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 errancy of the text here, but the errancy of the reader. For example, the timing of Jesus cleansing the temple varies in the gospels. Is this an error? The differences are clearly present in the text, but to claim that one of those instances is in error would be to misread what the text is saying. And just as it is futile to try and harmonize some of the chronology of the NT, it may also be futile to fully harmonize the variety of descriptions of the kingdom of God found therein.

Because of the variety of descriptions of the kingdom of God found in the NT, our holistic concept of the kingdom of God is a little fuzzy around the edges, particularly where it comes to time and extension. And I believe this is what the traditional tensions of anabaptist theology: now/not yet, internal/external, are trying to capture. The kingdom of God extends to the ends of the earth and is found in each believer, is among us right now and will come when the city of God descends out of heaven. These are all descriptions of the scope of the kingdom, and all are represented in Scripture. The kingdom is here and there and sometimes everywhere, and the only definite description given in Scripture is that one day the kingdom of God will remain eternally everywhere, as all other kingdoms submit before the throne of God.

The various descriptions of the kingdom of God have one basic thing in common, and that is they are all descriptions of the type of place that God rules. In the NT this is often contrasted, in so many words, with the rule of Caesar. Signs and wonder accompany the kindgom of God, but do not comprise it. The reason they accompany it is because the kindgom of God is an inversal of the worldly order. The blind can see and the deaf can hear. This inversal is also a reversal, a redemption and restoration of creation. It has its antecedent in the people of Israel, a group set aside for the sake of the rest of the world, a social order not corresponding to the neighboring kingdoms.

One of the places where we can find a description of the realm in which God rules is, I believe, the beatitudes. In the world, in Caesar's realm, it is the powerful and the warlike who are in charge. But not so in the kingdom of God; everything is turned on its head. And fortunate for those who are meek and peace-makers, for it is God's kingdom that will have the final say. There is secondarily an ethical component, but it is an ethic of more fully participating in God's realm. The kingdom of God is many things, and it is by a process of reading and listening that we are able to enter in.