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Theology

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.

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