On Earth as It Is in Heaven

            Jim Palmer opens Chapter 11 of Inner Anarchy with this:

“There are 41,000 different Christian denominations around the world, and close to 450,000 international missionaries mobilized abroad. The Roman Catholic Church is considered to be the largest financial power on earth.

“Evangelical Christianity isn’t doing too shabby either. A top Christian televangelist lives in a $10 million house, another one drives a $350,000 Bentley, and several of them make more than $1 million a year. One megachurch meets in a sports stadium, draws close to 50,000 people for a worship service, and has an annual budget that exceeds $70 million.

“Speaking of budgets, 82 percent of the average church budget is used to cover the expense of buildings and salaries. Considering the number of people, buildings, and dollars, Christendom is quite an impressive empire on planet Earth.

“But for what?

“What has this shiny, lucrative Christian empire actually accomplished? What do we have to show for it? We haven’t made even a dent in the suffering that plagues humankind and our planet.”[1]

My evangelical brothers and sisters will have great difficulty with Palmer. I have not yet completely connected the dots in his logic myself, but he definitely holds my attention!

Regarding the passage above, most evangelical models (among the 41,000+ Christian denominations) will respond that human suffering and sin will never be resolved until Jesus returns, so we should not concern ourselves with earthly matters. Our call is to get everybody saved in preparation for Christ’s return.

19th century eschatology notwithstanding, I find those models to be distortions of one of Jesus’ sayings and an dismissal of huge volumes of his teaching.

The misunderstood saying is in John 18:36 “My kingdom does not belong to this world.” The interpretation, based on the English translation, relates to location—a place: a “heavenly” (in the sky) kingdom in contrast to earthly kingdoms.

Luke and Mark speak of the “kingdom of God,” while Matthew uses the term “kingdom of heaven.” Remember, the Jesus movement was a Jewish movement, and Matthew was a Jew writing to Jewish converts. “Heaven” is a common Jewish reverential way of avoiding verbalizing the name of God. As Matthew uses the phrase, heaven refers to a person, not a place. 

In all three gospels, “Kingdom” refers not to a place but to an action, specifically, God’s authority and assertion of kingly power over creation. In the Lord’s Prayer, “Your kingdom come … on earth as it is in heaven” is one way of saying that. Christians pray for something to happen, not for a place.

In the passage from John, Jesus is saying, “My authority does not come from a human source.” His comment does not imply an other-worldly place.

Nor does any of his teaching discount human existence on planet earth. Indeed, the overwhelming bulk of his teaching and his behavior is focused on how we humans relate to each other and how we respond to poverty and to the systems—both governmental and religious—that sustain it.

But we Christians can’t come to a unified agreement and oneness among ourselves—about much of anything. Surely that fact alone gives us grounds to rethink a few things[2] (especially the everybody-is-wrong-but-me/us mentality).

Is it we Christians who have mucked up life’s possibilities with our human-constructed belief systems that actually restrict access to life for everyone who disagrees with us? Have we made our belief systems idols?

Jesus said the kingdom is within (among) us, but we keep looking for it “out there” somewhere. We keep waiting for God to intervene and make a physical appearance (return/second coming of Jesus) and save us from ourselves. Whether that eschatological narrative is metaphoric is part of what we Christians can’t agree on, but since we humans have zero control and zero knowledge of when such a return may happen, are we in the meantime within God’s will to totally ignore (or at least discount) human suffering here and now—something over which we do have a level of control?

I still haven’t connected Palmer’s dots, and he’s challenging some of the basic fundamentals of doctrine we humans have constructed (over 41,000 different constructions) over the last twenty centuries, but I think he’s on to something. He at least pushes me to look at my own faith with more humility.

That’s the way it looks through the Flawed Glass that is my world view.

Together in the Walk,

Jim


[1] Palmer, Jim. Inner Anarchy: Dethroning God and Jesus to Save Ourselves and the World (p. 67). Unknown. Kindle Edition.

 

[2] Paraphrasing Palmer, Ibid., page 62.

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