One of the trends to emerge in recent theological discourse is a renewed focus on Jesus’s proclamation of the kingdom of God. In particular, leading scholars have argued that Jesus’s kingdom vision was steeped within the first-century Jewish hope for Israel’s national restoration. At the same time, however, several scholars have also argued that Jesus deterritorialized kingdom. More specifically, Jesus is said to have uncoupled the kingdom from Israel’s territorial borders and transformed Jewish national existence from a geographic state into a universal religioethical praxis.
John Howard Yoder, for instance, has argued that Jesus’s announcement of the kingdom is “a visible socio-political, economic restructuring of relations among the people of God.” Nevertheless, he also suggests that “the universality of God’s kingdom contradicts rather than confirms all particular solidarities and can be reached only by first forsaking the old aeon.” Accordingly, Jesus’s kingdom proclamation confirms that statelessness is the normative sociopolitical posture for Christians.
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