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| Lake Erie sunset, on Kelleys Island, Ohio |
When I was attending Northern Baptist Theological Seminary,
Dr. Manfred Brauch’s required text for his New Testament Theology class was
George Ladd’s A Theology of the New Testament. Ladd’s work focused on Jesus’s
teachings on the kingdom of God as the heart of the Real Jesus and the gospel.
I am so thankful Dr. Brauch chose this text. Years later, when I was teaching
at Palmer Theological Seminary where Dr. Brauch was Dean, I was having lunch
with him. I told him I wore out Ladd’s book until the cover began to fall off.
Ladd’s focus on Jesus and the kingdom was revolutionary at
the time among evangelical Christians. Now many of us understand that the
hermeneutical key to the Real Jesus is the kingdom of God, which is defined as
the rule, or reign, of God. Richard Stearns, in his new book Unfinished, has
got this right. Stearns writes:
“The arrival of the kingdom of God in Jesus was like that of
a government in exile breaking through to establish its rightful authority, to
overthrow the established regimes and liberate the people living in bondage.
God undertook a rescue mission that would offer his children a final chance to
be reconciled. The rescue mission would leave nothing to chance. God would lead
it by taking on human form; he would send his own Son to accomplish it. And it
would be costly.” (Stearns, Unfinished, p. 63)
Like Moses before him, Jesus came to deliver us out of
oppression and into the freedom of his beautiful kingdom.
