What Is the Kingdom of God? Rethinking Sacred Space

Interview Transcript

Shirley Paulson

Well, I’m looking forward to a fun and thoughtful conversation with our guest scholar, Dr. Karen Wenell. In a nutshell, we’re going to talk about where the kingdom of God is. And part of what makes this especially enjoyable for me is that Karen was one of my supervisors during my PhD studies at the University of Birmingham in the UK. So today I get to turn the tables a little and ask the questions.

Karen Wenell

Yes, so thank you so much for having me, Shirley. And yes, it feels more natural to talk about your work in a way, but I’m looking forward to this.

Shirley

Well, let me explain that Dr. Karen Wenell is a senior lecturer in the Department of Theology and Religion at the University of Birmingham. Her research focuses on biblical texts and the reception, especially the ways texts become resources for ethical reflection and action. Her work on theories of sacred space and place leads us directly into today’s topic on the Kingdom of God. So here we go.

I should say that one of the things that really intrigues me in your work actually is the observation that when the disciples ask Jesus when the kingdom of God is coming, he responds by telling them where it is. I think I had always noticed that passage without really stopping to consider why he answered it that way. So your investigation in this question opens up some surprising and thought-provoking possibilities about how people in the ancient world may have understood that.

So I think to get into this, we ought to start with like what the kingdom of God is. I imagine that any kingdom involves rules. So let me ask you this: would you say that the kingdom is more like a place where the ruling happens or just the fact that God is ruling? Let’s start there.

Karen

Yeah, I think it’s a really interesting kind of question, isn’t it? And I think that’s been really kind of influential in scholarship, that whole idea of the rule of God and is it the kind of fact of ruling or the kind of where…or is it a where or when? And yeah, I think for like more than a century, you know, scholars have really been kind of going down that “God’s rule” kind of line and sort of really emphasizing that or sometimes the fact of ruling, and kind of not paying attention to what kind of place we might say the kingdom is or kind of how we might think about it at that kind of level. So I think what I was trying to say is like those kind of questions and that kind of focus on the rule is just a little bit too restrictive. It’s not that it’s not about ruling, but that it kind of limits what we’re able to say about the kingdom.

And so if we think of it in this more emplaced way, there might be more we could say about it in ways that the kind of thoughts around the kingdom might open up. And anyway, if you think about ruling, like ruling always takes place somewhere, doesn’t it? So, like, it has to be located in some way. So I feel like the gospels aren’t really saying to us, you know, there’s a choice, like a rule or a place; but it’s something more about this kind of like emplaced performative kind of aspect of the kingdom–as something that’s sort of happening in the world–or is kind of like among people as in that verse that you mentioned. Relationships–not something on a map, but not something kind of just out there and not located in the world either, if that makes sense.

Shirley

It’s so interesting to think about the “where” place because I guess I’ve never actually seen it that I know of. So, do you think of it in terms of sacred places or what does… actually, what does sacred mean to you?

Karen 

It’s a distinction that we make. And so we try to distinguish some places as different to others. So there’s some way that we perceive that we’ve gone from something that isn’t sacred to something that is. So I guess it’s interesting that…so it’s something about boundaries, but it’s also, I guess, like I use an example in the book of like a sign…at a church sort of courtyard saying…please keep dogs on a lead because it’s consecrated ground. And so I guess that’s sort of setting out in quite simple terms–in terms of language–a kind of a sacredness for that particular area, but there’s nothing that particularly changes on the landscape or there might be a fence, it might be enclosed.

It’s thinking about how that kind of designation is being communicated and sort of understood by people and how they behave differently. So what they’re doing with their dogs when they come across that space and how they respect that and how it’s understood. So I guess it’s that kind of non-material quality and how we kind of think about what it means and how it’s lived and that kind of thing.

Shirley 

So am I hearing you right that by talking about sacred places, we’re getting a feeling that this might be where the kingdom of God is?

