The Kingdom of God

(The following is intended as a companion to my first post. Together they form a sort of introduction. If you have not read The Modern Mind, I recommend doing so first)

Fancies as lost, I have stored for thee at home:

Rise, clasp My hand, and come!

Halts by me that footfall:

Is my gloom, after all,

Shade of His hand, oustretched caressingly?

‘Ah, fondest, blindest, weakest,

I am He Whom thou seekest!

Thou dravest love from thee, who dravest me.’

                                                -Francis Thompson

Though I wrote condescendingly, and perhaps somewhat bitterly, of the Modern Mind, and though it may come across that I have somewhat fallen into a spirit of pessimism toward my fellow man, I intend this as a sort of other hand. On the one hand, The Modern Mind has been a destructive, even paralyzing force in every age in which it has arisen. On the other hand, the Kingdom of God is the perfect antidote to this destruction, and it is a relevant topic in any and every age.

I do not intend to write only in the negative. Though it is easy to wax on about the reasons a person might find for despair, at some point even the most ardent cynic becomes disingenuous in his criticisms of society. One must try very hard to be an absolute pessimist; and it is all the more difficult when discussing a topic of such joy as The Kingdom of God—a topic that really ought to be returned to more often in Christian Literature, for here is the point where the apologist may be transformed into a poet. It is a point in which a man used to playing the defendant is transformed into a man who is no longer offering excuses and alibis, but is instead offering a perfect, beautiful vision of the freedom and joy available to every man.  

While discussing the Modern Mind in the future I may spend time defending what others view as the weaknesses of the faith, but this is not my ideal; the ideal is to turn every topic to this beautiful, perfect vision, for in discussing the Kingdom of God one is inevitably extolling the greatest strengths of Christianity. And anyone who has tasted that glorious sweetness will readily assert that, in light of its strengths, the apparent weaknesses of the Christian sect grow almost invisible.

The thing that is most often forgotten about The Kingdom of God is that it is not just something to look forward to. It is not merely a fanciful way of saying “Heaven.” It is not merely a vision of a thing that is to come; it is, in a sense that can be difficult to understand by those who are unaware, very much a present reality. It is a both something to be fervently sought and yet something already obtainable. It is already and it is not yet.

That, in some respects, this long-awaited Kingdom is already available to us becomes particularly important when observed in light of man’s persistent attempts to dispense with God and to build such a kingdom for himself. The story of humanity since the time of Christ is the story of a people with no knowledge of architecture attempting, again and again, to construct a tower reaching into the heavens. Their wasted effort is especially tragic, of course, because it is being constructed directly beside a tower already completed. Man’s tower is a crippled, reeling edifice of mud and straw, unable to support its own weight; a poor, pathetic imitation of the perfect tower. The building of man either grows too tall and collapses under its own weight, or it is destroyed by other men, who believe their own blueprints to be superior. Either way, the building is continually toppled and almost without hesitation, the work is begun again, as if an important lesson has been learned.

Throughout these centuries of futility, the tower of God’s Kingdom has stood, entirely unaffected by the tragicomedy in the adjacent lot. The tower of the Kingdom of God is unshakable, built of hardened steel, fortified with a foundation of concrete that will never be unearthed.

The history of man’s attempts apart from the Kingdom of God is, to put it bluntly, a history of failure.

No one writes more perfectly of this rarely-noticed phenomenon than a man who witnesses the phenomenon up close. One such man is Malcolm Muggeridge, who must be quoted at length:

“We look back on history and what do we see? Empires rising and falling, revolutions and counter revolutions, wealth accumulating and wealth disbursed, one nation dominant and then another. Shakespeare speaks of “the rise and fall of great ones that ebb and flow with the moon.” In one lifetime I have seen my fellow countrymen ruling over a quarter of the world, the great majority of them convinced, in the words of what is still a favourite song, that “God who’s made the mighty would make them mightier yet.” I’ve heard a crazed, cracked Austrian proclaim to the world the establishment of a German Reich that would last for a thousand years; an Italian clown announce that he would restart the calendar to begin with his own assumption of power; a murderous Georgian brigand in the Kremlin acclaimed by the intellectual elite of the Western world as wiser than Solomon, more enlightened than Asoka, more humane than Marcus Aurelius. I’ve seen America wealthier and in terms of weaponry more powerful than all the rest of the world put together, so that Americans, had they so wished, could have outdone an Alexander or a Julius Caesar in the range and scale of their conquests. All in one little lifetime. All gone with the wind. England now part of an island off the coast of Europe and threatened with dismemberment and bankruptcy. Hitler and Mussolini dead and remembered only in infamy. Stalin a forbidden name in the regime he helped to found and dominated for some three decades. America haunted by fears of running out of the precious fluid that keeps the motorways roaring and the smog settling, with troubled memories of a disastrous campaign in Vietnam and of the great victory of the Don Quixotes of the media when they charged the windmills of Watergate.”

