A New Kind of Christianity - Brian McLaren [146]
11. To be clear: I’m not denying the parousia in any way: I’m simply suggesting that what parousia meant to the early Christians may have been very different from what Christians today mean by the second coming of Christ.
12. See N. T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1996), pp. 360ff.
13. This understanding—parousia as the beginning of a new beginning—corresponds with the original political image of a king arriving after a victory. His arrival marks the beginning of a new reign, a new kingdom.
14. To me, the phrase “new generation of humanity” aptly captures the gist of “Son of Man,” so important in the gospels. The phrase evokes Dan. 7, where the Son of Man appears singularly as an individual (7:13–14) and socially as a people, the “holy ones (or saints) of the Most High” (7:18; 7:22; 7:27). In this way, when Jesus speaks of the “coming of the Son of Man,” he can be referring both singularly to himself having already come (as the “firstborn” of this new generation; see Paul’s use of the term in Rom. 8:29; Col. 1:15, 18; also, Heb. 1:6; 12:23) and socially to the “saints” to come (such an important term to Paul, appearing constantly in his letters). Just as the singular new generation of humanity came in Jesus (explaining his use of “has come” or “came” to describe himself, as in Matt. 11:19; Mark 10:45), the social new generation of humanity was coming soon, and Paul calls it “new creation” or “new humanity” (2 Cor. 5:17; Eph. 2:15; 4:20–24; Col. 3:9). For a highly nuanced and closely researched exploration of this term and its implications today, see Andrew Perriman’s The Coming of the Son of Man (Carlisle, UK: Paternoster, 2006) and Re: Mission (Carlisle, UK: Paternoster, 2008). See also the work of Tim King and friends at www.presence.tv.
15. The already/not yet language is often applied to the present, but I’m suggesting it more accurately applies to the period between Christ’s resurrection and the temple’s destruction.
16. For more, see Everything Must Change (Nashville, TN: Nelson, 2007), chap. 18, and Secret Message of Jesus (Nashville, TN: Nelson, 2006), chaps. 19–20.
17. Thanks to Diana Butler Bass, personal communication, for the term “anticipatory ethic.” See her A People’s History of Christianity (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2009) for a masterful overview of church history from this perspective.
18. Songwriter Bruce Cockburn captured the laughability of human effort achieving the peaceable kingdom in a 1976 song, “Laughter”: “Let’s hear a laugh for the man of the world / Who thinks he can make things work / Tried to build the New Jerusalem / And ended up with New York / Ha ha ha…”
19. Jesus’s mother also provides a model for the participatory way God’s good future comes into history. Mary was not impregnated against her will, nor did Jesus suddenly appear adult and motherless, as if “beamed down” by magic from heaven. Instead, God participated with Mary, and Mary with God, in the bringing of Jesus into the world. Like Mary, even if we deem ourselves small and insignificant, we receive a tender proposal to be participants and protagonists in history rather than mere observers or victims of it. Like Mary, we accept and participate by saying, “Let it be with me according to your word.” We let our lives be taken up into God’s unfolding drama as the Holy Spirit “comes upon” us and the gentle power of God “overshadows” us (Luke 1:35, 38).
20. See Michael Gorman, Cruciformity: Paul’s Narrative Spirituality of the Cross (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001).
21. This is the umbrella term that includes dispensationalism.
22. An older conventional view associated in the United States with Manifest Destiny and Christian Reconstructionism, postmillennialism was used to justify Christians seizing political power and even using violence (against native peoples, for example) to “bring God’s kingdom” to earth. Postmillennialism experienced a resurgence in the Reconstructionist movement of the 1970s