Kingdom of God and missional church: not as difficult to define as you might think | P.OST

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Author: On Podbean
Full Title: Kingdom of God and missional church: not as difficult to define as you might think | P.OST
Category: #articles
URL: https://postost.net/2022/05/kingdom-god-missional-church-difficult-define

Highlights

I think, we make life difficult for ourselves by ignoring the historical context. History carves the channel along which meaning flows.
- Note: cf. Oliver Wendell Holmes, our justifications follow our experience etc.
There is nothing imprecise, open-ended, or irrational about the kingdom of God motif in the Synoptic Gospels. It’s a first century square Jewish peg and it needs to go in a first century square Jewish hole. It won’t fit in a twenty-first century round hole.
In the Gospels, no one asks Jesus what “kingdom of God” means—not the scribes and Pharisees, not the tax collectors and sinners, not the disciples. People understood very well what he was talking about: the God of Israel would soon act to judge and redeem his people, to deliver them from their enemies, and to establish his own just rule over them in place of the Satanically inspired rule of the corrupt Jerusalem hierarchy and the Roman occupying force. This was something—good news—that needed to be proclaimed (cf. Lk. 4:43), not explained.
What was not so clear to Jesus’ hearers were certain corollaries. Who would benefit? What about the wealthy? What was the appropriate response to the message? Why did so many Jews not believe? How would it come about? When would it come about? When Jesus makes apparently enigmatic statements, therefore, about what the kingdom of God was like, the uncertainty lies not in the core definition of “kingdom of God” but in the manner and circumstances of its realisation.
The first point to make here is that it was those outside the community of disciples who struggled to understand what he was saying about the kingdom of God. That pretty much explains our problem. We are reading the texts as dull-eared, short-sighted, self-regarding outsiders to the historical context of Jesus’ ministry.
Missional church, on the other hand, may require us not to the enter the strange world of the Bible so wholeheartedly because its presuppositions in one crucial respect are not biblical. The churches of the New Testament period were communities of prophetic or eschatological witness, called into existence by the God of Israel to be signs of the new age that would come with the end of second temple Judaism and the conversion of the Greek-Roman world. Missional church in Western theological discourse is the church in a world unimagined in the Bible—after the long age of God’s rule over the nations. It is the church finally coming to terms with and constructively reacting to, first, numerical decline and, secondly, social-cultural marginalisation and irrelevance. It is the church scrabbling to salvage enough from the shipwreck of Western Christianity to keep it afloat in the turbulent waters now flooding our world. It’s the church asking the critical question, “Now what?”