2.6 Citizens of the Kingdom (radical evangelicalism series)

2.1 The State of Faith in America
2.2 Dunk and Run
2.3 Lasting Conversion
2.4 Joining a Club
2.5 The Mixed Church
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2.6 Citizens of the Kingdom
26. So, what is this kingdom again that true converts to Christ are becoming part of? What is its nature and what are its values?

It is, more than anything else, the kingdom of God. It is not ultimately a visible church, and it certainly is not a visible state. God is its only king, and its only high priest is Christ. 

It has other priests, but these are all the women and men of the invisible kingdom (1 Pet. 2:5, 9). Yes -- women are priests in the kingdom of God, despite what the current flavor of Christian nationalism in America might think.

It has no earthly king. From time to time, earthly kingdoms have had earthly kings, but these have never been Christ. Indeed, they rarely have had the spirit of Christ, who reigns as a servant, who "emptied himself" of the status and power of the Son of God to walk among us (Phil. 2:6-7). He was born virtually unknown and unseen in a humble place surrounded by animals (Luke 2:7).

If some earthly figure uses Christianity to gain power or weath for themselves, they are an antichrist. Let them be accursed (Gal. 1:8).

27. It thus goes without saying that if we "convert" someone into a church in which God is not truly king or Jesus is not truly Lord, then we have inducted someone into a club and not the Church of Jesus the Christ. We have brought someone into a tribe but not the people of God. We are leading them to worship an idol of some kind.

What does this look like? It is any context where God is not truly all in all.

We reflected earlier on the fact that the earthly church often mixes the hay and straw of earthly culture in with the gold and silver. As long as Jesus is ultimately and truly Lord, this is not fatal. As long as God is the one worshiped, the church can survive some stubble to be singed on the Day of Christ's return.

But when a church becomes a hero cult, it is encroaching on Jesus' territory. Pastors and leaders are meant to be servants, not kings. Certainly the church has no room for an idol of the state or an idol of any kind. God must be all in all.

Protestants are not meant to have saints, and even Catholics generally wait until after someone has died to declare one. No, in the biblical way of thinking, all believers are saints, holy ones (e.g., 1 Cor. 1:2). The word saint never appears in the singular in the Bible. Paul gives us the Christian perspective when he notes that God especially highlights the lesser parts of the body in the body of Christ, which is the church (1 Cor. 12:22-24).

We humans love hype and we love heroes, but the ordinary person is the earthly hero of God's story, and Christ himself is the "head" of the Church.

28. So when the church becomes a circus and a spectacle, with worship becoming more like entertainment, we are beginning to create churches of straw and hay. We are bringing people into more and more of a club rather than the kingdom. There is nothing wrong with emotion. There is nothing wrong with enjoyment. There can be substance in the midst of all-too-humanness.

But the focus must always be Christ. 

It's fun to join a club. It's fun to watch a movie. It's fun to go to a concert. But if Christ is not the feature show, it is not the Church. 

The Corinthians had this problem with the Lord's Supper. It was very enjoyable for some -- they were getting drunk alongside a gluttonous feast. Meanwhile, others in the assembly had no food at all. Paul says it starkly -- that isn't the Lord's Supper (1 Cor. 11:20). 

In the same way, a church is only a church if Christ is the true center of the show. Are we praying to the Lord or are we just talking to ourselves. Are our prayers monologs or even secret sermons? Are they performances? True prayers are spoken to God, empowered by the Spirit.

29. Then there is the sermon. In the next chapter, we will explore truly biblical values in more detail.

If people are attracted to our church because we are reinforcing the political rhetoric they are hearing from secular media, something is wrong. If they are joining us because we are reinforcing the culturally progressive or conservative talking points they like, something is wrong.

As we will reflect in the next chapter, the kingdom frustrates both the right and the left of the political spectrum. The person on the left says, "I like what you said here, but I'm upset at what you said there." And the person on the right standing next to them says, "I feel exactly the same way. I thought you were on my side when you said this. But then you said that!"

The kingdom of God is neither culturally conservative nor progressive. It is rather the measure against which both right and left are ultimately evaluated.

What we don't want is for God to have to call prophets to say to us, "What to me is the multitude of your baptisms? Your fog machine is an abomination to me. I cannot endure your performative worship and superficial assemblies. 

"Wash yourselves. Make yourselves clean. Learn to do good. Seek biblical justice, oppose oppression, defend the fatherless, plead for the widow" (Isaiah 1:11-17).

"He has showed you in Scripture what is good and what the Lord requires of you. Do biblical justice. Love mercy and empathy. And walk in humility with your God, your only King" (Micah 6:8).

