The Kingdom of God – John Bright
Book review by Fr. Rand York
The Kingdom of God by John Bright is a brilliant book revealing the Bible and the calling of Israel and the Church to be one story. Bright lays a foundation of context in his discussions throughout the book, and brings alive the historical and cultural situation of the world and peoples surrounding Israel, and to whom she was called to reveal the one true God.
The mission and destiny of Israel was bound up in God’s plan for the whole world. Israel’s faith was given to them by God, and although such a relationship was originally God’s plan for all, he chose Israel to be his shining light to the nations. The world around Israel did not know God, but worshiped many gods, and so Israel’s faith was unique. Bright describes the unique aspects of Israel’s faith on pages 24-26, citing several differences between the Israelites and their neighbors. They were monotheistic in the midst of the polytheism of other peoples. They were aniconic when others worshiped carved images. Their God controlled history, while the gods of other peoples could be manipulated. And rather than being a personification of natural forces, their God was a moral being.
Bright notes that Israel’s calling, “…involves the whole notion of the rule of God over his people, and particularly the vindication of that rule and people in glory at the end of history.”[i] The covenant that marked Israel’s calling was simple and bilateral: God for his part would give Israel a destiny to become a chosen people and a blessing for the nations, and Israel for her part would be obedient. God’s hesed, or grace, to Israel would be shown to the whole world, and the covenant itself, “…could, then, be understood in Hebrew theology only as a response to grace: man’s hesed for God’s hesed.”[ii]
When did Israel’s failure begin? When did she turn away from her calling? One could reasonably argue that the lapses go all the way back to the Golden Calf itself, at the very time Yahweh established his covenant with Israel. But perhaps the beginning of the end occurred when the kingdom split, and Judah and Israel began to develop competing state cults.[iii] This was perhaps a natural outgrowth of the earlier establishment of a state religion, when Yahweh’s covenant relationship with Israel became politicized. Such politicization is only possible when society forgets that the original covenant is bilateral, and that it is Yahweh who establishes the ground rules. Israel forgot this truth, and began through the state cult to try to manipulate the one true God in the same way their pagan neighbors manipulated their gods through cultic ritual.[iv] Competing cults would intensify this (at least by a factor of 2), trying to change God when he is instead trying to change them! Each cult would attempt to prove their unique relationship to God, much as today’s churches (Orthodox, Monophysite, Catholic, Protestant, etc.) compete for confirmation that each is indeed a true church, or even the true church.
When Israel became a kingdom, she became a nation, not just a people. What was once a group bound together in ethnicity and religion had become a political entity, and for a short time a political unity. And so, their religious identity became institutionalized as, “the people of Yahweh had become the Kingdom of Israel.”[v]
This did not happen all at once. Saul, the first king, did nothing to change Israel’s fundamental anatomy, let alone make it into a state: “He had no administrative machinery, levied no taxes, and his court was so modest it hardly deserves the name.”[vi] It was David, Saul’s successor/supplanter, who cemented his victories by cementing the people into a unified whole.[vii] He did this by appealing to the religious unity they already shared, establishing a centrally located capital in Jerusalem[viii], and bringing the Ark of the Covenant to reside there.[ix] In this way, David brought legitimacy to his state by way of connecting it to divine authority. Linking the state to the Ark brought state religion to Israel as part and parcel of David’s unification program. The general impact, therefore, was the transfer of significant religious influence from the judges to the kings. This worked well for the worship of Yahweh when the king was someone like David or Hezekiah, who loved the Lord. It was destructive when the king was someone like Ahaz or Manasseh.
And so, perhaps the greatest impact of the monarchy on religious life occurred as it became the prerogative of the monarch to support, and at times even impose, the religious cult. Depending on the monarch, this could be paganism just as well as Yahwehism. Such pagan imposition occurred under Jezebel, who forced Israel to worship imported foreign gods.[x] Interestingly, when Jehu destroyed the house of Ahab and butchered the foreign proponents of Baal worship[xi], he did so because it was foreign, not because it was pagan. He let the Asherah pole stand in his acceptance and ongoing encouragement of all things local – even local paganism.[xii] And so, we find Jezebel imposing foreign paganism and Jehu permitting native Hebrew paganism. The monarchs of the Hebrew people had a bully pulpit indeed. Many prophets, therefore, told the kings what they wanted to hear, and this conversion of the prophets to the service of the state was perhaps an unintended consequence of the monarchy’s heavy hand in religious affairs.