Karen 

I guess I’m trying to think about the kingdom as…I guess I was trying to kind of have a sort of a shift in kind of how we think about it from those kind of questions of future, present, rule, realm to more think about what kind of thing it is as a sacred space. So sacred spaces can very much be physical. We think about temples, churches, mosques. These are all physical places that we understand to be sacred and we behave in certain ways around them and in them. But I guess the kingdom, I was trying to understand it more as an important sacred space, but not one that has that physical referent in the same place where you can sort of point to it and say, there it is, you know, like the here and there, here it is. So it’s more, the kind of thing it is, is more something people build out of, in a way, the way they talk about it, the way they behave, the way they write things about it and live their lives in relation to it. So it can be as real as any physical place that they go to or point to or can physically experience, but it can direct their lives as much as any of those physical places. But yeah, the meaning is kind of through that kind of relational sort of experience.

Shirley 

I think you’re just as hard to pin down now as you were when you were doing my dissertation work.

Karen 

It is a bit slippery, definitely, and it is a bit abstract. But I guess, if you think about the meaning of a church, that meaning is symbolic. You know, you’re talking about it, you’re understanding that, you’re learning from other people around you why that space is sacred and what that sacredness means. So the kingdom has that same need; it still needs all that work, as it were, to kind of like talk about and understand it with other people in community. But it doesn’t have that kind of physical point. So it’s kind of doubly symbolic in a way, I guess.

Shirley

That’s so interesting. So you were talking about the doing of it and you used the phrase performing sacred space. Like how do you perform space? What does that mean?

Karen

Yeah, I guess if you think performative things like are things that require a lot of that kind of work to keep them kind of in our minds and like existing as it were. So the desks that we’re sat at or the chairs that we’re sitting on, those we can point to them and say, “Well, they’re kind of going to be there whether we’re sort of talking about them a lot or not.” But the kingdom is, yeah, a kind of a performative reality where it comes into being in the ways that we think about it, imagine it, argue about it sometimes, and live in relation to it.

So, I don’t know, if you think…if everybody…you think of this kind of like almost tidal wave of recitation of the Lord’s Prayer, “Your Kingdom Come”, that would happen Sunday after Sunday in a kind of global kind of date or weekly patterns. You know, if that just suddenly stopped and nobody talked about the kingdom anymore, you know, it’s not that, yeah, that it would… I guess I didn’t see it as my…as trying to like say, well, does it stop existing or not? But to say, well, that it would be difficult to then kind of re-enliven it and keep talking about it if all of that activity stopped. And I think the kingdom, because it’s so prominent in theology, in ritual, and in liturgy, it makes it seem really a solid part of the whole kind of fabric, but it’s still kind of…it has all that work going along with it, if that makes sense.

Shirley 

So interesting. I can see the participation in like the Lord’s Prayer or the ritual kinds of things we say or do in a space like that. What about the decisions to hang different colored curtains or the carpet or how do you make it sacred?

Karen 

Well, I guess, and maybe that’s where the kind of…where I’ve seen the ethics coming into it, where I think its kind of building blocks are more parabolic almost than anything else. They’re more like how you think through where you are in relation to the world, how your relations to others are, what communities you’re in, what the boundaries of those communities are, and how you ought to behave in light of that emplaced experience, in light of living in the world with other people. And that to me has an impact on ethics, responses to the world come out of that very located emplaced experience.

Shirley

So you’re using the word “emplacement.” What do you mean by that? Emplacement of the kingdom? What does that mean?

Karen

Well, I guess however much you talk about it as another world or an otherworldly kind of place, like it’s still always kind of spoken about from within the world from an emplaced perspective. So you can’t get away from that. I guess you can’t sort of like float above the world and sort of like exclude yourself from it in order to kind of like talk about what it is and what it means, I guess.

Shirley

So this is sort of like a way of connecting the divine thing with the human thing. Is that what I’m hearing?

Karen

I guess so. Yeah, connecting the divine and the human. I guess it’s kind of renewed each time it’s sort of enacted. So…if you think about in the gospels, the texts are really important to its kind of understanding. So I’m not trying to minimize the significance of text. But yeah, they’re kind of…so they have those kind of…there’s kind of almost core elements in the gospel. Things like…they’re talking about it in terms of an inside and an outside to the kingdom, or children being kind of belonging to it, or rich people struggling to enter it. So yeah, I guess that’s something that kind of parablic…the parables of the kingdom where there’s sort of surprising elements. Or I guess it’s always in kind of negotiation and thinking through things. So I wanted to get people away from thinking to tidy it up and make it really neat. And actually it’s about how we live our lives and, yeah, how we encounter the sacred in the world and how we understand that with other people.

Shirley 

Well, you’re right. It’s so interesting to think about how many times we hear, like Jesus saying, you’ll never enter the kingdom of heaven or kingdom of God if you do this or do that or don’t do this or do that. So I keep envisioning standing at the door of heaven, wondering if I’m going to get in or get out or whatever, not knowing quite where that is.

Karen

And it’s really interesting how people envision it, too, and like that whole idea of a kind of door. And there’s all these sort of different interesting elements.

And I think I also tried to talk about it in terms of like skill, because I think in the ancient world, there was more of that kind of like… Oh, I think Paula Gooder talks about it in her book on how heaven is like a kind of Hebrew cosmology and that kind of…There’s the above the earth and there’s the below the earth and the shawl. And people were like sort of more, …there was more skill around in the world to be able to kind of talk about those otherworldly kind of places and realms. That was just more kind of natural, and sort of…people had a more kind of understanding that kind of incorporated these non-material places or these non-material realm distinctions.

Whereas today, I think people think more symbolically or more sort of like, yeah, private space, private-public sort of spaces. So there’s not that kind of level of conversant kind of, you know, appreciation of other non-material spaces. Yeah, I think…but those skills are still there in religious communities, in…again in those kinds of community places where people do talk about them and try to understand what these places mean.

Shirley 

So, am I understanding you right by saying that this sense of space that we’re thinking about–or place—tends to negate the non-material aspects of life, like ideas or concepts or feeling or spirituality?

Karen 

Well, in a way, I think it does the opposite. I guess in modern thinking, we kind of separate physical and non-physical. But we don’t really live like that, do we? Like, it’s all together. So I guess that’s maybe the emplaced aspect—the ideas, emotions, beliefs, and spirituality. They’re all kind of what happens to us in bodies or in relationships and environments that we’re part of. So yeah, these are…but these can still be thought of as spatial, I guess is what I kind of wanted to say as well. So just because you can’t touch it in that way doesn’t mean it doesn’t like have a kind of…it doesn’t sort of take place or that we don’t take it seriously. Yeah.

Shirley 

So you’re stretching my mind about understanding space and place. You always stretch my mind. But anyway, so you can have a feeling or a spirituality or something that’s in a place but it’s not measured by a ruler.

Karen

Say it again so you…

Shirley 

Well, I’m asking you actually. So I think you’re saying that we can have ideas and things that are still related to a space or place. Is that right?

Karen

I guess so, but like all those like everything kind of comes together in kind of embodied experience in which happens in place. So I guess if you… on the skill thing again as well. Like some people have talked about it in terms of like sport, so like tennis or like swimming. My kids do a lot of swimming. So I guess swimming is a very physical thing. You’re in the water, you’re moving your body in certain ways, but you can’t then separate it from what’s going on in your mind. You have to know what you’re doing and that’s coordinated with the physical activity. So where do you draw the line? It’s part of the conscious sort of thinking and that kind of spiritual idea, thought realm, but it’s also very much translated into active physical things you’re doing. And so you might think about how to refine your abilities. And so I think that’s what all these things are sort of. They go together in terms of how we experience the sacred and how we do that from locations, from being in place and embodied, in-minded people who bring all that to the table, as it were, to the ground.

Shirley

Yeah, I think that’s really helpful. Your example here, like swimming, is a good example for helping us to see that we can engage in it, but you don’t lose your mind when you’re swimming.

Karen

Yeah, not purely physical; it’s physical and non-physical.

Shirley

So now let me see. Is there a difference now between the ancient and modern concepts of the sacred realm? I think you’re helping us to feel like we can feel our humanness in this. So ancient people were human too. Tell me about the difference between the ancient and modern concepts of these things.

Karen

Hmm, I guess it is that kind of what I was trying to get at, that kind of idea of ancient people being more comfortable with invisible realms than we kind of are in society and more broadly speaking today.

So I think even the language, the terminology of the kingdom itself– which I looked at a bit in the book—so you’ve got the kind of construction kingdom of God, which is interesting in terms of how it pairs the kind of person of God with a realm of the kind of kingdom, which… And then I think it’s really interesting, say, what Matthew does with this sort of kingdom of heaven, where he’s put two sort of spatial ideas together to really kind of emphasize that sort of location of God in heaven.

And again, this was a realm that people would have been very familiar with–to think about God’s dwelling being in heaven and this being sort of above the earth and you’ve got the pillars and the firmament and under the earth. So I think some of that we maybe struggle a little bit in the modern world to think in those terms because we don’t necessarily have that kind of understanding of the world to work with in broad terms. But maybe that can be cultivated in particular communities. But yeah, it’s less sort of part of everyday kind of concepts that we reach for readily in say the media or other.

Shirley 

Yeah, that’s interesting. You’re making me think about his parables, Jesus’s parables, when he never does talk about when you go to church, then you’re going to feel like you’re in the kingdom of God. And he talks about very everyday practical experiences.

Karen

Yeah. I love all the organic imagery and yeah, I’m trying to think about the environment and all the sort of animals and sheep and goats and yeast, one sold orchard are being compared to the kingdom. And again, I think that’s…it makes it very dynamic, very kind of like, again, connected to lived life and kind of that lived experience and relational significance of the kingdom, I think. It can be very eco-friendly if we read it that way.

Shirley

So then what is it that makes a place like sacred? Is it like the imagination of people or is it the performance or does it make any difference? Or how does it get sacred?

Karen 

Well I would see it like not things as being sacred in themselves but how it sort of happens through relationships, through the boundary making, and that kind of investing of care, meaning, and responsibility that comes through it. So I guess imagination does matter

and that performative element. But I guess it’s really…the thing that’s interesting to study, maybe for me, is like the real difference it makes in the world. So like how people might live their lives very differently based on their understanding of the kingdom of God rather than if they didn’t have that. And so it makes, yeah, like a huge…it can make a huge difference and a real significance. It can shape their day-to- day behavior, their ethics, the way they think of their own identity and belonging, what they’re included and excluded from, and their responsibilities towards other people. So I think it can be hugely shaping. And it makes it really kind of a perfect example of something with no physical structure that can still be very core to our identity and how we live our lives and what really matters to people.

Shirley

You keep finding ways of talking about this in ways I’ve just never thought of before. Like, so I’ve never thought about the boundary of the kingdom. And you’re talking about a boundary. What do you mean by a boundary of the kingdom?

Karen

Sometimes the kingdom—and other scholars have noticed this you know—where it’s almost talked about as if it’s the group of people, you know, rather than, yeah…so it’s almost like it’s trying to work out who we are as a…or who people, what the community is. So I guess that…and then how that involves a definition of the community and who the community thinks it is but also who they think is not part of the community. And there’s a lot of universal in the kingdom as well, a lot of universal kind of ways that we might think about it. And so then how do you then, again…that if you’re talking about the kingdom as emplaced as something that is part of the world where we live with other people, then those…then you have to think very carefully about who is inside and outside and whether you’re describing the universals in terms that only apply to one group. And I think those kinds of things then become important to those kinds of non-physical boundaries.

Shirley 

Okay, then other kinds of non-physical boundaries talk about our minds. Do you think that the sacred place is in somebody’s body or someone’s mind or the environment?

Karen

Yeah, it’s hard, isn’t it? I mean, I think it’s how we live; I guess it’s kind of connected to how we live together in the same world kind of thing. And where we find the sacred as we encounter it living in that world.

So I guess maybe one way to talk about is that how sacred can change over time. So if you think of something like standing stones maybe is a good example. So they’re very ancient structures that have been built by, yeah, yeah… I mean, we would love to know more about them and a lot of their origins is mysterious. So we know they’re there, we can say, but we don’t know exactly the set of beliefs that went with that, exactly the way people performed ritually in relation to them. They’re there. They’re very, you know, they’re marking the environment, but we don’t know everything about what they’re… how they were understood as sacred in the past. But people continue to treat those spaces as sacred, to have spiritual experiences there, to kind of… So it keeps moving, I guess. It keeps being performed in those places. So it has that kind of history. And it’s not a static one where it just has like one meaning and that just carries on through hundreds of years. You know, it’s dynamic, it’s changing.

