Among the most significant things that distinguish Christianity from the other religions of the world is that we have hope. This is not an anxious hope that constantly has us questioning if we have done enough to satisfy God's demands, but a secure hope that rests on the knowledge that God in Christ has redeemed us and called us to be His people. It is a hope that eagerly anticipates the establishment of God's kingdom in fullness. Willem VanGemeren, in The Progress of Redemption, says it like this:

The goal of God's kingdom is the establishment of God's absolute sovereignty over heaven and earth. From the expulsion from the garden till the glorious coming of the Messiah, God prepares a people to himself. This people desires to do his will on earth and awaits with hope the transformation of this world. The present world is scarred by the effects of sin and judgment, but the restoration of the world inaugurates the consummation of God's purposes...

Hope is a most vital element in the kingdom. It calls the subjects of the kingdom to theocentric living and keeps the present enjoyment of the kingdom of God and the future unfolding of its glory in dynamic tension. The children of the kingdom enjoy a foretaste of the future, but their lives are still in the shadow of the eschaton. Jesus has inaugurated the final stage in the history of redemption. Moreover, newness of life, sealed by the Spirit of God, is a token of the future restoration. The Spirit works in individuals and corporately in the church. The church is the messianic assembly instituted by Jesus Christ for the purpose of calling others to faith in himself and for adorning its members with the hope of his glorious coming...

Hope in the kingdom lies at the center of Christ's teaching, ministry, and kingdom (Matt. 6:10; 25:1-13). The proclamation of the Good News—that the kingdom is here in the Christ who gave himself a ransom—is incomplete unless it has the corollary preaching of the glorious coming of the Messiah...Peter admonishes the churches to wait and to encourage one another with the hope of the inheritance prepared for the saints at Jesus' coming (1 Peter 1:3-4, 8). The elements of that hope include the glorious appearing of our Lord, the resurrection of the body, the glorification of the people of God, the vengeance on the enemies of God's Messiah, the fullness of Jews and Gentiles in the church of Christ in accordance with God's promises and purpose in Christ, the presence of the triune God, and the renewal of heaven and earth (470-471).

That is hope. That is the hope that we as Christians live with, and can rejoice in. To be sure, this hope creates a tension right now—the kingdom has already come, but it is not yet fully established—and we live in this tension each day as we seek to make known the sovereign reign of God over all of creation, all the while struggling against the kingdom of the world as Satan attempts to subvert the rule of God. But our hope is rooted in the knowledge that this tension will be overcome with the return of Christ. And so we pray, "Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!" (Rev. 22:20).

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Every once in a while, I either come to a point where I feel as if I have nothing to say or I have so much going on in my head that I don't know what to say. In the last few weeks it has been the latter, hence the relative infrequency of posting here.

In the interim, then, I offer this delightfully inflammatory quote from one of the essays in James K. A. Smith's book, The Devil Reads Derrida, as a filler. Personally, I tend to opt for subtle provocation, but since this is a quote, I (somewhat) absolve myself of responsibility for what is said—though, I should add, for the most part I agree with the analysis. This particular essay focuses on some of the arguments in Greg Boyd's, The Myth of a Christian Nation. Let me anticipate what might be going through your mind—ultimately he takes Boyd to task for constructing his arguments on a number of false premises; it is the larger overall points with which he resonates.

Smith begins with a brief discussion of some of the evangelical figures who, in the early 1970s, began to make American Christians aware of the fact that they lived with a duality, one that had them altogether focused on redeeming the souls of individuals at the expense of redeeming the rest of the created order. Richard Mouw, for example, "invited evangelicals to take up the Cultural Mandate as a complement to, and expression of, the Great Commission." Only, it didn't quite go as planned.

