This is an attempt to clarify, in response to some perceptive comments on the post ‘NT Wright and the confusion of kingdom and new creation’ (the link is to a copy of the article in this site: the original with comments can be found here), how I understand the relation between ‘kingdom of God’ and ‘new creation’. These two themes have become central to the thinking of the emerging church, but I’m not sure that the tendency to treat them as broadly synonymous does justice to their biblical provenance.
There is clearly a connection between the two themes - I suggested in Re: Mission that Jesus’ comment to Nathanael about the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of man (Jn. 1:51) brings together in a quite remarkable way the story of new creation (the promise to Jacob) and the story of vindication and kingdom (Daniel’s vision of the human figure coming on a cloud). Indeed, the book basically explores how these two narratives intersect in the person of Jesus and in the experience of the early church that found itself called both to be new creation and to the community of the Son of man in him.
But that does not mean what we have here are simply two different terms for the same thing. A narratively constructed theology indicates quite readily, to my mind, how they are to be differentiated.
1. The new creation narrative is the bigger one - it contains the story about kingdom. Abraham is called to be God’s new humanity before Israel becomes a kingdom like its neighbours; and when the final enemy of creation, death, is defeated, the kingdom is handed back to the Father. Right at the centre of the whole thing is the critical story of how the new creation project is rescued from oblivion by God actively and decisively intervening as Israel’s ‘king’ - an intervention which is anticipated, we might say ‘incarnated’, in Jesus’ death and resurrection, but which should not be reduced to that pivotal episode.
2. I would argue that the kingdom theme has to do primarily with the problem that arises when Israel finds itself threatened by powers greater than itself or when YHWH’s sovereignty over the people is challenged. So the assertion in Isaiah that ‘YHWH reigns’ is meant specifically to contradict the power of Babylon and of the gods of Babylon over Israel. In Daniel kingdom is taken from the oppressive, war-mongering little horn on the head of the fourth beast and given to the saints of the Most High. The kingdom of God motif, therefore, has to do with the preservation and protection of God’s new creation. It is necessary, on the one hand, because Israel is surrounded by powerful enemies, and on the other, because God is willing to use those enemies to punish Israel when they persistently fail to keep the Law.
3. The dominant thought in the synoptic Gospels and in Acts is that the kingdom of God is something that is coming in the foreseeable future - that is, it is anticipated as an event that will have an impact on the future of Israel and the emerging church as they could realistically have imagined it. My view is that it is the borrowed story of the Son of man, which pervades the whole New Testament, that centrally (not exclusively) articulates the nature and scope of this expectation. It is a story of pagan oppression, Jewish apostasy and rebellion, the suffering of the righteous, judgment on unfaithful Israel, the eventual defeat of the oppressor, and the vindication of those who remain loyal to the covenant. It will be ‘fulfilled’ finally when the oppressor of the people of YHWH, that is pagan imperial Rome, is overthrown and the persecuted church is publicly vindicated in the ancient world, which I take to be the meaning of the parousia motif.
4. This is what finally and concretely liberates the community of those who have remained faithful to the new covenant in Christ to be God’s new creation inspired and guided not by the Law but by the Spirit of the creator God. So from our perspective the kingdom of God is no longer a future event; it has come. As long as that new creation needs to be protected and preserved, it remains under the ‘kingship’ of Christ (and of those who suffered and came to reign with him as part of that Son of man narrative). It seems to me that the New Testament takes a step beyond this in seeing Christ not only as the ‘firstborn from the dead’ but also as the ‘firstborn of all creation’ (Col. 1:15-20) - so I agree that Christ integrates these two themes in himself: he is both the Son of man who suffers and is vindicated and Jacob who hears a promise about a new creation in microcosm. But if we are going to read the Bible narratively, I think we need to allow the distance between these two themes and their complex narrative interaction to stand.
Hi Andrew, so in your view does the historical view of the bible able to teach us how God and Christ will carry on interacting with creation? And what might yet still come? Do people today still need to be baptized? And believe in the gospel..
@Elliot:
These are the right questions to be asking. Whether these are the right answers—well, we’re working on it.
@Andrew Perriman:
If Paul is spreading his message to the 70 nations or at least the Mediterranean, (James Scott’s work) he’s hoping to get to Spain as that would be the end of the world for him, doesn’t this mean Paul did not see the gospel or judgement needing to go beyond this area?
@Elliot:
I think that Paul, like any first century Jew conscious of operating in continuity with the scriptures, thought of judgment and kingdom in limited historical terms. In practice, what this meant was that YHWH was bringing to an end the political-religious hegemony of the Greek-Roman order, which had dominated Israel’s world since the conquests of Alexander the Great (Dan. 11:3-4), and would replace it with a new political-religious order, which would worship the living creator God and confess his Son as Lord. This prospect of empire-wide transformation was the gospel—not some universally applicable message about personal salvation. The news of massive civilisational change might reach more remote regions, but that is not really considered in the New Testament.
@Andrew Perriman:
So does this mean that other nations beyond the Greco Roman world were not under sin? Because if they were under sin then they would so need to hear the gospel?
@Elliot:
No, it means simply that other nations, outside of the Greek-Roman world, were not in the field of view of the apostolic mission. The global mission of the church—and with it the modern universalisation of the “gospel”—is beyond the horizon of the New Testament. It is part of the continuing story, as is the crisis of post-modernity, and we need to tell that story responsibly, which means, among other things, recognising the proper constraints imposed by historical perspective.
@Andrew Perriman:
So we can use the NT as a lesson of how God interacts with humanity but not insert ourselves into the narrative, rather the church now carries on the post biblical mission in which the spirit can still be seen as active?
@Elliot:
We can be more precise. The Bible as a whole shows us how God manages the existence of his priestly people under changing and often very difficult historical circumstances. He does this for the sake of his people and for the sake of his own glory or reputation among the nations and cultures of the world. Salvation and kingdom are things that happen to God’s priestly people in the course of history.
@Andrew Perriman:
Do you still think it is nessesary for people today to become ‘baptized’ for salvation or has that ship sailed?
@Elliot:
I would say that a person still needs to be baptised in order to become a member of the redeemed people of God and enjoy the full benefits of that membership. We can say that the person is “saved” in the process, but that somewhat misses the point. Of course, if you become part of the church as a priestly community, you need to “repent” of the behaviours associated with your former life, take a huge step of faith, confess Jesus as Lord, walk by the Spirit, take on the priestly task. But it is the community story through time that is determinative, not that of the isolated individual.
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