CHURCH AND KINGDOM: The Theological issue of Church and Kingdom
The Theological issue of Church and Kingdom: Basileia and Ekklésia: The most important factor in keeping the church and the kingdom of God together is the person of Jesus Christ. He is King of the Kingdom and he is the Head of the Church. To get a sense of how these are connected, we need to go back to when God’s kingdom began on earth. It was when God first created the first Adam, that he made him in his image, and amongst many other things, that meant he was to be a king. He was to be the vice-regent of God on earth caring for creation, reigning over it in a caring way, stewarding it for God and in fellowship with God. Another way to say this is that when God finished his work of creating, he passed the work baton on to Adam. He made Adam a microcosm of the cosmos and asked him to rule on his behalf. You are all aware that instead of reigning in fellowship with God, Adam and Eve decided to seek knowledge outside of relationship with God. Forever after, humanity has tried to rule creation but has succeeded only in abusing and even raping it so much so that global warming threatens the very existence of God’s world. God then formed a new community of humans, the people of Israel to be his kingdom, a theocratic kingdom. Sadly it too failed to be a worthy covenant partner with God. And then came Jesus. Jesus was the only man who ever lived who was as a man a worthy covenant partner for God. And crucially, the NT calls him the last Adam. The Son of God who entered into humanity at his incarnation to represent all humanity, to reconcile estranged humanity to God, to form a community in union with himself, a community of the kingdom, a community that he called his church. A community made up of people called to be fully human as God had intended for Adam and humanity in him. Christians who don’t just celebrate that they have been reconciled to God, and then just live dualistic lives, but Christians who as members of the community of the last Adam, are to exercise their co-heirship with Christ over creation by ruling over it in a caring way. They do this in their work, realizing that their work is a participation in God’s work in the world, and by being attentive to what their work does for their fellow human and the creation. Keeping Jesus as the king of the kingdom and as head of the community of the kingdom, forever spells death to a dualist way of thinking and living.
There is a tendency within the popular contemporary church to make a large separation between church and kingdom. Any inter-church activities are spoken of as ‘kingdom’ reality and is somehow superior to local church activity. This is even used as an excuse for some Christians to avoid being committed to the church, because, they say, I am participating in the kingdom which is larger than the church.
The biblical reality shows a much closer relationship between church and kingdom, so much so that the growth numerically and in terms of the ministry and character of the church and its life together, is considered to be “kingdom work.” The church in the theology of Jesus and Luke (the apostles went about preaching the gospel of the kingdom according to Acts) and Paul is not a side note to the coming kingdom of God but a central element of it. Theologian Peter J. Leithart points this out in The Kingdom and the Power: “Though I do not think the Bible teaches that kingdom and church are identical, it is clear that the social dimension of the kingdom – its chief visible, earthly, communal manifestation – is the church.”[1]
The tendency to differentiate too strongly between the church and the kingdom, and not to see the people of Christ as a manifestation of the kingdom, has been exacerbated by some influential theologians. Fuller theologian, George Eldon Ladd of the last century was a case in point. He averred that “The Kingdom of God is His kingship, His rule, His authority,” which means that “the Kingdom is not a realm or a people but God’s reign.”[2] Thus, the kingdom, according to Ladd, “is never to be identified with the church.”[3] Scot McKnight, has exposed that Ladd’s view is a consequence of his pressing for an unfair choice between reign and realm when defining the kingdom, where scripture clearly means both.[4] McKnight in fact shows this to be the consistent narrative of the whole Bible. In fact, he insists on the eschatological character of both the kingdom and the church, “affirming the fact that both have a ‘now and not yet’ reality.”[5] So it is not that the kingdom is perfect now but the church isn’t. It is that neither is perfect in the now and that the kingdom/church will be perfect in the not yet.
Another respected New Testament scholar who has weighed into this discussion is Richard Bauckham, especially in his paper Kingdom and Church According to Jesus and Paul.[6] His work may be summed up to conclude that the church is “at the very least the primary sign of the kingdom.”[7] Bauckham suggests that while there is not a direct correlation of kingdom and church, there is a strong resonances between how Jesus understood kingdom realities in at least six instances in the Gospels, and the Apostle Paul’s letters to the churches and six corresponding realities which the apostle Paul invites the people of God to embody.
