Ten-year Old Interview
Ten years ago, Steve Brown and I released our first volume of a projected three-volume work on the topic of the Kingdom of God. (By the way, all three of these can be bought as a package for a special price right now from Illumination Publishers.) What follows is a written interview conducted with the two of us shortly after the book came out. I am putting this on my website today in December 2020 as I am preparing for a Zoom interview this afternoon with Michael Burns. It seems Michael initiated this because volume 3 is finished now, at long last. If any of this can stir more interest in Kingdom seeking and Kingdom receiving, all the better.
DPI: When did you first begin to think some of these thoughts about the Kingdom of God?
Steve: I accepted the viewpoint that I learned in the congregation of the Church of Christ where I grew up. My thoughts were probably widened by the use of the term when we were part of the church in Boston. It was apparent that God was actively expanding the borders of his Kingdom, and the seriousness of the call to seek it first was invigorating to me, but this recent study has convicted me about how little I really understood about the Kingdom of God.
Tom: my graduate studies in theology put almost no emphasis on the Kingdom, but my major research project focused on a respected German theologian who, remarkably, believed in the resurrection. He presented the thesis that the end of history occurred proleptically in the resurrection of Jesus. After finding out what proleptically meant, I was introduced to the idea of the future breaking in to the present. That would prepare me for a better understanding of the Kingdom. However, my journey really began in earnest several years later in 1974 when I read John Howard Yoder’s The Politics of Jesus. Though there was much I did not understand as I struggled through his work, I did start seeing the Kingdom of God not in institutional terms but in revolutionary ethical terms. Soon after that I read George Eldon Ladd’s Theology of the New Testament, which begins with a long section on Jesus and the Kingdom. This helped me see the Kingdom as so much more than the church, but very much linked with it. I was teaching Introduction to the New Testament at the time in the department of religion at Missouri State University and was energized in teaching the Kingdom concepts to my students. I soon put together a class on the work of Jesus with the Kingdom as a central concept. most of that material would be published twenty-five years later with the title No One Like Him: Jesus and His Message.
DPI: What caused you to begin your focused study two years ago?
Tom: I had wanted to read Lee Camp’s book Mere Discipleship for some time. I was going to hear him speak in July 2008, and I wanted to read the book before hearing him. The book reawakened in me so many thoughts that I had back in the ’70s, some of which I started to share in my book on Jesus in 2002. I was impressed with the bold way he laid out things that I had believed but had too lazily consigned to the pile we call “opinion matters.” I encouraged Steve to read Lee’s book, and that began a serious quest by the two of us to get back to kingdom theology. The two of us eventually had some encouraging lunch meetings with Lee.
Steve: Like Tom said, he read Mere Discipleship and encouraged me to read it. Lee’s writing really resonated with me and kick-started a storm of reading and talking and preaching about the Kingdom.
DPI: Were others involved with you in this study and this journey?
Steve: Very soon Tom and I began to involve other staff members and elders in the Greater Nashville Church in our study. Frank Williams, who was our evangelist at the time, was most enthusiastic and began to put into practice in our staff interactions the kingdom principles we were learning. Dave Mundie, one of our elders, who has a PhD in engineering from Vanderbilt, was especially eager to get involved. Tom set up a private blog, and he and Dave and I posted frequently on it to share with each other new ideas and build on each other’s thinking. It was exciting with new insights coming every week.
Tom: Other staff members, Damien Charley, Barry Holt, Tim Kidwell and Keith Davis also contributed ideas and were very supportive. And, of course, so were our wives who didn’t immediately embrace all our conclusions but encouraged our quest. Eventually word trickled out about our study, and other members of the congregation began to ask questions and share ideas that helped refine our thinking.
Steve: And, let me add that we shared our work with other teach ers in our fellowship of churches, getting input from Gordon Ferguson, Wyndham Shaw, Douglas Jacoby, Steve Staten and Steve Kinnard. A weekend seminar on “Patristics” was sponsored by AIM (a ministry training program) featuring David Bercot, who is well known for his books Will the Real Heretics Please Stand Up? and The Kingdom that Turned the World Upside Down. That event also played a role in fueling our interest.
DPI: What has been the most exciting aspect of this study for you, or what has it meant to you personally?
Steve: It was exciting seeing formerly random ideas fit together in a unified framework and beginning to grasp the depth and power of God’s Kingdom. (Not that I’ve got it all!) for me there was a variety of ideas and experiences growing up in the church of Christ: the excitement of working side by side with a missionary, Robert Martin, in the Fiji Islands for two summers when I was in college, feeling like this was what Christianity was all about, preaching the gospel constantly and training men to do the same. I owe Robert a lot for who I am today. His passion and boldness was inspiring. I had a growing discontent with the way commitment to Jesus was often preached about but not practiced, or sometimes even ignored completely. Studying missions and then living and working in other countries changed the way I viewed everything. In the Crossroads movement and later in Boston I saw people living out their faith daily like I had only experienced in spurts. Of course, there was the reexamination of our core convictions after a trauma in our fellowship of churches. for me this focus on the kingdom brought all of this into a unified perspective and made sense out of all these somewhat disconnected things. It was also inspiring to go back and read Restoration movement authors whose names and reputations I was familiar with and see how a hundred years ago they were teaching and living out some of these same concepts.
