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4 The Church and the Kingdom of God The church stands in intimate and important relationship to the kingdom of God. The term we use to denote the relationship is "transparency." To be transparent to the kingdom means that the church proclaims that there is a kingdom of God, that the kingdom is redemption, and that the life of the church should be congruent with the kingdom. POSSIBILITIES FOR RELATING CHURCH AND KINGDOM OF GOD In this age, the church is "ecclesia militans',' the "militantchurch." The church provides a framework for its members, in which they can carry on the strug­ gle for meaning and peace. It provides structures of organization, sacramen­ tal actions, kerygmatic presentations of God's grace, and a network of per­ sonal caring. This concrete environment is basic to the church's historical existence. The really pressing question, however, the question that is decisive for the church, is its relationship to God and God's fundamental purposes for creation. This question points us back to the fundamental theological asser­ tion with which we began, that the church's essential role is determined by the recognition that it is a witness to the purpose that God has set for the created world. This question of the church's relation to God's ultimate purposes is the question of its relation to the kingdom of God. The ecclesia militans stands in relation to the ecclesia triumphans (triumphant church), a comparable phrase that speaks of the church's nature and destiny as a participant in God's final consummation. "Kingdom of God" is a central biblical and theological representation of God's own final purposes for creation. The kingdom of God includes the dimension of the actualaccomplishment of those purposes, hence the close association of kingdom and consummation. There are basically three ways to conceive of the kingdom of God: as only future, as thoroughly realized here and now, or as a dialectical joining of the 243 9 / THE CHURCH future and the realized. Practically all Christians hold to some form of the third, dialectical view.1 It is almost impossible to hold to a thoroughly futurist view, since the Christian faith intrinsically holds that Christ brought redemp­ tion sufficient to the human situation. On the other hand, Christianity just as intrinsically believes that God's full consummation has not yet been accomplished. Theology has nearly always tried to develop some form of the dialectical view of the relation between church and kingdom. Perhaps only those con­ ceptions gathered under the "institutional" model of the church, dominant from the High Middle Ages until Vatican II, break the dialectic completely.2 Such conceptions picture the church as a terrestrial entity that brings believers directly to the brink of God's consummation at the point of their death. They then enter directly into the vision of God. The church is simply a means of grace that transports to the heavenly precincts. All other ecclesiologies concentrate on the tension between kingdom and church; they recognize that the two are not the same thing, but they do have a relationship. Avery Dulles summarizes the relation: From the second model [mystical communion], I would take over the idea that the Church is not a mere means of grace, but a place where grace is realized and lived even here on earth. The community of grace is an anticipation of the final Kingdom. From the third model [sacrament], I would adopt the view that the Church is to be, here on earth, a sign or representative of the salvation to which we look forward—a sign that is admittedly somewhat ambiguous in this earthly life, but one that promises to become clear and unequivocal when the final Kingdom arrives. From the fourth model [herald], I would derive the ideas that the Church proclaims the coming of the Kingdom in Christ, and that the proclamation itself is an eschatological event, in which God's saving and judg­ ing power is already at work. From the fifth model [servant], finally, I would accept the thesis that the Church has the task of introducing the values of the Kingdom into the whole of human society, and thus of preparing the world, insofar as human effort can, for thefinaltransformation when God will establish the new heavens and the new earth.3 In Dulles's terms, then, we may say that the church is the anticipation, sign, proclamation, and actual preparation of the kingdom. The understanding of the church as...

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