If kingdom and church are that closely connected, “then one should see the building up of the church and its life together as manifestations of kingdom life. Practices like corporate worship (The Lord’s Supper), gospel proclamation, prayer, reconciliation, and the exercise of the fivefold gifting (Christian leadership) are to be considered kingdom practices because they reinforce the lordship of Christ and the healthy functioning of the body of Christ.”[8]
Keeping the kingdom reality central in the life of the church spurs it towards mission. In fact it reminds the church that it is in fact fundamentally a community on mission. There are two great realities about the church that make it profoundly missional: the kingdom and the Trinity. In John 20 we see the risen King saying to his little kingdom community, “As the Father has sent me, I am sending you.” As Lesslie Newbigin once said, Jesus called his disciples to be fishers of men [people], but he did so by forming a community.[9] And that community was a community in Christ, by the Spirit, in the very life of the triune God. “As the Father has sent me” was a reference to the fact that the Father had sent the Son into the world. Yet that sending of the Son by the Father did not imply that Jesus was subordinate to the Father (though he was always in glad submission to his Father). Throughout John’s Gospel, Jesus asserted that the Father was in the Son, and the Son in the Father. That is, the Father was always in union with the sent Son throughout his life of earth. The Father is in the Son who is sent.[10] Similarly when Jesus breathes the Spirit into his disciples, he is telling them that as a community, as the church, they would continue his sending but that they would do so as a community in union with Him. By the way, that act of breathing the Spirit into his disciples was an echo of Genesis 2 when God had breathed into the nostrils of the first human, the breath of life. In other words, Jesus was telling them and us that he is Yahweh, he is God, and as such he is the true King, the last Adam, with his kingdom community.
David Fitch, the missional theologian, has also weighed into this. He writes,
The church is not merely a product of mission. Rather, the church is mission. In the same way that Jesus’s incarnation both proclaimed and made present the kingdom of God, so too the church proclaims and makes present the in-breaking of his kingdom. The church is nothing if not local, incarnational communities practicing the kingdom.[11]
Jay Werner further reminds us that “[t]he church, as the New Testament exclaims, are those who are filled with the Holy Spirit, they are the temple of the Holy Spirit (1 Cor. 3:16).” And then, citing Leithart, he confirms that “In the Old Testament the temple contained the Holy of Holies, which was considered the throne room of God. It was the ‘concentration point of God’s rule.’[12]” The New Testament claims that that place “is now the church, the body of Christ.”[13] Indeed, Leithart points out, “the kingdom exists wherever the exalted king is present among His people. Since Christ is now present by His Spirit (John 14:16-18), we can also say that the kingdom of God exists wherever the Spirit of Christ is.”[14] The New Testament also makes clear that the church as the body of Christ is where Jesus’ presence dwells in a special way, even though his presence fills the cosmos.[15] Where he is present, in the church, in the Eucharist, there is the kingdom.
Ben Witherington has also strengthened this case but has also avoided any tendency to make the closeness of church and kingdom a source of triumphalism. He points out that “there is never a time when the Dominion [Kingdom] is so fully present that we do not need to continue to pray ‘Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.’”[16] Though the kingdom is present in and through the church, this is not complete but partial, and “only as a sign of the more comprehensive kingdom to come at the eschaton.”[17]
It seems to me that the chief reason we tend to separate church and kingdom, rather than merely distinguishing them but keeping them inseparable, is the evident failure in the church. We need to heed the warning of Lesslie Newbigin on this: “When we set Kingdom issues against church issues, we are always in danger of defining the Kingdom in terms of some contemporary ideology and not in terms of the manifestation of the Kingdom in the incarnate, crucified, and risen Jesus.”[18] For Newbigin, the church in its faithful ecclesial life, in its sacramental incorporation, especially because of its missional identity in the missional God, is the sign, the servant and foretaste of the kingdom of God[19] for society.
Here are some consequences of this discussion:
(i) The keeping of church in the kingdom will help us never to associate any political movement with the kingdom of God. For example, when a country like Zimbabwe achieved its independence and a racist regime gave way to free elections, one might have been tempted to say the kingdom had come. There may have been some signs of the kingdom, but the atrocities and injustices of the Mugabe regime which soon ensued gave evidence the kingdom had not yet come.
(ii) The keeping of the church together with the kingdom will help us not be fooled by movements, even movements that look like they are led by so-called evangelicals (even when they don’t know a single Bible verse) and supported by Christians in idolatrous ways. No political movement or party should ever be identified with the kingdom of God.
(iii) The keeping of the kingdom in the church will move the church towards its missional purpose, so that the church is not a tight circle with rigid boundaries in which it engages in huddle and cuddle,[20] but rather it is more like an open community, a community that does have its boundaries, but which is inviting everyone to the centre, to Jesus the King. The kingdom reality keeps the church outward looking. It keeps it aware of what God may be doing in the community around it. If by some terrible tragedy a church was forced to close down and sell their building to a commercial enterprise, would the neighbourhood around that church even know the difference?
