The Radical Kingdom of God:
Conventional Christianity or Biblical Faith?
by Art Katz
The Lord gathered about 100 men from across the State of Minnesota, as well as some from Canada, for this occasion, where Art spoke forcibly for the Church to become what God intended it to be right from the beginning. Art brings to men’s attention a number of relevant issues necessary for God’s Kingdom to come on earth as it is in heaven.
There is a remarkable indifference in the earth to the fact that this planet was visited by God. I think we just have to recognize that we are in a kind of sleepwalk, a stupor; the god of this world has blinded the minds, not only of those who do not believe, but also of those who only nominally believe. The impact of the significance that this planet was visited by very God has not penetrated us to the depths of our understanding. I very much agree with a brother who said, “We are not yet ready for the second coming of the Lord, because we have not yet fully appropriated the meaning of His first coming.” There is not a sufficient sense of astonishment. No one is really raising the electric questions: Why is it that God would choose to visit the earth, and for what purposes did He come? What was affected by His coming, and what is the significance to us who remain? It is surely much more than just a matter of historical curiosity or interest.
Instead of asking these questions, people see a world without God, and even if they do see a world with God, they think He has done nothing but set it in motion and abandoned it to men. And that this is a kind of mechanistic universe that prevails and perpetuates itself, in which God does not have to be too seriously considered. Therefore, it is not at all surprising that in the vital interests that affect the lives of men and of nations, God is not invoked, nor is He sought. It is just remarkable to pick up a newspaper, Newsweek or Time magazine, and see that the media is filled with the counsel of men. They discuss issues of war and peace and what constitutes wisdom, but never once is there any mention or reference to the fact that there is a God who can be considered, whose counsel can be sought, whose will can be obtained, or who was here at one time, had spoken, and had left us a body of statements saying that He intends to prevail in terms of the conduct of nations and of men.
There is an astonishing unresponsiveness toward God that amounts to rejection, and I hold the Church responsible for allowing men’s views to prevail. When it comes to the effectual circumstances of our own lives, though we believe, the way that we conduct our lives and make our own decisions is virtually the same way that the world makes theirs. God is not radically taken into our own consideration, and we make our decisions, whether it is going to college, getting married, establishing a business, or any such thing on the same basis as the world makes its reckonings—by appealing to reason, logic, circumstance, convenience, and personal advantage.
The world is indifferent to God because we who believe have not radically taken God into our consideration. The conditions have become such that any thought of bringing God into the counsel of men is considered a violation. It is ironic that it is the world that raises the issue of the separation of Church and state, as if somehow the state needs to be protected against the Church. The Church is not to have any voice, not to stick its nose in, not to sound itself, not to express itself, not to bring the counsel of God into the secular affairs of men. They say this would violate the separation of Church and state, but they are altogether forgetting that the principle, when it was first invoked, was invoked to protect not the state, but the Church. God never intended that there be the distinctions of sacred and secular that prevail today and constitute the comfortable categories, not only of the world, but also of the Church itself. God intended for the sacred to penetrate the secular, and the Church is the instrument by which the divine is to come into the ordinary and eternity is to come into time.
However, in keeping with the kind of impersonality that prevails today, and God only as a Sunday object, the phrase “the Kingdom” has lost its currency, or has never been known. It is a kind of airy phrase that refers, in some vague way, to some distant thing that could possibly be our experience after we die. The Church has little expectancy for a “Kingdom come…on earth as it is in heaven” (Mt 6:10). The incredible thing is that the Church has allowed the world to define it—to define its functions, its role, and its activity. I am reminded of the condition of Israel in its apostasy, “and My people love to have it so” (Jer 5:31).
As I go on, I think you will recognize that the alternative to what is prevailing will be a Church that is Kingdom-oriented; it will be an active, victorious, and triumphant Church that requires challenging things from its members. In the pursuit of this, the consequences will at least be reproach and persecution, and at the utmost, martyrdom. Martyrdom is not some kind of rare experience for the very few because they were not wise enough to avoid the consequence; it is the normative, logical end result of faith in Christ, if we pursue Him truly, because we live in a world that is hostile against Him. The fact that we do not expect martyrdom and are not preparing for it is in keeping to the statements I have already made, that the Church is living beneath God’s Kingdom intentions. We do not share the apostolic view held by the Church fathers. We do not share the apostolic view of the radical Anabaptists of the 16th century who were burned at the stake, tortured in dungeons, and drowned back-to-back, because they saw, as the context of the drama in which their own Christian lives were set, two Kingdoms in inexplicable conflict—the kingdom of darkness and the Kingdom of light. They had, as it were, a Kingdom view, and they lived out of that kind of seeing; therefore, they had a radical impact in the communities in which they lived. The result was persecution, not so much from the world or the state as from the prevailing religious bodies who saw their kind of Christianity as threatening, intimidating, and going beyond the safe prescriptions that they wanted to define as Christianity.
All these things have relegated the Church to a nominal and secondary place, as a kind of an institutional adjunct to society. The Church has been effectually domesticated, made tame. Its role has been defined by the world. The world has given us the hour in which we can safely conduct our services without interrupting the football schedules or the golf course. As long as we adhere to a schedule of services and see the faith as a Sunday continuing succession of services, as long as we keep our nose out of the world’s business and stay within the confines that have been established for us, we will be allowed our tax deductible advantages and the like. In the world’s sight, the Church constitutes a kind of fraternal order, or a society sharing a quaint vocabulary and a hymnology, whose presence can be tolerated, so long as it does not interfere in the things of the world that “really count.”
