right-here and right-now and creates profound changes to our lives." The grammar of the sentence suggests that those are 2 different ways of saying the same thing, but, what on earth, "the future" is totally different from "how the kingdom of God breaks into our right-here and right-now." Right?
Even so, I'm like, really into this. I'm very excited about the idea that our beliefs about heaven and hell and the end of the world should have a profound effect on the way we live now- in particular, that it means the kingdom of God breaks into our world now, and we fight for liberation for everyone.
When I was evangelical, I believed that people go to heaven or hell based on whether they are "saved"- ie, whether they believed in Jesus and "prayed the prayer" to commit their lives to him, with the appropriate amount of emotional sincerity. Heaven and hell last for eternity; everything we do here on earth is meaningless in comparison. Our actions in this life only matter to the extent that they nudge people closer to "getting saved," to falling on the correct side of that binary.
In evangelical land, it's easy to have the attitude "well, I'm saved, so there's nothing else I need to be doing now. Just waiting till I go to heaven." Or, "why should we give food to hungry people? If we're not also telling them about Jesus, it's pointless."
In evangelical land, it always felt like there was this big divide between the eternity of heaven and hell, and the normal lives we're living right now. Like getting people saved to get to heaven is the most important thing, and the time we spend just living our normal lives outside of that is just busywork.
But now my beliefs are completely different. Now I believe that we are supposed to bring the kingdom of heaven to the earth, as Jesus taught us to pray. Heaven is not some faraway unreachable thing; heaven is going to come to this earth, and we should do the work to make it happen. As Martin Luther King Jr said, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." That's heaven- and it ain't gonna bend itself. We have to do it.
So we look forward to heaven by doing the work to fight for justice on this earth. It's so profoundly and viscerally connected- not like the "pie in the sky when you die" and "fire insurance" of evangelicalism. I love it.
And that's what Stollar is talking about here. Eschatology is not this faraway future thing- it's about how the kingdom of God comes into our world right now. It's about the systems and powers in this world, and how they need to be redeemed and transformed, every valley raised up and mountain made low.
(Suggested background music for this post is Belinda Carlisle's "Heaven is a Place on Earth.")
So... it strikes me as strange that Stollar uses the word "eschatology" for this, but also, I love it. I think this a good way to think about heaven and hell. (And maybe this *is* how "eschatology" is used in liberation theology?) Let's do the work right now on this earth. That's heaven and hell.
And it makes me think, maybe religious beliefs should be understood as projections that inform our thinking about what we should do right now. Just like a complex 3-dimensional object projects a 2D shadow- religious beliefs are that shadow, and we live our lives in the shape of a 3D object that could make that shadow. Maybe heaven and hell are not real, but whatever you believe about them makes a real difference in how you live. Maybe religion is not actually true, but it's about the power of a story. Sure, you could make a list of behaviors that people should do or not do, but people respond better to stories. A big grand story about what the world is, and how God wants us to live, and the way that filters down into our very concrete actions in the here-and-now.
(And, to clarify, I'm not saying being religious is better than being non-religious. There's a wide range of different ways that people map their religious beliefs [or lack thereof] onto questions of morality/purpose/how we should live our lives, and I would not say that religious people's mappings are better than non-religious people's.)
I wouldn't regret it, if I lived my life in an effort to bring heaven to this earth, and then it turned out heaven didn't exist. Even if heaven is not real, there's something about this that *is* real. Something about... helping people is the right thing to do, even if there's no God rewarding you for it. That's real. It's a religious belief- because how can you prove it? what would it even mean to prove it? It's a religious belief that feels even deeper than my religion, somehow.
My religion is "I don't know how to explain to you that you should care about other people."
The kingdom of heaven is not far away. As Jesus said, the kingdom of heaven is at hand.
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Posts about "The Kingdom of Children":
"The Kingdom of Children" (a book about child liberation theology)
The Kingdom of Children: Comparing Religions
The Kingdom of Children: Eschatology
Related
The Prayer That Jesus Taught Us To Pray
I don't believe in a literal "Jesus coming back." But, be ready.
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