Rick McKinley wrote a fantastic book a few years ago, it's a great, concise perspective on the Kingdom of God. Rick brings a lot of practical stories to illustrate what happens when theology influences reality.
Here is my favourite bit...
"The kingdom of God is the living, breathing presence and purpose and reign of God on our planet. It’s beautiful and irreducible. To reduce it to a seven-point outline might help you on the quiz, but it won’t get you any closer to the experience. It would be like cutting up a corpse to figure out what it means to be human-sure, you’d end up with identifiable body parts in formaldehyde and maybe a micron photograph of a neurotransmitter, but the wonder of pulsing human life would elude you. Do you think in some piece of brain you’d find clues to friendship and falling in love, or learn why beach sand feels good between your toes, or what it means to be a child of God who also happens to like football, cigars, and the taste of a great cabernet?
To be human is to live with loose ends, with people and in a world of loose ends, feeling you’ve been made for perfection but knowing you can’t get there on your own. Knowing that you’ve been placed here to bring a taste of something beautiful and blessed.
I love studying theology, but I’ve noticed that theology has little tolerance for loose ends. As the study of God, it mostly uses human tools like logic and interpretation and systems to define Him and how He works in our lives. Countless brilliant women and men have written penetrating works that help us think more clearly about God. The give us a rich theological heritage, and I encourage you to read them. But be careful. You can study God expertly in His parts and miss Him entirely in His Being. Sometimes I think today’s evangelicals have dissected God, put Him in jars, labelled all His parts, and then breathed a sigh of relief. Whew. Job done they gasp. Now we have no more confusion about God. Now we have a God we can market. At least now we can be excruciatingly confident that “our team” is right.
As right as body parts in formaldehyde."
As right as body parts in formaldehyde."
This Beautiful Mess by Rick McKinley
