Live-Blogging the Kingdom Paper

I'm writing a paper on the kingdom of God today. The following blog I will update off and on throughout the day on my writing and other's writings on this wonderful subject:

• Noon-ish: George Eldon Ladd writes, "The Kingdom of God is His kingship, His rule, His authority." (p. 21, TGK)

• Two-ish: I state: "Instead of subduing the earth and reigning as God’s good agent in creation, Adam rebelled and God subjected the earth to futility and the power of Satan, sin, and death entered God’s good world. However this subjection by God the King and Creator was not one of ultimate rejection. At the same time of sin came the promise, the protoevangelion, from the Creator that the offspring of woman would bruise the head of the serpent."

• Three-ish: Me again: "The kingdom of God is for God’s glory, and if this is obfuscated the kingdom is stripped of its meaning and its proclamation loses its very center and can become something else altogether. This is why Jesus consistently preached the kingdom in the power of Holy Spirit as a part His vocation and mission to give glory to His Father, and by fulfilling the Father’s mission Jesus—God’s Son and Son of man—was killed and resurrected by God and vindicated as Lord of the world and King of Kings. This God-centered and Jesus-centered nature of the kingdom is not simply an assumption but its pinnacle and its clear and radical proclamation is the responsibility of the ambassadors of the King’s kingdom."

• 4:48: The Apostle Paul in 1 Cor. 15:24: "...Then comes the end, when [Jesus] delivers the kingdom to God the Father after destroying every rule and authority and power." Maranatha, Come Lord Jesus.

• 6:00: I write: "The error of a ecclesiological triumphalism can occur in those that insist that all blessings of God’s new age are always available now at the whim of the human will cloaked within the guise of an overly spiritualized “anointing”, and in contrast, the greater error, is seen in the rejection of God’s Messiah Jesus as not being the fulfillment of the promises and as bearer of God’s kingdom “now” presence—Immanuel."

• 6:30: Written earlier: "The church now, as Jesus did, proclaims the kingdom of God and does so in its connection to Jesus by the power of the Holy Spirit. Just as the blessings of the “not-yet” kingdom came into the “already” by the historical Jesus, so now in the church does the future blessings of the coming consummated kingdom come into the present by the power of the Holy Spirit—who is the Spirit of Jesus."

• 7:00: Yes, me again: "As Jesus willingly went to His death, He knew that without the laying down of His life (the cross) and taking it back again (the resurrection) his vocation as inaugurator of the kingdom would not be fulfilled. Just because the cross-resurrection events of Jesus are at the end of the Gospels do not mean they are footnotes to the concept of kingdom, quite to the contrary,—they are indeed the consummation of what He inaugurated during His earthly ministry."