Book Review: The Gospel of the Kingdom

I don’t quite remember how it happened.  Our small group was finishing up our hermeneutics book club (Reading the Bible for all its Worth), and somehow I became interested in the Kingdom of God and biblical theology. 

I decided to make that our next book club topic, and ordered several books.  I just finished the one I got as a “classic” – The Gospel of the Kingdom by George Eldon Ladd.  He has written longer books on the topic, but this one is a collection of sermons and talks he gave in the 1950’s and was billed as a good introduction.

And so it was!  They don’t give sermons like this anymore, but it makes for quality reading.  Ladd seeks to explain the theology of the Kingdom of God that accounts for the verses that indicate it is a glorious thing to come, along with the verses that indicate it can be entered now.

Essentially, Ladd argues this image:

The present age will one day be replaced by a glorious future age.  But the incarnation, death and resurrection of Jesus marks the beginning of this arrival, now here in part.  During this Church age, we can invite the Kingdom of God to have rule over us, and join with God as the Kingdom spreads.  Some main points from the book:

• The Kingdom is God’s rule, as well as his realm
• The Kingdom will be present in full in the future
• The Kingdom is present in part now
• The parables in Matthew 13 teach us about the kingdom now.  It is reject-able, it is small, it exists with evil still present, it is of great value
• Eternal life is not just in the future, it is also defined as full knowledge of God.  We can have that knowledge in part now.
• God demands righteousness from us now, and in who we are, not just what we do.  But he provides the righteousness through his rule in us
• Deciding to accept the Kingdom rule is a radical, costly, eternal choice
• God offered the Kingdom first to Israel, but has turned to the gentile Church when Israel rejected this new sort of rule.
• The church is not the Kingdom.  The Kingdom creates the church.
• The full Kingdom will not come until all nations have been told the good news of God’s rule over sin, Satan and death.

This book made a good companion to The Divine Conspiracy.  It was shorter.  I found it to be a little decisive … while Ladd obviously understands Kingdom verses better than I do, I question anyone who is sure they have figured everything out.  But it is an accessible read and explains well how the Kingdom can be both “already but not yet.”