June 17, 2008

Kingdom come
The public meaning of the Gospels

by N. T. Wright

In his new book, The Great Awakening, Jim Wallis describes how as a 
young man growing up in an evangelical church, he never heard a sermon 
on the Sermon on the Mount. That telling personal observation reflects a 
phenomenon about which I have been increasingly concerned: that much 
evangelical Christianity on both sides of the Atlantic has based itself 
on the epistles rather than the Gospels, though often misunderstanding 
the epistles themselves.

Indeed, in this respect evangelicalism has simply mirrored a much larger 
problem: the entire Western church, both Catholic and Protestant, 
evangelical and liberal, charismatic and social activist, has not 
actually known what the Gospels are there for.

Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are all in their various ways about God in 
public, about the kingdom of God coming on earth as in heaven through 
the public career and the death and resurrection of Jesus. The massive 
concentration on source and form criticism, the industrial-scale 
development of criteria for authenticity (or, more often, 
inauthenticity), and the extraordinary inverted snobbery of preferring 
gnostic sayings-sources to the canonical documents all stem from, and in 
turn reinforce, the determination of the Western world and church to 
make sure that the four Gospels will not be able to say what they want 
to say, but will be patronized, muzzled, dismembered and eventually 
eliminated altogether as a force to be reckoned with.

The central message of all four canonical Gospels is that the Creator 
God, Israel's God, is at last reclaiming the whole world as his own, in 
and through Jesus of Nazareth. That, to offer a riskily broad 
generalization, is the message of the kingdom of God, which is Jesus' 
answer to the question, What would it look like if God were running this 
show?

And at once, in the 21st century as in the first, we are precipitated 
into asking the vital question, Which God are we talking about, anyway? 
It is quite clear if one reads Christopher Hitchens or Friedrich 
Nietzsche that the image of "God running the world" against which they 
are reacting is the image of a celestial tyrant imposing his will on an 
unwilling world and unwilling human beings, cramping their style, 
squashing their individuality and their very humanness, requiring them 
to conform to arbitrary and hurtful laws and threatening them with dire 
consequences if they resist. This narrative (which contains a fair 
amount of secularist projection) serves the Enlightenment's deist 
agenda, as well as the power interests of those who would move God to a 
remote heaven so that they can continue to exploit the world.

But the whole point of the Gospels is that the coming of God's kingdom 
on earth as in heaven is precisely not the imposition of an alien and 
dehumanizing tyranny, but rather the confrontation of alien and 
dehumanizing tyrannies with the news of a God—the God recognized in 
Jesus—who is radically different from them all, and whose inbreaking 
justice aims at rescuing and restoring genuine humanness. The trouble is 
that in our flat-Earth political philosophies we know only the spectrum 
which has tyranny at one end and anarchy at the other, with the present 
democracies our dangerously fragile way of warding off both extremes. 
The news of God's sovereign rule inevitably strikes democrats, not just 
anarchists, as a worryingly long step toward tyranny as we apply to God 
and to the Gospels the hermeneutic of suspicion that we rightly apply to 
those in power who assure us that they have our best interests at heart. 
But the story that the Gospels tell systematically resists this 
deconstruction—for three reasons having to do with the integration of 
the Gospel stories both internally and externally.



