Your Kingdom Come
I’ve prayed the Lord’s prayer since childhood. Along with “Now I lay me down to sleep” it was probably one of the only prayers I had learned by heart. Simple and theologically rich at the same time, it deserves to be prayed again and again across denominational boundaries. It even bridges the Catholic-Protestant divide…although let me tell you, I learned that lesson the hard way. Attending my brother-in-law’s graduation from Notre Dame, all was going along swimmingly. We prayed the Our Father, but no one had told me that Catholics end the prayer with lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. So of course I belted out, “For thine is the Kingdom…” before I realized I was performing a solo. Newbie mistake.
What does my little anecdote have to do with this week’s reading? The answer is that it all comes down to the Kingdom of God. In Evangelization and Ideology: How to Understand and Respond to the Political Culture, Matthew Petrusek dives into the deep end of political and moral argumentation. Their end goal, however, is not simply to win an argument or even to persuade others. Their ultimate goal is to open the door to effective evangelism, and their well-constructed arguments are a vehicle to do that. “In sum, if evangelists can make a convincing case that the Church has a good vision of politics, a vision grounded in objective truth, then we at least open the door for considering whether the Church might have a good vision of religion as well—a vision founded in objective love.” [1]
I admit that this recent season (which feels like it has been going on for ages now) of political divisiveness, I’ve really lost hope of having any meaningful discourse with people who see things differently. It seems impossible to engage in a civil exchange of ideas, let alone possibly change someone’s opinion. For this reason, Petrusek’s book was a breath of fresh air that left me feeling hopeful.
I indeed ended the book feeling optimistic, but it took me a while to get there. Throughout Petrusek’s discussions of various political ideologies and epistemological approaches, I kept returning to a question that we corporately encountered last semester: Who gets to decide what values we pursue? Who makes the final call when we disagree on what is right and wrong? As a Christian, I believe that right and wrong is determined by God, but how do I engage with my friends and neighbors who don’t accept the premise of God’s existence? Incidentally, just yesterday, I tried to reason with a couple of friends using Petrusek’s line of thought: the Christian worldview is logically coherent and without the existence of God we can’t establish any objective right and wrong. [2] Let’s just say my friends were not convinced.
Despite feeling a bit overwhelmed by the daunting argumentation, the hope model started to bring things into perspective for me. The hope model allows for a standard of right and wrong, in other words an objective ideal to move toward. Petrusek puts it this way: “There is an underlying assumption that it is indeed possible to identify an objective standard of perfection, which, in turn, provides a means for determining whether any given society (or even humanity as a whole) is moving closer or further away from that standard. In other words, the hope model provides both a definition of moral progress and the possibility of moving toward that definition in history.” [3] But here’s what I really love about the hope model: “Against the utopian-optimist model, it denies that establishing a secular heaven on earth is or ever will be possible; against the pessimist model, it denies with equal vehemence that the fallen state of human beings means that we can never approximate a higher standard of justice and hold onto it.” [4] That sounds a lot like our prayer, “Your Kingdom come, Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” (Matthew 6:10 NIV) When we pray this, we don’t imagine that our neighborhood, our city, our world will suddenly become perfect like heaven. However, we do pray in faith that greater moral progress can be made; a higher standard of justice can exist.
I’ve come to look at my ministry primarily through this lens. If I can live out God’s Kingdom, if His Kingdom can be manifest in my neighborhood through me and my family, what better way to introduce my neighbors to Jesus. This approach does not resolve all the ethical and political questions I face, but it provides the foundation I need to engage in further conversation with those around me.
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1 Petrusek, Matthew. Evangelisation and Ideology: How to Understand and Respond to the Political Culture. IL: Word on Fire, 2023. 17.
2 Ibid., 70.
3 Ibid., 97-98.
4 Ibid., 98.
About the Author
Kim Sanford
12 responses to “Your Kingdom Come”
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Kim- I really appreciate your connection of the hope model to the Lord’s prayer. Perhaps I feel that way because it puts the responsibility of “being right” where it belongs; on God. Thanks for your good thinking on this.
You mentioned, “I’ve really lost hope of having any meaningful discourse with people who see things differently.”
As you and I read through our peers interactions with Petrusek’s book, I think you are right. It’s not easy to find common ground.
As you dig deeper into our peer’s posts, what are you discovering? I personally am having to reconsider Petrusek though a different lense.
John, I’ve been thinking about how to answer your question. It seems like many others focused their thinking and their blog on political discussion whereas I went straight to the goal of evangelism in the public sphere. Probably because I often feel so weary of political discussions that seem to go nowhere (which does not negate the importance of robust thinking in this area).
I’d be curious to hear your own answer to the question: What are you discovering or how is your perspective changing as you read our peer’s posts?
Kim,
As always, I gain so much from reading your posts. You mention “If I can live out God’s Kingdom, if His Kingdom can be manifest in my neighborhood through me and my family, what better way to introduce my neighbors to Jesus.”
This is truly a statement of hope and faith. It brings to mind icons such as Bernard of Clairvaux, Mother Teresa, and Henri Nouwen who had no idea that they would be thought of as icons, but lived among those who simply needed Jesus in the flesh, day after day.
And then I come to the present where I see those, like yourself, who are called to simply live in another land and “be.” Consistency with presence, faith, hope, and love, bearing witness to a greater Kingdom over time.
One of our global workers, who is in a Muslim context in the Middle East, lost her husband to cancer well over 15 years ago on the field. I remember her giving her story at a conference. With much grief she shared, “I always thought our job was to show the Muslim people what it meant to live for Jesus, but perhaps he is showing them through us, what it means to die with Jesus.” She allowed them to grieve with her and also showed the hope of heaven. She is still there today.
