The Beautiful Scandal and Heresy of The Kingdom of God.

     I believe that the church, the body of my fellow believers, has been consistently wrong throughout time and to the modern era on some of its widely held views about Jesus and God and the afterlife.  Consider, for example, the widely-held view that we will be bodily ascending to Heaven when we die.  This is based on a mis-amalgamation of a Jewish view in the Old Testament and the New Testament take on the afterlife. In the Old Testament, many of the Jews had a persistent view that there will be a moment after the coming of the messiah that all the dead will bodily rise from Sheol and will enter the afterlife. Christians all over the world have taken some parts of Revelation and reading it as a literal account of the afterlife, have inferred it supports this view and have come up with the Rapture and they wait in breathless anticipation for its coming.  But even the Pharisees and Sadduces were at odds over the Old Testament view that there was this bodily resurrection from the dead.  The Pharisees took several references in scripture:  Gen. 25:8 (Abraham), 25:17 (Ishmael), 35:29 (Isaac), 49:33 (Jacob), Deut. 32:50 (Moses and Aaron) and II Kings 22:20 (King Josiah) and thought that they implied a moment sometime in the future that the dead would be raised and join their fellow believers in some kind of existence after death.  The Sadducees did not hold this view.  But Christians have papered over this disagreement and sided with the Pharisees. 

     We see it all over the world in the common view that Christians have to this day. But Jesus, I
propose, did not share this view.  Jesus spoke of an immediate realization of our place in the Kingdom of God, here and now, when we believe. "What was new enough,  to provoke a violent riot, was Jesus' declaration that the kingdom of God had shown up, and that the Day of the Lord was here (Luke 4:16-30)" (Christianity Today)  We do not need to be bodily raised from the dead and ascend into Heaven.  The Kingdom is here now, all around us.  We just have to enter into it.

     Jesus was viewed as a heretic for this and other earth shattering views that the Jews held.  He was brutally tortured and executed for these views, including his proposal that he was God in the Flesh, which is not exactly what he said.  He said he was the Son of God and I Am, before Moses was, I was.  Here, I think, is where some Christians have gotten it right:  Jesus was the first born of the Sons of God and we become Sons of God when we believe in him.  This does not mean I think he was not divine.  But he was the predecessor of all Christians who came after him.

    What is my point?  It is simply this: that when we model our beliefs on Jesus' beliefs, we should not fear heresy and wrong doctrine.  Jesus was here to blow apart the doctrine of his time.  I think the fear of heresy keeps many Christians from thinking critically and coming up with new ways to interpret scripture.  The whole of the doctrine and dogma in the Catholic church is based on the view that if a few key theologians came to a consensus over the centuries, that we should take this consensus as the gospel truth.  And anything outside of that is heresy.  But Jesus was the world's greatest heretic.  He did not miss any opportunity to rail against the widely held religious views of his time.  I think over time, Christians take so much of the theology from people's opinions throughout the ages and ignore what was actually taught by Jesus.  This leads to a stagnation in the church.  And people who have new and different ways of interpreting the text are feared to be heretics and are often excluded from the church.  Shouldn't we open our churches to new and earth-shattering views by opening our hearts toward people with a new take on scripture and Jesus?  Perhaps then we wouldn't need to wait for "fresh movements of the spirit" to awaken the people of God. We wouldn't have to wait for revival.  It is silly.  Waiting for Revival is ignoring the fact that fresh perspectives and movements of the Holy Spirit are going on daily all around the world and in our communities.  I have heard this waiting for revival shtick nonsense throughout my time as a Christian   But Christians as a whole, like a herd of bison that are too scared to move outside the herd and stand alone, desperately search for leaders with sound doctrine the is consistent with long-held beliefs in the church.  NO WONDER THE CHURCH SEEMS SO STAGNANT AND SLOW TO CHANGE. What if people all around us - lay people especially - without the fetters of spending time in long ago written theology, are the source of new life in the church.  A source of new life that is daily receiving revelation from the Holy Spirit.  Because they have read the bible simply, as scripture, I believe, was meant to be read. It was revelation for the masses, not the Pharisees and Sadducees of Jesus' time and the Pharisees and Sadducees in the modern church.  The modern Pharisees and Sadducees are people who read the scripture filtered through all these long held beliefs and miss the earth shattering, world-view-shredding simple revelation of the text. A simple revelation that was plain for the masses. The simple revelation is that love is supreme.  And we are living and loving now in the Kingdom of God as soon as we take one step out of our self-centered lives. 

     I remember distinctly having a conversation with a man in the men's group I ran, who was so unsure of his own beliefs that he searched for teachers that were "widely accepted in the church." And he didn't know what he himself believed unless he was told to believe something from these gurus.

     But what does the scripture say to you, personally?  What does the life of Jesus do to shatter your world view?  That is the treasure buried in the field.  Go sell everything and buy that field, as Jesus said.  The kingdom is here, now.  God is waiting in breathless anticipation for his people to just realize that and start living in the Kingdom now. The Kingdom trades in the currency of love.  And one cannot give love to strangers and close relationships and even our enemies if we don't love ourselves.  God knew this and taught us that we are his sons and daughters, perfect and valued infinitely by Him, the Creator of everything. If we believed this we would know that each of us individually is the best thing since sliced bread.  And we would have the courage to shake off old beliefs and follow our hearts.  This would revolutionize Christianity.  It would not be a dying world view. It would be a belief held by the humble masses who lived in love for others, love for themselves, and love for God.  I think the whole world would become the Kingdom of God on Earth.