The Realm of God, the Reign of God

There are a couple of things in my life that I've long been fascinated by. Of course, if you've gotten to know me, you won't be surprised that these are weird, abstract things. One of them is the mystery of consciousness. What is going on in our brain, physically? How does that produce self-awareness, perception, understanding, creativity? Another is the gap between people. Whence language and how do we communicate? What is the nature of all those emotions that happen between people, like love and hate? How does forgiveness work? How do sets of one-on-one relationships turn into larger and larger groups, communities, societies? For now, I'll say, "That's all," and try to keep the scope of my thoughts under control for this article. I'll call those two fascinations the interior and the relational.

Of course, these things can be studied from different perspectives. The modern scientific perspective turns these into academic disciplines of biology, neuropsychology, studies of emotions, families, groups, leadership, anthropology, sociology, political science, and ethics. Religion, too, gets to weigh in, but in a different framing of the problem(s). The question, "Where does conscious self-awareness come from?" becomes "What is a soul?" "How shall we get along?" becomes "What is righteousness?" Scholars these days include all disciplines in their inquiries, thus we have biblical scholars studying what archeology might say about the cultures at the time when the texts of the Bible were written. Theologians add "theological anthropology" to their scope of inquiry and to their toolset for asking questions. The Bible is studied from many different perspective: Gustavo Guttierez and others developed Liberation Theology by looking at the Bible from the perspective of the poor, and James Cone further developed it by looking at the Bible from the perspective of people who were poor and black in North America. Sociology and political science are every bit as relevant to the religious understanding of the interior and the relational as anything in the Bible or creeds or commentaries. The more of our human gifts we can bring to bear on the process of our understanding, the more complete understanding we will have.

Because I've been fascinated with these things for a while, I've come up with my own ideas that help me understand them. When it comes to humans, I think about Genesis 2. God scooped up some dirt, formed it into a human and breathed life into it--because breath and Spirit are the same word in Hebrew, we can say God breathed God's spirit into it--and it lived. What are we? We are dirt plus God's spirit. In the view of neuropsychology, the dirt part is made more precise by the language of organic chemistry, and the spirit part is still mostly a mystery. Where does self-consciousness come from? God breathed it into us.

Does this make us gods? I don't think so. We were made in the image of God in Genesis 1, but God was not made. Having God's image in our original creation still does not make us the same as God. For reasons that I mostly agree with laid out over many centuries, I believe God is both three and one. Within the trinity, God practices perfect love, perfect community, but I believe God wanted, for God's own pleasure, to have an "other" to also be in relationship with and to love. When God made us, it was never God's intent that we be part of the Trinity or become gods ourselves. God wanted us to stay distinct from God so that there could be a space between us where a relationship could exist, where love could exist. I believe God wanted relationship and instilled in us a desire for relationship amongst our neighbors. When we are living up to the potential and purpose that God intended for us, then we are in a loving, mutual relationship with God and loving, mutual relationships with our neighbors.

If we were made in God's image, if God breathed God's own Spirit into us, what went wrong? The fall. We are fallen creatures with a propensity to sin. Evolutionary biologist can explain some of the behaviors that we would call fallen. The pheromones of an attractive person are part of what make them attractive. Sociologists can explain some of our behaviors. Someone born in poverty has limited opportunities. Political science

can explain how injustice leads to oppression, and back to biological psychology, we can explain the effects of oppression in the form of persistent, low-grade, recurring trauma. All of these conditions conspire to create in us a propensity to behave certain ways, fallen ways. There is surprisingly little room for free will, even in humanist science.

All of these issues can be understood from both scientific and religious perspectives. These perspectives are not contradicting each other, but complementing each other (from the same root word as completing each other). Collectively, these describe our current circumstance. We are created to be loved by God; we are fallen and imperfect creatures, but we are still able to love one another; we are fallen, and God loves us anyway.

Now with that background of things I think I've figured out, I want to talk about yet another perspective. I like science fiction, and there's a campy sci-fi movie called "The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension." I don't know if it holds up to my mature tastes, but when I was a teenager I really liked it. There was a scene where Buckaroo Banzai drives through a mountain. He has figured out how to go through the mountain by way of the 8th dimension and discovered a parallel universe where other, alien lifeforms exists. The mountain exists, and the aliens exist in the same space.

Ok, this is kinda campy, but I think the Kingdom of God is like that. We live our fallen, sin-prone lives in a human society full of barriers. We also live in the realm of God at the same time. They occupy the same space and both exist in a human relational dimension. In our human psycho-sociological world, our biology and culture drive our desires and behaviors. In the realm of God, our relationships are governed by God's grace and righteousness. It's tempting to set them against each other, but remember that it was God who scooped up that dirt. God gave us biological bodies. It was God who was in community first and God called us into sociological relationships. These are not contradictory, but complementary.

What is the kingdom of God? In Greek, that word is both a noun and a verb, but in English it is only a noun. To make the distinction, we might think of something with an extent, such as the kingdom of God. I'll call this the realm of God. It's tempting to say that our society and culture are not in the realm of God, but our worship and loving relationships are in the realm of God. For myself, I'm going to reject that idea. I won't accept anything that puts a limit on God. We are both in culture and in kingdom at the same time, and both are in the extent of God's realm.

Several commentaries I've read recently advocate the use of "Reign" instead of kingdom. The Reign of God is a noun, and God also acts through the verb to Reign. This dual relationship is closer to the Greek word. God reigns. God is in control of all. There is not a part of our lives that God is in control of (the Kingdom) and another part that God is not in control of (our culture and society). God is in control of it all.

So, the following are all true at the same time: We are physical beings with bodies, but we also have consciousness, self-awareness, or a soul. We are made in God's image and infused with God's Spirit, but we are also fallen. We are fallen, but God loves us anyway, and we are still able to love one another. We live in our culture and society, but even that is part of the Realm of God. We are called to love one another and we do that imperfectly, but God has made us free from sin so that we can choose to work for the good of God's realm. We have imperfect, fallen wills and try our best to live in relationships with each other and to make a good society using those wills, and we fail, but at the same time we do not despair because God is in control; God reigns.

Blessings,

Chas