41. Asitimbay, What’s Up America? 9.
42. To cite just one example, individualism influences how willing (or able) U.S. Americans are to respond to the idea that God created us to be relational and social beings, and this impacts our understanding of the vital role of participation in communities of faith as integral to our Christ-following journey.
43. Althen and Bennett, American Ways, 11.
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Theological Foundation More Fully Developed
Tension between the “Already” and the “Not Yet” of the Kingdom
The Synoptic Gospels present the kingdom as a primary focus of Jesus’s ministry. Mark shows Jesus’s public ministry commencing with the announcement that “the time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel.”44 Matthew portrays a similar beginning after Jesus’s wilderness experience, noting that “from that time Jesus began to preach, saying, ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.’”45 Luke introduces Jesus’s connection with kingdom thinking even before Jesus’s birth, as the angel Gabriel tells Mary that the child to whom she will give birth “will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.”46
The importance of kingdom to Jesus’s ministry and teaching is seldom in dispute. However, Jesus’s kingdom imagery has been interpreted in a wide variety of ways through the years. One of the most important is whether and/or when the kingdom of God will be (or has been) fulfilled.
Albert Schweitzer, for example, believed that Jesus was originally awaiting a kingdom consummation in some sort of parousia. When that failed to materialize, Jesus and his followers began to reformulate their views about the kingdom’s nearness, pushing the coming of the kingdom out to the future. Schweitzer follows the lead of the “thoroughgoing eschatological school,” noting that “the whole history of ‘Christianity’ down to the present day, that is to say, the real inner history of it, is based on the ‘delay of the parousia.’”47
C. H. Dodd, on the other hand, believed that the predominant lens through which we should view Jesus’s kingdom language is that of “realized eschatology,” by which he meant that “it is not that the Kingdom of God will shortly come, but that it is a present fact.”48 This perspective led Dodd to interpret most of Jesus’s kingdom-related parables as focusing on present impact rather than referring to future events. Thus, in commenting on the four “parables of crisis”49 (“therefore keep watch”), Dodd observes that “it seems possible, therefore, to give to all these ‘eschatological’ parables an application within the context of the ministry of Jesus. They were intended to enforce His appeal to men [sic] to recognize that the Kingdom of God was present in all its momentous consequences, and that by their conduct in the presence of this tremendous crisis they would judge themselves as faithful or unfaithful, wise or foolish.”50
For Dodd, therefore, the kingdom had already arrived in the person and ministry of Jesus. For Schweitzer the kingdom had not yet made its appearance or reached its fulfillment.
A large number of scholars today prefer to include both of these dimensions in their thinking about the kingdom, so that they reach what Caragounis calls “mediating positions according to which the kingdom of God is conceived as both present and future.”51 The basic concept is that in Jesus the kingdom has already come, as validated by his miracles (especially his power over Satan), confirmed through his sacrificial death (a coronation of sorts), and vindicated through his resurrection; and yet the final fulfillment of the kingdom is still to come in the end times with the parousia and the great wedding banquet of the Lamb.
There is a wide variety of perspectives on how one might conceive of the balance or tension between the already and the not-yet of kingdom fulfillment. Beasley-Murray writes that “the believer’s experience of grace is set between an accomplished redemption and an awaited consummation.”52 Kummel prefers to think of the kingdom as being expected in the near future (and therefore not yet here), so that Jesus’s miracles served as “premonitory signs in the present.” Yet he notes that there is also a sense in which the kingdom is already present in Jesus, the Strong Man. The tension, therefore, lies between the promise of a future consummation of history and the fulfillment of that history in Jesus.53
Cullman grounds his views in the understanding of time among early Christians, who thought not in terms of “the spatial contrast between the Here and the Beyond, but from the time distinction between Formerly and Now and Then.”54 This means that the Judaic view of two ages (this age and the age to come) has been altered in Christianity, for Jesus has divided time in a fresh way, having become the center of the age to come. Believers, therefore, know that although the war is still being fought, the decisive battle has already been won.55
These examples serve to illustrate that a great deal of material has been written on the theme of the already and not-yet character of the kingdom’s fulfillment.56 For my purposes, the most important factor to note is how the tension between the already and not-yet dimensions of kingdom fulfillment relates to the biblical theme of life, and then consequently how this relates to the theory and practice of evangelism. Tension is the critical word here, for it helps us understand that the dynamic more appropriately has to do with the tension between the both–and of the already and not-yet dimensions of the kingdom than with any attempt to choose between these two dimensions in an either–or way.57 James Dunn suggests that Paul sees an eschatological gap opening up with Jesus, so that the starting point of the future age has been “pulled back into the present age, to begin with Christ’s resurrection” and the “distinctive feature of Paul’s theology is not the eschatology, but the tension which his revised eschatology sets up.”58 Peter Davids also characterizes the already and not-yet dynamic as a tension, observing that “the king may have come, but he is still coming. The kingdom is already here in the presence of the king, but the kingdom has not yet arrived.”59 Bosch shares these sentiments, and he helpfully notes that not only is this tension unresolved in Jesus’s usage (he prefers the designation of reign of God), but should remain that way, for “it is precisely in this creative tension that the reality of God’s reign has significance for our contemporary mission.”60
In keeping with the spirit of Bosch, I suggest that the tension between the already and not-yet dimensions of kingdom fulfillment bears a strong relationship to the biblical theme of life. Recognizing this tension prompts us to ask: Has the kingdom come fully enough in Jesus that we can experience the life that God intends for us when we submit to Jesus’s reign