30. How can we "make evangelicalism great again" in relation to conversion? First, we are not the ones that can make it anything. It is a matter of surrender to God and his empowerment.

But we can get our heads on straight. If our church looks almost exactly the same as some secular group and its values, we should be worried. If becoming part of our form of Christianity has no cost, we may be a church of rocky soil. We may be setting up our "converts" to be scorched during the next heatwave.

If coming to faith in our church requires no difference from what we were before, then we probably are more of a club than a true church. We have simply found group members who have come home to their tribe. They are attracted to us because they already had our values and already thought the way we thought.

But true "conversion" means change. It means passing from death to life. It means dying to ourselves and becoming alive again in Christ. More than anything else, it means being filled with the Spirit so that we can be led by the Spirit and bring forth the fruit of the Spirit. 

We are not our own. We are bought with a price (1 Cor. 6:19-20).
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1. What is Evangelicalism?
1.1 Revivals of the 1700s and 1800s
1.2 The "New" Evangelicalism
1.3 The Poltical Takeover

The Kingdom of God 2

This is the second post in my series, "What is a Christian?' The first post asked:

1. What is a human being?

The Kingdom of God
1. There is a danger in posing the question, "What is a Christian?" The danger is that we fall into the trap of individualism and subjectivism. These are the waters in which the typical Western Protestant swims, so I may gravitate toward an individual description without thinking.

However, the focal point of Christianity is not me. It is not even us. The focal point is God, who looks at us first before we ever look back.

This is a danger in thinking about the gospel in Western Protestantism. We easily assume, unthinkingly, that the heart of the gospel is about getting saved and salvation. But Christ is the center of the good news. [1] The good news is the gospel of Jesus Christ, God's royal Son, who was designated Son of God in power by the resurrection of the dead (Rom. 1:3). My salvation is good news, but it is only part of the good news.

2. A Christian is a servant in the kingdom of God. A Christian is also part of the family of God, a member of the people of God. But the kingdom of God was the language that Jesus used primarily in his preaching when he was on earth.

In the kingdom of God, God is king and the creation are God's servants. As Christians we are more than God's servants, but we are also God's servants. Jesus is also king Jesus, the anointed one, the Messiah, the Christ. We are co-heirs with Jesus of the kingdom, which puts us as Christians in a special place in the kingdom indeed.

3. Within the kingdom, the primary posture of the Christian is that of faith. This is not faith as in belief, although belief in the king and the kingdom is clearly an assumption. It is faith as in allegiance to the Lord and to the King. [2]

"If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord, and have faith in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved" (Rom. 10:9).

When you confess someone as Lord, it is not a mere mental assent. It is a commitment. Faith is not merely belief but we must "keep faith" with our Lord. Someone is not a Lord simply on a quiz. "Check yes or no." Someone is a Lord if we obey them, if we serve them, if we surrender to them.

A Christian is someone who has confessed allegiance to Christ as Lord.

4. The posture of surrender is difficult. We are more accustomed to seek our own power, our own freedom, our own rights and what we have coming to us. We can even use God as an excuse not to submit. "I defy you because God told me to," when I get to decide what God thinks.

Yet as a servant of God my primary posture is one of submission. When my life outside of the kingdom first comes into contact with the kingdom, acts of confession and repentance are natural. I confess that I have not lived in loyalty to the king. I repent of my past misdirection and turn toward the King.

Then I make another confession, this time not a confession of sin but a confession of faith. I swear allegiance to the King and to the Anointed One. I become part of the kingdom, part of the people of God. From then on I am a loyal servant. I am more than a servant, but I am a servant.

5. It is gracious of my Lord to grant me entrance to the kingdom, after living outside in rebellion. It is a gift I cannot merit. Entrance comes with the power to live as a loyal subject. I am not left to flail on my own as a miserable failure to live up to the expectations of all citizens of the new Jerusalem.

Nevertheless, allegiance remains a requirement of the kingdom. It would have made no sense in biblical times to say, "I am in the kingdom though I act with regular defiance of the King." The expectation of faithfulness remains. "If we continue sinning willfully after receiving a knowledge of the truth, there remains no more sacrifice for sins" (Heb. 10:26). The King does not eject us for any failing, but it is absurd to think we can remain in a kingdom to which we have no true allegiance. This is simply not the way grace worked in the New Testament world. [3]

6. God's kingdom is an exclusive kingdom. God will not suffer any other lords but God alone and his Christ. "A double-minded person is unstable in all their ways. That person should not think they will receive anything from the Lord" (James 1:8). The path of the person with divided loyalties to the kingdom is a path toward expulsion from the kingdom. "Throw this worthless servant into outer darkness, where there will be weeping and wailing and the gnashing of teeth" (Matt. 25:30).

