CELEBRATING LIFE IN GOD’S KINGDOM - Graham Buxton

In this article I would like to suggest that many Christians need to rediscover the Kingdom of God precisely because they have lost its true meaning. In the gospels there is much that Jesus taught about the Kingdom of God. To the Jews, of course, the concept of the Kingdom was highly significant. Before the Jews were exiled to Babylon, the great prophecies of a coming King in Isaiah were interpreted as a literal fulfilment to come on earth. In other words, it was seen by the Jews as a present possibility. But after the exile, indeed quite probably because of the exile, the conviction grew that if God wasn’t going to act inside history then perhaps the way to understand the Kingdom was in terms of the future. And so we have this idea of the dramatic inbreaking of God in the person of a heavenly Son of Man, bringing in his wake a Kingdom that wasoutside history … so Daniel 7 and the imagery of an “Ancient of Days.”

Now, by the time Jesus came on the scene of human history, this spiritual vision had become very secular and nationalistic too. The Jews fully expected that God would come and rescue them from the powers of this present evil age and establish the new redeemed community in “the world to come.” During Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem, with palm branches laid before him, the people cried out: “Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! Blessed is the coming Kingdom of our father David!” But in Jesus we see – and many Jews failed to see – that the Kingdom of God has come in the here-and-now. In fact there are three great truths about the Kingdom of God that are disclosed in Jesus Christ:

1. The coming of the Kingdom in advance of its full and final manifestation – the Kingdom is both now and not-yet.


2. The coming of the Kingdom in the person of Jesus himself.


3. The hidden and secret nature of the growth of the Kingdom – so Jesus taught about the Kingdom in various parables … the mustard seed, and leaven in the dough.

The Kingdom of God is therefore not just some future spiritual reality to look forward to, something that takes us outside the world in which we live today. Ultimately, of course, it is that – but it is more. The Kingdom of God also has to do with the present reality of Jesus in our midst, and what we do with this Jesus who is deeply involved in the structures and very fabric of this world. And if Jesus’ teaching in the gospels opens us up to the true nature of the Kingdom of God, then Paul’s letters teach us about how we are to live in the Kingdom. In a nutshell, Kingdom living has to do with our relationship with Jesus Christ.

Now what has happened – and the church has a lot to answer for this if we take a broad historical perspective – is that the Kingdom of God has been interpreted by many in purely spiritual terms. The contours of the Kingdom have been narrowed down to spiritual realities at the expense of a more holistic and more generous understanding. The famous 5th century church father, Augustine, once summed up the essence of true spirituality in the words noverim te, noverim me – they are in Latin, and mean “may I know you, may I know myself.” Not just knowing about God, but knowing God intimately, personally. Then, and only then, do we truly begin to know ourselves. Actually, good though Augustine’s phrase is – and it is good – it may be misleading, for it suggests that our spiritual life is defined solely in terms of our vertical relationship with God … full stop. Keep your eyes firmly fixed on God, gazing heavenwards – like the pilgrim Christian in John Bunyan’s celebrated Pilgrim’s Progress – and you’ve attained ‘true spirituality’. In my new book, Celebrating Life, I seek to demolish that myth.

In The Travail of Nature, Paul Santmire invites us to imagine that we are climbing a mountain. There are two alternatives that we are asked to consider as we make our way up the mountain: either we keep our gaze firmly fixed upwards, unaware of all around us as we journey towards the transcendent light above; on the other hand, we may choose to look around us as we make the journey, our eyes drinking in the beauty and glory of the mountain scenery … look up or look around. The first perspective – which Santmire describes in the metaphor of ascent – implies a form of spirituality that takes us not just towards God, but away fromnature, away from the physical world around us. The second metaphor, that of fecundity (or lush fruitfulness), invites us into an awareness and appreciation of the rich goodness of creation. The second alternative suggests that, in the words of Sally McFague, we need to be not just supernatural Christians, but ‘super, natural’ Christians!

Recently I came across the following definition of spirituality:

“Spirituality can be described as the whole of our deepest religious beliefs, convictions, and patterns of thought, emotion and behaviour in respect to what is ultimate, to God. Spirituality is holistic, encompassing our relationships to all of creation – to others, to society and nature, to work and recreation – in a fundamentally religious orientation. In relation to God, it is who we really are, the deepest self.” (Anne Carr, in a book entitled Exploring Christian Spirituality).

What I like about this definition is that it is all-embracing. It has both breadth and depth. Deep, because our lives are grounded in the depths of God himself. And broad, because the life of this God reaches into every part of his creation.

