|
Stanley Jones on Kingdom
"When I say that the Church has lost the
Kingdom, I do not mean that it has totally lost the conception of
the Kingdom; it has it as a marginal concept, something you get into
for security by the new birth now, something you will inherit
hereafter as a reward in heaven, something you get at the Second
Coming, something to which you point to as an ideal. These
conceptions of a kingdom are generally dehydrated because they are
marginal. They are not the starting point and the ending point, not
the total program now for all life, not the head-on and total answer
to man's total need, individual and collective. In other words, we
do not seek first, last, and always the kingdom of God as our way of
life now, and we do not offer it to the world as our answer to the
world's ills now. What we have lost is God's redemptive
totalitarianism, the kingdom of God. That is the central sickness of
our age. Until we find that all our endeavors for amelioration are a
sprinkling of rose water on a cancer. ...
"The totalitarianism, fascism, nazism,
communism have broken down or are breaking down. Fascism made the
state supreme; naziism made race supreme; communism made the
proletariat supreme. All were half-gods and hence no gods. ...We
chose the wrong totalitarianism. We now see that what we were
seeking for was the kingdom of God, but we didn't know it."
E. Stanley Jones, The Unshakable Kingdom
and the Unchanging Person, 1972, 21, 16.
|
CSCO, P.O. Box 60123, Dayton, OH 45406; email: