I returned last Monday refreshed from a weekend in New York after meeting with my fellow clergy at our annual conference. One of our bishops spoke about the sad state of the Church, noting how few Christians understand the spiritual reality of the Kingdom of God which Jesus proclaimed. He quoted the biblical scholar Gordon Fee who said, “… it is fair to say that to miss—or to misunderstand— [the term the kingdom of God] is to miss Jesus altogether” (164).
Mostly the bishop spoke of out a conventional understanding of the kingdom of God motif, thus, sadly missing the main point as well. Nevertheless, he did expound on one important scriptural truth of what the kingdom of God is really all about: The Spirit of God. Jesus said to his detractors, “But if I cast out demons by the Spirit of God, then the kingdom of God has already overtaken you” (Mt 12:28, NET). The kingdom of God is about the Spirit of God operating in the realm of our lives—in our hearts—, and not necessarily about earthly political rule and power.
This woeful misunderstanding of maybe the most important term in the Bible is why I have chosen to regularly use the term un-kingdom of God. Because, as I have repeatedly said, most people think of earthly political power and rule when they think of a kingdom, I hope to jar them into a new way to appropriate the real meaning of this term: The Un-Kingdom of God, which is the opposite of political rule/power, thus ethical anarchy.
Some believe that the confusion surrounding the terms The Kingdom of God/Heaven or The Gospel of the Kingdom is that Jesus and St. Paul seemingly use the term in different ways. Jesus spoke of the Gospel of the Kingdom or the Kingdom of God/Heaven exclusively, whereas Paul used other prepositional phrases to describe the Gospel: the Gospel of God, the Gospel of God’s grace, the Gospel of peace, the Gospel of His Son, the Gospel of salvation, but most often the Gospel of Christ. This polarity between Paul and Jesus has been exaggerated by some (i.e., Jesus preached the Kingdom, Paul preached Grace or the Church). I believe both Jesus and Paul preached the same gospel of the “kingdom,” but Paul used an array of descriptive terms to display the many beautiful facets of the gospel of that same “kingdom.”
Nonetheless, one of the most important (and there are not that many) Pauline uses of the Kingdom of God term occurs in Romans. “For the kingdom of God does not consist of food and drink, but righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit” (Ro 14:17, NET). Paul is saying that the kingdom of god is not an external thing, like the kingdoms of the world. John Gill, in his commentary about this text, reiterates this truth that the kingdom is not about the State or the hierarchical church, but the inner disposition of the free Christian. Gill, I believe, is connecting us back to Jesus’ clear teaching, “The Kingdom of God is within you” (Lk 17:21, KJV). It is the Spirit of God within all of us.
Though I have come to appreciate the shock value of the un-kingdom phrase, it is not unique to me. Even though I came to it through my own discovery of Jesus as my un-king, I immediately found these terms already in use among other Christian anarchists, especially Mark Van Steenwyk, who claims to have first received it from a blogger named Jason Evans. (I must give props to those who deserve props, Ro 13:7).
It is not my desire to create more confusion, however. I want to be clear in communicating the unique version of the kingdom that Christ was proclaiming. Thus, I am considering dropping the use of un-kingdom and using and explicating a replacement term: The Commonweal of Love. I know that, on the onset, this may be more confusing. And I am not attempting to be arrogantly neologistic. I am simply attempting to follow the advice that David Tracy gave to those attempting theology in the post-modern age. Tracy saw the contemporary theologian exercising a metaphorical or analogical imagination to make the Christ event contemporarily understood and relevant. He said, contemporary theologians will create poignant analogies through a “reflective and imaginative power [while] involved in the dialectical relationships of participation and critique” (410).
For me The Commonweal of Love expresses the radical societal nature of Christ’s vision, while expressing it within the most fundamental understanding of the nature of God. Maybe it could be called The Agape Society or The Christhood (Christian-Neighborhood), or some other way to spark the anarchistic Christian imagination, so as to emphasize a new way of relating to others and living a truly free and responsible life in the world with God and others. What has to be done, I believe, at the core, is to somehow help others, Christians especially, to begin to truly appropriate what Jesus was saying about the radical nature of the Kingdom of God which has come near. This is the Good News.
I’ll close this entry with the words of the excommunicated and executed Dominican priest Girolamo Savonarola. “Do you wish to be free? Then above all things, love God, love your neighbor, love one another, love the common weal; then you will have true liberty” (Gibert, 1895: 378).
References
Fee, Gordon (2000). Listening to the Spirit in the Text. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.
Gilbert, Josiah Hotchkiss (1895). Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers. New York, NY: Wilbur B. Ketchum.
Tracy, David (1981). The Analogical Imagination. Christian Culture and the Culture of Pluralism. New York, NY: Crossroad Publishing.
© Pablo de la Paz, 2016
Jesus Anarchist 