Many of us do not realize our divided loyalties. They can lead us outside of the kingdom before we hardly even realize it. "You cannot serve God and wealth." The American church often cannot tell the difference between Christ and capitalism. But rest assured, God and the New Testament couldn't care less how much money you have.

Syncretism is the mixture of elements into our faith that do not belong, in fact that are contrary to its essence. The love of money is a potential syncretistic element. Though Scripture says that the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil (1 Tim. 6:10), we somehow baptize the economic system of capitalism, which is based on self-interest.

But rest assured, whatever good there is in capitalism, it is only insofar as it leads to overall human thriving. This is a much different purpose than the goal of individual, personal wealth or my own acquisition of material goods. The latter goals have nothing to do with the kingdom of God.

7. Nationalism and racism are also syncretistic elements. There is nothing wrong with loving your country (patriotism) or loving your ethnic heritage. But there is no place in God's kingdom for someone who exalts their people over other peoples. "In Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek" (Gal. 3:28).

No earthly kingdom is righteous enough to be confused with the kingdom of God. Although God is merciful in the face of our blind spots, the flag of no human kingdom has a place in God's sanctuary. God is merciful, but it is intrinsically blasphemous to confuse any earthly polity with the divine polity.

God is not a Republican. God is not a Democrat. Even to think so suggests blindness and a syncretism of human thinking with kingdom thinking. The same impulse in Jesus' day that confused the tradition of the elders with God's values is present in the confusion of conservatism with the kingdom. By the same token, the world's idea of progress is just as beset with confusion and blindness.

God's kingdom is not of this world, although it will come to this world. It is inaugurated in this world but not consummated. Our blindness to our own culture will always threaten a syncretism of worldly values with heavenly ones.

8. God loves the immigrant as much as the natural-born citizen. God loves the Iranian as much as the person of European descent. The law-breaker who breaks the speed limit and the law-breaker who crosses a border are no different in God's eyes. "All have sinned and are lacking the glory of God" (Rom. 3:23).

God sees through our excuses. We divert. But what about this other kingdom issue? Yes, your eyes are open to that issue. That issue is easy for you to talk about because it is not a temptation for you. But at this moment God is talking to you about something else, something that is not easy for you. Right now God is speaking to you about something that you do not want to open your eyes about.

God is not fooled by our diversions. Nor can you talk God out of the values of the kingdom. You can fool yourself. You can fool others. You cannot fool God. God is not elected. God grants you the freedom to rebel against the kingdom for now. But a Day is coming when "every knee will bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord" (Phil. 2:10-11).

On that day the true motives of our hearts will be laid bare (Heb. 4:13). There will be no negotiations. There will be no rationalization or excuses. All the excuses not to love our neighbors and enemies will be exposed without rejoinder. Anything that conflicted with our love of God will be seen for what it was.

A Christian is a servant in God's kingdom. We are more than servants. But we cannot be Christians for long if we are not surrendered to our Lord.

[1] Cf. Scot McKnight, King Jesus Gospel: The Original Good News Revisited (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2016).

[2] Cf. Matthew Bates, Salvation by Allegiance Alone: Rethinking Faith, Works, and the Gospel of Jesus the King (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2017).

[3] Cf. John Barclay, Paul and the Gift (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2017).

Seminary CM5: The Kingdom Core

This is the fifth post on the Contexts of Ministry in my Seminary in a Nutshell series. See the bottom for the previous posts in this unit, "The Person and Contexts of a Minister." I have completed one other unit in this series, The Pastor as Leader.
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1. Cultures differ significantly from each other and the biblical cultures differed significantly from us. Is there not some "kingdom core" that transcends culture? Is there not some timeless truth and practice that applies in all times and all places?

We cannot reiterate enough the fact that all human thought is ensconced in culture and that all biblical thought was incarnated in culture. What we are really talking about here are truths and practices that apply to all cultures rather than ones that transcend culture. We are asking about omni-cultural truths and practices.

Perhaps more importantly, we are asking about standards by which we can judge elements of culture. The danger here is that we so very often cannot distinguish our culture from this kingdom core. It seems beyond question that a large amount of what Christian missionaries from the United States have exported to the world over the last couple centuries has had as much of American culture in it as it has the gospel. No doubt we can attribute some contemporary mission failure to an inability to discern cultural elements in the way the mission was conducted.

