A Thinking Reed

"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed" – Blaise Pascal

“Making God’s kingdom real”

Matthew Yglesias, pointing to this post by Alexia Kelley at the TPM Cafe discussion of E. J. Dionne’s Souled Out (see my previous post), says that it exhibits “a side of the ‘religious left’ that strikes me as a bit creepy and illiberal.” I’m not sure I’d go that far, but it does employ a style of language that I find a bit wrongheaded:

It is particularly tempting for people who are privileged to have a seat at important tables to forget that our task is nothing less than making God’s kingdom real.

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Clearly, all of this has specific political implications, but it also requires a more expansive religious imagination that is mindful of ultimate ends. For Christians, this is the work of building God’s kingdom up here on earth – realizing a time of justice and peace. Our Jewish brothers and sisters speak of tikkun olam, repairing or perfecting the world. Martin Luther King, Jr. and thousands of nameless heroes of the civil rights movement were challenging unjust social structures, but they were also converting hearts and moving spirits through an uncompromising moral witness to human dignity.

I’m genuinely curious where this language of “building God’s kingdom” or “making God’s kingdom real,” which seems to be a staple of some segments of the Religious Left, comes from. It strikes me as both biblically and theologically dubious. Does God need us to build his kingdom? I can’t think of any place in the New Testament where this kind of language is used. And it seems to imply a very Pelagian view of human agency. So, what is its historical provenance? Does it come from the social gospel movement?

It also, as I’ve argued before, seems to identify God’s Kingdom with an idealized social and political state of affairs. But the final advent of the Kingdom, at least as traditionally understood, involves far more than this. We’re talking about the end of suffering, disease, and death and the healing of all relationships between human beings and God. No political settlement engineered by human beings, however just, can accomplish this.

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13 responses to ““Making God’s kingdom real””

  1. Gaius Sempronius Gracchus

    Surely you are familiar with liberal reconstructions of the “metaphorical” or “non literal” meanings of such things as the Kingdom of God?

    Apparently EJ’s understanding of these things owes more to Marcus Borg than to St Paul, say.

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  2. Christopher

    Indeed. It’s a troubling bit of language but it shows up a lot in the religious left. In my opinion, it has the potential to be dangerous because it can suggest that our politics are identifiable with God’s kingdom to such a degree that disagreement shows you’re not on board with God. Take abortion, for example. As I’ve noted before I don’t fall into either pro-life or pro-choice camps on this matter, but for many on the religious left (and religious right), that means I’m not on board with God’s politics.

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  3. Lee

    Just to clarify, the post I quoted wasn’t by Dionne, but by one of the other participants. I’ll make that clearer in the post.

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  4. Lee

    More substantively – Gaius, to your point, what I find troubling here is not the “de-mythologization” per se, but that it seems to invert, or at least distort, the relative roles of God and humanity in bringing in the kingdom.

    Christopher, right on. I think you and I are on a very similar page regarding not investing our political projects with a divine imprimatur.

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  5. Gaius Sempronius Gracchus

    I followed the link to a post with a picture of a young woman on it, but no name of an author.

    Looks less than a reference to the social gospel or liberal theological tradition than a use of that sort of lingo to refer to Catholic social teaching, which is a tad more radical on those issues than the money and power parts of any Democratic platform, though wholly conservative on the social issues of contrary interest to sociocons and sociolibs.

    Why is this creepy?

    CREEPY?

    Oh, and doesn’t it matter to anyone that there is no Christian analogue of Sharia?

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  6. Lee

    Yeah, I agree that it’s not creepy. Illiberal, though, might be more accurate. I can see how one might have concerns that someone who thought they were building God’s kingdom on earth might be tempted to run roughshod over competing views, for the kinds of reasons Christopher identifies.

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  7. Gaius Sempronius Gracchus

    I would have thought you would agree with such an idea. And that God made us to know, love, and serve Him in this world and the next. And with a good many other things liberals might find creepy, or even alarming, but you should not.

    So I thought, anyway.

    Anyway, if a person has any political drothers at all he must struggle with and either defeat or be defeated by those with contrary views.

    How is it different, or worse, if his views or theirs are thought to stem from Divine Law, as all varieties of Christians once thought in common with the Jews and even with the pagans was true of the natural law, i.e., the moral law?

    This is not the source of conflict between contemporary liberals and Christians, which arises from substantive differences of opinion as to morals to which the question of the relationship between God and moral truth is surely irrelevant.

    The fight is really over abortion, gay rights, and the like.

    And the other fight between liberals and Muslim fundamentalists is over the veil, stoning and flogging of adulteresses, and the like.

    The problem is not that these people love God and think God requires right action. It is what they think is right action.

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  8. Lee

    Correct – there’s nothing inherently wrong with acting – and seeking to act politically – in accordance with what one believes God requires. I don’t, however, think this is incompatible with being wary of the use of coercion to impose controversial moral ideals. Precisely for religious reasons in fact – if personhood is sacred then we ought to be wary about coercing persons.

    But this, I submit, is different from talking about “building God’s kingdom.” Politics, in my understanding, is a penultimate matter that has to do with creating the conditions for human flourishing in this world, which include at least relative justice and freedom. But this inherently involves trade-offs between competing values, whereas the kingdom, I suppose, is a state of affairs where all values are realized simultaneously. (How that works is beyond my ken.)

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  9. Whither Progress? « A Banner Coward

    […] two interrelated posts, one a rather evocative bit from John Gray’s Straw Dogs, and the other an observation on some eyebrow-raising rhetoric from one corner of the emerging religious […]

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  10. Marvin

    I agree completely that “No political settlement engineered by human beings, however just, can accomplish” the kingdom.

    But may I play devil’s advocate? Is the real political danger these days from the Utopian Christian left?

    Is it not from the cynics who piously quote (out of context) the first half of John 12:8, and then smugly conclude that the only “realistic” political program is more tax cuts for me, not so that I can contribute the money to the poor, because they probably deserve their fate, but because “God helps those who help themselves?”

    Or is it not from the sci-fi apocalypticists among us who think that shuttle diplomacy in the Middle East is not only doomed to fail but is actually a sinfil resistance of God’s will b/c “the Script” calls for Armageddon?

    Give me the wide-eyed, naive utopians!

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  11. Lee

    That’s a fair point, Marvin and in political terms I completely agree. But, while secular liberals like Yglesias might be thinking about potential political dangers, I’m just as concerned about theological dangers. Exaggerated theological rhetoric should be avoided, IMO, even in service to a relatively good cause.

    I also admit that, given my personal social milieu, wide-eyed Christian lefties are a more common object of my everyday experience than Left Behinders.

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  12. Camassia

    The line “making God’s kingdom real” reminds me of a sermon a few months back where the pastor described a Christian’s work as, among other things, “giving people real food as well as spiritual food.” It sounded to me like a sort of Freudian slip, an admission that maybe spiritual things aren’t “real.” Which opens up a whole theological can of worms, but suffice to say I can see why secular folks might feel that people who talk that way are trying to force reality to bend to their will, rather than declaring reality as they see it.

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  13. Lee

    That’s a good point, Camassia. I was focusing more on the “making” (i.e. the emphasis on human agency) than the “real.”

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