Joel Green on the kingdom of God, part 4

In a fourth piece on the kingdom of God, Joel Green argues that the kingdom of God is a “master lens through which the nature of reality is disclosed and by which all rival accounts of reality are measured.” It is not a doctrine, it is a way of seeing. That sounds like a very modern notion. Is it likely to help us understand the biblical concept better? I don’t think so. Hermeneutically speaking, I think it’s moving us in the wrong direction.

1. The kingdom of God, Green says, is not a topic within theology but a “theological hermeneutic,” a way of seeing and interpreting the world. It tells us “who the principal actor in history is, what kind of ruler he is, what he is doing in the world, and therefore how human beings are to locate themselves within that world.”

The problem here is that “kingdom of God” is a biblical term before it is in any sense a hermeneutical lens, so we must ask whether its use as a theological hermeneutic corresponds to its biblical meaning or function.

I would argue that “kingdom of God” in scripture is a way of speaking about and interpreting certain historical data. It belongs to the field of history.

In modern usage, however, it has come to denote a set of theological ideas without reference to history. For Green, it is the sovereign rule of God over the cosmos that defines the hermeneutic. For others, it may be the demand for social justice or the obligation to proclaim a gospel of personal salvation. But what invariably happens is that the hermeneutic is used not only to shape an account of our world but also to re-interpret the historical events that generated the language, the rhetoric, the narratives in the first place.

If we are going to use “kingdom of God” as a hermeneutic, we need urgently to reassess the theological rationalisation—or better, frankly, ditch it altogether. Seriously. At least until we get scripture straight, and then we can try again.

2. The theological hermeneutic is evident in the Old Testament in the “pervasiveness of royal language and metaphors.” In the Ancient Near East creation is a royal function. The exodus is a “revelatory event” that answers the question: Who is king? The kingship of God is celebrated in the psalms. Daniel applies the lens to geopolitics. Isaiah “deploys kingdom language as interpretive code for exile and restoration.”

There are two general points I would make in response to this.

The first, as I have frequently argued, is that in the scriptures the kingdom of God is a political construct; it does not encompass the creational or cosmic activity of God. Green gives no examples, either from Jewish or from other Ancient Near Eastern sources, of creation as a royal function.

The basic idea in the Old Testament is, I think, that the God who made the heavens and the earth further chose a particular nation—Israel, who knew this God as YHWH—to serve him as a priesthood in the midst of the nations of the Ancient Near East. YHWH as king managed the integrity and security of Israel and eventually was persuaded, against his better judgment, to hand over that royal function to a human king.

The coming of the kingdom of God, roughly speaking, is when YHWH steps back in and takes control in a crisis, when the integrity and security of the nation are severely compromised.

The consistent failure to distinguish between creation and kingdom has contributed to the modern theological disregard for history. Creation is a more or less stable reality and amenable to theological thought. History is erratic, changeable, contingent—the stuff of story-telling rather than theology.

Secondly, Green betrays his theological bias by describing the exodus as a “revelatory event.” The fundamental significance of the exodus is not that it reveals something about God; it is that it was the historical event—as ancient Israel understood it—by which the people were delivered from slavery in Egypt, etc.

In the Song of the Sea, YHWH is for the first time celebrated as a king who reigns (yimlokh) because he triumphed over a hostile nation and threw the horse and his rider into the sea (Exod. 15:1, 18). So too in Deuteronomy 33:5 it is said that YHWH “was king in Jeshuran,” having come as a divine warrior to deliver his people. The is politics, not creation.

3. What holds the historical diversity together is the conviction that God’s rule transcends and reframes the counter-evidence. “God rules even when that rule is not transparent.”

Here we see the tendency of the theological mind to generalise, to drift upwards towards a level of abstraction that cannot be contradicted.

The biblical hermeneutic works in the opposite direction: it always looks for the concrete, real-world fulfilment of what has been grasped prophetically—the return from exile, the destruction of an unrighteous political-religious system, the overthrow of a civilisation, the vindication or justification of those who believed in the future outcome.

So if the kingdom of God is our hermeneutical lens, it compels us to ask about the concrete, real-world events that it now interprets. It presses us to keep telling the story of the tumultuous experience of God’s priestly people in the midst of the nations, cultures, and civilisations of our age. Where is God in the crisis of the western church, for example?

4. The theological hermeneutic was severely tested in the second temple period, when Israel was subject to foreign empires. In the paraphrases of the prophets in the Aramaic Targumim, God’s saving activity is consistently presented in kingdom language.

This sounds much better—historically specific. But I still think that Green misses the point when he says that the dilemma was: “How to maintain the hermeneutical claim that God’s kingdom is universal and everlasting when God’s people are living under a succession of foreign empires, the righteous suffer, and the wicked prosper?”