A funny thing happened on the way to the Capitol. If [people like] Mouw were trying to pull evangelicals back from their isolation out on the pietist end of the pendulum's arc, they didn't likely anticipate the degree to which the pendulum would swing the other way...In fact, evangelicals became such zealous converts to the Cultural Mandate that it has pretty much trumped the Great Commission. Christians leaders spend more time worrying about activist judges, Venezuelan dictators, and constitutional amendments than their evangelical forebears could ever have imagined. Devoting themselves to political strategizing and marshaling the machinations of government, evangelicals have so embraced participation in the 'earthly city' that one wonders whether they've lost their passport to the City of God. Worse yet is the suspicion that evangelicals in America have just collapsed the two, such that the City of God is just downright confused with America as a city set on a hill...[We must denounce] the nationalistic 'idolatry' of American evangelicalism which fuses the kingdom of God with a preferred, made-in-America version of the kingdom of the world, confusing and conflating the cross and the flag (98-99).

As I said above, I agree with the overall point being made, though I would make a few qualifications. However, this is not the time to get into those, lest this turn into something of a tome. Ultimately, what Smith is attempting to bring out is that American evangelicalism is characterized by an over-realized eschatology. One need not look any further than the pervasive rhetoric of superiority, the quasi-divinization of the Founding Fathers (or Reagan, for that matter), and the unquestioning ascent to the supposed biblical principles of the Constitution to see the evidence of this.

By no means should Christians abdicate their responsibilities with respect to the cultural mandate; Smith is not advocating a return to isolationist pietism. Neither is he vilifying America or its principles (nor do I). Instead, this is meant to remind Christians that our citizenship in the Kingdom of God and resultant designation as resident aliens in this world calls us first and foremost to the task of being ambassadors of the King, of being a sign and foretaste of His Kingdom and bearing witness to the rule of our Sovereign Lord over all of creation. It is to this Lord that every knee shall one day bow.

I have stirred the pot with the ladle that is Smith (and Boyd) long enough. What do you think?

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When exploring the relationship between the Old and New Testament, we tend to pay lip service to the idea of continuity, while in reality we conceive of it more in terms of discontinuity. That modern evangelicalism tends to be one-dimensional does not help, nor does the great chronological distance between the era of Old Testament Israel and our own time.

But there are many important parallels to draw between then and now. Andy Crouch, in his recent book, Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling, explores the significance of place in terms of the location God chose Israel to occupy. The nation of Israel was at the center and heart of the Ancient Near East and was surrounded by a number of different larger and more powerful nations, each of which had direct contact and interaction with Israel. Crouch points out that

Israel's location...ensured that its unique cultural vocation would be lived out in 'public,' we might say, among the great nations of its day. As much as Israel might have been tempted to withdraw from the larger cultural currents over the centuries of its history, it simply never had that option (128-129).

To complicate matters, these larger, stronger, pagan nations exerted a great amount of cultural pressure on Israel, which found its faith constantly put to the test. God could have chosen to isolate them instead, Crouch says, perhaps in a remote valley of the Swiss Alps or the Brazilian rainforest, "but in such a location, neither would have Israel's extraordinary claim to worship not just its own local god, but the world's very Maker and Lord, made much of a difference in the wider course of history" (129). God's design and purpose for Israel required it to be center stage, for

it was only in 'public,' in the context of tremendous political and economic pressure, that Israel's cultural creativity could be made available to the neighboring nations big and small: its legal code with its keen sense of justice and responsibility toward the weak; its poetry of praise, thanksgiving and lament; its Scriptures bearing witness to the character of the one true God. Indeed, without those cultural pressures Israel's culture might have been substantially less creative in the first place. The exile into Babylon was the most devastating blow Israel suffered, an attempt at cultural eradication comparable to the Holocaust of the twentieth century. But the exile forced Israel to grapple with the implications of its faith beyond its borders, to ask what faithfulness looked like in a diaspora where neither kings nor priests had majority power, to cry, 'How could we sing the Lord's song / in a foreign land?' (Ps. 137:4) and begin to find an answer (129).

The implications and parallels for us are clear; Crouch has a way of stating the obvious without ever actually saying it. Although God's people find themselves in a radically different time and place today, our calling and purpose remains the same as Old Testament Israel's—to bear witness to the sovereign King of the Universe, and bring His rule to bear on all of life. Our place, living in the midst of this world and its various cultures, does not allow us to passively withdraw.