One may readily refuse to believe in the existence of God—one may fight him tooth and nail, denying, decrying, defaming both the Creator and His Kingdom—but if there is to be one thing that is impossible to deny—one clear point of agreement between the theists and non-theists and anti-theists—it must certainly be this: man, despite his best efforts, has not yet obtained his goal of a perfect, just and peaceful society. Perhaps we can even agree that the one force that has ultimately stymied man every step of the way in his efforts is himself. Nations (when not self-destructing) are destroyed by other nations; Presidents and kings fall from grace because of their own impotence or indiscretions; Emperors are more often killed by their own when they are not gallivanting around without clothes. Man, it should be undeniable, has only himself to blame.

But our efforts have been great: Perhaps we came close to something important in the days of the Russian Revolution, when the overthrow of the bourgeoisie gave way to the rulership of the proletariat and the rise of a true communist utopia. Little could we have predicted that the proletariat, being human, would prove just as prone to dictatorship as the bourgeoisie. Perhaps we were even closer with the laissez faire doctrines of the roaring 1920’s, when the economy of the United States saw unparalleled growth, absent the intrusion of Government. Little could we have known that the hand of man, whether greedy or power-thirsty or simply idiotic, would turn the greatest upturn into the greatest depression within a single decade.

It is the utter lunacy of the Modern Mind that even in accepting this much—in acknowledging the hand of man in his own perpetual downslide—there remains a real hope that man may overcome the thousands of years of history that readily demonstrate otherwise. It is a madness known only to man that he thinks himself singularly worthy of besting his fellow men, whether in his political theories or the cleverness of his maneuverings.

I believe that anyone looking honestly at the history of the world must recognize the truth of this, and in so doing, one must be led either to an admission of hopelessness regarding the fate of mankind, or to a desire to find some Kingdom outside of man in which to place our hopes.

If this still seems too cynical, just wait! Muggeridge beautifully resolves the tension of his own observations:

“In Christian terms, such hopes and fears are equally beside the point. As Christians we know that here we have no continuing city, that crowns roll in the dust and every earthly kingdom must sometime flounder, whereas we acknowledge a king men did not crown and cannot dethrone, as we are citizens of a city of God they did not build and cannot destroy. Thus the apostle Paul wrote to the Christians in Rome, living in a society as depraved and dissolute as ours. Their games, like our television, specialized in spectacles of violence and eroticism. Paul exhorted them to be stedfast, unmovable, always abounding in God’s work, to concern themselves with the things that are unseen, for the things which are seen are temporal but the things which are not seen are eternal. It was in the breakdown of Rome that Christendom was born. Now in the breakdown of Christendom there are the same requirements and the same possibilities to eschew the fantasy of a disintegrating world and seek the reality of what is not seen and eternal, the reality of Christ.”

I find it encouraging that the Kingdom of God was not created recently, that it was not fabricated in response to the continued hopelessness of man’s failed conquests. It does not respond to man’s inability, it predicts man’s inability. The message of The Kingdom arose at the very height of the Roman Empire, just as man was undertaking perhaps his greatest attempt at unifying the Earth under a single throne. The message of the Kingdom first arose just at the point when man had perhaps the least need for it. Christ demanded that both Heaven and Earth would pass away before his message, but he did so at a time when it seemed inconceivable that even the Roman Empire would ever pass away! And this same message has remained the one consistent hope of man, surviving the sackings of Rome, the watering-down and politicizing of Christianity under Constantine, the horrors of the Crusades and the Inquisitions, the Mongols and the Mohammetans. The message of the Kingdom of God, which really ought to form the foundation of all sects of Christianity—surpassing all false gospels of morals and methods—is a message that has survived precisely because man has so utterly failed. The cross remains an enduring symbol precisely because man continues to fail to live up to the standard of the man who died upon its beams.

The good news of the Kingdom of God is that man is no longer compelled to create a kingdom for himself. He is no longer compelled to instigate his own salvation by way of fame or wealth. He is no longer distressed when he looks at the world and sees that everyone is just as lost as him. This is the aspect of the Kingdom that is here already—the only true freedom offered to man, surpassing all Earthly slavery. The message is that we may live as free men, unburdened by the eternal weight of his own soul. This freedom—a freedom more perfect than any known to man—is the great gift of the already Kingdom.

The aspect of the Kingdom that is still to come is the thing that is worth giving up all simply to seek. The Kingdom to come is the pearl of great price and the treasure hidden in a field, for the sake of which a man might give up all he has and never be disappointed in his reward. The Kingdom of now is but a shadow of the Kingdom that is to come, but one must lead to the other. The “already” Kingdom culminates in the “not yet” kingdom. One makes life worth living in the present; the other offers something to hope for in the future.

“Let us rejoice,” Muggeridge concludes his own discussion of The Kingdom, “that we see around us on every hand the decay of the institutions and instruments of power, see intimations of empires falling to pieces, money in total disarray, dictators and parliamentarians alike nonplussed by the confusion and conflicts which encompass them. For it is precisely when every earthly hope has been explored and found wanting, when every possibility of help from earthly sources has been sought and is not forthcoming, when every recourse this world offers, moral as well as material, has been explored to no effect, when in the shivering cold the last stick has been thrown on the fire and in the gathering darkness every glimmer of light has finally flickered out, it’s then that Christ’s hand reaches out shire and firm. Then Christ’s words bring their inexpressible comfort, then his light shines brightest, abolishing the darkness forever. So, finding in everything only deception and nothingness, the soul is constrained to have recourse to God himself and to rest content with him.”