Journal: Southern Baptist Journal of Theology
Volume: SBJT 12:1 (Spring 2008)
Article: The Kingdom of God and the Church: A Baptist Reassessment
Author: Russell D. Moore

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SBJT 12:1 (Spring 2008) p. 68

The Kingdom of God and the Church: A Baptist Reassessment

Russell D. Moore

Robert E. Sagers*

*Russell D. Moore is Senior Vice President for Academic Administration and Dean of the School of Theology at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, where he also serves as Associate Professor of Christian Theology and Ethics. Dr. Moore is the Executive Director of the Carl F. H. Henry Institute for Evangelical Engagement and a Senior Editor of Touchstone: A Journal of
Mere Christianity. He is the author of The Kingdom of Christ: The New Evangelical Perspective (Crossway, 2004).
Robert E. Sagers serves as Special Assistant to the Senior Vice President for Academic Administration at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, where he is a Doctor of Philosophy student in Christian theology.

Introduction

The United States Constitution isn’t a sacred document; it isn’t even a grammatical one. That was the claim of E. B. White who, as one-half of Strunk and White, the twentieth century’s most famous team of style-writing experts, probably ought to know. In an essay in the New Yorker in 1936, White pointed to the preamble’s language of forming a “more perfect union.” Perfection is perfection, White noted, and degrees of more or less perfection have “turned many a grammarian’s stomach.” A grammatically-correct author, White concluded, would have written simply “in order to form a perfect union—a thing our forefathers didn’t dare predict, even for the sake of grammar.”1 The founding statesmen, of course, were reacting to something virtually all generations of humans have known—kingship, including a divine right to rule. The American skepticism of such claims to monarchy has had an impact on more than simply the grammar of our founding documents. The hostility to monarchy and of utopianism—rightly placed hostility, in this present age—has left a Western culture in which “kingship” and “Kingdom” means very little, apart from a fast-food logo or the latest bored trivialities of the British royal family. It is little wonder, then, that Western Christians often read “Kingdom of God” in their Bibles as either “when the roll is called up yonder” or a denominational program or a sermon series or the sum total of their individual “quiet times.”

The past century, though, has seen a renewed emphasis among evangelical Christians on the Kingdom of God both in its present and future manifestations. This ongoing reflection on the Kingdom has yielded, and promises to yield further, great insights on the mission of the church in the present age.

This article argues that Baptist ecclesiology particul...

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