The Kingdom of God
One of the primary difficulties with trying to establish the "New Testament vision" or the "Scriptural vision" of the kingdom of God (or a variety of other topics) is the authors of the bible were not modern academics. Now I know that is quite obvious, but we must realize the implications of that, particularly with regards to our practice of "clearly defining our terms". Near-mathematical clarity is a primary virtue, especially in the field of systematic theology. But the NT writers were not systematicians, and so we cannot discount the possibility that at one point in the NT the phrase "kingdom of God" means one thing, and at another point it means something rather different. But would this imply that the NT writers are wrong at some places, that there actually is a single description of the kingdom of God and that they muddle it at some points? And here we find ourselves back in a systematic mode of thinking. It is not a question of the er