The Kingdom Of God In The Teaching Of Jesus

A landmark work, Mark Saucy's The Kingdom of God in the Teaching of Jesus presents and critiques all significant scholarship done in the last 30 years in both New Testament and systematic theology studies on Jesus and the kingdom.

In the last hundred and fifty years the kingdom of God has emerged as one of the most important topics in theology, New Testament studies, and the life of the church. But what exactly is the kingdom of God? What does it mean for the people of God and what does it mean for how they live in the world? In The Kingdom of God, part of the Biblical Theology for Life series, Nicholas Perrin explores this dominant biblical metaphor, one that is paradoxically the meta-center and the mystery in Jesus' proclamation. After survey interpretations by figures from Ritschl to N. T. Wright, Perrin examines the "what, who, and how" questions of the kingdom. In his sweepingly comprehensive study, Perrin contends that the kingdom is inaugurated in Jesus' earthly ministry, but its final development awaits later events in history. In between the times, however, the people of God are called to participate in the reign of God by living out the distinctly kingdom-ethic through hope, forgiveness, love, and prayer. X

Daily meditations taken from the works of an acclaimed novelist, essayist, and preacher who has articulated what he sees with a freshness and clarity and energy that hails our stultified imaginations.

Geerhardus Vos devotes this work to a discussion of Jesus' greatest focus in ministry -- the "kingdom of God" (and the "kingdom of heaven," which Vos takes to be referencing the same thing.) Vos begins by connecting Christ's teaching on the kingdom to the Old Testament and its concepts of a Messianic king. Then he moves into the conception of the kingdom during the New Testament with a cursory analysis of the pertinent Greek phrases (but largely accessible to a layman). From there, he moves into the kingdom as it is now, and as it will be in the new heavens and the new earth. Finally, the remaining chapters detail specific aspects and characteristics of the kingdom as it currently exists including the church as it is also compared to the kingdom, and as the means by which one gains entrance into the kingdom. Vos' enlightening treatment of this important theme in the Scriptures ought to be read, particularly by pastors, to assist in preaching and teaching on passages dealing with this vital subject.

In recent years the theme of the kingdom of God has come to the forefront in the preaching, teaching, and popular writing of Christians of all theological persuasions. Any attempt to gain clarity on the biblical meaning of the phrase the "kingdom of God" must take the teaching of Jesus as its major point of reference; for the prominence of kingdom terminology today is directly attributable to the great frequency with which he appealed in his teaching to the notion of God's kingdom. In this little book, the author sets Jesus' proclamation of the kingdom of God against its Jewish background and discusses some of the characteristic emphases that appear in Jesus' message. He then identifies three broad ways in which God's kingdom operated in Jesus' ministry, which he suggests provide, at least in broad outline, an agenda for the Church today as it strives to bear witness to the "gospel of the kingdom" entrusted to it by its Lord.

Recent research on Jesus' teaching about the Kingdom of God has in common the assumption that it remains the same throughout the time of his proclamation of it. The data that cannot be harmonized are usually judged to be inauthentic, originating from Christian prophets in the early church. Smith shows in closely argued detail how essential it is to differentiate two historical contexts for Jesus' teaching about the Kingdom of God. The nature of the Kingdom of God is conditional upon its acceptance and the acceptance of its messenger-which is to say, Jesus' teaching about the Kingdom of God is hypothetical. This is the non-rejection context of Jesus' teaching about the Kingdom of God. But some of Jesus' teaching about the Kingdom of God presupposes a context of the rejection of his message by the majority of Jews and especially the Jewish authorities. In this new context, Jesus teaches that the Kingdom will still come but not in the way first delineated, in the non-rejection context. This can be called the rejection context of Jesus' teaching about the Kingdom of God. No attempt should be made to assimilate all the data into one historical context. Distinguishing two contexts for Jesus' teaching about the Kingdom of God allows us to appreciate how Jesus modifies his teaching in the light of the rejection of the Kingdom. Without this differentiation of two historical contexts, it is impossible to make sense of Jesus' teaching about the Kingdom of God.