with beautiful expressions of teeming life, fertile abundance, and multiplication, all of which God pronounced as good. If creation of and participation in life was God’s original intention for creation, then God’s intention in Jesus is a restoration and re-creation of that same life: teeming, fertile, abundant, and good.85 This directly and powerfully impacts the theory and practice of evangelism, for it helps shape our understandings of what we are offering in our communication of the good news. We are offering the possibility of participation in the fully orbed life that God originally intended in creation. We are communicating the good news that vibrant living is possible now. We are inviting people to follow the way (reign) of Christ in their lives so they can participate with him in all that he intends and desires for us. The shape or contours or ingredients of this life will be more fully developed in subsequent chapters. At this juncture, I simply (yet importantly) want to reaffirm that while the theological foundation for this project rightly begins with considerations concerning Jesus’s synoptic emphasis on the kingdom of God, it more rightly ends with an emphasis on God’s ultimate goal of full life, which even more rightly provides the starting place for evangelism.
44. Mark 1:15.
45. Matt 4:17. Although some scholars believe that Matthew’s designation of the kingdom of heaven should be interpreted differently than the designation of the kingdom of God in Mark and Luke, most scholars believe these designations refer to the same symbolic concept. In “Kingdom of God/Kingdom of Heaven,” Caragounis, for example, says that the “equivalence” of these two designations “is indicated by their content, context and interchangeability in the Gospels” (417).
46. Luke 1:33.
47. Schweitzer, Quest of the Historical Jesus, 328.
48. Dodd, Parables of the Kingdom, 143.
49. The Faithful and Unfaithful Servants (Matt 24:45–51 and Luke 12:42–46); The Waiting Servants (Mark 13:33–37 and Luke 12:35–38); The Thief at Night (Matt 24:43–44 and Luke 12:39–40); and The Ten Virgins (Matt 25:1–13).
50. Dodd, Parables of the Kingdom, 138–9.
51. Caragounis, “Kingdom of God/Kingdom of Heaven,” 421.
52. Beasley-Murray, Jesus and the Kingdom of God, 338.
53. Kummel, Promise and Fulfillment, 21, 109, 155.
54. Cullman, Christ and Time, 37.
55. Ibid., 81–87.
56. As one might imagine, much has been written concerning other dimensions of the kingdom too, with a broad variance of perspectives. Perrin, for example, building on his own work in biblical studies plus the work of Philip Wheelwright in Metaphor and Reality, contends that the kingship-of-God myth in ancient Israel led to the emergence of the symbol of the kingdom of God, and that Jesus’s use of this symbol is tensive (carries a wide range of meanings) rather than steno (a more fixed meaning). To interpret the kingdom symbol in the New Testament, therefore, one must consider whether the kingship-of-God myth has meaning to those who hear Jesus’s use of the kingdom of God symbol, and what that symbol might evoke in the hearers in relation to that myth (Perrin, Jesus and the Language of the Kingdom, especially 1–45; 202). Bock, however, is uncomfortable with Perrin’s insistence that all of Jesus’s kingdom language is tensive, so he argues in “The Kingdom of God in New Testament Theology” that Jesus’s kingdom language was tensive but built on a stable (steno) base (36). From a completely different perspective, Houtepen in “Apocalyptics and the Kingdom of God” refers to the kingdom more as a prophetic reality than an apocalyptic one, and speaks of “eschatological ontology” in terms of God as “creative advance” (291–311). Waltke in “The Kingdom of God in Biblical Theology” speaks of the kingdom in terms of God’s establishment of his moral rule, and then discusses the four related primary Old Testament themes (common people, land, law, ruler), and how those themes were reinterpreted in the New Testament (15–27). I could give a myriad of other illustrations, but these suffice to portray the broad diversity of views related to the kingdom of God. My project is not finally about the kingdom of God but about the evangelistic implications of a strong emphasis on the biblical theme of life. Thus I want to limit my focus in the theological foundation to the relationship between the already and not-yet dimensions of kingdom fulfillment, the biblical theme of life, and evangelism.
57. O. V. Jathanna in “Jesus Christ—The Life of the World” addresses the tension by suggesting that “life” is an “intensive metaphor,” which means that its meaning goes beyond both the literal and metaphorical associations of the term. “It refers to what is transcendentally and eschatologically real—i.e., in view of reality-as-it-should-be and reality-as-it-will-be, and in the proleptic event of Christ reality-as-it-already-is” (78).
58. Dunn, Theology of Paul the Apostle, 464–5.
59. Davids, “The Kingdom of God Come with Power,” 19.
60. Bosch, Transforming Mission, 32.
61. For an excellent treatment of the tension created by this overlap, see Dunn, Theology of Paul the Apostle, 461–98.
62. Another factor involved in our less-than-full experience of life on earth is that we are created as finite beings. I will deal with this topic in chapter 5, using insights from David Kelsey (who speaks of living on “borrowed breath”) and Karl Barth (who talks about the provisional nature of our life in Christ).
63. Willard, Divine Conspiracy, 29.
64. Perhaps a similar belief in the fullness of God’s kingdom that was present in Jesus’s life, ministry, death, and resurrection is what led John Wesley to believe in Christian perfection to the extent that he did. He acknowledged that Christians are not exempt “either from ignorance, or mistake, or infirmities, or temptations,” due to their continued presence in the old age; and yet because they also experience the full power of the age to come, “Christians are saved in this world from all sin, from all unrighteousness; that they are now in such a sense perfect, as not to commit sin, and to be freed from evil thoughts and evil tempers” (Wesley, “Christian Perfection,” 1–19).
65. Jacob, Theology of the Old Testament, 38.
66.