(iv) But be wary, the church of the kingdom and the Trinity, because it is one with the King, one with the triune God, is a deep community of Word and sacrament and community. It is not an activistic church, but discerns what God is doing, and seeks to work with God not for God. It cultivates the impulse of mission both to its near and distant neighbours by its practice of deep spiritual life together in Scripture, the Lord’s Supper and deep community that brings healing to souls.
(v) The keeping of the impulses of the kingdom in the church keeps it from dualism. That is, its people are called to be holy, but they are as such called to be human. That is, just as Jesus ministered to the whole person, we must minister to whole persons, body, soul and spirit. Just as Jesus was the fully and truly human Son of God, our mission in light of the arc of the biblical narrative is to help people become more fully human, knowing that even our eternal destiny is not be disembodied angels in heaven, but to be resurrected to be fully embodied human persons in the new Jerusalem that is coming to earth. Disciples of Jesus in a kingdom church have a theology for what they spend most of their lives doing… work. Disciples of Jesus don’t just talk at kids and youth, they support them in their sports. Disciples of Jesus see themselves as human persons fully engaged in the sciences, the arts, commerce, education and bring a fresh impetus to these human pursuits that are signs of the image of God in people. Disciples of Jesus are concerned to love God and their neighbour, and that means championing the cause of justice for the marginalized. Disciples of Jesus in a kingdom church feed the hungry and visit the sick and pray for their healing, and they are present to the dying.
References:
[1] Leithart, Peter J. The Kingdom and the Power: Rediscovering the Centrality of the Church (Phillipsburg, NJ: P & R Pub., 1993), xii.
[2] George Eldon Ladd, The Gospel of the Kingdom: Scriptural Studies in the Kingdom of God (London, England: The Paternoster Press,1959), 21, cited in Werner.
[3] Scot Mcknight, Kingdom Conspiracy: Returning to the Radical Mission of the Local Church (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Baker, 2016), 82, cited in Werner.
[4] Ibid., 12.
[5] Ibid., 92-95
[6] Richard Bauckham, 1996. “Kingdom and Church According to Jesus and Paul.” Horizons In Biblical Theology 18, no. 1:1-26. ATLA Religion Database with ATLASerials, EBSCOhost (accessed August 1, 2017).
[7] Jason Werner, MA APPL. comp exam, 2016, Regent College.
[8] Jason Werner, MA APPL. comp exam, 2016, Regent College.
[9] Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989), 227.
[10] Theologian George F. Vicedom developed the concept that coinherence or perichoriesis is a solution to the problem that the sending of the Son by the Father seems to suggest subordinationism. He insisted that God is not just Sender – he is Sent. Thus as Vicedom notes, “Catholic dogmatics since Augustine speaks of sendings or the missio within the Triune God … (yet) … every sending of One Person results in the presence of the Other.” So God is not only the one sent but is the one sending “for in every Person of the Deity, God works in his entirety.”
George F. Vicedom The Mission of God: An Introduction To a Theology of Mission, trans. Gilbert E.Thiele and Dennis Hidgendorf (St. Louis: Concordia, 1965), 7.
[11] David E. Fitch and Geoff Holsclaw, Prodigal Christianity: 10 Signposts into the Missional Frontier (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2013), 104. See also David E. Fitch, Faithful Presence: Seven Disciplines That Shape the Church for Mission (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2016). There Fitch highlights seven disciplines that function as kingdom practices within the life of the local church.
[12] Leithart, The Kingdom and the Power, 96.
[13] Jason Werner, MA APPL. comp exam, 2016, Regent College.
[14] Ibid., 110.
[15] This is not to say that Jesus’ presence does not fill all creation only that he promises to be present in a particular special way with his church. See Leithart, The Kingdom and the Power, 62.
[16] Ben Witherington, Imminent Domain: The Story of the Kingdom of God and Its Celebration (Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans Pub., 2009), 6. Cited in Jason Werner, MA APPL. comp exam, 2016, Regent College.
[17] Jason Werner, MA APPL. comp exam, 2016, Regent College.
[18] James Edward Lesslie Newbigin and Geoffrey Wainwright, Signs amid the Rubble: The Purposes of God in Human History (Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans Publ., 2003), 106.
[19] Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989), 232-3.
[20] A phrase used by Alan Hirsch in The Forgotten Ways: Reactivating the Missional Church (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2007), 277.