First, the narrative told by each Gospel—yes, in different ways, but in 
this regard the canonical Gospels stand shoulder to shoulder over 
against the Gospel of Thomas and the rest—presents itself as an 
integrated whole in a way that scholarship has found almost impossible 
to reflect. Attention has been divided, focusing either on Jesus' 
announcement of the kingdom and the powerful deeds—healings, feastings 
and so on—in which it is instantiated, or on his death and resurrection. 
The Gospels have thus been seen either as a social project with an 
unfortunate, accidental and meaningless conclusion, or as passion 
narratives with extended introductions. Thus the Gospels, in both 
popular and scholarly readings, have been regarded either as grounding a 
social gospel whose naive optimism has no place for the radical fact of 
the cross, still less the resurrection—the kind of naïveté that Reinhold 
Niebuhr regularly attacked—or as merely providing the raw historical 
background for the developed, and salvific, Pauline gospel of the death 
of Jesus. If you go the latter route, the only role left for the stories 
of Jesus' healings and moral teachings is, as for Rudolf Bultmann, as 
stories witnessing to the church's faith, or, for his fundamentalist 
doppelgängers, stories that proved Jesus' divinity rather than launching 
any kind of program (despite Luke 4, despite the Sermon on the Mount, 
despite the terrifying warnings about the sheep and the goats!).

Appeals for an integrated reading have met stiff opposition from both 
sides: those who have emphasized Jesus' social program lash out wildly 
at any attempt to highlight his death and resurrection, as though that 
would simply legitimate a fundamentalist program, either Catholic or 
Protestant, while those who have emphasized his death and resurrection 
do their best to anathematize any attempt to continue Jesus' work with 
and for the poor, as though that might result in justification by works, 
either actually or at the existentialist meta-level of historical method 
(Bultmann again, and Gerhard Ebeling and others).

The lesson is twofold: (1) Yes, Jesus did indeed launch God's saving 
sovereignty on earth as in heaven; but this could not be accomplished 
without his death and resurrection. The problem to which God's 
kingdom-project was and is the answer is deeper than can be addressed by 
a social program alone.

(2) Yes, Jesus did, as Paul says, die for our sins, but his whole agenda 
of dealing with sin and all its effects and consequences was never about 
rescuing individual souls from the world but about saving humans so that 
they could become part of his project of saving the world. "My kingdom 
is not from this world," he said to Pilate; had it been, he would have 
led an armed resistance movement like other worldly kingdom-prophets. 
But the kingdom he brought was emphatically for this world, which meant 
and means that God has arrived on the public stage and is not about to 
leave it again; he has thus defeated the forces both of tyranny and of 
chaos—both of shrill modernism and of fluffy postmodernism, if you 
like—and established in their place a rule of restorative, healing 
justice, which needs translating into scholarly method if the study of 
the Gospels is to do proper historical, theological and political 
justice to the subject matter.

It is in the entire Gospel narrative, rather than any of its possible 
fragmented parts, that we see that complete, many-sided kingdom work 
taking shape. And this narrative, read this way, resists deconstruction 
into power games precisely because of its insistence on the cross. The 
rulers of the world behave one way, declares Jesus, but you are to 
behave another way, because the Son of Man came to give his life as a 
ransom for many. We discover that so-called atonement theology within 
that statement of so-called political theology. To state either without 
the other is to resist the integration, the God-in-public narrative, 
which the Gospels persist in presenting.



Second, the Gospels demand to be read in deep and radical integration 
with the Old Testament. Recognition of this point has been obscured by 
perfectly proper post-Holocaust anxiety about apparently anti-Jewish 
readings. But we do the Gospels no service by screening out the fact 
that each of them in its own way (as opposed, again, to the Gospel of 
Thomas and the rest) affirms the God-givenness and God-directedness of 
the entire Jewish narrative of creation, fall, Abraham, Moses, David and 
so on. The Old Testament is the narrative of how the Creator God is 
rescuing creation from its otherwise inevitable fate, and it was this 
project, rather than some other, which was brought to successful 
completion in and through Jesus. The Gospels, like Paul's gospel, are to 
that extent folly to pagans, ancient and modern alike, and equally 
scandalous to Jews. We gain nothing exegetically, historically, 
theologically or politically by trying to make the Gospels less Jewishly 
foolish (or vice versa) to paganism and hence less scandalous, in their 
claim of fulfillment, to Judaism.

