I’ve been a regular reader of Scot McKnight’s blog The Jesus Creed for nine or ten years now. In fact, along with the late Michael Spencer’s Internet Monk, it’s probably the blog that I’ve been following the longest. If you want a rich and varied source of comment on theology, the church, and news and current events, The Jesus Creed is hard to beat. (Just be warned that you might struggle to keep up with the number of posts that appear daily.) I’ve also read a couple of McKnight’s previous books, and enjoyed them. So I was intrigued last year when he released his latest book, Kingdom Conspiracy: Returning to the Radical Mission of the Local Church. Given that the term “kingdom of God” seems to have become one of those bits of Christian jargon that is routinely tossed around without much thought to what it really means, I was interested to read what this highly respected New Testament scholar had to say about it. I recently finished reading the book and would like to share some brief thoughts here.
The first thing to say is that this book is not a light read. That’s not a criticism of McKnight; he is, after all, a serious scholar tackling a subject that is both deep and broad. I have to say, however, that compared to some of the author’s earlier works (I’m thinking particularly of his book The Jesus Creed, for which he is perhaps still best known), I found Kingdom Conspiracy quite heavy going. It weighs in at a reasonably hefty 289 pages, and on quite a few occasions I found myself losing the thread of McKnight’s argument and wondering why he was taking ten pages to labour a point that could perhaps have been more effectively made in two. Those who like their theology in easily digested, bite-sized chunks, then, should probably look elsewhere.
Next, Kingdom Conspiracy should be applauded for at least attempting to tackle such a big topic in a reasonably accessible way. The question the book tries to answer is essentially this: what did Jesus mean by the kingdom of God, and how does this relate to the Church? McKnight is careful to try to build his response on a scriptural foundation, and the pages of the book contain a fair amount of exegesis and commentary.
However, this is where it gets more difficult. Personally, I didn’t find the basic argument of the book entirely convincing. McKnight’s fundamental thesis is that the kingdom of God cannot be separated from the local church. I found two major problems with his approach.
First, McKnight’s starting point is to draw a contrast between two groups, which are then referred to throughout the book. The first group is what he calls the “Skinny jeans” folks, who are committed to social justice and tend to see the kingdom manifested in working towards the common good, irrespective of whether the Church is involved or not. The second group is the less pragmatic and more conservative “Pleated pants” crowd, typified by scholarly theologians who tend to define the kingdom as “God’s rule” or some such abstraction. While McKnight rightly points out that neither of these groups can be said to have fully understood the kingdom, what he essentially does is set them up as straw men – exaggerated stereotypes that can be knocked down without too much difficulty, making whichever third option is presented appear to be much more balanced and reasonable. Which, in my opinion, is essentially what he goes on to do.
My second problem with the author’s approach is that for me, he ties the kingdom far too tightly to the Church while failing to articulate clearly exactly what the Church is and isn’t. His bottom line is that any work, however socially beneficial or morally laudable, that isn’t tied directly to the Church and done with the sole express purpose of bringing people to Christ is not kingdom work. And one is left with the impression, intended or not, that by “the Church” he means exclusively the institutional church. In places, I almost had the feeling that he was trying to defend and “big up” the importance of local churches, and using his “kingdom = church” argument as a way to do so. Little account is taken of the great many people who find themselves in churches that do no real “kingdom work”, whether in the form of pure evangelism or with more of a social bent; and equally little is taken of the growing numbers of people who have tried institutional churches of all flavours, found them wanting and left, and yet who are still passionately committed to bringing people into relationship with God and extending the kingdom outside of any kind of formal ecclesiastical structure. For McKnight, however laudable such people’s efforts may be, they cannot be described as kingdom work. Simply put, there is no kingdom work outside the Church. For me, this makes the kingdom and its gospel far too narrow and robs us of the opportunity for a genuinely all-encompassing and practical kingdom vision.
In summary, then, what I can say in support of Kingdom Conspiracy is that it is an in-depth look at the meaning and identity of the kingdom in an age when the topic is largely taken for granted. As such, it should if nothing else give any genuinely interested reader plenty to think about. Unfortunately, I found that the argument presented was too narrow, and was not a sufficient payoff for the amount of effort required to work my way through the book.
