2.02. A Survey of the Kingdom of God in Theology
Chapter Two: A Survey of the Kingdom of God in Theology In this brief survey of the various theological viewpoints on the Kingdom of God, I examine first the critical-historical debate. I then turn to the three major views of Evangelicalism, the kingdom-future perspective of revised dispensationalism, the kingdom-now perspective of classical reformed or covenant theology, and the increasingly popular kingdom-already-but-not-yet perspective of historic premillennialism and progressive dispensationalism. The Critical Historical Debate
Nineteenth century liberal theologians Albrecht Ritschl and Adolf von Harnack believed that the kingdom of God is not something to be established in the future, but is now present in the form of the “brotherhood of man,” the infinite value of the individual soul, and the ethic of love. To them, the apocalyptic element in Jesus’s teaching was the “husk” that contained the “kernel” of his real message of love.6 Hence, the predominant liberal view was that the kingdom of which Jesus spoke was a present ethical kingdom.
Johannes Weiss rejected that view. He wrote in The Preaching of Jesus about the Kingdom of God that Jesus was “thoroughly eschatological, futuristic, and even apocalyptic in his outlook.”7 According to Weiss, Jesus expected the kingdom to come in the immediate future by a dramatic action of God.8 Thus, Jesus’s ethical commands (including the Sermon on the Mount) were interim rules in anticipation of the imminent kingdom, not rules of conduct given for all time.9 Albert Schweitzer picked up where Weiss left off. He interpreted the whole of Jesus’s preaching as being permeated with a conviction of the approaching kingdom. He called this interpretation a “consistent eschatology.” According to Schweitzer, a future heavenly kingdom was at the base of Jesus’s preaching even from the beginning of his ministry.10 However, in the end, in Schweitzer’s view, Jesus was traumatized by “the delay of the parousia” and he thus died in despair and disillusionment.11
C.H. Dodd gave eschatology its next major reorientation. He believed the kingdom had already arrived, calling his system a ‘realized eschatology.’ According to Dodd, the kingdom is a transcendent order beyond time and space that has broken into history in the mission of Jesus.12 The debate over “kingdom future” or “kingdom now” continues to rage. This is true in evangelical circles as well. The three views discussed below are representative.
Revised Dispensationalists—Thy Kingdom Come!
Revised dispensationalists13 have traditionally characterized the kingdom of God as consisting of an earthly theocratic kingdom promised to Israel in the Old Testament. It is the thousand year reign of Christ on earth.14 They believe that Jesus offered the kingdom to the Jews, but that Jesus’s own people rejected the offer, and so, instead of establishing the kingdom, Jesus postponed it until the second coming. In the meantime, he established the “mystery form” of the kingdom during the “inter-advent age,” in which “Christ rules spiritually in the hearts of believers without fulfilling the prophecies of the kingdom on earth.”15 As John Walvoord has stated:
Jesus had been offering the kingdom in the form of offering himself as the Messiah and King of Israel. This offer had been rejected, as God had anticipated, and ultimately this rejection would lead to the cross of Christ, which was part of God’s plan for the redemption of the world. On the divine side this was no change of plan, but on the human side it was a change of direction regarding fulfillment of the kingdom promise.16
Revised dispensationalists thus believe that the kingdom promised in the Old Testament (what I call the eschatological kingdom) will be established in the millennium at which time Israel will be converted and Jesus will sit on David’s throne. Both inauguration and consummation of the kingdom are future in orientation.
Revised dispensationalists have been particularly vigorous in proposing that the entirety of the eschatological kingdom of God will come in the future, as Jesus returns and ushers in the millennium. Charles Ryrie has emphatically declared that the kingdom is not the church, the body of Christ.17 Rather, the kingdom is future:
What would those people [the Jews of Jesus’s day] have understood the kingdom to be? The Messianic, Davidic kingdom on this earth in which the Jewish people would have a prominent place.18 The kingdom is “physical, glorious and powerful.”19 The gospel of Matthew factors prominently in the revised dispensational scheme of the kingdom. As Walvoord stated in his commentary on Matthew, the very purpose of the first gospel is to “explain[] why the prophecies relating to the kingdom of Christ on earth are delayed in fulfillment until the second coming.”20 It “was designed to explain to the Jews, who had expected the Messiah when He came to be a conquering king, why instead Christ suffered and died, and why there was the resulting postponement of His triumph to His second coming.”21 Reformed Theology—Thy Kingdom Came (Mainly)!
