Canter Bridge

When Australian New Testament scholar and educator David Seccombe writes about ‘Jesus’ revolutionary message’ (the subtitle of The Gospel of the Kingdom), it is almost inevitable that he should set out a two-part arrangement that puts one in mind of the apostle Paul: ‘What is the Gospel?’ and ‘Proclaiming the Gospel’.

This is so because Seccombe’s scholarly gifts have always been deployed in the interests of people and churches whom the author longs to see brought into redemptive, joyous, and invigorating relationship with Jesus Christ. A gospel minutely defined and delimited but not preached, lived, and taught would fall short of Seccombe’s ambition.

So in thirteen spritely chapters, in the course of which Seccombe wears his scholarship lightly but not without effect, we are asked to think again—or even for the first time—about the nature of the strange news that intruded into human discourse by means of Jesus’ life and teaching.

Seccombe writes because he perceives a problem: an abundance of ‘confusion and fuzzy thinking’ about what ‘gospel’ means (Ch. 1, ‘Gospel Confusion’). Scanning Old Testament and extrabiblical antecedents, the author concludes that ‘(a) gospel at the time of the birth of the New Testament was the announcement of momentous good news, mostly about victory in battle and the rise and fall of kingdoms’.

Seccombe has a large space for the Old Testament book of Isaiah in his understanding of ‘gospel’. He works his way toward that formidable prophetic scroll in chapter two (‘The Old Testament and the Kingdom of God’) by tracing the way in which divine rule or kingship works its way into the covenants and the promises embedded in them. Israel, in effect, leans through her mixed experiences with good and bad rulers and the disappointments that cling to them and into a future where the Lord will make good on his promise to send a Davidic scion who will rule well. The ‘kingdom of God’ as an abstraction is not language that is common to the Old Testament, but this does not mean that the idea of a divine king and his human proxies is anything close to absent.

When it comes to Isaiah (Ch. 3, ‘The gospel according to Isaiah’), Seccombe is not bashful about the ancient book’s influence:

The gospel language of Jesus and the apostles derives primarily from the book of Isaiah. Israel’s prophets delivered political, social and religious criticism from God to the people of their day, but they also spoke of what God would do in the future. Isaiah was the most detailed and influential with respect to the New Testament.

Seccombe derives from Isaiah’s vocabulary license to turn his own gospel language in unconventional directions: Hebrew מבשר (mebasser) becomes ‘gospeller’ as a noun and ‘gospelling’ as a participle/gerund. Seccombe’s linguistic liberty is key to expressing his point that in the Old Testament the language that we know as ‘gospel’-related would have corresponded to the announcement of earth-shaking news, usually but now always good news. He is on his way to driving home the point that the gospel is a revolutionary development and its proclaimer is the bearer of revolutionary news.

Strictly speaking there is no gospel in the Old Testament, but only the promise of a future gospel. The Old Testament is a book of promises, the gospel being one of them; its coming belongs to the age of fulfillment, just like the Messiah. In the Old Testament the coming of the gospel is an event which is yet to take place. When it does, it will mean that God has arrived (or is about to), and that salvation has come, the promises have been fulfilled and the kingdom of God is at hand.

In this light, the announcement is that Jesus comes ‘gospelling’. Indeed, his famous words in the Nazareth synagogue are not a sermon, but rather an announcement ‘of the kind that brings into being what it declares’ (Chapter 4, ‘Jesus’ gospel of the kingdom’). Jesus self-identifies as the awaited gospeller whose teaching is gospel itself. God’s kingdom has come or, better, made its initial appearance. Jesus’ news would have had a decided political import. Insofar as people became his followers, Jesus became a dangerous man. Tragically, most people rejected him, which occasioned Jesus’ teaching that the kingdom whose arrival he heralded would be a long time in the making. Its coming would be marked by conflict and by the death of Jesus’ himself.

In fact, Jesus and his gospel experience opposition of at least two kinds. There was opposition that was ‘flesh and blood’, chiefly the Jewish religious leaders. And then there was a threatened kingdom that was not of flesh and blood and that Jesus had come to supplant from his Father’s world. Kingdoms would clash (Chapter 5, ‘The gospel under fire’).

