Carmen's Blog: Kin or King?

Carmen’s Blog: Kin or King?

By Carmen Fowler, The Layman, December 3, 2010

            No doubt this Christmas you will sing “O come let us adore Him … worship Christ, the new born King.” With the angels heard on high you will sing Hallelujahs. With the shepherds you will bow in adoration of Christ the Lord. With the Magi you will search out and worship the King of the Jews. At some point you may well wonder why everyone is not engaged in the advent of the Christ child, the one whose birth inaugurates the Kingdom of Heaven on earth. It may well be that others are not joining you in adoring Christ the newborn King because they have exchanged the truth of the Kingdom for a humanistic “kin-dom.”   

            Kin-dom theology is espoused by those for whom the concept of the Kingdom of the God is considered elitist and sexist. Popularized by Drew University ethics professor Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz, kin-dom theology replaces the Bible’s King and God’s Kingdom with images of kin-dom. Isasi-Diaz rejects the word kingdom because “First, it is obviously a sexist word that presumes that God is male. Second, the concept of kingdom in our world today is both hierarchal and elitist.” (Isasi-Diaz, Ada Maria. “Solidarity: Love of Neighbor in the 1980’s,” in Lift Every Voice: Constructing Christian Theologies from the Underside, edited by Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite and Mary Potter Engel, San Francisco: Harper, 1990, 304.) 

            Apparently Jesus’ 32 explicit references to the Kingdom of Heaven in the gospel of Matthew are disregarded. Set aside are the myriad revelations of Jesus of what the Kingdom of God is like. Gone is the call of John the Baptist to repentance, gone is the parable of the sower and the soils, gone is the acknowledgement that the kingdom of God belongs to people with childlike faith. Stripped away are the beatitudes, including Jesus’ assurance that “blessed are the poor, for theirs is the kingdom of God” (Luke 6:20).  This is particularly curious because proponents of liberationist theology often rely on these very images to advance their cause. 
  
            The entire notion of our having kin-ship with one another as brothers and sisters is based on the reality of the Lordship of the Savior, Jesus Christ. It is His righteousness that is imputed to us. It is His inheritance of which we become co-heirs. How is it that we come into restored relationship with one another if we are not first restored in our relationship to God the Father, through Jesus the Son, by the power of His Holy Spirit? 

            Friends, as much as a human-centered self-promoting religion might advance the cause of those who speak on seminary campuses and publish esoteric texts, you simply cannot have the Kingdom without the King. 

            Why raise this concern? Most notably because a candidate for ordination in the Presbyterian Church (USA) was approved even though his published statement of faith, vetted by the presbytery’s Committee on Ministry, includes explicit references to “the holy task of creating the new Kin-dom of God,” and that the grace of God is given us “not so much that we may become God’s subjects, but so that we can become once again God’s children and the heirs of the kin-dom.” (Nielson, Leonard. Statement of Faith, San Francisco presbytery, submitted August 11, 2010; approved by presbytery on September 14, 2010.  COM 7-1, Report #5.) When asked, the candidate dismissed the references as obsolete metaphors.
 
            The Kingdom of God is not a metaphor, it is Biblical promise, an eternal hope and a present calling. Indeed, one of the Great Ends of the Church affirms that we be a “provisional demonstration of the Kingdom of God to the world.” (Book of Order, Form of Government, G-1.0200.)  One of the commands of Christ is that we pray, God’s “kingdom come,” God’s will be done on earth as it is in heaven. 

            Finally, for those who would be saved and for those who would live in the world as resident aliens, citizens of the Kingdom of Heaven and ambassadors of the Prince of Peace, neither the King nor the Kingdom are obsolete. O come, let us adore Him! Worship Christ, the newborn King .