Covenant theologians agree that Christ will return as He promised and that, when He does, He will bring in the fullness of the kingdom. Nevertheless, in contrast to revised dispensationalists, that is not their emphasis. They focus on the belief that the kingdom has already arrived. Charles Hodge is representative of this view. He said, with respect to the nature of the kingdom:
First, it is spiritual. That is, it is not of this world. It is not analogous to the other kingdoms which existed, or do still exist among men. It has a different origin and a different end. Human kingdoms are organized among men, under the providential government of God, for the promotion of the temporal well-being of society. The kingdom of Christ was organized immediately by God, for the promotion of religious objects. It is spiritual, or not of this world, moreover, because it has no power over the lives, liberty, or property of its members; and because all secular matters lie beyond its jurisdiction. . . . The kingdom of Christ, under the present dispensation, therefore, is not worldly even in the sense in which the ancient theocracy was of this world.22 More recently, D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones wrote:
It is a kingdom which is to come, yes. But it is also a kingdom which has come. ‘The kingdom of God is among you’ and ‘within you’; the kingdom of God is in every true Christian. He reigns in the Church when she acknowledges Him truly. The kingdom has come, the kingdom is coming, the kingdom is yet to come. Now we must always bear that in mind. Whenever Christ is enthroned as King, the kingdom of God is come, so that, while we cannot say that He is ruling over all in the world at the present time, He is certainly ruling in that way in the hearts and lives of all His people.23 The New Geneva Study Bible sharpens the contrast between reformed theology and revised dispensationalism. It states that “the kingdom or the reign of God is what the Old Testament prophets awaited: God’s display of His sovereignty in the redemption of His people.”24 Thus, with the death and resurrection of Jesus and the “spread of the good news to all nations,” the Old Testament promises of God “have been largely fulfilled for us, although we still await their complete realization when Christ returns in judgment.”25 “The kingdom came with Jesus and is known wherever the lordship of Jesus is acknowledged.”26 Historic Premillennialists and Progressive Dispensationalists:
Thy Kingdom—Already but Not Yet! A growing number of conservative theologians have refused to be boxed into either a “kingdom future” or a “kingdom now” emphasis. Beginning with Herman Ridderbos and George Ladd, these theologians embrace a “both/and” approach to the kingdom—postulating that the kingdom of God has already arrived in an inaugural form, but has not yet fully been consummated, and will not be until Christ’s second coming.27 This “already/not yet” approach has drawn proponents from dispensational, historic premillennial and reformed camps, so much so that Richard Gaffin has observed that it “has now virtually reached the status of consensus.”28 This position is well represented by New Testament commentators such as D.A. Carson and progressive dispensationalists such as Craig Blaising, Darryl Bock and Robert Saucy. As Bock stated:
What emerges is a picture of a career [of Jesus] that comes in stages as different aspects of what the Old Testament promises are brought to fulfillment at different phases of Jesus’s work. One might characterize these phases as the ‘already’ and the ‘not yet’ of Jesus’s career, or by reference to the kingdom, as the invisible and the visible kingdom of God.29
Progressive dispensationalists, in particular, claim that they offer “a corrective” to both revised dispensationalism and covenant theology because “covenant theologians of the past have tended to overemphasize the ‘already’ in their critiques of dispensationalism, while underemphasizing the ‘not yet.’“30 The gospel of Matthew is an integral component of the “already/not yet” eschatological scheme (though Luke appears to have been emphasized in progressive dispensational writings because of the particular expertise of Darrell Bock with respect to the Luke/Acts texts).31 D.A. Carson declared in his seminal commentary on Matthew that a “constant theme” of the book is that “the kingdom came with Jesus and his preaching and miracles, it came with his death and resurrection, and it will come at the end of the age.”32 As this short survey demonstrates, there are a wide variety of interpretations and explanations of the nature and purpose of the kingdom program of God. In 1958, J. Dwight Pentecost wrote that it was “almost impossible to make one’s way” through the maze of interpretations.33 This task has not gotten any easier in the forty subsequent years, and any interpreter must remain humble in attempting to maneuver the maze. Yet Pentecost pointed the way out when he observed that the truths relating to the kingdom will not be found in examining the writings of men but only by an inductive study of the Word of God.34 Accordingly, I now turn to the book of Matthew and its treatment of Jesus’s proclamation of the kingdom.