Kingdom Harbor

What is the gospel?  I mean: What is the full, Kingdom of God-announcing, cross-centered, New Creation focused, sin-bearing, substitutionary atoning, wrath-absorbing, life-transforming, social justice-bringing gospel really about?  

Scot McKnight is doing perhaps the best job I’ve ever seen in concisely and biblically recapturing the fullness of the Kingdom Gospel of Jesus that has been so stripped down, individualized and privatized for so long.  I urge you all to read his “Kingdom Gospel” series at Jesus Creed.  He is unpacking so marvelously and concisely the big picture stuff I was wrestling with a few years back in graduate school.  

A lot of the conclusions I had drawn on this central matter then are unpacked in my essay entitled “Loosening the Helmet of Salvation.”  Here I highlight the church’s tendency to downsize and simplify the multi-dimensional nature of the Christian doctrine of ‘salvation” and then I put forth two essential, yet often overlooked, dimensions of what it means to be saved. You can read the Full Article Here.  Otherwise, the two main points I unpack are:

1. Salvation involves being invited into the Christian Story. Being saved involves coming to a realization that the world is a battlefield of competing narratives, and only one story can be true. Through one’s knowledge of the Story, they are then, as John Navone puts it, “invited to share the same dynamic orientation that was Christ’s creative way of imagining and experiencing the world; [they] are invited to accept his story as the structure or context for [their] faith’s imagining and experiencing the stages of life…”

2. Salvation involves being incorporated into the Christian Community. Since our self-identities are shaped and molded by the communities we are a part, a person begins the process of Christian conversion—taking on a Christlike identity—as one is engrafted into the Christian community and exposed to the kind of life characterized by Christ’s selfless love. Salvation then, repeating an earlier quote, “requires re-socialization within the community being formed around Jesus.”

McKnight argues, like me, that the Kingdom gospel Jesus announces, enacts and dies and rises to secure involves (1) stepping into the larger, Covenant Story of redemption and (2) the formation of a messianic, Kingdom community shaped and guided by this Story.  In McKnight’s own words: “Kingdom Gospel means community formation through commitment to Jesus. That community brings justice and it ends every form of oppression. Jesus’ kingdom vision will mean a total spiritual and social make-over for Israel.”  Furthermore, McKnight demands that we liberate the minimized gospel from it’s conceptual, abstract, rationalistic straight-jacket and bring our understanding of gospel and salvation into alignment with the far larger meta-narrative Jesus (through Luke) is telling:

“What Luke’s wiki-story gives us is a grand vision, so grand at times that it boggles. Every author summoned to the table by Jesus, to use our image from the last chapter, is asked to tell the story in light of those five elements: creation, cracked Eikons, covenant community, Christ, and consummation. Luke’s Gospel emphasizes covenant community and Christ. His emphasis, so I believe, deserves emphasis today” (McKnight).

The most brilliant move McKnight makes in unfolding his argument from Luke’s gospel is by asking the million dollar question of Luke and Jesus:

If “kingdom” is the solution, what is the problem?

or

If “kingdom” is the answer, what was the question? 

Go read Luke for yourself and see how you would answer those questions.  Or, if you’re a bit too lazy, then just go read Jesus Creed!