I have been blown away by the response to Subversive Kingdom. Several readers have posted book reviews and tweeted them to me. I am thankful for your kind words. Like all books, Subversive Kingdom was a labor of love, and I pray it has spurred many to live on God's mission and become a rebellion to the rebellion.
Many of you have also commented on the app. It's available for iPhone and iPad if you don't already have it and are interested. Also, be sure to follow the twitter account @LiveSubversive.
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Finally, here is an excerpt from Chapter 8 of the book entitled "The King's Mission."
The dominant, culture-shaping story throughout much of the world for the past three hundred years has been the pursuit of progress--a story inspired by the hope that humanity, by maximizing its powers of intellect, discovery, and initiative, is fully capable of creating its own version of heaven on earth.
The late missionary/theologian Lesslie Newbigin traced this story back to the new governments that were established in the afterglow of the French and American revolutions. He noted that many of the tenets behind these cultural movements were developed during the age of Enlightenment, later to be embodied in such heady texts as Thomas Paine's The Rights of Man, and further articulated in FDR's "Four Freedoms" speech before the U.S. Congress in 1941--as well as "in the promises which any political party must now make if it is to have a hope of power."
And while I'll leave it to others more skilled than I to evaluate the political implications of such analysis, I do know that the challenge of the church in our age is to live, function, and minister within a culture that demands few if any limits on its personal freedoms, one which has embraced consumerism as a way of life, one which attempts to use what it has--its own inner drive and resources--to get what it wants. That's the kind of thinking and energy that turns on the coffeepot each morning in most homes throughout the Western world. This is the generational mind-set embedded into the fabric of modern life and the expectations of modern man.
Try harder. Work smarter. Take charge. Make it happen. But what is foundationally wrong with this picture? The problem is that the Bible--our authority on all life and our guide to all truth--doesn't subscribe to this same story of human progress. The story of the Bible (and, therefore, the story we as Christians are called to tell and participate in) is the story of human redemption.
Progress. Redemption. Big difference. The first one futilely attempts to fashion heaven on earth in the form of hard work, positive energy, peaceful thoughts, better nutrition, and stuff like that. The other successfully brings heaven to earth in the form of God's Son and his atoning death, sent here to redeem (to "buy back") the captives of this oppressive world order and to set them free. One fails; the other cannot fail. People don't move toward a paradisiacal "not yet" by being turned loose to pursue their own personally beneficial ends. The only "not yet" that promises any joy and freedom is the "not yet" of Christ's consummated kingdom. And none of us progresses toward it; we are redeemed into it.
Life enslaves. But Jesus saves.
Not too long ago I had the opportunity to speak to the Religion Newswriters Association at the Washington Post building in Washington, DC. It gave me the chance to share with secular religion reporters from across the United States what our current research is telling us about the beliefs and practices of evangelicals today. But it doesn't take a research professional to interpret what I observed among this crosssection of journalists gathered that day in such a distinguished setting. When one of the other speakers at the event--a reporter himself--responded to a question about world religions by declaring, "I believe Jesus is the only way to God," more than a few folks looked uncomfortable. To the people in that room (and to most people, really), making such a bold, restrictive claim smacked of exclusivism, narrow-mindedness, and intolerance, a real misunderstanding of wider thought. The assertion of a "narrow" way--salvation through Jesus Christ alone--was (and always is) offensive to normal folks. But it is essential to us.
And yet isn't the "broad" way of human progress littered with the corpses of those who tried and failed to achieve what they hoped to accomplish? Despite all these years of concerted effort, what kind of news and business headlines continue to float to the top of the public consciousness on most days of the week? By pursuing their own paths and pleasures in ways that cut God out of the picture--at least in any fashion beyond the sentimental, religiously controlled version of spiritual practice--the search for "heaven on earth" fails to accomplish even its own admitted goals, often in miserably lonely and discouraging detail.
So here's just the way it is (with apologies to Thomas Paine): The story of human progress is 100 percent guaranteed to have a bad ending, no matter how many variations people come up with, no matter how many different ways they try to spin things. Christ alone and his work of redeeming helpless humankind is the sole remedy for what ails the inhabitants of any society, in any age, in any place.
There is only one way. The narrow way.
But (and here's where we start to see our kingdom role in all this) it's not so narrow that it can't handle more travelers.
As we begin wrapping our arms around the call to action that Christ extends to his kingdom agents, we must not fail to see the primary importance of the gospel in framing our plan of subversive attack. Redemption is a reality we must not be ashamed of, even in a world that beats its boot-straps to the tune of human potential and progress. Christ's redemption is the great hope--the only hope--for the culture we live in. The only thing "progress" does is make excuses for the bondage.
Here is reality at ground level: People who have been deceived into thinking they can successfully map the course of their own destiny, people who are wearing themselves out trying to cobble together a life that's too big to be figured out on their own, people whose greatest need isn't for more money or better job prospects or a couple of lucky breaks--they need Jesus.
Just like we needed Jesus--and still need Jesus.
But this divine turn of events that we recognize as the gospel--God in Christ reaching down to the broken and lost world, rescuing them from bondage, and transferring them into God's kingdom of light--is actually even more than that. The gospel is not merely the story of the Bible and the only hope for hopeless mankind. It is indeed the grandest expression of God's mission.
And God's mission needs to be our mission.
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