Unless the Church introduces truth and righteousness into the earth, there is no means by which these things can be admitted. Do you realize that? Unless the people of God return to the standard of truth as lived out by Jesus Himself, we cannot admit these sins, because we would undermine the very foundation we have chosen to build on. Will you, like our fathers before us, fall on your knees, call your sin what God calls it, humble yourself, and cry out for God’s grace and mercy, longing to see a house truly built on God’s plumb line of truth and righteousness? Righteousness and truth are distinctive of the Church alone. Only the Church has the capacity to understand the meaning of these words, as they are spirit words given from heaven and are understood not by reference to the dictionary, but in the living experience of the saints. God expects the world to see righteousness and truth through our lives, because His Spirit dwells in us. Unless the Church makes truth and righteousness visible through its conduct and through its presence, there is no way for the world to understand what these words mean.
However, the Church today, for the most part, moves as the world does; that is to say, they live as if God does not really exist and that no practical input by God into their daily lives is expected by virtue of their believing. What am I saying here? I am saying that those who wear the name of Christ do not themselves believe that there is going to be an existential consequence for their life by virtue of their believing. The fact that they believe does not effectually touch the practicalities of their life, and we therefore conform to the world’s attitude toward the Church that is antiseptic, making the Church of no consequence, because they see that it has no visible consequence for those who profess to believe. Instead of seeing transcendent men and women who are really above disease and above calamity and above disaster, they see them beset by the same kinds of misfortune as those who make no profession to believe in God. Such things ought not to be! The reason that they prevail is because the Church is not the Church until it recognizes its Kingdom mandate. It always will live beneath the transcendent and powerful place that God intended for it until it understands its Kingdom call. Church life is more than a succession of Sundays. Our salvation is intended to procure something in this earth. We are intended to affect nations and societies. We are a light unto the world. We are not just a fraternal society that has its own peculiar vocabulary and hymnology.
As I said before, the decision making of most Christians is like the world, predicated upon secular premises such as reason, logic, need, self-interest, probability. It is not assumed that God has a will in such matters, that it can be discovered and obeyed, or that it is indeed His normative intention to reveal His will for those who call upon His Name. What this shows is that the reality of what we believe is not determined by what we say with our mouths, but rather what we demonstrate in the actuality of our life. As long as that actuality does not demonstrate a God whose will can be revealed and obeyed, the world has no obligation to consider Jesus as God and Lord and King. As long as they see us predicating our lives and making our decisions on secular premises and not the consultation of God’s will, as long as we do not have a faith that believes God’s will can be revealed by the Spirit, the world is under no obligation to take the Church seriously. Unless He is the Lord of everything, He is the Lord of nothing. As long as we have a mentality that divides the great questions and the small, consulting for the will of God in what we consider the great questions and allowing ourselves the prerogative of making our decisions in what we consider the things that are small, we will suffer from an inadequate view of the King and the Kingdom. In the Kingdom of God, there is no decision that is small; there is no issue that is little. He is totally the Lord, or He is not the Lord at all. That is something that has got to be more than just a piece of our doctrine. It has got to be demonstrated in the actuality and the totality of all of our living.
Another demerit of the Church that reveals to the world that there is no such thing as a King or a Kingdom is our attitude toward sickness, toward accidents, and toward death. We think these things are wholly arbitrary. “It just happens; that’s the way the cookie crumbles; it’s natural; I caught it.” The Church has little sense of divine causation, little awareness of cause and effect of things that come from God as chastisement or judgment, or the various reasons why God will allow things to happen. So we dismiss our things as the world dismisses them and therefore repair to the same remedies, whether it is aspirin or doctors, without asking why it is that we are suffering an economic setback, or a calamity in marriage, or a failure in health, or the various other things by which God is seeking to probe and touch us. We do not have a Kingdom view that sees the hand of God in our circumstances; therefore, the world is not obliged to see the hand of God in theirs.
Another aspect of this cosmic impersonality of not bringing God vitally into the world that He created is a lack of awareness of the invisible spirit world, which is greatly dismissed and is outside the consciousness of most Christians. There is no practical knowledge of the wiles of the enemy who manipulates his victims at will. The prevalence of Halloween, or jokes about the devil, or pictures of him in magazines with a tail and a three-prong trident, and all of these kinds of cultural things show the complete dismissal of one of the most awesome facts that constitutes the reality of the universe, namely the existence of a whole spirit world of principalities, powers, and rulers of darkness that affect the conduct of nations and men. Because the Church has not sufficiently reckoned on that, does not sufficiently believe it, and does not walk and live as if it believes it, the world has not been required to take it seriously into its consideration. Therefore, Satan is having an unparalleled opportunity to jerk, to intimidate, to threaten, and to affect the conduct of nations without the slightest awareness that he is the source behind the evil that prevails in the world, since. The Church is too anemic to even indicate the source of the evil in the world, let alone to bring the remedy. We have not understood the great conflict between light and darkness that underlines all reality, both in the things of the past and of the future. This is a Kingdom consciousness that needs to be restored.
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