Re: NT Wright and the confusion of kingdom and new creation

Jonas, I would suggest, in fact, that the concept of ‘kingdom’ is very clear in the Hebrew scriptures. For example, the people ask for a king in order to be like the bullying kingdoms around them; David represents the high point of the notion that Israel is ruled by a king, who is God’s ‘son’ and who is given victory over Israel’s enemies (cf. Ps. 2 and 110, which are critical for the development of New Testament thinking about Jesus); Isaiah proclaims the good news that YHWH is coming as king to set free his people and reign over them; and the clash of nations symbolized in Daniel has as its outcome the establishment of an eternal righteous kingdom, one that is given to the saints of the Most High.

Notice that all these motifs contain the idea that Israel as a kingdom is at odds with, if not at war with, the more powerful nations round about it. The issue of kingdom arises when Israel ceases to be God’s new creation because it ceases to be obedient to the Law and consequently brings upon itself the ‘inter-national’ disasters predicted in Deuteronomy 28:47-57. The king is the one who will go out before them and fight their battles (1 Sam. 8:20). When Jesus announces the coming of the kingdom of God, he is not announcing the coming of a new creation. He is announcing that God’s microcosm will be delivered from the hand of its enemies and that, as prefigured in Daniel’s vision, the kingdom, the right to reign over the people, will be given to the Son of man, who is both Jesus and the community that suffers in him. The ‘kingdom of God’ in the Gospels is a dynamic eschatological notion: it is a statement about judgment, restoration and the eventual victory of the early church over its immediate historical enemies. That victory is won, through the death of Christ, so that the people of God can - by grace and through the indwelling of the Spirit - be the new creation that from Abraham onwards they were intended to be.

I agree that the kingdom idea spills over somewhat into John’s vision of the new creation. But I pointed out in the post above that Revelation 22:3-5 has very strong associations with the motif of the reign of the martyrs with Christ, which greatly restricts its significance. Otherwise, I think the basic principle holds, that kingdom is a relevant category as long as sovereignty over God’s people is contested, as long as there are ‘enemies’. But once the final enemy, death, has been defeated, the kingdom, as Paul says, is given back to the Father. In the new heaven and the new earth there are no more battles for Israel’s king to fight.