Joel Green on the kingdom of God, part 1

Joel Green is doing a series of posts on the kingdom of God on Substack. He has some good things to say about how narrative works, but his argument about the kingdom of God doesn’t escape the gravitational pull of planet theology. I will summarise his posts and try to show where and why and with what consequences the historical aspect of the kingdom narrative gets eclipsed. In the first piece, he argues that the kingdom of God did not begin with Jesus.

Did Jesus “bring” the kingdom?

The common idea that Jesus inaugurated a fundamentally new thing, the kingdom of God, Green insists, is “an erroneous and deeply problematic reading of the evidence.” The kingdom of God didn’t break into the world with Jesus as though for the first time. It is actively present in the Old Testament record.

The kingship of YHWH is evident in creation; it is universal, though centred on the election and liberation of Israel; it is expressed in YHWH’s “deliverance and power, mercy and care.”

The affirmation of the kingship of YHWH was profoundly challenged in the second temple period by the harsh realities of foreign domination.

The theological response was either to look to a spectacular eschatological solution (the apocalyptic literature) or to reinterpret the kingdom as a spiritual reality (Wisdom of Solomon, Philo).

The exile is a template for the restoration of God’s “universal, comprehensive, peaceable rule.” The prospect comes with both assurance and threat, “depending on how God’s people and the nations comport themselves vis-à-vis God’s royal rule.”

The kingdom of God idea functions as a “hermeneutical lens” for understanding how the world is in general terms. So the key question is not whether God is king or when the kingdom of God happen. It is: how will the “human family, individually and collectively,” respond to God’s rule? Will people conform to it or oppose it?

If there appears to be no evidence that God is ruling, you are not looking correctly. You need to locate “present reality on the grand mural of God’s agenda”; and you need to consider the right sort of evidence. God’s rule is not just a bigger and better version of “human power and authority.”

The (partial—to be fair) eclipse of history

• The stress on the continuity with the Old Testament is correct. Jesus does not announce to Israel something new or out of the ordinary.
• I disagree that the kingdom of God is evident in creation. Kingdom language belongs to the sphere of Israel’s political existence. A king does not create; a king governs a people and leads an army in their defence. Humanity is given dominance (radah) over all living creatures (Gen. 1:26, 28), and kings will sometimes act in the same way (Lev. 26:17; Num. 24:19; Ps. 72:8), but the thought is of subjugation not of government.
• God is not depicted as a king before the exodus, I think (by all means correct me on this). There may be a hint of it in the words of Balaam, for example: “The LORD their God is with them, and the shout of a king is among them” (Num. 23:21). Otherwise, we have to wait until the people demand a king, in imitation of the nations, who will usurp the place of God as King over his people: “they have rejected me from being king over them” (1 Sam. 8:7; cf. Deut. 17:14-15).
• Green seems unable to explain the relation between the universal rule of God and the focus on the particular story of Israel. The problem here is that he assumes a salvation-historical narrative, so the story of Israel has to provide the means by which God saves humanity. I would argue that Israel is not the means to the end of salvation. Israel is the means by which the creator God is represented to the world, throughout the ages, and sometimes Israel needs saving. Israel is a “kingdom of priests and a holy nation” (Ex. 19:6)—that is, it is a priesthood that exists as a nation or kingdom in the midst of other kingdoms or nations.
• So God is creator with respect to humanity and king with respect to the management of the troubled existence of his priestly people among the nations.
• The distinction, incidentally, is fundamental to New Testament christology: what is transferred or delegated to Jesus is not the creational role but authority to judge and rule over peoples as Lord or King—Israel in the first place, then the nations.
• The kingdom of God as a “theological response” comes to the forefront when Israel becomes subject to other nations and its priestly function is compromised. Green’s approach, however, is closer to the spiritual reinterpretation of kingdom than to the apocalyptic paradigm. The historical account of oppression, judgment, deliverance, and eventual rule over the nations becomes an allegory for the universal and a-historical theological programme.
• The exile is not a template for the restoration of God’s “universal, comprehensive, peaceable rule”—not if that has all humanity in view. It is a limited and contingent template for the restoration of Israel, arguably in advance of the prophesied catastrophe of the war against Rome. But the kingdom implications of this crisis are conveyed in other ways—principally the enthronement motif in Psalms 2 and 110 and the awarding of kingdom to the figure like a son of man in Daniel 7:13-14. Jesus’ response to Caiaphas fuses the two traditions: the Davidic king ruling at the right hand of God in the midst of his enemies and the persecuted Son of Man who has been vindicated and given rule over the nations.
• As soon as we start using “kingdom of God” as a “hermeneutical lens” for understanding what it means to be human, we lose touch with the real point of the language in the biblical context. In the biblical narrative, the concept is inseparable from the changing historical experience of a community. It has its origins not in creation but in the exodus—the definitive redemption of the descendants of Abraham and the appointment of them as a priestly nation. In the New Testament the kingdom narrative begins with judgment against unrighteous Israel and culminates in the overthrow of Rome and the installation of Jesus as King of kings and Lord of lords. There is no kingdom event—nor a parousia—when we get to the final judgment of all the dead and remaking of heaven and earth in Revelation 20:11-21:8.
• In this narrative, the whether and when questions are of fundamental importance. They are presupposed by everything that is said about faith and discipleship. It is irresponsible to shove them aside in the interests of a universalised theology.
• If we are looking for signs of the kingdom of God today, then we should begin with crisis. What now threatens the integrity, priestly function, perhaps existence of God’s priestly people? The rule of God happens when God steps in to rectify a very bad state of affairs.