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.”

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The current issue of the Catholic Biblical Quarterly includes my article “When the Fullness of the Time Came: Apocalyptic and Narrative Context in Galatians.” It’s only available to subscribers for the time being—and, of course, in libraries—but here’s the abstract and a brief overview of… ( | 2 comments)
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Is John Walton right about the “codependent transactionalism” of the people who built the tower of Babel?
John Walton must know a lot more about the Tower of Babel story in Genesis 11:1-9 than I do—it was the subject of his doctoral dissertation, and, of course, he is an eminent Old Testament scholar. Still, I am not persuaded by his argument in a recent Christianity Today article, “Beware Our Tower of… ( | 2 comments)
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