In discussing the reign of God, I should first address the language I am using using to reference it. Throughout this work, I prefer to use “reign of God” rather than “kingdom of God.” While these terms are somewhat interchangeable (and when quoting Scripture or other sources I will use them so, unless I am making a specific point), I have been following the logic of Scott Jones in preferring “reign of God” language.1 In an increasingly Post-Christian era, the word “kingdom” carries with it Christendom-related baggage, perhaps made more explicit alongside rising levels of Christian nationalism in America. It also implies an image of God as a stereotypically masculine king, adding additional distance from God for half of humanity that the incarnation event refutes. “Reign of God” focuses on God’s sovereignty separate from human institutions, while also clearly defining an alternative to those human institutions established in and through Jesus Christ.
In its most basic sense, the reign of God is the promised perfect future of God which began at the resurrection of Jesus and will be fulfilled in the new creation. In this future, humanity and God are with each other and everything which is not as it should be in this world is remade in the fullness of God’s presence. This is how Jesus of Nazareth began his ministry, with the proclamation of the reign of God: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news” (Mark 1:15).2 In his teaching and preaching, Jesus described the reign of God as welcome for those on the margins of 1st Century Judean society (Matthew 21:31, Mark 10:14, Luke 6:20–23). The reign of God is food for the hungry, drink for the thirsty, welcome for the stranger, clothing for the naked, care and healing for the sick, and companionship and freedom for those in bondage (Matthew 25:34–36, Luke 4:18–19). The reign of God is also a warning to those who are rich or powerful (Mark 10:17–27, Luke 6:24–26) even as it comforts the poor and powerless. God’s reign is something small and hidden in the world that is growing into something large and joyous (Mark 4:21–32, Luke 15).
In the messianic hopefulness of Judea in the 1st Century CE, one of Jesus’ hearers might not be faulted for hearing a “rebellious” tone in that message: the “kingdom” of God is quite unlike the “kingdom” of Rome. But Jesus is not starting a revolution. Instead, Jesus announces a transcendent kingdom that is outside of this world (John 18:36), one which is, according to Mortimer Arias, for people—specifically for the whole person:
Jesus points to a holistic ministry of good news as the sign of his divine mission. In response to John the Baptist’s question, “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to expect some other?” (Luke 7:20, NEB), Jesus said to John’s disciples: “Go and tell John what you have seen and heard: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, the poor have good news preached to them.”3
In the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth, the reign of God is not a replacement for the kingdoms of the world with another worldly kingdom. It is something different, in which many of the norms that humans understand are reversed. The reign of God is not found in a rebellion or revolution, but in healing and liberation.
Walter Brueggemann collects these various aspects of the reign of God into the term “alternative community,” which he sets against the status quo of the world, “totalism.”4 He offers the example of Moses in the wilderness; through whom God sets up a religion of freedom, justice, and compassion; against the oppression the Hebrews experienced in Egypt.5 As God led them out of oppression, the community of Israel is the physical expression of God’s freedom. In the Incarnation, Jesus continued forming an alternative community. When Jesus stood in the synagogue in Nazareth and announced his mission to the people gathered there (Luke 4:16–21), he expressed two aspects of Brueggemann’s alternative community. First, it carries a criticism of the present social order. In giving hope to the poor, captive, blind, and oppressed; Jesus declares that the reign of God is against those who benefit from others’ poverty and blindness, who hold others captive, and who cause oppression.6 Second, the reign of God is not only a dismantling of the old but an invitation to something new. The reign of God is a community in which no one is poor, captive, blind, or oppressed. It invites hope in a new future in the face of a present which offers no hope.7
In the cross of Jesus, God announces the ending of the hopeless present order. Brueggemann says, “The crucifixion articulates God’s odd freedom, his strange justice, and his peculiar power. It is this freedom,… justice,… and power…that break the power of the old age and bring it to death.”8 This announcement is not God’s last word on the matter—the alternative community is more than a criticism of the present order, it is also the promise of something new. The promise is secured in the resurrection of Jesus. Brueggemann writes, “The resurrection can only be received and affirmed and celebrated as the new action of God, whose province it is to create new futures for people and to let them be amazed in the midst of despair.”9 The old order dies as it kills Jesus on the cross; in its place, God raises a new order, the reign of God, which breaks into our present world as Jesus is resurrected.