2. So what is the kingdom core? It is perhaps easiest to address ethics and practices first, rather than beliefs. The reason is that the New Testament is so clear on what the fundamental Christian ethic is. From Jesus to Paul to John to James, the New Testament is unanimous in its sense that loving God and loving our neighbor/enemy is the kingdom ethic. [1] It is not its core. It is the whole of the ethic.

Any appropriation of the Bible that conflicts with the love of God and the love of neighbor is a misappropriation of Scripture!

Love is a universal human value. All cultures have some sense of what love is. It is thus an omni-cultural ethic. To be sure, different cultures understand it slightly differently. What is considered unloving can differ somewhat from culture to culture. American culture right now probably has a very weak sense of love, one that befits our world of vast convenience and ease. We thus probably under-appreciate the harder aspects of love that are intrinsic to cultures and sub-cultures where life is much more difficult.

Another warning applies to the impulse to use the concept of loving God as a way to wiggle out of loving our enemy or neighbor. Someone might say, "I cannot show love to my enemy at this point because my love of God trumps it here." This is a trick of Satan. Love of God never requires us to act hatefully toward our enemy, although a misinterpretation of the Bible might.

Love has to do with bringing good to others. It has to do with action rather than feeling. I can love someone that I do not like. Justice does not conflict with love. Justice can be redemptive toward an individual. And justice can be protective of a group of people. Finally, justice can be protective of the order of things. In none of these cases is justice unloving.

The love of God is about giving him priority in all things and in letting nothing in our life get in the way of loyalty to him. However, God is not threatened by the disobedience of his creation. In the mystery of his will he has created the world with the possibility of such disobedience. He thus does not always shut down opposition to him immediately, nor does he command us to do so. Nevertheless, the love of others suggests that we will help them find God and will protect others if we can.

3. So the "law of love" is at the essence of the kingdom core--what our attitudes and actions should be. How that love plays itself out will differ somewhat from time to time, culture to culture, sub-culture to sub-culture. For example, it is hard for me to imagine that the law of love can play out very well in American culture in a way that insists men must rule over women. In my world, love insists that husband and wife be of equal value and authority in the home.

Yet it was not universally so in the world of the New Testament. The household codes of Colossians and Ephesians, the instructions of 1 Peter to a persecuted church, these were accommodations to first century culture. The kingdom core suggests that if we find ourselves in a world where we can more fully implement Galatians 3:28, we should.

Yet there are many cultures around the world where the household codes seem to fit the cultural context neatly. Husband-headship in those contexts does not conflict with the love of neighbor. Accordingly, Christians in each time and place must "work out your salvation with fear and trembling" (Phil. 2:12). Those of us from different cultures will often not be able to see what love exactly looks like for them.

4. What of beliefs? Certainly Scripture is a sacrament of transformation for all cultures. No matter where we live, God will help his people see what they need to see in Scripture.

There is however a core, a commonly held set of beliefs derived from Scripture that Christians have agreed on for millennia. These are especially found in the core creeds of Christendom.

• God exists and is active in the world (cf. Heb. 11:6).
• Jesus is the Son of God. Jesus in fact is God (e.g., John 1:1). 
• Jesus is the only mediator between God and humanity (1 Tim. 2:5). Humanity stands under the power of Sin and under the prospect of judgment (Rom. 3:23), but through Christ, God has provided a way of salvation from final judgment (Rom. 6:23; 10:9).
• There is thus eternal life to be gained through Christ (John 3:16).
• Those who have the Spirit of God within them constitute the people of God (1 Cor. 3:16).
• Scripture is the canon, a divinely appointed meeting place for God to inform and by which to form us (2 Tim. 3:16). The Bible is the primary source of our story and our symbols as Christians.

5. The way these beliefs play themselves out in various cultures may differ a little. The symbols that speak the most strongly may differ. Indeed, these things differ from denomination to denomination in my own culture. The impulse to say, "This is the core," is almost always more restrictive than it is for God.

It is ultimately the charge of Christians in a particular culture or sub-culture to determine how the gospel might play out. The importance is that those decisions are made full of faith. And of course, we can be wrong!

Next Sunday: Culture 6: The Church and Culture

[1] Cf. Matt. 22:34-40; 5:43-48; Rom. 13:8-10; Gal. 5:14; 1 John 4:7-8; Jas 2:8.

