Journal: Southern Baptist Journal of Theology
Volume: SBJT 12:1 (Spring 2008)
Article: The SBJT Forum
Author: Anonymous

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SBJT 12:1 (Spring 2008) p. 104

The SBJT Forum

Editor’s Note: Readers should be aware of the forum’s format. D. A. Carson, Barry Joslin, C. Everett Berry, and Denny Burk have been asked specific questions to which they have provided written responses. These writers are not responding to one another. The journal’s goal for the Forum is to provide significant thinkers’ views on topics of interest without requiring lengthy articles from these heavily-committed individuals. Their answers are presented in an order that hopefully makes the forum read as much like a unified presentation as possible.

SBJT: What are the most common errors that people make when it comes to understanding and proclaiming the kingdom?

D. A. Carson:1 I shall list a handful. They are in no particular order of importance, primarily because several of these interpretive errors belong to distinctive groups. To rank the importance of the error would require ranking the influence of each group—and that, of course, is an entirely different question. But several of these errors have something in common: they are errors because they succumb to reductionism. They rightly see some corner of the truth, but then absolutize it in such a way that they fail to see how “kingdom” is, linguistically speaking, a tensive symbol, with a very broad array of referents and overtones in the Bible. To absolutize only a part of the evidence not only makes exegetical nonsense out of other passages and thus skews the comprehensiveness of the ways in which the Bible speaks of the kingdom of God (and related expressions), but it ends up with distorted theological synthesis.

First, some forms of theology inject a temporal barrier between “kingdom” and “church”: the church belongs to this dispensation, and the kingdom to the next. At least some passages cannot easily be squared with such an outlook: e.g., “For he has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sin” (Col 1:13-14).

Second, sometimes the inverse error is promoted. The old hymn by Timothy Dwight promotes the view that “kingdom” and “church” refer to the same thing:

I love Thy kingdom, Lord,

The house of Thine abode,

The church our blest Redeemer saved

With His own precious blood.

But this is a category mistake. The word “church” refers to a gathering, an assembly, of people; the word “kingdom,” in the first instance, refers to the dynamic notion of “reign” (whatever the ...

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