Tom: for me it was returning to something that had meant a great deal to me earlier, but this time with a much greater openness to how it needed to affect and change my life. Also, this time around as a sixty-two-year-old, I am much more willing to speak out on some issues that may not be popular as long I am convinced that they are a part of Jesus’ kingdom message. I have become convinced that we have dismissed as disputable or opinion matters some key kingdom principles that are inconvenient for us. We wouldn’t think of doing that on some of our long-held beliefs, but elements of Jesus’ kingdom message are just as clear and maybe even more central. I am further convinced God will work in powerful ways when we are focused on the kingdom way, which is not concerned with being effective but faithful.
DPI: What concepts have you found most personally challenging?
Steve: The most exciting idea was understanding that we are really “aliens from the future” and beginning to grasp what this entails. The most challenging on a personal level was to wrestle with my attitude toward possessions. And I am still really struggling with how to fully live that out.
Tom: I personally settled some of the issues about the Kingdom and its effect on patriotism, the military and non-resistance long ago. But now, I see the need to speak clearly and openly about these things. What I have not done nearly enough thinking about is how the kingdom relates to my material possessions, my attitudes toward radical generosity and making financial decisions that go against all conventional wisdom for the sake of the Kingdom. There is what I call a kind of “over the top” obedience in the Sermon on the mount that is exciting to me but challenging! Growth in this area has been fulfilling, but I have miles to go before I sleep!
DPI: As you have been teaching this in different places both in and outside the US, what kinds of responses have you received?
Steve: Initially very positive, people have been very excited to “connect the dots.” It makes sense. There have been a few strong negative reactions to certain issues or applications, especially in regard to some of Jesus’ teaching in the Sermon on the mount.
Tom: Overwhelmingly positive. People are eager to see the big picture of the Kingdom. At the same time, some aspects of the Kingdom that we have sadly neglected are a real struggle for some people. When it comes to some of those areas where Lee Camp says we have certain deep-rooted (but unbiblical) Christian reflexes, we see some people just wanting to avoid the issues. Of course, this has to change and leaders must lead the way. Avoidance of clear teachings of Jesus is not the way of the cross or the Kingdom.
DPI: What obstacles will have to be overcome for the church today to live the kingdom life?
Steve: The hardest thing is to move beyond the intellectual discussion and put it in action. Beyond that we have huge cultural and nationalistic expectations that run very much counter to kingdom expectations.
Tom: (1) We will have to decide that though some of us have been very serious—even radical—disciples, we must be open to letting the Kingdom come in new ways. The obstacle here would be thinking that we basically have our understanding of the Kingdom down, and we just need to practice what we have been teaching. (2) We must once again overcome our fear of rejection. The Kingdom is so counter-cultural. There will be strong reactions to it—when we practice it all. We must prepare to be aliens and strangers.
DPI: What is your vision for how this could affect the church in our time?
Steve: Living the kingdom life is what “church” is all about. Teaching about the Kingdom is not some extraneous “new teaching.” It is all about following Jesus every day and submitting to God’s will. Hopefully as we live it out, we can truly become all that God has planned for us to be and to achieve.
Tom: The more I study Jesus’ call to repent and receive the Kingdom, the more I see that repentance was not first of all a call to make some moral changes, though that was involved. It was a call for the Jews to give up their agenda on how the Kingdom of God ought to look and be shaped, and to turn to Jesus and completely surrender to his agenda. The writings of N.T. Wright have been very helpful with this. I believe it is time for us all to sit down and completely reevaluate our agenda as a church, rigorously compare it to Jesus’ kingdom agenda and realign our priorities and reshape our activities accordingly. evangelism is something that must not stop, as it seems to among many who focus on certain aspects of the Kingdom, but the evangelistic message needs to involve much more about the Kingdom—particularly, how its message is good news for the poor. When I read our book again just before it went to press, I wished we had put much more emphasis on how the Kingdom calls us to be with the poor. You can expect that emphasis in a subsequent volume.
DPI: This is part one of a projected three-part series. What will the next two books be about?
Steve: We have been calling the Sermon on the mount, “The Sermon on the Kingdom” because it is such a clear statement from Jesus about how the reign of God is to affect our lives. So we want to devote the entire second volume to the Sermon, many parts of which we have sadly ignored. In our congregation in Nashville, we did a weekend seminar on the Kingdom and then followed it with seventeen weeks of study on the Sermon on the mount. It all fits together.
Tom: Then in volume three, which will be subtitled “Aliens and Strangers, a Light to the Nations,” we want to explore various ways in which kingdom values clash with and surpass the values of this world. We want to look at how the distinctive life enables God’s people to become that city set on a hill.
DPI: Do you have any final thoughts for us?
Steve: may God’s Kingdom come in ever increasing depth in our hearts and in ever expanding breath as the good news of the Kingdom is spread around the world. may his will be done, right here and right now, starting with me, just exactly as it is done in heaven. That about sums it up.
Tom: I believe with these thoughts about the Kingdom we are getting a grip on God’s plan that is deeper, more faithful to the historical context out of which it came, but at that same time even more relevant and exciting for today’s church. finally, I try not miss an opportunity to ask people to pray for me: Please pray that by the grace of God, I may keep seeking to understand the vastness of this Kingdom as long as I live, and know the freedom that comes from practicing what we learn. my last thought is a prayer that we will ever be learning more about the Kingdom, but always being humble about how much we still need to learn.
