Christian Reconstruction: What It Is, What It Isn't - Reconstructionist Radio (Audiobook)

<p><strong>THE NATURE OF GOD’S KINGDOM</strong></p> <p><em>Jesus answered, “My kingdom is not of this world. If My kingdom were of this world, My servants would fight, so that I should not be delivered to the Jews; but now My kingdom is not from here.”</em></p> <p><em>John </em>18:36; <em>New King James Version</em></p> <p>Few passages in the Bible are misinterpreted in our day as often as this one. The only other one that seems to rival it is the favorite verse of the people who resent all church discipline (or any other kind of discipline imposed in the name of God): “Judge not, that you be not judged” (Matthew 7:1). (Can you imagine a police department that went by this rule?) We will consider the interpretation of this passage in Chapter 2. But before we do, we need to know exactly what Jesus meant by the word, “kingdom.”</p> <p>What about the kingdom of God? Does it have any jurisdiction or manifestation on earth, or is it strictly heavenly and limited to the human heart? Whenever a Christian argues that Christians have a God-given responsibility to work today to build God’s kingdom on earth, unless he is referring only to personal evangelism or missions, someone will object. “Jesus wasn’t building a political kingdom. He was only building His church. The church isn’t an earthly kingdom. After all, His kingdom is not of this world.”</p> <p>Notice the implicit argument. First, Jesus was (and is) building His church (true). Second, Jesus was (and is) also building His kingdom (true). Third, the church is not supposed to be political (true). Fourth, His kingdom therefore is not political (true only if His kingdom is identical to His church).</p> <p>Question: Is His kingdom identical with His church?</p> <p><strong>Protestants and Catholics</strong></p> <p>It always astounds me when I hear Protestants cite John 18:36 in order to defend a narrow definition of God’s kingdom in history. Four centuries ago, this narrow definition was the Roman Catholic view of the kingdom. Roman Catholics equated the kingdom with the church, meaning the church of Rome. The world is outside the church, they said, and it is therefore doomed. The institutional church is all that matters as far as eternity is concerned, they argued. The world was contrasted with the kingdom (“church”), and the church could never encompass the world.</p> <p>In sharp contrast, the Protestant Reformation was based on the idea that the <em>institutional </em>church must be defined much more narrowly than God’s world-encompassing kingdom. Protestants always argued that God’s kingdom is far wider in scope than the institutional church. So, from the Protestant viewpoint:</p> <ol> <li>The kingdom is more than the church.</li> <li>The church is less than the kingdom.</li> </ol> <p>The Protestant doctrine, “every man a priest” – as Protestant an idea as there is – rests on the assumption that each Christian’s service is a holy calling, not just the ordained priest’s calling. Each Christian is supposed to serve as a full-time worker in God’s kingdom (Romans 12:1). What is this kingdom? <em>It is the whole world of Christian service, </em>and not just the institutional church.</p> <p>What we find today is that fundamentalist Protestants have unknowingly adopted the older Roman Catholic view of church and kingdom. Writes Peter Masters of Spurgeon’s Metropolitan Tabernacle: “Reconstructionist writers all scorn the attitude of traditional evangelicals who see the church as something so completely distinct and separate from the world that they seek no ‘authority’ over the affairs of the world.”<a href="#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1">[1]</a> We do not argue, as this critic argues to defend his own position of cultural isolation, that “The kingdom of God is the church, small as it may sometimes appear, not the world….”<a href="#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2">[2]</a></p> <p>This definition of <em>the kingdom of God as the institutional church </em>is the traditional Roman Catholic definition of the kingdom, and it has led in the past to ecclesiocracy. It places everything under the institutional church. The church in principle absorbs everything.</p> <p>This same definition of the church can also lead to the ghetto mentality and cultural isolation: it places nothing under Christianity, because the kingdom is narrowly defined as merely