Christian America and the Kingdom of God

3. The Witness of the New Testament

Chapter 3 tHe WitneSS of the New Testament Of all the biblical concepts that advocates of Christian America fail to grasp, the most important is the biblical vision of the kingdom of God. If they had any comprehension of that notion at all, they would abandon their claim that America is a Christian nation. The kingdom of God is one of the central themes in the New Testament text, and the phrases “kingdom of God” and “kingdom of heaven”—phrases that have the very same meaning, as we saw in the previous chapter —appear there some one hundred times. The mere frequency of those phrases suggests that it may well be impossible to grasp the overall message of the New Testament text unless one first comes to terms with the meaning of the kingdom of God. The same two ideas that stood at the heart of the kingdom of God motif in the Hebrew Bible also stand at the heart of the kingdom of God ideal in the New Testament. Those two ideas, as we know by now, are the themes of peace and justice. The vision of peace looms large in the New Testament text, as when Jesus—for example—counsels his followers, “Blessed are the peacemakers , for they will be called children of God” (Matt. 5:9), or when he tells them, “Love your enemies and pray witness of the new testament 51 for those who persecute you” (Matt. 5:44), or when the apostle Paul writes, “Do not repay anyone evil for evil, but . . . live peaceably with all” (Rom. 12:17–18). What must be said about the theme of social and economic justice in the New Testament’s presentation of the kingdom of God is this: In almost every instance where the phrase “kingdom of God” appears in the New Testament, it is closely linked to concern for the poor, the dispossessed, those in prison, the maimed, the lame, the blind, and all those who suffer at the hands of the world’s elites. In other words, the kingdom of God is where the powerless are empowered, where the hungry are fed, where the sick are healed, where the poor are sustained, and where those who find themselves marginalized by the rulers of this world are finally offered both equality and justice. There is therefore great continuity between the vision of the kingdom of God in the Hebrew prophets and the vision of the kingdom of God in the New Testament. And Jesus—the founder of the Christian religion and the centerpiece of the New Testament text—stood squarely in that prophetic tradition. But two additional ideas characterize the meaning of the kingdom of God in the New Testament text. Donald Kraybill put his finger on the first of those ideas—the paradoxical dimensions of the kingdom of God—in a book he entitled The Upside-Down Kingdom .1 Simply put, the kingdom of God is that kingdom where the poor and the weak are exalted while the rich and the powerful are brought low; where one achieves greatness not by pursuing success, ambition, and self-interest, but by emptying one’s self on behalf of others; where the wise are foolish and the foolish are wise; and where one preserves and enhances one’s life not by pursuing health, wealth, and success, but by dying to self so that others might live. Put another way, the kingdom of God requires what most human beings would never anticipate, what most would view as nonsense , and what most, therefore, would tend to resist. Thus, when we think success lies straight ahead, the kingdom of God takes us backward. When we think we need to go up, the kingdom of God takes us down. And when we think we can meet our goals by going in one direction, the kingdom of God takes us in quite another. This is why the kingdom of God is so fundamentally paradoxical. In our analysis of the Hebrew Bible, we saw hints of this paradoxical dimension of the kingdom of God when, for example, Zechariah told of the king who would ride on the donkey. But in 52 christian america and the kingdom of god the New Testament, especially in the teachings of Jesus, the theme of paradox emerges full-blown. The Kingdom of God and the (American) Empire The fourth theme central to the New Testament’s understanding of...