In recent years I have developed a keen interest in the relationship between science and Christianity. The general impression gained by many people today is that science and faith are diametrically opposed: science deals with facts and religion deals with – to put it as charitably as possible – untestable dogma. Science is objective: faith is subjective. It is commonly thought by many Christians that science will inevitably shipwreck faith. Understandably, this idea has caused many Christians to have a negative view of science. The result is that they fail to appreciate what science can say to us about this marvellous universe in which we are privileged to live.

Notice, I am not talking about scientists, but science. There are some scientists who are biased against faith, none more famously so than the arch-critic of all things that have to do with religious faith, Richard Dawkins – his book The God Delusion has been a runaway bestseller in recent months. And then there are others who are sympathetic … and there are more scientists who are Christians than you might think. What I want to emphasise here is that science is essentially neutral. The goal of science is to help us to discover why the universe is as it is. I am a pastor at heart, and I am grieved that many pastors fail to appreciate the value of science in demonstrating the amazing features of God’s creation. And so I decided to do something about that, and eventually published a book on the topic in 2005.

My starting point was the Trinity, and my basic thesis is that God has brought into being, at both the human and the non-human level, a creation that reflects his relational, trinitarian nature. Not only do you and I exist as relational beings, interconnected with one another, but the universe is also shot through with interconnectedness – and this is something that science is beginning to show more and more – cosmically and ecologically: from stellar galaxies to tiny microscopic plant life. We could call this God’s ‘creation-community’, a community of both creatures and environments contributing to a ‘web of life on earth’. I am not a scientist, so as I studied these things I found myself on a very steep learning curve when it came to things like quantum mechanics and chaos theory!

And, of course, there is more to all this – in a very profound way, you and I are connected to creation. In fact, I believe that to become a person in the fullest sense is to cultivate a spirituality that gets in touch with physicality – our own physicality, and the physicality of the world around us. This is one of the unique gifts of contemporary Celtic spirituality. If pastors in our churches want to help people become more spiritual, they need to first help them become more human – not just more in touch with God, but also more in touch with themselves and more in touch with creation … The Kingdom of God has to do not only with the God of creation, but also with the creation of God – though the two are distinct, they are not to be separated – let’s think about that a little more.

As Christians rightly insist, there is a distinction to be made between the kingdom of God and the kingdom of this world. However, at times it is hard to distinguish Christians from everyone else, which was not the case with the early disciples of Jesus, who turned the world they knew upside-down. As Christians we are not meant to blend into society, unnoticed and indistinct from everyone else; we are called to be salt and light, making a difference in the world. That’s what Kingdom living is all about. Christians are not meant to be unnoticeable in society – we are called to be salt and light, making a difference in our world! Someone once said that Christians in the world are sometimes chameleons, fading into the colour of the culture, sometimes ostriches with heads in the sand avoiding all contact, and sometimes porcupines, confronting others with hackles raised!

Making a difference in our world – Kingdom living – implies that there is a duality to be acknowledged. Jesus said: “whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life” (John 8:12). There is light and darkness, right and wrong, good and evil. But what has happened is that all that is light, right and good has been identified with one side of ‘reality’ (= the church) and all that is dark, wrong and evil with the other side of ‘reality’ (= the ‘world’). The result is that many Christians have adopted a ‘siege mentality’, hauling up the drawbridge so that there is little real intercourse between the church and the world. Instead of celebratingall that is good in the world, some Christians view the secular world as unspiritual, even to be avoided.

Early on in the life of the church all sorts of wrong ideas about the world in which we live began to take root. It’s called dualism, and it has a lot to do with Plato, whose ideas have infiltrated the church over the centuries. Dualism has robbed many people – and many Christians – of the joy of life in God’s good creation. Simply put, dualism says that life is divided into two compartments, the holy and the unholy, or the sacred and the profane: for one compartment – obviously ‘holy’! – read ‘church’, and for the other (‘unholy’) read the ‘world’. As I prepared for ordination, I experienced family and friends voicing their views about the fact that I was now ‘going into the church’, as if previously I was somehow ‘out’ of the church! At the same time others despaired that I was leaving the ‘real’ world for some kind of spiritual asylum.  We so easily divide life up into two realms, with a whole lot of false opposites. We pit sacred against secular, faith against works, church against world, soul against body, heaven against earth, prayer against politics, creeds against deeds, and so we could go on.