I guess that’s the same way I think about the kingdom of God is…it’s something that didn’t have that initial physical aspect of its origins in terms, and it’s not just origins in that kind of whole sort of cultural kind of context. But it keeps moving; it keeps kind of being understood in changing ways and in different ways as people kind of live with it and keep thinking about it. Well, its sacred character maybe changes; it keeps moving.

Shirley 

So with it moving like that and involving people and where they are and how they interact with everything, there must be an ethical element in there then. And I know you study ethics and so how does that fit then with this moving place?

Karen

I guess that’s part of the kind of challenge of something like the kingdom that again in these parabolic ways asks us to think about who we are in different scenarios and how we treat other people in the world that share this, you know, kind of world with us. So I guess to me the parable is never kind of definitively sewn up in that it’s like the key to. So you have to keep thinking about it. You have to keep working on it and keep trying to understand who you are, who you are in relation to others and how you ought to behave in a world where…where it’s this idea of cohabitation that from Hannah Arendt and others. So where, yeah, you can’t hover over the earth before you’re born and pick a nice place to live. They all want to be born here because this looks like a nice place. No, no, if we didn’t get to choose that, then no one else did. So that gives us a certain responsibility to others who didn’t choose circumstances that may be very difficult, may be very different to ours. And we have to have that perspective of just in the same way we didn’t choose, they didn’t either. So I think that sort of supports or kind of gives us that sort of challenge to responsibility to think about our emplaced lives with others.

Shirley 

So I can’t just have a kingdom of God all to myself, right?

Karen

Well, not in that verse that we started with, I guess, but it’s defined as among you. And I think scholars have also said, well, it’s not very–this bothers me when they say—oh, it’s not very well defined. And I think, well, maybe not for you, but actually there’s a lot said about it. And I think it has had a lot of kind of attention, and maybe there’s more there than…maybe it’s just we’re not comfortable with all of what it has to say.

Shirley 

Well, you keep on stretching this for sure. Tell us about your book. Can you tell us the name of your book or how we find it or what is it?

Karen

Yeah, it’s called Locating the Kingdom of God: Performing Sacred Space and it’s… we are continuing with Bloomsbury. Yeah, I’m not sure I have… I keep waiting for my copy actually. A paperback copy was supposed to come to me, but I haven’t seen it yet. Yes, I believe you can get hold of it.

Shirley

So it’s published this year.

Karen

Yeah, well, year before.

Shirley

2025?

Karen 

I think it’s 2024 actually. See, we’re out of date already.

Shirley

Tell me, what would you like us to take away from your studies? What do you want us to continue to ponder?

Karen 

Yeah, well, I think, yeah, I can…I think for people to sort of change maybe some of the questions they ask about the kingdom or the kind of…again, that sort of what, what we might say that it is and to sort of expand our sort of thinking, I guess. I guess if people would kind of ponder where it’s being performed today, who’s in it, who’s excluded from it, those kinds of questions. How what we’re doing makes it visible or yeah, in the shared world.

Shirley 

So one of the things that I really appreciate about this conversation is that you are, I think, making the kingdom much more, I think, present and relevant and practical than thinking that it’ll happen someday somewhere else when it doesn’t really matter. But you’re making it sound like it really matters, and it matters how we live right now and that we engage in it in a way that keeps us in relationship to others and that the kingdom isn’t just some place that we think about theoretically somewhere else. That’s what I’m getting from you.

Karen

Yeah, definitely. Yeah, and I think that it’d be interesting to kind of think how it works in some of the texts you’ve looked at too. You know, thinking like, because it is, yeah, all these interesting different articulations of it, I think, are sort of fascinating to sort of think about and study as well.

Shirley 

All right, well, it’s fun to talk to you again. I really love it. Thanks a lot. I really appreciate it. Thank you. Bye bye.

Karen

Yeah, thank you so much. Yeah, thank you so much.