Morgan / Peterson The Kingdom of God

1. Auflage 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4335-2358-8
Verlag: Crossway
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, Band 4, 272 Seiten

Reihe: Theology in Community

The kingdom of God is a very large biblical category indeed. Accordingly, a comprehensive understanding of the kingdom would illuminate many aspects of theology. With this in mind, Bruce Waltke, Robert Yarbrough, Gerald Bray, Clinton Arnold, Gregg Allison, Stephen Nichols, and Anthony Bradley have collaborated to articulate a full view of the kingdom of God across multiple disciplines. One of the most important books on the kingdom since G. E. Ladd, this volume offers a robust theology and is corroborated by the very series in which it stands. Fourth in the noted Theology in Community series, The Kingdom of God establishes the significance of the kingdom from the perspectives of biblical theology, systematic theology, history, pastoral application, missiology, and cultural analysis. Part of the Theology in Community series.

Christopher W. Morgan (PhD, Mid-America Baptist Theological Seminary) is a professor of theology and the dean of the School of Christian Ministries at California Baptist University. He is the author or editor of over twenty books, including several volumes in the Theology in Community series.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Morgan, Christopher W.

Peterson, Robert A.

Leseproben

The Kingdoms of God

The Kingdom in Historical and
Contemporary Perspectives

STEPHEN J . N ICHOLS

And this gospel of the kingdom will be proclaimed throughout the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come.—Matthew 24:14

For what other end do we propose to ourselves than to attain the kingdom of which there is no end?—Augustine, The

Leo Tolstoy, author of such classic novels as , also tried his hand at nonfiction. In 1894 he penned one such piece, entitled . The novelist went looking for a solution to the socio-political challenges his native Russia faced as the new century loomed. In most parts of the globe, optimism reigned as the new millennium approached. Such optimism especially ran high throughout most of Europe and in North America. But Tolstoy saw the roadblocks and hurdles in the path when it came to his homeland. He saw the hindrances that lay between his fellow countrymen and the safe and sound arrival of what many were hailing as “The Christian Century.” Tolstoy went looking for a way into the utopian “Christian Century.” He found what he believed to be the answer in Christ’s words from Luke 17:21 (kjv), the words that he used to title his book. Tolstoy found the kingdom of God. Or, more accurately, he found what he thought was the kingdom of God.

The phrase, “the kingdom of God,” not only captivated this Russian novelist; it has also captivated theologians, biblical scholars, churchmen, and laity through the centuries. Some have claimed the kingdom to be the central message of Jesus’ teachings. In fact many have. And there are about as many interpretations of the kingdom as there are theologians addressing it. This essay lays out the history, the long and curious history, of interpreting the phrase the “kingdom of God,” and its variants such as the “kingdom of heaven,” throughout the Christian tradition. Looking deeply at this phrase reveals a number of things, chiefly the differences within the Christian tradition regarding understanding the kingdom and, more importantly, the far-reaching implications of understanding the kingdom for the rest of one’s theology. Like the tentacles of an octopus, how one understands the kingdom of God reaches and stretches out to all other areas of doctrine.

The church can little afford to neglect theological consideration of the kingdom of God. As perplexing as it might be, and as much of a source of disagreement the kingdom and eschatology might be, the church must grapple with it. Such an understanding of the kingdom is first and foremost informed by the pages of Scripture. But we will also be aided by the work of those who have gone on before. In the pages of church history we will see wisdom, perhaps also a share of folly. Even such folly, however, can be good for us for it can alert us to our own folly—or at the very least our own limitation—in interpretation. To set the stage for this journey into the Christian tradition, consider the decades around the turn of the twentieth century, from the 1880s through the 1920s, the time period in which Tolstoy wrote his book, a time period in which the kingdom received a great deal of attention.

The Coming of the Twentieth Century and the Coming of the Kingdom of God: Setting the Stage for a History of the Kingdom
Returning to Tolstoy, what the Russian novelist found in this deceptively simple little phrase—“The kingdom of God is within you”—set him off articulating a strange, but not so foreign, concept in the modern age, that of pitting the Jesus of history against the Jesus of faith or the Jesus of Christianity. The Jesus of some parts of the four Gospels, the “historical Jesus,” was a far cry, Tolstoy and a long train of others argued, from the Jesus of Christianity, the Jesus of the creeds. In his book, Tolstoy seems to have particularly the Nicene Creed in his sights. And, to Tolstoy, understanding what Jesus meant by the seven words of this Luke 17:21 phrase held the key to opening the door to understanding Jesus properly. In Tolstoy’s hands, capable writer that he was, the phrase “The kingdom of God is within you” meant that Jesus was all about human life, human flourishing, in the here and now. He was not some God-man who died on the cross as a substitute, rose again bodily from the grave, and will come again visibly to bring swift justice and sweep all of humanity and creation into the long-awaited eschaton—all the dogma of the creeds. No, Tolstoy thunders on in his prose. Such theological platitudes had precious little to do with improving the plight of the peasant. The kingdom that Jesus spoke of, as Tolstoy understood it, is here and now:

