Re: Psalms 2 and 22 and the conversion of the whole world

My argument is that there is at least a core paradigm that organizes thought about the kingdom of God and possibly that this is in effect a comprehensive paradigm: Israel is seen as a nation covenantally related to YHWH in the midst of the other nations of the earth, many of which are perceived to be hostile towards YHWH and his people.

The kingdom of God motif in both the Old and New Testaments, in my view, has to do primarily with the existence and destiny of the family of Abraham in relation to these other nations. In particular it has to do with what happens when Israel becomes exiled, invaded or oppressed by nations more powerful than itself. These circumstances raise the question of whether Israel’s God is really more powerful than the gods of the nations. So when YHWH acts to bring his people back from exile, that is seen as a ‘kingdom’ event - and a matter of ‘good news’ (Is. 52:7). When YHWH defeats the Syrian king Antiochus Epiphanes and vindicates his suffering saints (Daniel 7-12), that is seen as a ‘kingdom’ event.

But in the process of overcoming the powers that oppress Israel, YHWH also re-establishes his own sovereignty over his people, not least by judging that part of the community that did not remain faithful to the covenant, that colluded with the pagan power.

So the idea of the kingdom of God has two parts to it: i) God acts through geo-political events to deliver his people; and ii) through that intervention, and concretely through the faithfulness and suffering of those who remain true to the covenant, God restores his own rule over his people. In the first part, God is sovereign among the nations in the sense that no nation is strong enough - no god is strong enough - to defeat his purposes for his people. This is just as true for Rome as it is for Egypt or Babylon or Syria. But this is not understood to mean that all nations will eventually and finally acknowledge God as king over them. It is only a particular people, the family of Abraham, that has chosen to live under the reign of God as it has been delegated to Christ.

For those of us who live under a monarchy ‘sovereign’ is not such an anachronism. As long as we talk about the ‘kingdom of God’, I see nothing wrong with using the category of ‘sovereignty’. Of course, we may wish, like Brian McLaren, to find alternatives to the ‘kingdom’ metaphor (‘peace insurgency’, ‘unterror movement’, ‘global love economy’, ‘sacred ecosystem’), but there is a danger that in the process we lose sight of the central biblical idea that God acts sovereignly in history on behalf of (and sometimes againsty) his people.