Third, the Gospels thus demonstrate a close integration with the genuine 
early Christian hope, which is precisely not the hope for heaven in the 
sense of a blissful disembodied life after death in which creation is 
abandoned to its fate, but rather the hope, as in Ephesians 1, Romans 8 
and Revelation 21, for the renewal and final coming together of heaven 
and earth, the consummation precisely of God's project to be savingly 
present in an ultimate public world. And the point of the Gospels is 
that with the public career of Jesus, and with his death and 
resurrection, this whole project was decisively inaugurated, never to be 
abandoned.

 From the perspective of these three integrations, we can see how 
mistaken are the readings of both the neo-Gnostic movement that is so 
rampant today and the fundamentalism that is its conservative analogue. 
Indeed, if an outsider may venture a guess, I think the phenomenon of 
the religious right in the U.S. (we really have no parallel in the 
United Kingdom) may be construed as a clumsy attempt to recapture the 
coming together of God and the world, which remains stubbornly in 
scripture but which the Enlightenment had repudiated, and which 
fundamentalism itself continues to repudiate with its dualistic theology 
of rapture and Armageddon.

It is as though the religious right has known in its bones that God 
belongs in public, but without understanding either why or how that 
might make sense; while the political left in the U.S., and sometimes 
the religious left on both sides of the Atlantic, has known in its bones 
that God would make radical personal moral demands as part of his 
program of restorative justice, and has caricatured his public presence 
as a form of tyranny in order to evoke the cheap and gloomy 
Enlightenment critique as a way of holding that challenge at bay.

The resurrection of Jesus is to be seen not as the proof of Jesus' 
uniqueness, let alone his divinity—and certainly not as the proof that 
there is a life after death, a heaven and a hell (as though Jesus rose 
again to give prospective validation to Dante or Michelangelo!)—but as 
the launching within the world of space, time and matter of that 
God-in-public reality of new creation called God's kingdom, which, 
within 30 years, would be announced under Caesar's nose openly and 
unhindered. The reason those who made that announcement were persecuted 
is, of course, that the fact of God acting in public is deeply 
threatening to the rulers of the world in a way that Gnosticism in all 
its forms never is. The Enlightenment's rejection of the bodily 
resurrection has for too long been allowed to get away with its own 
rhetoric of historical criticism—as though nobody until Gibbon or 
Voltaire had realized that dead people always stay dead—when in fact its 
nonresurrectional narrative clearly served its own claim to power, 
presented as an alternative eschatology in which world history came to 
its climax not on Easter Day but with the storming of the Bastille and 
the American Declaration of Independence.



Near the heart of the early chapters of Acts we find a prayer of the 
church facing persecution, and the prayer makes decisive use of one of 
the most obviously political of all the Psalms. Psalm 2 declares that 
though the nations make a great noise and fuss and try to oppose God's 
kingdom, God will enthrone his appointed king in Zion and thus call the 
rulers of the earth to learn wisdom from him. This point, which brings 
into focus a good deal of Old Testament political theology, is sharply 
reinforced in the early chapters of the Wisdom of Solomon.

Psalm 2 also appears at the start of the Gospel narratives, as Jesus is 
anointed by the Spirit at his baptism. Much exegesis has focused on the 
christological meaning of "Son of God" here; my proposal is that we 
should focus equally, without marginalizing that Christology, on the 
political meaning. The Gospels constitute a call to the rulers of the 
world to learn wisdom in service to the messianic Son of God, and thus 
they also provide the impetus for a freshly biblical understanding of 
the role of the "rulers of the world" and of the tasks of the church in 
relation to them. I have three points to make in this regard.