The Sermon on the Mount, or the Creed. One cannot believe in both. And Churchmen have chosen the latter. . . . People who believe in a wicked and senseless God—who has cursed the human race and devoted his own Son to sacrifice, and a part of mankind to eternal torment—cannot believe in the God of love. The man who believes in a God, in a Christ coming again in glory to judge and to punish the quick and the dead, cannot believe in the Christ who bade us turn the left cheek, judge not, forgive these that wrong us, and love our enemies. . . . The man who believes in the Church’s doctrine of the compatibility of warfare and capital punishment with Christianity cannot believe in the brotherhood of all men.

And what is most important of all—the man who believes in salvation through faith in the redemption or the sacraments, cannot devote all his powers to realizing Christ’s moral teaching in his life.1

Tolstoy ironically becomes like one of the false prophets Jesus warned about. Jesus told his disciples that there would be those to come who would point and say, “There’s the kingdom.” Jesus told his disciples not to believe in such a message and not to follow such a messenger. When Tolstoy says, in effect, “Look here, at this ethical system, this is the kingdom of God,” he could not be more off target.

At about the same time Tolstoy was writing in Russia, theologians and biblical scholars in Germany were striking similar keys on their typewriters, promulgating what has come to be called “realized eschatology.” Tolstoy was not alone. In 1892 Johannes Weiss published Jesus’ Proclamation of the Kingdom of God. This book marks a watershed in the so-called “quest for the historical Jesus” movement that occupied so much of German theologizing in the nineteenth century (and would continue into the twentieth century as well). As Benedict Viviano explains, “[Weiss’s] book was so offensive because liberal theology had a bad conscience about its suppression of Jesus’ eschatology. It was not ignorant of it. It simply hoped to keep it a dirty little secret. Thanks to Weiss, the liberal emperor was seen to have no clothes.”2 Weiss put eschatology and Jesus’ message of the kingdom at the center of the quest. The twentieth century would be the century of the kingdom, as far as theological discussions were concerned.

Though Weiss himself held to a future realization of Jesus’ kingdom message and eschatology, other theologians followed the trajectory he set out and left the future behind. In the hands of such English theologians in the Anglican tradition as Charles Dodd, J. A. T. Robertson, and G. B. Caird, the kingdom of God was understood to be entirely for the present and not for the future. There would be no physical, visible second coming. There would be no apocalyptic kingdom. Eschatology consequently became not a matter of the sweet by and by, but entirely a matter of the gritty here and now. Just as some of Jesus’ early disciples missed the point, thinking he was speaking of a kingdom to come, so also centuries’ worth of theologians had done the same as they speculated and theorized about some cataclysmic future event that would set in motion the end times. When Jesus spoke of the kingdom of God as being in the midst of his contemporary audiences, Dodd and his fellow adherents of realized eschatology argued, Jesus meant it.3

In this teaching of “realized eschatology,” the kingdom is entirely here and now. Eschatology—and all that this subject of theology concerns, including the meaning of the kingdom, the second coming, the events of the end times, the future judgments, even heaven and hell—is fully realized now. All that is bound up in eschatology is made real and experienced in this life, in this world.

And concurrent with Tolstoy and Weiss and the Germans, American theologians were also getting in on the act. Among the more liberal strands of American theology, realized eschatology appeared to win the day. In the hands of Baptist German-American Walter Rauschenbusch, realized eschatology would result in the Social Gospel movement. The gospel, Rauschenbusch argued in the early years of the 1900s, has nothing to do with sinners in need of salvation, but instead has everything to do with the socially oppressed and marginalized realizing justice.4 Realized eschatology became the central driving force in his theology. For Rauschenbusch, the idea that the kingdom is now means that salvation is now, that judgment is now, that heaven and hell are now. Of course, for such things to be now requires that one take the New Testament teaching on these subjects as mere poetry, myth, and metaphor. And, from its proponents Tolstoy, Weiss, and Dodd, this realized eschatology also requires an uneasiness—if not flat-out rejection—of the Jesus of the...