God's Reign/Realm/Kingdom... and Frederick Buechner

You wouldn't really expect any other 1,900 year old literary collection to reflect the cultural sensitivities of a completely foreign contemporary setting, but that's exactly what many of us do with the Bible. We are surprised and sometimes taken aback when we expect the Bible to express itself one way, and what it really says is something strikingly different.

Case in point. Many contemporary thinkers and church people are uncomfortable with the phrase "kingdom of God." Some are uncomfortable with the "male-ness," the "assumed patriarchy" of something called a "king-dom." Those who pay attention to these kinds of concerns have attempted to alleviate that tension by translating male terms for monarchs and monarchies with non-gender-specific words (eg. "Sovereign" for "King," "realm" or "reign" for "kingdom" and the like. That makes some old favorite hymns a little difficult to sing ("Lead on, eternal sovereign" doesn't roll off the tongue for many as does "lead on, o king eternal), but it kind of lets folks at least talk about what the Bible means when it mentions it.

Another way to approach the whole "kingdom of God" discussion is the way author Frederick Buechner does in his remarkable little book Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC, published the year I graduated from college. In Wishful Thinking Buechner offers brief essays on a number of very common but often misunderstood and confusing personalities and ideas in a way that makes them accessible. Here's what he writes about "The Kingdom of God:"

"It's not a place, of course, but a condition. Kingship might be a better word. 'Thy kingdom come, thy will be done,' Jesus prayed. The two are in apposition.

"Insofar as here and there, and now and then, God's kingly will is being done in various odd ways among us even as this moment, the kingdom has already come.

"Insofar as all the odd ways we do God's will at this moment are at best half-baked and half-hearted. the kingdom is still a long way off, to be more precise and theological.

"As a poet, Jesus is maybe at his best in describing the feeling you get when you glimpse the Thing Itself -- the kingship of the king official at last and all the world his coronation. It's like finding a million dollars in a field, he says, or a jewel worth a king's ransom. It's like finding something you hated to lose and though you'd never find again -- an old keepsake, a stray sheep, a missing child. When the kingdom really comes, it's as if the thing you thought you'd never find again is you."

Notes from Marcus Borg

When Marcus Borg wrote The Heart of Christianity, he was interviewed by Deborah Caldwell for Beliefnet. In addition to recommending that website to you (www.beliefnet.com), I found this interview fascinating, and very relevant to our conversation in a couple of weeks (Tuesday, October 19, 6:30 PM at First Church).

Why Be Christian? (from www.beliefnet.com)

Interview by Deborah Caldwell

In renowned Jesus scholar Marcus Borg's latest book, The Heart of Christianity, he responds to an audience of readers who, over the years, have asked him about the essence of their faith. How, they ask, can Christianity be relevant in a time of ever-expanding historical and scientific knowledge? In a conversation with Deborah Caldwell, Borg answers that question, touching on the afterlife, living in a multi-cultural society, the meaning of salvation, and being born again.

You say that Christianity in North America and Europe is going through a paradigm change-that a new vision of how to be Christian is emerging. What is it and why is it happening?

Broadly speaking, there are two different visions of Christianity in North America today. The earlier vision is the product of the last few hundred years, especially the last 150 years. This earlier vision of Christianity is literalistic in its understanding of the Bible, absolutist in its understanding of the ethical teachings of the Bible, and exclusivist--meaning Christianity is the only way.

That's the vision of Christianity that the majority of us grew up with, whether we are mainline Protestant, Catholic, or conservative Protestant. But that way of seeing Christianity has become unpersuasive to millions of people--who can't be literalists or absolutists or exclusivists. But now there is an emerging vision, an emerging paradigm.

The conflict between these two paradigms can be seen in many different places. In the second half of the 19th Century and early in the 20th Century we saw conflict over evolution. Thirty years ago the conflict was over ordination of women in mainline denominations, and of course today we see the conflict about gays and lesbians in the church. For Protestants, the two visions have everything to do with biblical authority. The earlier vision sees the Bible as divine product with a divine guarantee to be true. The emerging vision sees the Bible as a human historical product, the product of two ancient communities [Judaism and Christianity]. It tells us what they thought, not what God thinks.

My book has almost an evangelistic purpose--to show that Christianity makes persuasive and compelling sense, that the intellectual stumbling blocks that many people experience with Christianity are unnecessary and artificial and largely the creation of the last few hundred years. I'm persuaded that Christianity, rightly understood, makes sense--and so do Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism. And they make very much the same kind of sense.

You say the original way of seeing Christianity has become untenable for a lot of people. How do you know this?

Mainline denominations have seen a membership decline of roughly 40% over the last 35 years. But most of the people leaving mainline denominations have not joined more conservative churches. They've simply dropped out. Presumably, a major reason many of them dropped out is that the form of Christianity they learned growing up ceased to make compelling sense to them. If it had made sense, they still would be in the church.

Another example: The vast majority of Americans, according to polls taken in 2002, cannot be religious exclusivists. Only 18% of people surveyed in two different polls taken in 2002 said yes to "My religion is the only true religion." Another example: In a Gallup poll taken in 1963, 65% of the sample were biblical literalists. By 2001 that figure had gone down to 21%.

But hasn't this issue of the paradigm shift, how to make Christianity relevant, been going on for at least 35 years? What is different now?

The shift has been going on in seminaries for over a century. It actually began a couple hundred years ago, but then it was a tiny circle of theological elites. Maybe in the last 10-15 years it's become a major grassroots movement among the laity. If you look at the number of religious bestsellers on the New York Times list, all of them reflect the emerging paradigm, with the exception of the Left Behind series.