A Review of Scot McKnight’s Kingdom Conspiracy

I recently read Scot McKnight’s very fine book, Kingdom Conspiracy: Returning to the Radical Mission of the Local Church (Brazos, 2014), in which he discusses the New Testament’s presentation of the kingdom of God and its relevance for the church today.  In doing this, McKnight provides an especially important description of the missionary dimension of God’s kingdom.

McKnight argues, correctly in my view, that “kingdom work” (as many are prone to say nowadays) is always centered within the Christian church.  Then, from within the body of Christ, kingdom ministry radiates outward into the surrounding society and the rest of the world (see especially chapter 7, “Kingdom Mission is Church Mission”).

But, he warns, if Christian social activism is not an extension of the local church’s gospel teaching, fellowship, ministry and shared experience, then it is not kingdom work.  It may be laudable social and political work, but it has nothing to do with the kingdom of God.  “This means all true kingdom mission is church mission” (96).

McKnight’s church-centered understanding of God’s kingdom is pivotal to his argument.  On this point, Prof. McKnight and I are in agreement.

But McKnight’s laser-like focus on the local church also accounts for the book’s central mistake.  For he defines the kingdom and the church as synonymous with each other.  The kingdom of God IS the church, and the church IS the kingdom of God. (Beginning with chapter 5, “Kingdom is People” and passim).

This is where Prof. McKnight and I must part company.

Anyone who has read my book, I Pledge Allegiance: A Believer’s Guide to Kingdom Citizenship in 21^st-Century America, will observe the similarity between McKnight’s emphasis on the missional dimension of God’s kingdom and my own.  But my readers will also recall my insistence that the church is best understood as the citizenry of God’s kingdom, not the kingdom itself.

 

It is unfortunate that Prof. McKnight’s concern for tightening the connection between church and kingdom leads him to such an extreme. I say “unfortunate” because I don’t believe that he is any more comfortable with his identification of church with kingdom than I am.

There are numerous places throughout Kingdom Conspiracy where McKnight slips alternative definitions into the mix without acknowledging that he has just changed the terms of his discussion.  In other words, he masks the limitations of his explicit definition of kingdom by implicitly expanding that definition when his argument demands it.

For example, he sometimes notes that a kingdom “implies a king, a rule, a people, a land, and a law” (76, 159, 205).  So, the kingdom is not synonymous with people alone, after all.  It is more complex.

He also teasingly refers to “the important overlap of kingdom and church” (95), without noting that an overlap is not the same as an identity.  We are left with a suggestion that God’s kingdom overlaps with something more than people.

At one point, he resorts to the very language that he had previously criticized and rejected, referring to “the kingdom as the realm of redemption” (114).  Elsewhere he repeats that the word kingdom asserts “God’s dynamic rule” (126), the more widely held view that I endorse.

McKnight also notes that God’s kingdom brings redemption, and this redemption is “cosmic” in scope (151-52, 156, 159); that is, it includes a great deal in addition to human beings.  The kingdom of God also involves Christ’s subjugation of “principalities and powers” as well as the imminent redemption of all creation.

Finally, Prof. McKnight frequently lapses into my preferred terminology:  Christians are described as the citizens of God’s kingdom (75, 76, 99, 111, 155, 157, 164, 207).  Which, in my view, is the proper way to explain the New Testament’s perspective on God’s kingdom rule and its relationship to the people of God.

Think for a moment of what it means to live in the United States.  We the people are not synonymous with all that is America.  We are citizens of this country, but the people and the nation are not identical or coextensive.  America is as much (if not more) an idea; an idea about liberty with a specific history; a projection of power and influence as much as it is a particular population.

McKnight is forced into using this rhetorical sleight of hand because his preferred definition, identifying the kingdom exclusively with the church, simply does not comport with the full spectrum of Biblical evidence.

Am I quibbling over a minor issue?  I don’t think so.

Both Prof. McKnight and I would agree that it is important to understand the answers to Biblical questions accurately.  Thus, it is also important to understand that God’s kingdom rule is not confined only to the church.

God’s reign is working its way throughout all of history, although we may not always be able to explain exactly where and how that is happening. God’s ways are rarely self-evident.  Although church work certainly lies at the heart of kingdom work, for redeeming sinful folks like us is at the heart of Jesus’ mission, God’s kingdom is much bigger than any of us.

God rules victoriously and will one day be glorified, not only by the church, but by angels, demons, principalities, powers, and all things above the earth and below.  These spiritual powers now tremble at the knowledge of their ultimate defeat.

The kingdom of God is our heavenly Father’s redemptive reign, His saving sovereignty, now being established over all creation.  Believers are privileged to become citizens of that victorious kingdom, but our citizenship is evidence and a partial product (central and vital, but not the whole) of Christ’s reign.

I suspect that the heavenly host of innumerable cherubim and seraphim, the legions of fallen angels, as well as the new heavens and the new earth, including the redeemed supernovae, unseen galaxies, black holes and dark matter will one day loudly object to the ecclesiastical hubris which suggests that God’s kingdom involves only the church.