Class Reflection for Wednesday of Week 3

This week, Dr. Bolger, asked us what we thought the Kingdom of God might look like in society, our personal spheres and our churches.  In particular, he wanted us to think about what the kingdom of God might look like in the specific situations of our case studies.  It doesn’t seem as though there should be an enormously qualitative differance between what the Kingdom looks like in society vs. the church, but it’s interesting to think that if the Kingdom of God did come, would society look like the redeemed, glorified church or would the church look like society, albeit redeemed, glorified.  Of course, the idea is that there wouldn’t be any dicernable difference, but by thinking about why the church exists, what it will be  at the eschaton, we can perhaps have  a vision of what the church should look like now.  Mostly, church seems to be a place we go to worhsip God and become spiritually fed, which are wonderful things, but the church seems to exist alongside our secular lives without really being a sacrament of the future, which is how many of the theologians, those that Fuellenbach discusses, want to describe it. If it acted more as a sacrament of the future, would the church look more like a society…a way of life..that “contrast society” that Loehfink describes, instead of a building, which is so often how we think of it.  It seems that the line between the sacred and secular, then, would have to be blurred some…that is if the idea of redeemed society served as our model for church.  If it is the other way around, that when the Kingdom comes, society will like the church, then we may want to continue drawing the line between the sacred and secular clearly.  In any case, these are the things that I’m thinking about in terms of my case study.  Before  I begin thinking about how I would want to structure the ministry that I have in mind, I will want to wrestle with the larger issues involving the relationships between Kingdom, society and church.