Whether they were speaking in a time of national prosperity as did Amos, or national disintegration as did Hosea[xiii], the prophets were unified and consistent in their message to God’s covenant people. They objected to the intemperance of the regime of kings, advocated a continuation of the charisma of the time of the judges, and especially rejected the state’s acquiescence toward the worship of foreign gods.[xiv] They saw Israel as a people set apart, and then set out to communicate just what that meant. Most importantly it meant that they were called to worship and serve Yahweh only as the one true God: “Paganism was, then as now, no trivial thing. As long as men take on the character of the gods they serve, so long does it greatly matter who those gods may be.”[xv]
Called to serve Yahweh, they were therefore called also to take on his character. This they did not do, and their failure as a people was assessed and addressed in different ways by different prophets. Amos saw a state that was beyond correction[xvi], while Hosea likened Israel to his own wife Gomer, with covenant seen as wedlock, paganism as adultery, and national ruin as divorce.[xvii] Micah found Judah’s moral decay comparable to that of Israel.[xviii] Some prophets held out hope, while others despaired. Early prophets spoke of God’s mercy, while later prophets spoke of judgment.
Amos brought an ethical protest[xix] and a message of doom.[xx] He saw Israel’s chosen status as a “double responsibility”[xxi] and saw no hope for sinful society as it existed.[xxii] The only way out was for “Thy kingdom come” to mean “Thy will be done” in order for the calling of the kingdom of God to be fulfilled in Israel.[xxiii]
Deutero-Isaiah offered a way for Israel to recover her mission, and so her destiny. Through the acceptance of a servant’s role, indeed that of a suffering servant, Israel’s hope for release from captivity could be transfigured into a new mission as Servant of God.[xxiv] With the restoration under Cyrus, suffering was common among the Hebrew people. Life was hard for those who accepted his invitation to return home, and many preferred to continue an unpleasant life of exile to an even more difficult migration back to Palestine. They could embrace their experience or cling to their fond fantasy of superiority over all others because of their chosen status.
They rejected the call to servanthood presented by Deutero-Isaiah in the midst of a disappointment of hope, a crisis in morale, and a fear of assimilation.[xxv] Their rejection of servanthood became an insistence of superiority, in which exclusivism arose out of a fear of contamination (lest they fall prey to the syncretism of the old kingdoms of Israel and Judah). They exhibited a national pride that brought with it contempt for foreign people.[xxvi] Theologically, for them to be chosen did not mean serving others, but rather being God’s best friend. To be sure, they were chosen people, but they did not understand the meaning of it. It was not unlike James and John who presumed upon their friendship with Jesus to ask to sit at his right hand and left hand in glory. Jesus responded to them, “You do not know what you are asking. Can you drink the cup I drink or be baptized with the baptism I am baptized with?”[xxvii] To be chosen is to sacrifice everything. James and John did not yet understand this, and Israel’s failure to understand it led to their rejection of Deutero-Isaiah’s answer to their crisis of identity.
With Israel’s rejection of her role as a suffering servant,[xxviii] God has raised up the Church to fulfill that role[xxix] and to be the body of Christ in the world. Christ himself became the suffering servant, and called his church to live it out as he did: “He fulfilled the messianic hope of Israel by incarnating it in the form of a Servant.”[xxx] By establishing the Church and calling it to the role in which Israel failed, God has made the Church the New Israel.[xxxi] It is unfortunate that the Church has often responded to this calling by acting as Israel did in her failure to live up to her calling. As Bright puts it, “People who imagine themselves a peculiar and holy people are seldom lovely.”[xxxii]
Still, the apostle Peter reminds us that our calling is to be, “…a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation.”[xxxiii] This language is identical to that used by God in Exodus 19:6, when he called Israel to be his own. Bright does a brilliant job of making this very connection and presenting the story of God’s kingdom as one story, for the blessing of the nations.
©2011 Rand York
[i] John Bright. The Kingdom of God (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1953, 1981) 18
[ii] John Bright. Op. cit. 28-29
[iii] John Bright. Op. cit. 51
[iv] John Bright. Op. cit. 64
[v] John Bright. Op. cit. 39
[vi] John Bright. Op. cit. 34
[vii] John Bright. Op. cit. 37
[viii] John Bright. Op. cit. 37
[ix] John Bright. Op. cit. 41
[x] John Bright. Op. cit. 53
[xi] John Bright. Op. cit. 54
[xii] John Bright. Op. cit. 57
[xiii] John Bright. Op. cit. 73
[xiv] John Bright. Op. cit. 49
[xv] John Bright. Op. cit. 53
[xvi] John Bright. Op. cit. 66
[xvii] John Bright. Op. cit. 74
[xviii] John Bright. Op. cit. 79
[xix] John Bright. Op. cit. 60
[xx] John Bright. Op. cit. 63
[xxi] John Bright. Op. cit. 64
[xxii] John Bright. Op. cit. 69
[xxiii] John Bright. Op. cit. 70
[xxvi] John Bright. Op. cit. 162
[xxvii] Mark 10: 35-40
[xxviii] John Bright. Op. cit. 208
[xxix] John Bright. Op. cit. 210-211
[xxx] John Bright. Op. cit. 213
[xxxi] John Bright. Op. cit. 226-227
[xxxii] John Bright. Op. cit. 254
[xxxiii] I Peter 2:9
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