Some sections of the church need to repent of the narrow dualism that avoids any form of genuine contact with the world, a suffocating dualism that can treat God’s creation as intrinsically contaminating rather than intrinsically wholesome and good. There are some wonderful lines in Aurora Leigh, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s nineteenth-century verse-novel of early Victorian life in England:

… Earth’s crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God:
But only he who sees, takes off his shoes,
The rest sit round it, and pluck blackberries …

Consider the distinction often made between heaven and earth. Some Christians – most, in fact – assume that the purpose of life on earth is to prepare us for heaven, like batting practice for our future! That’s a false analogy, and far too spiritualised. It is more correct to say that the purpose of life on earth is to give glory to God by living as humanly as possible! Hans Kung, the well-known Catholic theologian, was once asked why we should embrace Christianity. His reply was: “So that we can be fully human.” Spirituality and humanity go together – they are not to be pulled apart – in fact, I would go so far as to say that our Christian maturity could be measured not by how ‘spiritual’ we are, but how fully human we allow ourselves to be! What is our ultimate destination, as Christians? … Our ultimate destination is not heaven – it is the new earth that will represent the final act in God’s great redemptive purposes.

God’s original plan was for us to live eternally with him in the creation that he brought into being through his mighty power – expressed in the wonderful language of Genesis 1 and 2. In a book called Heaven is a Place on Earth, Michael Wittmer writes these great words: “ … the Christian hope is that our departure from this world is just the first leg of a journey that is round-trip. We will not remain forever with God in heaven, for God will bring heaven down to us.” This is precisely what John is saying to us in his vision in Revelation 21:2: “I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God,” followed by these wonderful words: “Now the dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with them.”  Notice that – heaven comes down to earth, not the reverse! Earth, once shamed and denuded, is replete with the glory of God.

So heaven is where we shall be until that great day when the new creation of Revelation 22 unfolds. The point is that you and I are not really made for heaven – there is, as Michael Wittmer says, one thing better: “to kneel in the presence of God with the bodies he created us to have in the place he created us to live.” In fact, you might say that but for sin we would not be going to heaven! … if there had been no sin, then humankind would be forever alive with God in his original creation. So we might as well get used to our bodies, and the reality of God’s good creation, because that’s what eternity is going to be like! I think C S Lewis had a profound understanding of the physicality and naturalness of the new earth that is our eternal home-to-be inThe Last Battle, as well as in The Great Divorce.

Many people ask the question, “What on earth am I here for?” In the American TV series Everybody Loves Raymond, Ally, Raymond’s daughter, asks some questions about the origin of life. The typically inept Raymond thinks she is asking about how babies are made. Eventually he discovers that she is far more interested in why we exist at all. She asks: Why are we born? Why does God put us here? If we all go to heaven when we die, then why does God want us here first? Why are we here, Daddy? … Good questions, aren’t they? Poor Raymond fumbles around for a while until he blurts out a totally silly answer – God put us on earth to ease the heavenly congestion! It must be crowded up there, so God created this planet as a temporary measure until he could free up more space for everyone! … That’s the complete opposite of what I am trying to convey here – earth isn’t a temporary stopping-place for us … it’s our real home.

My answer to the question “What on earth am I here for?” is simple: “You are here to enjoy God on earth!”: To live in God’s image means to experience the joy of life in God, life with one another, and life in relationship to God’s creation. Classical Christianity has given prominence (rightly) to the first, acknowledged the second, but in large part ignored the last of these three. In the gospels we are all familiar with the story of Jesus calming the wind and waves. This story is significant because it reminds us that there is a clear distinction between Jesus and the created order – no confusion here between God and nature that we find in some contemporary spiritualities. In this incident we see clearly that Jesus is God, and the creation is not.

But notice this: God and the real world cannot be separated, even though they are distinct. The problem with some Christians is that they draw the line in the wrong place: rather than drawing a line between God and his creation, recognising that they are distinct, they become dualists and draw a line separating the physical from the spiritual. We do it all the time: we create false opposites, and then pit them against each other … church against world, the spiritual against the physical, creeds against deeds, and so on. Think about Jesus – he was perfect man, as well as God in human flesh. He lived in perfect loving relationship with his Father and with the Spirit – as Trinity. Luke 2:52 reminds us that he grew in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and with those around him. His life was one of compassion and integrity in relationship with others. He lovedin a way that marked him out as exceptional. In him the Kingdom was revealed in all its glory and wholesomeness.

And his relationship with creation is expressed powerfully in his mastery over the created order – but he did not exploit creation for his own selfish purposes … rather, he related to creation in order to bless others. He turned water into wine, and multiplied loaves and fishes. His Kingdom teaching invites us to consider the birds of the air and the grass of the field. Throughout his life, he treated creation as something of value – he gave it its own intrinsic integrity. As a man, he was at home in this world. To live as full human beings in the Kingdom of God means to live as Jesus lived – in fulfilling relationship with God, with others, and with creation … for each represents what it means to be at home. For the Kingdom is here and now, not just that which is to come! I close Celebrating Life with this exhortation: let us, with discernment and wisdom, participate with others in their enjoyment of life, partner with those who seek to liberate the oppressed, and celebrate all that is good in God’s world. This is Kingdom living in all its fullness!

Humanity Of The Kingdom - Graham Buxton