Moore The Kingdom of Christ

The New Evangelical Perspective
1. Auflage 2004
ISBN: 978-1-4335-1765-5
Verlag: Crossway
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 320 Seiten

In this scholarly work, Russell D. Moore relates the history leading up to the new 'Kingdom' consensus among evangelicals from the time theologian Carl F. H. Henry called for it fifty years ago. He examines how this consensus offers a renewed theological foundation for evangelical engagement in the social and political realms. While evangelical scholars and pastors will be interested in this sharp, insightful book, all evangelicals interested in public policy will find it useful in discovering how this new Kingdom perspective works out in the public square.

Russell Moore (PhD, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary) is public theologian at Christianity Today and director of Christianity Today's Public Theology Project. He is a widely-sought commentator and the author of several books, including The Kingdom of Christ; Adopted for Life; and Tempted and Tried. Moore blogs regularly at RussellMoore.com and tweets at @drmoore. He and his wife, Maria, have five sons.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Moore, Russell

Leseproben

2

TOWARD A KINGDOM ESCHATOLOGY:
THE KINGDOM AS ALREADY AND
NOT YET

I N T R O D U C T I O N

There have been few issues more divisive among conservative American Protestants than that of eschatological timetables. The postwar evangelical theology led by Carl Henry recognized the lack of consensus among evangelicals on eschatology and the nature of the Kingdom of God to be at the root of fundamentalist isolation. So the call to evangelical engagement was a call to a reconsideration of the Kingdom. While the effort to move beyond the “uneasy conscience” sought to transcend the millennial debates of their fundamentalist forebears, it simultaneously recognized that eschatology could not be ignored in the construction of an evangelical sociopolitical ethic because eschatological presuppositions had driven Protestant political attitudes through both postmillennial optimism on the left and premillennial pessimism on the right. Since that time, however, evangelical theology has moved toward a Kingdom consensus around the concept of inaugurated eschatology, developments that are especially evident within the ranks of dispensationalism and covenant theology. This “already/not yet” Kingdom consensus carries with it, therefore, far-reaching implications for evangelical engagement in the public square.

ESCHATOLOGY AND THE THEOLOGICAL PROJECT
OF POSTWAR EVANGELICALISM

It is not much of an overstatement to say that Carl F. H. Henry’s The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism is first and foremost a tract on eschatology. Indeed, in the book’s introduction itself, Harold J. Ockenga pointed out that the book grappled head-on with the foremost obstacle to evangelical social and political action—namely, the lack of a consensus on the nature of the Kingdom. Some evangelicals recognized the “continuity” of the Kingdom, Ockenga complained, while some recognized the “breaks,” leading to a “hopeless puzzle” for evangelical theology.1 While other evangelical theologians, such as E. J. Carnell, attempted to critique the eschatological over-commitments of fundamentalism, Henry was the one theologian to address specifically and strategically the relationship between the Kingdom theology of fundamentalism and the fundamentalist withdrawal from the arena of social and political action.2 The Kingdom issues raised by Henry, pointing evangelicals toward an incipient theology, would later be taken up by others, most notably George Eldon Ladd.

POSTWAR EVANGELICAL ESCHATOLOGY AND THE UNEASY CONSCIENCE

In his Uneasy Conscience, Henry tried to “triangulate” theologically between the Kingdom eschatologies of the Social Gospel left and the fundamentalist right. It would be a mistake to assume that Henry considered the two eschatological positions to be equal and opposite errors. Instead, he pointedly asserted that Protestant liberalism had more than a troubled conscience, but had in fact abandoned the gospel itself.3 For Henry, the challenge for conservative Protestants was somehow to synthesize theologically the relationship between the biblical teachings on the “Kingdom then” of the future, visible reign of Christ and the “Kingdom now” of the present, spiritual reign of Christ. Until this matter could be theologically resolved, Henry believed, evangelical eschatology would remain kindling for the fires of a troubled social conscience. Surveying the contemporary eschatological options, Henry drew on a metaphor from the pages of the New Testament:

The two thieves between whom Jesus was crucified might, without too wild an imagination, bear the labels of humanism and fundamentalism. The one on the left felt that Jesus had no momentous contribution to suffering humanity, while the one on the right was convinced of His saviourhood but wanted to be remembered in the indefinite future, when Jesus would come into His Kingdom.4