No less than Israel, we are to be a light to the nations. We live our lives in public.

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Steve Bishop posted this clip on his blog last week, and I had to post it here as well because what Wright is saying is so important. I especially appreciate his emphasis on viewing this as a pastoral matter. Most of the talk I've been engaged in on this issue has occurred on more of a theological or philosophical level, but this truth is crucial for everyone to understand.

This ties back to a couple of things I said earlier on the subject of redemption. In January, I posted a quote from Herman Ridderbos' The Coming of the Kingdom, which I think especially brings to light a point that Wright is implicitly making here: redemption is not first about us, but about God. That is to say, the focus of redemption is not about us as individual people going to be with God in some ethereal, spiritual existence. Redemption is about God, the sovereign King, establishing His reign over His creation, bringing His people under His rule, and placing His blessing on them.

The distinction is between a dichotomous escapism that largely relegates God's sovereignty to a spiritual plane and couches salvation in purely individual terms, and a faith and worldview that recognizes Christ as Lord enthroned as the sovereign King over all of creation and which understands salvation as something cosmic and restorative extending as far as creation. It is not ultimately about you getting saved. Certainly that is part of it, but that needs to be understood in the context of the larger story, the story of God's redemptive plan enacted in history to bring all things under Him.

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I am currently working on a post for my ongoing discussion of redemption that I should have published in the next day or two, which will deal with our conception of God and how it relates to our understanding of redemption and salvation.

As I was thinking it through, I pulled Herman Ridderbos' book, The Coming of the Kingdom, off the shelf again and started reading. I turn to Ridderbos often when I am thinking about such topics as these because he is an absolute wealth of wisdom and insight into biblical truth. What I am about to quote I think will help lead into my upcoming post. Consider what Ridderbos has to say here on God as Father and how it relates to our salvation:

Wherever Jesus speaks of 'your Father in heaven,' and the 'heavenly Father,' or of 'children of the heavenly Father,' he has in view the exclusive relationship between the Lord and those who will share in the bliss of the kingdom of heaven, and share in it now already. Here, too, it appears that the new covenant has begun with the kingdom of God, and that those to whom salvation is promised are the new people of God. But full stress, however, must be laid on this idea of a community. The salvation Jesus proclaims is a salvation of the people of the Lord...and this also applies to God's Fatherhood. The whole gospel proves that this relation must not be thought of in an individualistic sense, i.e., it does not in the first place denote a relationship between God and individual human beings, but between the Lord and his people. This fact is not at all affected by the circumstance that membership with this people in the fullness of time is not due to natural descent from Israel but to personal conversion and faith in Jesus as the Christ. Sonship to God must be understood in a redemptive-historical sense. It is the realization of the promise of the new covenant, the continuation and fulfillment of the bond between the Lord and Israel.

...The fact that from the outset God's fatherhood denotes a relation which coalesces with the theocratic relation of the covenant, indicates the close connection between the two. God's fatherhood over Israel consisted in the fact that he was Israel's king. And this connection is again and again found in Jesus' preaching. Jesus teaches his disciples to pray to the Father that his name be hallowed and that his kingdom may come. The salvation of God's people lay in the fact that he would fully reveal and sanctify himself as king. The good pleasure of the Father towards his children is his giving them the kingdom (Luke 12:32) [235, 238].

Note that this is only a very cursory lead in to what I'll be expanding on in the next few posts. What I have quoted here only alludes to the distorted conception of God as Father that many modern evangelicals hold to. For now what I want to emphasize is what Ridderbos warns against, something I have seen become far too characteristic of evangelicalism—a thorough individualizing of salvation, which not only takes us away from the heart of the gospel and the true nature of redemption, but also trivializes both God's enthronement as the sovereign King and the covenant He makes between Himself and His people. Again, I will be returning to all this in forthcoming posts.

For now, any thoughts on what Ridderbos says here? I would appreciate your insight on this as I go along.

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