the difficulty of imagining the kingdom of God

31 May 2024 - 4 minutes read - 743 words - kudos:

In recent years, I’ve enjoyed seeing the “kingdom of God” in a new way than I’d understood it growing up. To take one example, here’s a quote from Mormon blogger Michael Austin in a By Common Consent post:

The Kingdom of God was and is part of the world of human possibility: something that people could build in the middle of whatever other kingdoms they inhabited by acting with charity, forgiveness, and compassion. It is a kingdom whose boundaries are drawn only among the network of people who are committed to its creation.

Later on in the post, in a riff on the Ascension, he includes this thought, too:

The angelic beings who appeared after Jesus ascended forced the disciples to confront their failure with one forceful rhetorical question: “Why stand ye gazing up into heaven?” That’s not where the kingdom is. That’s not where He told you to look. The Kingdom is here already, but some assembly is required. Stop looking for God where He is not–on some big white throne up in the sky–and start looking where he told you he would be: among the poor, the outcasts, the despised, and the broken. Stop looking up and start looking out.

Leo Tolstoy has a more radical take on this same basic idea than Austin did: Rather than build the kingdom of God among the existing kingdoms of the world, he advocated for tearing down all of those kingdoms and building up a Christian anarchist world instead. Anticipating some of the critics of his radical hope that such a thing could be done, he includes this passage in The Kingdom of God is Within You:

Men say, “By what shall we be made secure, when the existing order is destroyed? What will the new orders be which will take the place of those of the present time, and in what will they consist? So long as we do not know how our life will be composed, we shall not move on or budge from our place.”
This demand is what the explorer of new countries might put forth, in demanding a detailed description of the country into which he is entering.
If the life of the individual man, in passing from one age to another, were fully known to him, he would have no reason for living. The same is true of the life of humanity: if it had a programme of the life which awaits it as it enters upon its new age, this would be the surest symptom that it is not living, does not move on, but is whirling about in one spot.
The conditions of the new structure of life cannot be known to us, because they have to be worked out by ourselves. In this alone does life consist, namely, in recognizing the unknown and conforming our activity to this new cognition.
In this does the life of every individual and the life of human societies and of humanity consist.

In short, yes, it’s difficult to imagine what the kingdom of God would look like, but we shouldn’t expect to have all the details hammered out before we strive for it. (I suspect this is a common criticism of anarchist thinking, in that a similar, less religious version of this argument has cropped up in Scott Branson’s Practical Anarchism: A Guide for Daily Life).

I was reminded of Tolstoy’s argument earlier this week while listening to Dorothy Sayers’s The Man Born to Be King, a cycle of plays on the life of Christ that she wrote for the BBC (and which I finished this morning). In the eighth play, we see hecklers confront Jesus with the famous question of what will happen to the woman sequentially married to and widowed from seven different brothers in the resurrection. I appreciated Sayers’s take on Jesus’s response:

“do you think the resurrection will be just this world all over again?”

Kind of like Tolstoy and the kingdom of God, Sayers’s Jesus asks disciples to break beyond our conventions to imagine what resurrection will look like. As I’ve written repeatedly before, I appreciate resurrection as a symbol of hope for the future, and I’m glad for the encouragement by Sayers’s Jesus to radically rethink our future. We can imagine—and work toward—something better than the climate catastrophe, polarization and radical politics, and gross inequalities. It’s hard to grasp what such a radically different world might look like, but it’s worth trying to.

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