The Calling of a Minister

• The Domains of Ministry
• The Calling of a Minister
• Ministerial Calling in Scripture
• Ministerial Calling in History
• God can call anyone he wants into ministry.
• A Theology of Calling

The Person of a Pastor

• Intro to the Pastor as Person
• Personal Strengths and Weaknesses
• Sacred Pathways
• Individual Spiritual Disciplines
• Corporate Spiritual Disciplines
• Some Formational Reading

Contexts of Ministry

• Kinds of Context
• The Making of Meaning
• How Culture Works
• The Cultures of the Bible

Life Reflections on the Kingdom

Filling in some missing pieces in my first Jesus book...
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“Your will be done, in earth as it is in heaven.” We do not know when Jesus will return to earth and God will set up his eternal kingdom. Should we just wait and do nothing in the meantime? The gospels themselves urge us to press on.

I remember singing a song growing up in church that said, “We’ll work, till Jesus comes.” The song perhaps found its inspiration in John 9:4: “As long as it is day, we must do the works of him who sent me. Night is coming, when no one can work.” We find a similar idea in the Parable of the Ten Minas in Luke 19, where a man goes off on a journey to be crowned king. He leaves varying amounts of money with his servants (a mina was an amount of money) and tells them to “Put this money to work until I come back” (19:13).

What are we to do while we wait for Jesus to return? In John 9, the “work of God” Jesus does is healing a blind man to show the power of God. In Luke 19, Jesus tells the Parable of the Minas after the tax collector Zacchaeus has decided to stop cheating people and to give half of his possessions to the poor. Accordingly, being a good steward of what Jesus has left us in the parable directly has to do with using our resources to help those in need.

But we can extend the idea of “occupying ourselves” until Jesus’ return to anything we might do in this world to try to live out Jesus’ values and to bring the values of his kingdom into the world. First, is God king in our individual lives? We cannot control so much of what goes on around us. We certainly cannot control what other people do, at least not for long. Often we cannot even control ourselves.

But I have more control over myself than I do most anything else in life. I can control my attitudes. I often cannot control my circumstances or how other people treat me, but I can work with God to control how I respond to life and others, as well as the choices I make.

A good first step in bringing the kingdom of heaven to earth is for God to be king over my life. When I know what God wants me to do, what the right or wrong thing to do is, will I commit with God’s help to make the right choice? Charles Sheldon once urged his congregation to ask themselves “What would Jesus do?” in every choice they made for a week. Although people unfortunately have vastly different ideas of what Jesus would do in various situations, it at least gets us to where we are not doing things that we are pretty sure God doesn’t want us to do!

It is also not God’s style to force the world to conform to his will, at least not for now. If it were his way, then evil would have stopped a long, long time ago. God will bring his kingdom with force in his own good time. In the meantime, the model of Jesus is one of “wooing” the world to God by showing the world his love. It is one of doing good in the world, of healing the sick, helping the poor, themes we will explore in later chapters.

Some tried to make God’s kingdom come by force in the days of Jesus (11:12), but God will come in force on his schedule. Our task as Christians is not to try to force America or any other nation to become a Christian nation. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to influence our world for good, especially when we are talking about helping others and making the world a better place.

There is an important distinction here. We demonstrate the spirit of Jesus when we stand against the oppression of others, when we stand for others. This is something quite different than preaching against sin in the sense of rule-breaking. Standing against oppression comes from a different spirit than making sure sinners are punished. The first is the spirit of Jesus, the second is a vindictive spirit hiding under the disguise of righteousness.

So let us work till Jesus comes. Let us work at helping others, using the “mina” or “talent” (Matt. 25:14-30) God has given us to help others. May the Spirit work through us to perform miracles in the lives of others. Let us try to influence the world to love one another and to serve its true and ultimate king.

And when we can stop oppression or work to change unjust structures of society, that is a good work. This is not forcing the world to serve God. It is forcing the world not to oppress others. We have witnessed movements in the last two hundred years that have abolished overt, public slavery. We have witnessed the empowerment of women in Western society for women to have the same opportunities and voice as men.

“There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28). This is the way things will be in the kingdom of God. If it is possible to see the structures of modern society become a place of this sort, a color blind, gender blind society, then we will be doing good work till Jesus comes.


The kingdom work that Jesus did while he was on earth focused primarily on inviting everyone who would to be included, especially those disempowered in Jewish society. No one needed to face the coming judgment of God on the world. And God would be particularly angry at those who refused to allow in those who wanted to come.

The Coming Kingdom

Continued from yesterday and the day before...
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To a large extent, many of these questions are unanswerable.  We are plodding through them to get a sense of exactly what we are dealing with here, what the possibilities are and which are more and less likely.  As we continue this troublesome journey, we notice interestingly that Luke 21 has seriously toned down the immanent expectation of Mark 13.  For well over a century, most gospel experts have concluded that Luke likely used Mark as a major source when writing.  We can thus see Luke's mind at work in where he seems to edit Mark's text.