First, it is noteworthy that the early church, aware of prevailing 
tyrannies both Jewish and pagan, and insisting on exalting Jesus as Lord 
over all, did not reject the God-given rule even of pagans. This is a 
horrible disappointment, of course, to post-Enlightenment liberals, who 
would much have preferred the early Christians to have embraced some 
kind of holy anarchy with no place for any rulers at all. But it is 
quite simply part of a creational view of the world that God wants the 
world to be ordered, not chaotic, and that human power structures are 
the God-given means by which that end is to be accomplished—otherwise 
those with muscle and money will always win, and the poor and the widows 
will be trampled on afresh. This is the point at which Colossians 1 
makes its decisive contribution over against all dualisms which imagine 
that earthly rulers are a priori a bad thing (the same dualisms that 
have dominated both the method and the content of much biblical 
scholarship). This is the point, as well, at which the notion of the 
common good has its contribution to make. The New Testament does not 
encourage the idea of a complete disjunction between the political goods 
to be pursued by the church and the political goods to be pursued by the 
world outside the church, precisely for the reason that the church is to 
be seen as the body through whom God is addressing and reclaiming the world.



To put this first point positively, the New Testament reaffirms the 
God-given place even of secular rulers, even of deeply flawed, sinful, 
self-serving, corrupt and idolatrous rulers like Pontius Pilate, Felix, 
Festus and Herod Agrippa. They get it wrong and they will be judged, but 
God wants them in place because order, even corrupt order, is better 
than chaos. Here we find, in the Gospels, in Acts and especially in 
Paul, a tension that cannot be dissolved without great peril. We in the 
contemporary Western world have all but lost the ability 
conceptually—never mind practically—to affirm that rulers are corrupt 
and to be confronted yet are God-given and to be obeyed. That sounds to 
us as though we are simultaneously to affirm anarchy and tyranny. But 
this merely shows how far our conceptualities have led us again to 
muzzle the texts in which both stand together. How can that be?

The answer comes—and this is my second point—in such passages as John 19 
on the one hand and 1 Corinthians 2 and Colossians 2 on the other. The 
rulers of this age inevitably twist their God-given vocation—to bring 
order to the world—into the satanic possibility of tyranny. But the 
cross of Jesus, enthroned as the true Son of God as in Psalm 2, 
constitutes the paradoxical victory by which the rulers' idolatry and 
corruption are confronted and overthrown. And the result, as in 
Colossians 1:18-20, is that the rulers are reconciled, are in some 
strange sense reinstated as the bringers of God's wise order to the 
world, whether or not they would see it that way. This is the point at 
which Romans 13 comes in, not as the validation of every program that 
every ruler dreams up, certainly not as the validation of what 
democratically elected governments of one country decide to do against 
other countries, but as the strictly limited proposal, in line with 
Isaiah's recognition of Cyrus, that the Creator God uses even those 
rulers who do not know him personally to bring fresh order and even 
rescue to the world. This lies also behind the narrative of Acts.

This propels us to a third, perhaps unexpected and certainly challenging 
reflection that the present political situation is to be understood in 
terms of the paradoxical lordship of Jesus himself. From Matthew to John 
to Acts, from Colossians to Revelation, with a good deal else in 
between, Jesus is hailed as already the Lord of both heaven and earth, 
and in particular as the one through whom the Creator God will at last 
restore and unite all things in heaven and on earth. And this gives 
sharp focus to the present task of earthly rulers. Until the achievement 
of Jesus, a biblical view of pagan rulers might have been that they were 
charged with keeping God's creation in order, preventing it from lapsing 
into chaos. Now, since Jesus' death and resurrection (though this was of 
course anticipated in the Psalms and the prophets), their task is to be 
seen from the other end of the telescope. Instead of moving forward from 
creation, they are to look forward (however unwillingly or unwittingly) 
to the ultimate eschaton. In other words, God will one day right all 
wrongs through Jesus, and earthly rulers, whether or not they 
acknowledge this Jesus and this coming kingdom, are entrusted with the 
task of anticipating that final judgment and that final mercy. They are 
not merely to stop God's good creation from going utterly to the bad. 
They are to enact in advance, in a measure, the time when God will make 
all things new and will once again declare that it is very good.



