The Table Video

Transcript:

I use, maybe inappropriately, the word utopia because I think in terms of God’s presence and intervention in our affairs, recreation of the world. And I think in terms of the positive vision that is shaped by the grand elements of Christian story that have to be kind of critically always attended to so as not to be co-opted. It’s a kind of co-option of that story into the projects that are alien to it. It’s a very important task of theology.

But I think, I mean, when I name home of God among mortals, I see the image of the new Jerusalem and interesting left-right, the city contrasted with the Babylon. And, if you set this contrast of the two, you see the kind of trajectories of history in the imagination of this year. And to me, that is not just utopia, you dreamt one dreams up. It’s actually formed profoundly out of a kind of human self and the world that is incarnate in the story of Jesus Christ.

I mean, I’m pretty straight forward Jesus is the answer kind of a guy, right? It just really important to read that really well and not domesticate Jesus, not to create those little Jesus’ in our own image and we know that this is the propensity so insidious, even folks who do their best to do historical work, to dig very closely and then suddenly you look, it looks the same way as the guy who crea-, who wrote about him, right?

Kinda of a Jesus in multiplicity of faces and you can trace it up to today also. And that’s the thing that we have to worry about, projecting ourselves onto this and then claiming our own utopian thinking as with a divine sanction and then you’re back into a- we’re chasing our own tails. [relaxed instrumental music]