For example, if Mark and Matthew seem to blur the events surrounding the destruction of the temple with Christ's second coming, Luke has apparently edited Mark to focus almost exclusively on the destruction of Jerusalem in AD70.  So Mark 13:14 is somewhat ambiguous: "When you see the abomination of desolation standing where it should not be" (NASB).  After Luke's editing, it reads like this: "When you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, then recognize that her desolation is near" (Luke 21:20). [1] Luke has made it clearer that this event took place when the Romans destroyed Jerusalem in AD70.

Similarly, Luke has apparently removed statements in Mark like 13:19: "in those days there will be suffering, such as has not been from the beginning of the creation that God created until now, no, and never will be" (NRSV; this verse should have followed Luke 21:23).  Luke also removes Mark 13:20: "if the Lord had not cut short those days, no one would be saved" (should also have appeared before Luke 21:24).  The effect is to limit the scope of catastrophe in Mark and Matthew.  Now we hear of the "times of the Gentiles" (Luke 21:24), a period during which the Gentiles will trample on Jerusalem in between the the time when the first part of the prophecy is fulfilled and when the kingdom will be restored to Israel at Christ's return (Acts 1:6). [2]

The impression we get is that we are not the first to wrestle with this question of when the kingdom of God will be here in full, when Christ will return to the earth to rule.  Already in Luke we see early Christians wrestling with what some call the "delay of the parousia," the fact that Jesus did not return to earth as soon as his first followers initially anticipated.  How did Jesus originally put it?  To what extent did Mark interpret it?  It seems impossible to answer these questions with any certainty from a historical perspective.

What we do have are the conclusions Christians have reached on these issues over the centuries. Does not the Holy Spirit come on the church at Pentecost?  Perhaps it is not what Mark himself had in mind, but does not the birth of the church through the Spirit constitute "that the kingdom of God has come in power" (9:1)?  Did not that generation see the destruction of Jerusalem and did not at least most of Mark 13 come true in their lifetimes?  What if the events of the second coming were "telescoped" into material about the destruction of the temple?

It is often said that when you look at things through a telescope, things that are far removed from each other may look right next to each other.  So it is often said of prophecy.  We also know from Jonah also that God reserves the right to "change his mind" on prophecy.  Predictions of destruction can be reversed because of human response--presumably, predictions of blessing can also.

We as Christians believe that Jesus inaugurated the rule of God on earth as it is in heaven.  The kingdom was starting on earth in his ministry.  We believe it came to earth spiritually with the pouring out of God's Spirit on the earth, beginning the age of the church, which has continued up until the present.  And we believe that the kingdom will become entirely literal when Christ returns to earth and sets up an eternal kingdom here.

This is a theological perspective on the kingdom.  It is the result of centuries-long Christian reflection on Jesus' words and the events that followed.  The earliest followers of Jesus probably did not have a full understanding of how God was playing it all out.  This is one of the blessings of having so many interpreters go before us.  We have inherited the answers God has bequeathed to the church through them... often when we did not even realize there was a question.

[1] The clarity of Luke's paraphrase here is one reason to conclude that Luke-Acts was written after the destruction of Jerusalem in AD70.  The desolation of Jerusalem by armies is a massive interpretation of the ambiguous, "abomination that causes desolation standing where it should not be."

[2] The freedom with which Luke paraphrases Mark should not worry us.  All the evidence we have indicates that the New Testament authors felt free to paraphrase Scripture freely and interpretively, much as Eugene Peterson's paraphrase, The Message.  We should not be bothered that Luke is doing it to statements of Jesus, in effect altering historical statements.  Our sense of what is appropriate in history writing is simply not the same as theirs was.  Luke is giving an inspired interpretation of Jesus. 

Now and Not Yet 2

Can't seem to get my body clock right after almost three weeks.  It's almost 3am here (almost 9pm at home) and I'm up for the day.  Next installment on Jesus.
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Now and Not Yet
So everyone agrees that Jesus preached the kingdom of God.  But when was that kingdom going to come and what was it going to be like?  Our answer to this question is no doubt seriously affected by the fact that we know what did not happen at the time.  The kingdom was not restored to Israel, as Acts 1:8 so clearly addresses. Jesus did not return from heaven in any literal sense, as we might have expected from Mark 9:1 or 13:30.

The historical context and literary overtones of the message of John the Baptist push us to expect a political restoration of Israel.  What happened was a largely unanticipated two part series to be finished next season when Christ returns to earth from heaven. The question of how the kingdom of God has played out over time has generated an immense amount of discussion and speculation throughout history and we will want to take some time to ponder these matters in this chapter.

