The Kingdom of God: Salvific or Rewardific
This book is about the Kingdom of God, which is the good news of the coming rule of God on the earth. It refers primarily to who will rule as God's prince of creation: Jesus Christ and his most faithful disciples, granted positions of honor to reign alongside him. It is a promise - a grand announcement - that God has not forgotten his creation, and that one day everything wrong with the world will be made right under his direct reign through the God-Man, Jesus Christ.
At the heart of Jesus's teaching in the Synoptic Gospels lies a Greek phrase: basileia tou theou, "the Kingdom of God." He spoke of it constantly, telling parables of seeds, banquets, and buried treasure, and healing the sick and casting out demons as signs that God's rule was breaking into the world. Whatever else he came to do, this was the message he could not stop preaching.
And yet, for more than a hundred years, scholars have argued over what he actually meant.
The debate ignited in 1892, when a German scholar argued that the kingdom Jesus announced was entirely future - something only God could bring about, not a matter of human initiative. A later scholar pushed further, claiming Jesus expected the kingdom within his own generation and died still holding that hope. Both insisted it was no gentle inner feeling but a world-changing event yet to come.
Then, in 1935, the British scholar C. H. Dodd flipped the conversation. The kingdom had not been pushed into the future, he said - it had already arrived with Jesus himself. He coined the term "realized eschatology" the great ending event of history had already taken place in Jesus's ministry.
Others found both extremes wanting. One described an "eschatology in process of realization." George Eldon Ladd put it simply: "already but not yet." The king has arrived, and his reign has begun, but the physical manifestation of God's rule in its totality still lies ahead. Ladd also clarified that "kingdom" in the Bible means not primarily a place, but a reign - the dynamic kingly rule of God, with any sense of realm being secondary.
N. T. Wright adds that the four Gospels are fundamentally stories about God becoming king - reclaiming his rightful authority over the world through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.
All of these scholars are wrestling with the same treasure buried in two Greek words. Their debates center on one of the greatest promises ever made - that God intends to reign through his Son's rule and that his people will share in that glory.
Why has consensus proved impossible? Like forcing a square peg into a round hole, people assume the "Gospel of God" (the Kingdom of God) and the "Gospel of Christ" (Jesus's death, burial, and resurrection for the forgiveness of sin) are the same thing. They are not, and squeezing one into the other only breeds confusion and endless debate.
Jesus preached two great messages, both rightly called gospels. The first was God's good news about his coming kingdom. The second was about his death, burial, and resurrection to forgive our sins. Over the past 1,500 years, these two melted into one. The Gospel of God lost its identity, and the good news about Jesus Christ became the only gospel most Christians have ever heard.
This book is a serious effort to untangle those two messages - and to bring the first one back into the light. It is the announcement of God's plan to place his Son on the earth as its rightful Ruler, with his most faithful men and women serving alongside him (Revelation 2:26-27; 3:21). Jesus called that rule the Kingdom of God - God's good news.
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