All this might sound like irrationally idealistic talk—and it is bound 
to be seen as such by those for whom all human authorities are tyrants 
by another name—were it not for the fact that along with this vision of 
God working through earthly rulers comes the church's vocation to be the 
people through whom the rulers are to be reminded of their task and 
called to account. We see this happening throughout the book of Acts and 
on into the witness of the second-century apologists—and, indeed, the 
witness of the martyrs as well, because martyrdom (which is what happens 
when the church bears witness to God's call to the rulers and the rulers 
shoot the messenger because they don't like the message) is an 
inalienable part of political theology. You can have as high a theology 
of the God-given calling of rulers as you like, as long as your theology 
of the church's witness, and of martyrdom, matches it stride for stride.

This witness comes into sharp focus in John 16:8-11. The Spirit, 
declares Jesus, will prove the world wrong about sin, righteousness and 
judgment—about judgment because the ruler of this world is judged. How 
is the Spirit to do that? Clearly, within Johannine theology, through 
the witness of the church, in and through which the Spirit is at work. 
The church will do to the rulers of the world what Jesus did to Pilate 
in John 18 and 19, confronting him with the news of the kingdom and of 
truth, deeply unwelcome and indeed incomprehensible though both of them 
were. Part of the way in which the church will do this is by getting on 
with, and setting forward, those works of justice and mercy, of beauty 
and relationship, that the rulers know ought to be flourishing but which 
they seem powerless to bring about. But the church, even when faced with 
overtly pagan and hostile rulers, must continue to believe that Jesus is 
the Lord before whom they will bow and whose final sovereign judgment 
they are called to anticipate. Thus the church, in its biblical 
commitment to "doing God in public," is called to learn how to 
collaborate without compromise (hence the vital importance of 
common-good theory) and to critique without dualism.

In particular, as one sharp focus for all this, it is vital that the 
church learn to critique the present workings of democracy itself. I 
don't simply mean that we should scrutinize voting methods, campaign 
tactics or the use of big money within the electoral process. I mean 
that we should take seriously the fact that our present glorification of 
democracy emerged precisely from Enlightenment dualism—the banishing of 
God from the public square and the elevation of vox populi to fill the 
vacuum, which we have seen to be profoundly inadequate when faced with 
the publicness of the kingdom of God. And we should take very seriously 
the fact that the early Jews and Christians were not terribly interested 
in the process by which rulers came to power, but were extremely 
interested in what rulers did once they had obtained power. The greatest 
democracies of the ancient world, those of Greece and Rome, had 
well-developed procedures for assessing their rulers once their term of 
office was over if not before, and if necessary for putting them on 
trial. Simply not being reelected (the main threat to politicians in 
today's democracies) was nowhere near good enough. When Kofi Annan 
retired as general secretary of the United Nations, one of the key 
points he made was that we urgently need to develop ways of holding 
governments to account. That is a central part of the church's vocation, 
which we should never have lost and desperately need to recapture.

All this, of course, demands as well that the church itself be 
continually called to account, since we in our turn easily get it wrong 
and become part of the problem instead of part of the solution. That is 
why the church must be semper reformanda as it reads the Bible, 
especially the Gospels. Fortunately, that's what the Gospels are there 
for, and that's what they are good at, despite generations of so-called 
critical methods which sometimes seem to have been designed to prevent 
the Gospels from being themselves. Part of the underlying aim of this 
essay is to encourage readings of the Bible which, by highlighting the 
publicness of God and the gospel, set forward those reforms which will 
enable the church to play its part in holding the powers to account and 
thus advancing God's restorative justice.

This article is adapted from a lecture N. T. Wright gave at a meeting of 
the Society of Biblical Literature in November 2007.

	N. T. Wright is bishop of Durham in the Church of England.

http://www.christiancentury.org/article.lasso?id=4862	
-- 


Shalom/Salaam/Pax!                         Rowland Croucher

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