In the background of fundamentalist eschatological pronouncements stood the ghost of Walter Rauschenbusch. With a full ballast of “Kingdom now” rhetoric, for example, Rauschenbusch had called upon socialist organizers in the United States to welcome Christians into their ranks for the good of a common effort to “Christianize the social order.”5 Rauschenbusch applied the language of Christian eschatology, even of millennialism, to the no-small controversy within his own Northern Baptist ranks.6 He redefined, however, the prophetic hope of a “millennium” to mean an imminent possibility of a Kingdom of social justice in the present age.7 It was this view of the present reality of the Kingdom, Henry argued, that had led to the fundamentalist eschatological backlash that lay behind the “uneasy conscience.” Fundamentalist political isolationism was, at least in one sense, an attempt to defend the future hope of the Kingdom from the anti-supernaturalism of the modernists. Henry may have warned evangelicals that they had overreacted, but he did not tell them their fears had been unfounded.8 This was true especially in the area of eschatology.

For Henry, if an alternative to the Social Gospel were to be formulated, revelational theism would have to do it. In his Uneasy Conscience and elsewhere, Henry affirmed with earlier fundamentalists that the Social Gospel vision of a present Kingdom was little more than a continuation of the same antisupernaturalistic presuppositions that had fueled both the left wing of the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy and the larger secular Enlightenment opposition to Christian theism. He equated the eschatology of the Social Gospel with the Enlightenment idea of the inevitability of human progress, an idea intertwined with a naively optimistic, if not explicitly Pelagian, anthropology.9 While thus perpetuating this antisupernaturalist point of view, he argued, Enlightenment modernism and its Social Gospel colaborers had adopted a more fanatical devotion to an eschatological scheme than the most ardent Bible Conference organizers among the fundamentalists. “There has been more millennial fanaticism in modern anti-supernaturalistic theories than in contemporary evangelicalism,” Henry wrote. “One of the curiosities of church history is that the naturalistic world-view, so hostile to the Christian notion of the kingdom, finally embraced zealously the idea of an immanent millennium.”10 Thus, Henry argued, Protestant modernism had attempted to baptize the Enlightenment idea of autonomous human progress by uniting it to a Christian eschatological vision of the Kingdom of God. Thereby, Protestant liberalism could equate “its strategy for abolishing social inequities” with “an immediate and forced bringing in of the kingdom.”11 Henry wondered how any such theological concept could be sustained after “the empirical happenings of two world wars, horrible in their toll of both life and security.”12

Nonetheless, Uneasy Conscience pressed the claim that fundamentalists had overreacted as they tried to avoid the “tendency to identify the kingdom with any present social order, however modified in a democratic or communistic direction.”13 In so doing, however, the fundamentalists had strictly relegated the Kingdom to the age to come, thereby cutting off its relevance to contemporary sociopolitical concerns. Moreover, Henry complained, fundamentalism’s pessimistic view of history informed by dispensationalist eschatology fueled an attitude of “protest against foredoomed failure.”14 Fundamentalism “in revolting against the Social Gospel seemed also to revolt against the Christian social imperative,” he argued. “It was the failure of fundamentalism to work out a positive message within its own framework, and its tendency instead to take further refuge in a despairing view of world history that cut off the pertinence of evangelicalism to the modern global crisis.”15 The result, Henry concluded, was that “non-evangelical spokesmen” were left to pick up the task of sociopolitical reflection “in a non-redemptive context.”16 Henry did not level all of the blame for this otherworldly flight from the public square on fundamentalist dispensationalism, but he did suggest that dispensationalism carried a disproportionate share of the blame, in terms of both political engagement and personal ethics.17

Henry proposed that fundamentalists did not need to co-opt the Social Gospel vision of the Kingdom in order to answer the social and political dilemmas they faced. Instead, he argued that the postwar evangelical renaissance should capitalize on the theological strengths of both its premillennial and its amillennial eschatologies. He viewed both groups as the inheritors of the evangelical eschatological task following the dissipation of postmillennialism, even the more orthodox strands held by relatively evangelical theologians such as James Orr. Henry argued that evangelical eschatology had the responsibility to provide a biblical and theological alternative to the utopian visions of both evolutionary secularism and Protestant liberalism.18 Thus, Henry’s Uneasy Conscience did more than sound the alarm that fundamentalists had neglected “kingdom now” preaching. Henry also indicted fundamentalists for abandoning “kingdom then” preaching. It was not only that fundamentalists were too future-oriented to care about sociopolitical engagement, but also that, in the most important ways, they were not future-oriented enough. Henry focused the key reason for this “apprehension over kingdom then preaching” on what he considered to be the overheated zeal of the earlier generations of dispensationalist popularizers. It was true, Henry...