Thank you, Kim, for your post. You inspire me to keep being present in my own neighborhood…
Kim I really like that you have embraced this personally and I would track with you on that. The question I have after reading this book is “is it possible or even advisable to try to change the world politically/morally when people’s hearts haven’t changed?” In other words I’m not convinced that better politics opens up people to the gospel more (as we’ve seen with the exploding underground church in China, for instance) but that when more people open up to the gospel it affects our politics.
Your reply to my post is really making me think and I’m not sure I’ve sorted out the jumble of thoughts in my head but here goes… I do think that it is possible and even our calling to try to change the world morally for a couple of reasons. Advocating for moral change (for lack of a better way to put it) is a way to love our neighbor at the same time as show our neighbors what it means to walk with Jesus. Personally, for me that doesn’t manifest itself in a lot of political activism but for some Christians it does. That’s their way of acting out “your Kingdom come”.
I also think there is value in influencing culture toward Godly ethics. This is a change in my thinking from just a few years ago. I used to think that Christians should live by Biblical standards but the rest of the world should do what they like. But recently I’ve seen how living a post-christian culture can make it nearly impossible for people to believe the gospel (not discounting the role of the Holy Spirit of course, but in terms of a person’s free will). It harkens back to the analogy of the fish unaware of the water it’s swimming in. Petrusek kind of gets at this in his conceptual hierarchy image. If someone doesn’t believe that God could even possibly exist they are going to understand everything else (including being confronted with the gospel message) in a different (in my view incorrect) way.
All that in no way negates your example of China and the role of politics. But maybe that’s an example of God moving in spite of the state of society and not so much the norm that we should aim for.
That was a bit circular and certainly incomplete. But I’ve just about written a second blog post here, so I think I’ll stop there.
Kim I appreciate your ‘long’ answer (not too long at all) as it shows you’re wrestling with the concept as I am. I’m not ready to throw this particular baby out with the proverbial bathwater yet, but this is making me want to dive deeper, which is, I suppose, what doctoral work ought to be doing!
Kim,
You say, “I’ve come to look at my ministry primarily through this lens. If I can live out God’s Kingdom, if His Kingdom can be manifest in my neighborhood through me and my family, what better way to introduce my neighbors to Jesus. This approach does not resolve all the ethical and political questions I face, but it provides the foundation I need to engage in further conversation with those around me.”, I really think this is the answer, to engage in conversations with those around us and listen!
This was an excellent post!
Kim, I smiled as I read your first paragraph, as I have done EXACTLY what you did, bellowing out “For thine is the kingdom” in a Catholic service in Missouri, only to become immediately embarrassed and wanting to hide (I’m sure everyone around me smiled and laughed).
But it was your final paragraph that stood out, specifically your statement: “If I can live out God’s Kingdom, if His Kingdom can be manifest in my neighborhood through me and my family, what better way to introduce my neighbors to Jesus.” I immediately thought of David Bosch’s book, Transforming Mission. I referenced his book in a post last semester (the post following the reading of Bebbington). Your quote made me think of this statement, which I have in a file of statements from multiple authors concerning the kingdom of God. Bosch’s is one of my favorites (sorry, it’s a long quote): “In Jesus’ ministry….God’s reign is interpreted as the expression of God’s caring authority over the whole of life. Meanwhile, however, the counter-forces remain a reality. They continue to declare themselves as the real absolutes. So we remain both impatient and modest. We know that our mission will not usher in God’s reign. Neither did Jesus. He inaugurated it but did not bring it to its consummation. Like him, we are called to erect signs of God’s ultimate reign—not more, but certainly no less either (Kasemann 1980:67). As we pray ‘your kingdom come!’ we also commit ourselves to initiate, here and now, approximations and anticipations of God’s reign. Once again: God’s reign will come, since it already has come.” (Source: Bosch, David, Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission, Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1991, p. 35.)
Thanks, Travis, for sharing that quote. It reminds me of a conversation I had with a teammate a little while ago. We were talking about how the vocational missionary is called to unrelenting hope in the face of continual disappointment when our friends and neighbors reject Christ. Now I’m moving toward thinking that call to hope spills over to all Christians. We all are called to hope and pray for God’s reign to be seen and experienced on earth even as we know that we will be disappointed by ongoing pain and injustice this side of Heaven.
Kim, thank you for your thoughtful post. I too struggle with the question, “Who gets to decide what values we pursue? Who makes the final call when we disagree on what is right and wrong?” You write, “As a Christian, I believe that right and wrong is determined by God” with which I agree, but even that is subject to interpretation. I am a Christian but I read/interpret scripture a bit differently than some others in this program – or in my own church. There are plenty of issues – take most of the issues Petrusek mentions in his book, about which I believe differently, completely opposite of Petrusek, yet I *think* we would both claim that we believe the way we do because of our Christian faith.
I really, really, struggled with Petrusek and what I felt was his binary way of thinking, his right vs wrong, or, what I perceived to be his “I am right and others are wrong” sort of writing. I say this because you are hearing my frustration with HIM, not with you, in my response to your post. I appreciate your thoughtful writing – and you are making me, think about going back and reading (because I got so frustrated with him I couldn’t read the whole book) the hope model.
I love how you utilized the Lord’s Prayer! I have often made that mistake when praying with my Catholic patients. I don’t have any better questions then what has been asked, but wanted to say I enjoyed that connection.