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.

In his rather short third post on the kingdom of God, Joel Green begins by asking what we can learn about God’s royal rule by examining how the expression is used in the Gospels. He summarises the various contexts: the kingdom of God is entered, proclaimed, possessed, has drawn near, etc. Then he makes the important point that, contrary to much contemporary talk, the kingdom of God does not depend on what people do.

This is a rather technical examination of Jason Staples’ argument in Paul and the Resurrection of Israel: Jews, Former Gentiles, Israelites that when Paul speaks of Israel as “vessels of wrath,” he does not mean that the people are are the objects of God’s wrath; rather they are the instruments of God’s redemptive purposes. My view has been that Paul is saying that part of Israel really has become liable to destruction—much as Jesus foresaw destruction coming upon Jerusalem and the temple.

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!

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.

In Romans 9:4-5 Paul lists the several prerogatives of his own people, the Jews, the last being that from them is “the messiah according to the flesh.” Then comes this clause: “the one being over all God blessed forever, amen.”

Here we have the christological crux.

Do we put a period after “according to the flesh” and punctuate this as an independent benediction or doxology, keeping messiah and God apart?

…the messiah according to the flesh. The one being over all, God, (be) blessed forever, amen.

The group of people criticised in Romans 1:18-32 is said to have known the truth about God and to have known God but also to have departed from that knowledge by worshipping and serving the creature rather the creator. Jason Staples has argued that this can be said only of Israel, not of the gentiles because only Israel has known God.