What is clear is that our hindsight has massively affected later interpretations of Jesus from the beginning of Christianity to the present.  Did Jesus preach that the kingdom was coming but was not here yet?  Did Jesus preach that the kingdom was already fully present in himself?  Or did Jesus preach what has generally become the consensus: that he was inaugurating the kingdom but that it was not yet fully here?

[text box on the three eschatologies]

Given how important Jesus is for our faith, it is perhaps not surprising that interpreters would spend so much time rankling over minute details in the wording of the gospels.  What does it mean to say that the kingdom "has come near" (Mark 1:15)?  Near is not quite here yet, is it?

But can there be any real doubt that Jesus saw the beginnings of the kingdom in his own ministry? "The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that someone took and sowed in his field; it is the smallest of all the seeds, but when it has grown it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches" (Matt. 13:31-32).  Surely Jesus meant to say that the kingdom of God was already present there in Galilee, starting out small, beginning to grow, almost imperceptible at first, but destined to tower over the world. [4]

Perhaps the favorite verse of those who have wanted to stress that the kingdom of God was already present in Jesus' ministry is Luke 17:21: "The kingdom of God is among you" (NRSV).  This is probably the best translation of the verse, but no doubt those who emphasize the presentness of the kingdom would rather translate it like the old NIV used to: "the kingdom of God is within you." Some would like to make Jesus' preaching on the kingdom of God purely a matter of the heart and the coming of the Holy Spirit.

But this is not what the disciples were expecting (Acts 1:8) and this is not what the historical context and the preaching texts from Isaiah were expecting.  Everything in the context of Jesus' environment pointed toward a literal kingdom on earth with a visible king on the throne of Israel. The questions this situation raises are so significant that we will not wait till the end of the chapter to reflect on them.

For example, these matters raise questions about what Jesus knew and when he knew it.  They raise questions about what the New Testament authors knew and when they knew it.  These are incredibly serious issues because people have lost their faith over them.  Alfred Loisy once said that "Jesus preached the kingdom of God; but what came was the church."  This cynical comment captures well our sense that what has come after Jesus is not yet quite what we were expecting.

I myself was once deeply troubled by Mark 13:30: "Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place" (13:30). The context is Jesus and some key disciples looking at the Jerusalem temple and Jesus predicting that it will be destroyed.  Tim LaHaye and others aside, the temple they were talking about is not something yet to be rebuilt.  It was right in front of them and it was indeed destroyed in AD70.

So what are we to make of the fact that Jesus flows seamlessly into a discussion of his second coming?  "In those days," he says, "after that suffering... they will see the Son of Man coming in clouds... this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place" (13:24, 26, 30).  N. T. Wright has ingeniously suggested that this is about the Son of Man going in the clouds, abandoning Israel.  But is this great scholar here not simply guilty of the same kinds of reinterpretations we might hear in a Sunday School class, when we just do not like what the text seems to be saying...

[4] The Parable of the Mustard Seed is one of Jesus' sayings that not only appears in the "canonical" gospel of Matthew, but in the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas as well (20).

Our God Reigns 1

Now moving on to a possible second chapter to The Essential Jesus, this one titled, "The Kingdom of God."

Our God Reigns
What was Jesus' ministry on earth all about?  What did he say to the crowds?  What did he teach?  Matthew, Mark, and Luke all agree that his key message was the good news of the kingdom of God. [1] This is the message he brought to the crowds on the Galilean countryside. [2]

But what did he mean when he said that, "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news" (Mark 1:15, NRSV)? Again, all four gospels locate the beginning of Jesus' earthly mission in the preaching of John the Baptist.  Since Jesus was baptized by John, we can assume he also was 1) looking for the restoration of God's people, Israel, 2) that he agreed with the call of Israel to repentance and the symbolic washing away of sins in baptism in preparation for 3) the arrival of the anointed one, the messiah and 4) the judgment of sinners, at least within Israel.

Thus the gospels explicitly remember Jesus preaching repentance and commitment to this "good news," similar to what the Baptist was calling Israel to do. Against this backdrop, the kingdom of God must have referred to this coming, restored people of God.  The kingdom of God, of course, locates God as the king over this renewed people.  But we can also assume that a messiah would be part of this kingdom.  The Jews of the day would have assumed that an earthly king would reign over the kingdom as God's representative on earth.

The prayer Jesus taught gives us a key insight into at least part of what he meant when he spoke of God's kingdom coming: "Your kingdom come. Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven" (Matt. 6:10).  For God's kingdom to come was for God to rule the earth as he does the heaven. No doubt the idea of God's rule returning to the earth involved more than one layer in Jesus' message.  For most in the crowds, they would have surely heard the return of Israel's sovereignty and political independence as a people.  For Jesus, as we will see, it also involved the defeat of demonic forces that God had allowed to run rampant in the land.