When Jesus ascends to heaven, the promise of his return is also the promise of the fulfillment of the reign of God. As the promise was proclaimed by the two men in white robes at the ascension—“This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven” (Acts 1:11b)—it continues in the life and writings of the apostles. The story of Jesus’ disciples shows that the reign of God is present in the world even as its fulfillment with Jesus’ return is still hoped-for. Paul writes to the church in Rome of the hope for a more perfect future in the midst of decidedly imperfect present the early church experiences (Romans 8:18–25). The book of Revelation inspires Christians with a vision of that perfect future, in which “Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away” (Revelation 21:4). The reign of God has begun, and it is not complete until the new world to come, but God has promised its fulfillment.
Jürgen Moltmann describes the promise of the reign of God’s fulfillment as, “a declaration which announces the coming of a reality that does not yet exist.”10 When God the Son, incarnate as Jesus of Nazareth, announces that the reign of God is near, he is asserting a promise. The reign of God is coming near, even and especially when it seems absent or distant. Because God promises it, the reign of God stands in opposition to the world as it is and brings hope for the world as it will be. At the center of God’s promised future reign is the death and resurrection of Jesus. Jesus’ resurrection is the first of the promised resurrection for all, and it is the culmination of his proclamation of the reign of God.
The fullness of the incarnation of the Son of God in the human Jesus of Nazareth is certainly opposed to Post-Christianity. The incarnation is the ultimate inbreaking, and it conflicts with both Exclusive Humanism and Antihumanism. N. T. Wright alludes to this, presenting the non-Beyonder understandings of the incarnation without saying so explicitly. Jesus’ story is not only one of loving care for one another that ended tragically (a story of “inner genius” which appeals to the Exclusive Humanists), nor is it the story of the redemption of humanity with a largely insignificant introduction (a “heroic action” which appeals to the Antihumanists). The proclamation of the reign of God which began Jesus’ ministry and teaching expressed fully in his death and resurrection is something else entirely. Wright says,
It is the story of God’s kingdom being launched in heaven and on earth, generating a new state of affairs in which the power of evil has been decisively defeated, the new creation has been decisively launched, and Jesus’ followers have been commissioned and equipped to put that victory and that inaugurated new world into practice.11
The announcement of promise that began with Jesus’ proclamation of the nearness of the reign of God became a world-changing shout with Jesus’ resurrection. The reign of God was not only near, it was here—proclaimed through the Holy Spirit in the words and actions of those whom the Holy Spirit gathered as the church. What Jesus described and exemplified in his ministry, his followers continued in the empowerment of the Spirit.
Notes
- For Jones’ own reasons, to which I allude above and with which I agree, see Scott J. Jones, The Evangelistic Love of God and Neighbor: A Theology of Discipleship and Witness (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2003), 18. ↩︎
- All Scripture references from the New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition. ↩︎
- Mortimer Arias, Announcing the Reign of God: Evangelization and the Subversive Memory of Jesus (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock Publishers, 1984), 3. ↩︎
- Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination, 40th Anniversary Edition (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2018), 127. In the main text of the book, Brueggemann uses the term “royal consciousness;” however, in the afterword he suggests “totalism” as a better expression of the concept he is describing, making more clear the application to the current sociopolitical environment. ↩︎
- Brueggemann, 6–7. ↩︎
- Brueggemann, 84. ↩︎
- Brueggemann, 102. ↩︎
- Brueggemann, 99. ↩︎
- Brueggemann, 112. ↩︎
- Jürgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope: On the Ground and the Implications of a Christian Eschatology, trans. James W. Leitch (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), 103. ↩︎
- N. T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church (New York: HarperOne, 2008), 204. ↩︎