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DiggBrian McLaren on The Fullness of Life
This article appears in the Eschatology issue of Trinity News , the magazine of Trinity Church-St. Paul's Chapel.
Does God’s kingdom spell the end of the world, or the beginning of something new? Is it found here on earth or in the hereafter?
Interestingly, John almost never used the term “kingdom of God” (which is at the heart of Jesus’ message for Matthew, Mark, and Luke). Instead, John normally translates “kingdom of God” into another phrase that is notoriously hard to render in English. Most commonly, John’s translation of Jesus’ original phrase is rendered “eternal life” in English. Unfortunately, the phrase eternal life is often misinterpreted to mean “life in heaven after you die” — as are kingdom of God and its synonym, kingdom of heaven — so I think we need to find a better rendering.
If “eternal life” doesn’t mean “life after death,” what does it mean? In John’s Gospel, Jesus reduces the phrase simply to “life,” or “life to the full.” Near the end of John’s account, Jesus makes a particularly fascinating statement in a prayer, and it is as close as we get to a definition: “This is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom [God has] sent” (John 17:3). So here, “eternal life” means knowing, and knowing means an interactive relationship. In other words, “This is eternal life, to have an interactive relationship with the only true God and with Jesus Christ, his messenger.” Interestingly, that’s what a kingdom is too: an interactive relationship one has with a king, the king’s other subjects, and so on.
The Greek phrase John uses for “eternal life” literally means “life of the ages,” as opposed, I think we could say, to “life as people are living it these days.” So John’s related phrases — eternal life, life to the full, and simply life — give us a unique angle on what Jesus meant by “kingdom of God”: a life that is radically different from the way people are living these days, a life that is full and overflowing, a higher life that is centered in an interactive relationship with God and with Jesus. Let’s render it simply “an extraordinary life to the full centered in an interactive relationship with God.” (By the way, I don’t expect you to be satisfied with this as a full definition of the kingdom of God. I’m not satisfied with it myself. But it’s one angle, one dimension, one facet.)
Brian D. McLaren is a pastor, author, mentor, and speaker, and has assisted in the development of several new churches. He is a frequent guest on news broadcasts, and was listed by Time magazine as one of America’s 25 most influential evangelicals. His most recent book, upon which this article is based, is The Secret Message of Jesus: Uncovering the Truth that Could Change Everything (W Publishing Group, 2006).
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