Edgework

In Part Five of A New Kind of Christianity, Brian McLaren attempts to get at the heart of what “The Gospel” is all about. He contends that in addressing this question, we have most often started looking in the wrong place – in the writings of Paul. He asks a question many have not thought about; namely, “Shouldn’t you read Paul in light of Jesus instead of reading Jesus in light of Paul” (138)?

If you start reading with Jesus, it quickly becomes clear that Jesus’ central message is, “The Kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe the good news” (Mark 1:15). He argues that Paul never tries to redefine this gospel but mostly attempts to “…clean up the mess that Jesus had created with his gospel. By mess I mean Jesus had quite effectively ruined the tidy conventional categories of this religious community” (142.)

The central problem, of course, was how to get Jewish and Gentile converts to thrive together in the new community founded by Christ. Most evangelical theologians consider Paul’s letter to the Romans to be an explanation of what the gospel is all about. McLaren suggests, however, that it is a defense of the inclusive nature of the gospel as defined by Jesus. Far from creating a new gospel, Paul defends the gospel of the kingdom to his last breath in a Roman prison (Acts 28:31).

The proclamation that the kingdom of God has arrived, claims McLaren, is a natural follow-through of the Old Testament themes of (1) Genesis and Reconciliation, (2) Liberation and Formation, and (3) The Vision of a Peaceable Kingdom. If we can’t see this continuity we wrongly tend to see the gospel as detached from its Old Testament roots.

McLaren speaks right into my world. I too had my theological grounding in Paul, not Jesus.  But along the way, I was dismayed to discover how I had basically left Jesus out of the picture in defining the gospel. Since listening to Jesus’ ideas about the gospel first, I think I have begun to grasp more fully God’s plan for the church and for the world.

It was probably my reading of John Bright’s classic book, “The Kingdom of God” (1953), that set my sights in this direction. Bright does a masterful job of demonstrating how the hope of the kingdom of God was kept alive throughout the Old Testament. Already with the call of Abram there was a vision that the new people God was creating would serve to bless the peoples of the world (Genesis 12:2-3). This vision resurfaced  in the call of Moses and the formation of a people over whom God would rule – a proto-type, you might say, of God’s eventual rule over all nations. But the story of Israel in the promised land is largely one of failure as Jews repeatedly refused to submit to God’s rule.

Eventually Amos and other prophets raised the hope of a remnant that would repent and follow God faithfully. Isaiah began to envision a new Israel “according to the spirit,” suggesting that the kingdom of God would ultimately find its fullest expression beyond the bounds of the Jewish people. So as the Old Testament winds down, we have the emergence of the vision of a “future” kingdom that will be inaugurated by a “suffering Messiah.”

By the time Jesus arrived on the scene, every Jew was looking for signs that the promised future kingdom would soon be inaugurated by a messiah, but mostly they thought in terms of the establishment of an independent Jewish state. All were expecting a messiah, but most saw him as a man of might who would throw off the Roman yoke, not a suffering messiah as depicted by Isaiah. So when Jesus appears and announces that the kingdom has arrived he was speaking into a context in which “kingdom of God and messiah” thinking was on everyone’s mind. The scandal, of course, was that Jesus was not the kind of messiah the people were looking for and so they killed him. And this is precisely where Paul comes in to proclaim that the kingdom of God is moving forward, nevertheless, through the church that is founded on the resurrected Christ who is the true Messiah.

There is a lot of literature in the Anabaptist world about such a focus on the kingdom of God. The Politics of Jesus, by John H. Yoder (1972) and The Upside-Down Kingdom, by Donald B. Kraybill (1978) are prime examples. In the evangelical world, George Eldon Ladd was one of the first writers to wrestle seriously with the subject in his classic work, The Gospel of the Kingdom, (1959). Two weaknesses I see in Ladd’s work are the fact that he tries to blend millennialism and the future of “Israel according to the flesh” into the kingdom motif. Of course more contemporary writings on the subject include McLaren’s own book, The Secret Message of Jesus, (2006), Steve Chalke and Alan Mann’s book, The Lost Message of Jesus, (2003), and N.T. Wright’s book, Surprised by Hope (2008).

One of the first questions that often emerges when considering Jesus’ message of the kingdom relates to what happens in the future. With the six-line, Greco-Roman narrative, the future is clear: the righteous are enjoying heaven, and the unrighteous are suffering eternal torment in hell. What about judgment and resurrection, it is asked? McLaren addresses some of these issues in Part VIII, “The Future Question,” and we will reflect on these questions when we get there.

What is significant to grasp at this point is that while Jesus’ message has ramifications for the future, his main call is to action in the present. Repent and believe that the Kingdom of God has arrived. Get on board with God’s agenda in God’s way – the way it will ultimately be in the future. Be saved from your sins and find a new “eternal” quality of life as you follow Jesus in his way.

For On-Going dialogue:

1. In the past, on whom have you relied more to define the gospel, Jesus or Paul? Why did you start where you did?
2. Is it possible to blend the six-line Greco-Roman worldview with Jesus’ announcement that the kingdom of God is near? Why or why not?
3. Have you read any of the books referred to in the article? How have they helped you? What about other books on the subject?
4. If the gospel message is that the kingdom of God has arrived in Jesus, what implications does that have for life today?