With the word "gospel" and the idea of the reign of God right next to each other, it seems overwhelmingly likely that Isaiah 52:7 stands in the background of Jesus' message:

"How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of the messenger who announces peace, who brings good news, who announces salvation, who says to Zion, “Your God reigns.”

To be sure, the gospels are in Greek and Jesus would not have been using the Greek Old Testament.  But the collection of images and language fits the historical context so well that it seems likely we are hearing in the gospels a Greek version of a message that goes back to Jesus.

For example, just as Isaiah 40 which was used of John the Baptist, Isaiah 52 also comes from the context of Israel's return from captivity in Babylon.  Since Jesus' ministry flowed out of the ministry of John the Baptist, since this imagery of restoration and returning from exile was part of John's message, since experts overwhelmingly agree that the kingdom of God stood at the heart of Jesus' message, we are surely safe to think that Isaiah 52:7 was ground zero of Jesus' earthly preaching.  When the message moved into Greek speaking territory, surely the word "gospel" leaped from the page of Greek Isaiah.

In the Roman Empire, a gospel was good news of an extraordinary sort, such as the birth of an heir to the throne or a major military victory.  The Roman Emperor Augustus is celebrated in one inscription as savior of the world and his birth was the beginning of a gospel for the world. [3]  Jesus and the earliest Aramaic speaking Christians may not have used the word in this way, but we can make a good argument that the idea started in Jesus' use of Isaiah and that the word "gospel" took off as soon as the message hit Greek speaking believers.

It thus also seems likely that the phrase "the kingdom of God" also comes directly from Isaiah 52:7 and the idea that in the restoration of Israel, God will reign once more.  The kingdom of God is the fact that "our God reigns," once more on earth as it is in heaven.  If John's message was one of anticipation and preparation, Jesus' message was one of arrival.  The kingdom of God is imminent, about to embark in full.  It is beginning and growing.

[1] Matthew's "kingdom of heaven" is not something different but a matter of Matthew's style.  Following the dominant assumption that Matthew used Mark as a starting point, then Matthew at a number of points intentionally changes Mark's "kingdom of God" to "kingdom of heaven," indicating that the phrasing comes more from Matthew than from Jesus himself.  Some think it was a reverential move on his part, to refer to the place where God is rather than to God directly.  The theory is not without problems, but is perhaps the best one out there.

[2] Key summaries of Jesus' message in all three of the "Synoptic" gospels summarize Jesus' preaching in this way (Mark 1:14-15; Matthew 4:17: and Luke 4:43).  Matthew, Mark, and Luke are called the Synoptic Gospels because they have such similar wording and events that gospel experts unanimously believe they stand in some literary relationship to each other, meaning that they share common literary sources.  The dominant theory for well over a hundred years is that Matthew and Luke both used Mark as a major source.  Meanwhile, Christians since the 100s have recognized that something quite different is going on in John, with the second century Christian Clement of Alexandria calling it a "spiritual" gospel.  It seems to give a less literal and more symbolic presentation of Jesus, as we will see in the second volume of this series.

[3] The Priene Inscription.

The Kingdom: Commenced and Coming

Bob Whitesel was telling me at lunch how revolutionary George Ladd's theology of the kingdom was at Fuller when he was there in seminary.  It's an odd story to me, because to me I have always found both Albert Schweitzer's rendition of Jesus (the kingdom is entirely yet to come) and C. H. Dodd's rendition (the kingdom is entirely here already) as so strangely extreme in the light of the gospels.  Ladd's idea of "inaugurated eschatology"--the kingdom has begun in the person of Jesus but is not fully here and will not be fully here until Christ's return--has always seemed commonsensically the best description both of the gospels and of Christian theology.

But Bob has helped me see that these ideas, which for me in seminary were simply different ideological positions, were originally ensconced in what was going on at the time of these scholars.  Ladd, for example, gave theological justification to a burgeoning charismatic movement for whom it was important to see the spiritual gifts of the kingdom as present reality.  John Wimber, for example, was about to start the Vineyard movement at the time.

No doubt the same could be said for Schweitzer and Dodd, especially Dodd.  It's a reminder that historical Jesus research often has as much or more to do with those doing it as with the historical Jesus.  I'm not at all saying such investigations are illegitimate.  I'm just confirming what so many have said before: when we see Jesus as our model for today, we often see Jesus as a mirror of ourselves.