A New Kind of Christianity - Brian McLaren [68]
I didn’t admit it to the theologian as I stared deep into my hot and sour soup, but I had no idea what he was talking about. As a constitutional reader of the Bible, I considered the words of Jesus and Paul pretty much on a par. Beyond that, I had always assumed that “kingdom of God” meant “kingdom of heaven,” which meant “going to heaven after you die,” which required believing the message of Paul’s Letter to the Romans, which I understood to teach a theory of atonement called “penal substitution,” which was the basis for a formula for forgiveness of original sin called “justification by grace through faith.”
But my lunch mate’s questions unsettled all that. They bugged me so much that I started rereading the gospels with new intensity, and it became clear that my knowledge needed to be doubted and at least some of my accumulated learning needed to be either unlearned or supplemented. Jesus’s one-word preface to his gospel—“Repent!”—made sense to me as never before (Mark 1:15). “Repent” means (literally, become pensive again or have a change of mind and heart), and I needed to become pensive again about the gospel—its meaning for the world and for me.
The kingdom of God is at hand, or, in the words of my friend Rod Washington, God’s new benevolent society is already among us.1 I’ve devoted two entire books to understanding what that simple phrase meant and means, and I still feel there’s so much more to discover.2 I, along with many others, have written about how the phrase shimmers and glows in relation to the dominant social reality of Jesus’s time: the kingdom of Caesar or the empire of Rome.3 We’ve explored how the kingdom-oriented term “Christ” means “liberating king,” the one who will free God’s people from oppression, confront and humble their oppressors, and then lead both into a better day. We’ve considered the radical—even treasonous—use of the term “Lord” by the early Christians: to declare Jesus is Lord meant—joyfully and defiantly—that Caesar wasn’t.4 This original three-word creed helps explain why so many people were willing to be martyrs in the early church. Each martyrdom was a witness to the striking contrast between the two competing kingdoms and their lords—one who would gladly torture and kill to establish dominance via the Pax Romana and another who would willingly suffer and die to establish reconciliation via the Pax Christi.
Increasing numbers of us, when freed from the constraints of the six-line Greco-Roman narrative and the associated constitutional reading of the Bible, gain courage to speak what has become joyfully clear to us in this fresh reading of the gospels: Jesus didn’t come to start a new religion to replace first Judaism and then all other religions, whether by the pen, the pulpit, the sword, or the apocalypse. (In fact, in light of everything we know about Jesus, doesn’t it seem positively ludicrous to imagine him gathering his disciples to announce, “Listen, guys. Here’s my real agenda. We’re going to start a new religion, and we’re going to name it after me”?)5
Instead, he came to announce a new kingdom, a new way of life, a new way of peace that carried good news to all people of every religion. A new kingdom is much bigger than a new religion, and in fact it has room for many religious traditions within it.6 This good news wasn’t simply about a new way to solve the religious problems of ontological fall and original sin (problems, remember once more, that arise centuries later and within a different narrative altogether). It wasn’t simply information about how individual souls could leave earth, avoid hell, and ascend to heaven after death. No, it was about God’s will being done on earth as in heaven for all people. It was about God’s faithful solidarity with all humanity in our suffering, oppression, and evil. It was about God’s compassion and call