Joel Green on the kingdom of God, part 2

Joel Green’s second post on the kingdom of God begins with an excellent thought attributed to Marianne Meye Thompson: Jesus did not bring the kingdom of God, the kingdom of God brought Jesus. Very good!

Telling the Story of the Kingdom of God

Green proposes to locate the coming of Jesus “on the grand mural, within the grand narrative, that extends from creation to new creation.”

He then offers an “ode to narrative theology.” By narrative theology he means a package of interpretive methods which, on the one hand, resist the “systematic organization of propositions grounded in ahistorical principles,” and on the other, trace the “ongoing plotline” of the ways of God in history.

The key events identified in this story are the creation of the world, humanity’s “falling away from God,” God’s attempts to restore his people culminating in the coming of Jesus, and the “final revelation of Christ and the new creation.”

Green notes that scholars have proposed multipartite literary models for the narrative but confesses his preference for a minimalist, Aristotelian three part model that collapses the two phases of restoration into one: “beginning (creation), middle (liberation: exodus / new exodus), and end (new creation).”

So we have a single, coherent narrative unified by the theme of God’s kingdom. It is the story of the activity of God.

• The beginning is an orientation of God’s people to God’s royal rule.
• The exodus is a paradigmatic revelation of God’s kingly activity.
• The coming of Jesus is the decisive revelation of God’s royal rule, not least because it unmasks the “powers that stand as the antithesis of God’s royal rule” (emphasis removed).
• “The end is the ultimate revelation of God’s royal rule that wipes out those powers that oppose God’s rule” (emphasis removed).

How is a narrative theology formative? Green outlines three mechanisms, though they look to me like three different ways of saying more or less the same thing.

First, narrative is key to identity formation. Secondly, people inhabit a narrative; we embody and perform the good news. Wolterstorff is quoted: “The story that most decisively shapes our lives must be the biblical story.” Thirdly, the biblical narrative invites readers to align themselves with God’s aim, running from creation to new creation.

This all means, in sum and in rather bombastic terms (now there’s the pot calling the kettle black!), that

“narrative theology” is less method and more an intrinsically self-involving vision of the Three-One God, and, so, of church, Scripture, and world, bound together within the economy of salvation, with God’s people cast as pilgrims on a journey whose destination is known and achieved only by indwelling the divine story that cannot be reduced to principles and rules, but must be embraced and embodied.

The (partial—to be fair) eclipse of history

• If we say that the “grand narrative” of the Bible runs from creation to new creation, we have immediately generalised it. Locate Jesus on that arc and we have not progressed far beyond the traditional theological sequence: creation and fall, redemption, and final judgment. The historical narrative extends from the summons of Abraham out of the shadow of Babel to the overthrow of Babylon the great. That cannot all be counted as historically accurate, but it is the story that a historical community has told about itself over a long period of time.
• Green makes the point that a narrative theology seeks to describe the overall shape and purpose of divine action both in scripture and as it is expressed subsequently in history. But if what happens between the beginning and the end can be reduced to exodus as paradigmatic event and “new exodus,” the story has no historical shape or purpose as such. What about the land? The exile? The clash with Hellenism? The war against Rome? The conversion of the empire? The crisis of modernity? The challenges of globalism? The looming disruption of climate change?
• The story of Israel in the Old Testament is still treated as a failed prelude to the coming of Jesus as saviour of humanity. Jesus is not the reason for the Israel, Israel is the reason for Jesus.
• The choice of a three part narrative structure tells us that Green is more interested in literary form than in history. History is made up of many stories, but we cannot say that history overall has a beginning, middle, and end. The Bible does not make the coming of Jesus the centre of human history. Paul only tells us that, at a critical moment in Israel’s history, God sent his Son, born under the Law, to redeem those under the Law (Gal. 4:4-5). A narrative-historical hermeneutic, therefore, has to be open-ended, has to address what is fundamentally new and epochal in human experience, even if we must hold to a final judgment and remaking of heaven and earth.
• The best literary model for the story of the people of God so far, in my view, would be Shakespeare’s four part history cycles—for example, Henry VI parts 1 to 3 and Richard III. On the stage of God’s creation we have seen acted out: 1) the story of Israel and the land; 2) the conquest of the Greek-Roman world in the name of Jesus; 3) the great age of Western Christendom and its expansion; and 4) the crisis of modernity, of which we are probably in act three or four. Eventually, we will need a fifth play.
• The history plays tell the stories of kings and dynasties, and with good reason we may identify the kingdom of God as a unifying theme of the whole narrative. Green sees it, however, more as an expression of the essential character of God’s dealings with his people and with humanity—hence the emphasis on the revelation of God’s royal activity. In scripture, I think, the emphasis is on YHWH’s active management of the political life of his people amid the nations: he liberates his people from their captivity in Babylon; he punishes the wicked and adulterous generation of first century Jews; he brings an end to the dominance of pagan Rome and establishes his own Son—not the son of Zeus or of Caesar—as ruler of the nations.
• The biblical story, all the way through and beyond, is an interpretation of events.
• The biblical story is formative for us not because we inhabit it. It’s formative because we do not inhabit it. The story tells us who we are as God’s people: a priestly community serving the God who made the cosmos in the midst of largely disbelieving nations and societies, no longer subject to the Law of Moses, but led by the Spirit and subject to Christ as Lord. But the biblical story ends with the happy-ever-after wedding feast that accompanied the defeat of Rome by the testimony of the early suffering church (Rev. 19:6-9), and a great deal of history has passed under the bridge since then. So what we must now learn from the old biblical story is how we may expect the living God to manage the political life of his people now, in the crisis of late modernity, at the dawn of a new and daunting age.