This is a first in a series of posts that will review Russell D. Moore’s important book The Kingdom of Christ. In the course of the book review, I’ll reflect a bit on how a robust theology of the Kingdom is important for cultural engagement.
A theology of the Kingdom of God is vital, and difficult, because how we answer the question “what is the Kingdom of God” determines how we answer questions such as “how should Christians relate to culture and society” and “what is the Church’s proper relationship to the State.” Anyone who wishes to develop a Christian perspective on law, culture and society must first develop a theology of the Kingdom. In fact, the “Kingdom of God” arguably is the central concept in Jesus’ teaching as recorded in the Gospels. And yet, Evangelicals have long had a complicated relationship with the Kingdom of God.
Within Evangelicalism, an understanding of the Kingdom was muddied by competing threads in the dispensational covenantal camps, both of which were reacting to liberal theology.
In the clasically dispensational camp of Evangelicalism, the Kingdom often has been pushed entirely into the future. God is not presently building His Kingdom, in the sense of transforming culture and society. Rather, believers act much like the little Dutch boy, holding fingers in the breaching levies here and there until they are raptured from the scene and the levies explode.
In the classically covenantal camp, the Kindgom of God is already present in the Church, but it is essentially a “spiritual” Kingdom. Culture and society are changed only as a byproduct of individual regeneration. There is no role for the Church in public affairs, except in the extereme of Reconstructionism, in which the Church takes over society.
In Protestant circles outside Evangelicalism, meanwhile, the Kingdom of God seemed to become litle more than a metaphor for seemingly progressive social causes. The “Kingdom” was stripped of its royal attributes and blended with a simple ethic of love and tolerance.
In “The Kingdom of Christ,” Russell D. Moore examines how more moderate dispensationalists and covenantalists — the “progressive dispensationalists” and “modified covenantalists” — are seeking to recapture a robust Evangelical doctrine of the Kingdom, which is neither merely a Kingdom entirely deferred, nor a Kingdom only internalized, nor a Kingdom that is merely a modern Western liberal ethic. Moore’s book is both an important call for renewal of an Evangelical Kingdom theology and a frustratingly parochial tract for one particular embodiment of that Kingdom.
Moore first traces how the pioneering work of neo-Evangelicals such as Carl F. Henry and George Eldon Ladd has influenced current Evangelical soteriology (the theology of salvation). In The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism, first published in 1947, Henry called the Evangelical community to cultural and political engagement. Ladd wrote prolifically on how an “already / not yet” formulation of the Kingdom fits within the context of an Evangelical soteriology. Henry and Ladd affirmed that salvation involves individual deliverance and eschatological hope, but that at the same time salvation is not merely individual. Salvation involves all of creation, including culture.
Moore shows how this wholistic concept of salvation has become rooted in the “Evangelical left,” dispensationalism, and covenantal theology in remarkably similar ways. For the Evangelical left (personified for Moore by Sanley Grenz), “Christian soteriology includes personal forgiveness of sins, the distruction of relational barriers between human beings, and the renovation of the cosmos.” (KOC at p. 89.) Similarly, he says, progressive dispensationalists “have begun the call for evangelicals to broaden the message of salvation beyond merely the emphasis on an otherworldly rescue of so many units of individual souls.” And in the Reformed, covenantal wing, Evangelical scholars draw on a rich tradition of engagement dating back to Luther and Calvin, as particularly developed by the Kuyperian stream within modern Reformed thought.
The result of these developments, Moore suggests, is a growing Evangelical concensus about how salvation relates to the Kingdom of God. The heirs of Henry and Ladd, whether they characterize themselves as dispensational, covenantal, or neither, view individual salvation and cultural redemption as related aspects of the “already / not yet” Kingdom of God innaugurated at Pentecost. Moore sees this as a good thing, and he is right. In fact, I would go further and say that this sort of wholistic, Kingdom-based soteriology is essential for meaningful Christian cultural engagement.
In a subsequent post, I’ll develop why I think a wholistic Kingdom-based soteriology is so important. Then, in another post, I’ll discuss Moore’s views about how a wholistic view of the Kingdom affects the theology of the Church — ecclesiology. On that score, I’ll have some bones to pick with Moore.