Certainly, questions like that arose, but the challenge was not to solve a theological problem. It was to find a way through the crisis. There was a wide gate and a broad road leading to the destruction of the war against Rome. There was a narrow gate and a perilous path leading to the life of the age to come, which only a few in Israel would find. That was the dilemma.

5. The kingdom of God provides the “narrative architecture” for scripture. Creation provides the “interpretive baseline, the claim against which everything else is measured.” Exodus is a “paradigmatic revelation of God’s kingly activity.” The coming of Jesus constitutes “the decisive disclosure of God’s royal rule, so the key question is not “where?” or “when?” but “Whose account of reality will govern life?”

The terminology is orotund: “narrative architecture,” “interpretive baseline,” “paradigmatic revelation”; but it serves only to reinforce the theological abstraction.

Green’s approach has much in common with the “apocalyptic Paul” narrative. It subordinates lived reality to idealised revelation, historical experience to a theological construct. The aim is to reduce everything to an epistemological quandary: “Whose account of reality will govern life?”

There is, of course, some point to this, but the thought leads us away from, not towards, a good understanding of the kingdom of God as the theme emerges in scripture.

6. “New Creation is the ultimate vindication of this hermeneutical claim.”

No. A new heavens and new earth will be the ultimate vindication of the creator—perhaps we can say that. But the ultimate vindication of the kingdom of God hope must be political: judgment against a wicked and adulterous generation of Jews, the confession of Jesus as King of kings and Lord of lords by the peoples of the Greek-Roman world. These anticipated, large-scale, epochal events, not the simple coming of Jesus, would constitute decisive disclosures of God’s royal rule.

7. The narrative framework manages the problem of biblical unity by proposing that scripture’s diverse and sometimes divergent voices “all participate in a single narrative whose subject is the kingly activity of God.” They have a common frame of reference: “This is God’s world, governed by God’s rule, moving toward God’s ends” (emphasis removed).

Yes, as long as we are clear about what the biblical narrative is. It is (at risk of repeating myself) the story of the troubled experience of God’s people in history, from the call of Abraham to leave Babel, the prototype of empire, to the overthrow of Rome, Babylon the great, because of the witness of the suffering churches, and the establishment of the reign of Christ and the martyrs throughout the coming ages (Rev. 20:4-6).

8. Postcolonial study has taught us that the kingdom of God hermeneutic came into competition with the elitist and imperialist “script” by which Rome operated—an alternative account of “who rules the world, what that rule looks like, and what human beings owe in response.” Jesus and his followers were not adding a spiritual dimension to Rome’s hermeneutic; they were “advancing a rival claim to interpretive sovereignty.” Modernity has misled us into thinking that the kingdom of God was apolitical. This is false, Green says: “The kingdom of God as a hermeneutic was always already political, because it answered the political question at its deepest level: Who governs the cosmos?”

Postcolonial study has taught us that the kingdom of God hermeneutic was co-opted by the western imperial powers, but that’s another story.

I don’t think that Jesus was interested in challenging the hegemony of Rome. When Satan offered him rule over the empire, his response suggests no political ambition: “It is written, “‘You shall worship the Lord your God, and him only shall you serve’” (Lk. 4:8). This is directed against apostate Israel (Deut. 6:13-15), not against the imperial oppressor.

But Paul certainly came to believe that the Son who sought to be a “servant to the circumcised” would in due course be confessed as Lord by the nations (Rom. 15:8; Phil. 2:11).

But in order to explain the “political” aspect Green has dug too deep. Governing the cosmos is not a matter of politics. That is ludicrous. The kingdom of God was political because it had in view a realignment of the fundamental political-religious structures of the ancient world: the nations would abandon their idols, they would worship one living God, they would pledge ultimate allegiance to a Lord to whom all authority and power, etc., had been given.

9. The “grammar” of the kingdom of God suggests that the kingdom is not a geographical space but a sphere: “a field of influence, activity, and operation that one enters and comes under.” So at issue is not being in the right place or institution or movement or nation but being “under the right governance.”

I disagree. I think that all the way through scripture geographical space is of the utmost importance. First, the land, then the oikoumenē, from Jerusalem to Spain, which Paul claimed as new territory for the God of Israel.

The fulfilment of that mission lasted a very long time. Now, however, we are having to rethink the “kingdom of God” on a global scale—even a planetary scale.

In fact, I would suggest that it is no longer really a matter of “kingdom” at all because the structures that shape authority and identity are so different. But “sphere” is too vague. We still need language that names the realities of the church’s engagement with the world. I don’t know what the answer is.