But Jesus seemed to fail against his deepest adversary.

Jesus’ death presents us with a paradox: was it Satan’s victory, or Jesus’? To human eyes it was clearly the former. Jesus came to save sinners, but the sinners turned against him, would have none of his kingdom, and ejected him from the world—all through satanic manoeuvering. Yet Satan failed to break Jesus’ obedience to God. He stood firm through coaxing and ordeal and died a death which he believed was God-ordained. Could it be he who triumphed?

This is how the early Christian saw it. They did not make this up, but obtained their view from Jesus. He had spoken of his death as the means by which he would overthrow Satan’s power and establish his own kingdom over the human race …’

One of the principal virtues of Seccombe’s book is that the author finds the story of Jesus strange and he perseveres in allowing it to remain strange rather than taming it in order to find an anodyne ‘moral of the story’.

Seccombe would have his reader peer for a moment through a lens that focuses on the sequence of Jesus’ grand gospel announcement (Ch. six, ‘The gospel breaks out’). Jesus announced first that the kingdom of God was very near to invading and even imposing itself upon reality as its hearers knew it. Yet his own role in that kingdom—that of its monarch—comes only gradually into view. First comes the announcement of a kingdom, then the presentation of its king.

We are not so very far from this dynamic at the present time, Seccombe argues, for Jesus’ kingdom has been established in his advent, life, death, and resurrection and it is sustained via Christ’s heavenly reign and the gift of his Spirit. Yet we do not yet experience this kingdom in its fullness.

Both the apostles’ experience and our own disciplined waiting correspond not to two different versions of Christian faith—as is sometimes alleged—but rather to two different forms of the same gospel. Seccombe presents a ‘strong/high christology’, which equates the application of YHWH’s name to Jesus as the ontological identification of Jesus and YHWH. In recognizing Jesus as king of the announced kingdom, we stand at an incomparable advantage over against the apostles in their earliest experience, when the kingdom had been announced but its king was in their frame of reference still to be identified.

This reader finds Seccombe at his best in this chapter, not least in observations like this:

The early Christians knew that their message was not self-evidently true. But if Jesus’ life and the Old Testament were carefully considered they were confident that its truth would emerge. Thus although it is possible to state the essence of the gospel in a sentence, the communication of the gospel can seldom be done in such an easy fashion. Where Jesus’ characteristic way of authenticating his message was by miracle and exorcism, the apostles’ was by reasoned statement and argument.

When Seccombe turns to the break-out of the gospel to the Gentile world that lends its name to the chapter’s title, he insists that gospel argumentation was necessary if gentiles were to make sense of the Jesus message. Yet he drives home what might be isolated as the book’s principal point when he argues that the gospel is not everything that we learn in the biblical witness. Rather, it centers on the kingship or lordship of Jesus:

I run the risk of frustrating my reader with what may appear to be a nit-picking desire to keep a narrow focus for the gospel. Why can we not take everything the early preachers said as gospel? Why can’t we put together Jesus’ life, death, resurrection, ascension, the Holy Spirit, salvation, judgement, second coming, God and creation and the rest—call all these gospel, and preach the lot? The answer is that we can, if we know what we are doing. But it is possible to preach some of these things—even all of them—and for it not to be the gospel, if the lordship of Jesus is absent or out of focus. Yet it is the gospel—and only the gospel—which saves people. It is also possible to preach any one of these and for it to be the gospel, so long as that crucial declaration of Jesus’ kingship is the keynote.

This insistent pressing of the disruptive nature of kingdom announcement sets the stage for the book’s second of two sections: ‘Proclaiming the gospel’. In this section, Seccombe argues that the revolutionary brevity of the gospel—captured in the declaration that ‘Jesus is Lord’—must be astutely reconstituted and delivered of its fullest implications. He finds the canonical ‘gospels’—even Mark, the briefest of the four—to be an excellent model for such reconstitution, for these works tell the story of the Jesus who is Lord in a way that fills in the reader’s understanding of just what this king of the encroaching kingdom is like (Ch. 7, ‘The Kingdom’s King’).

Seccombe next turns to the deep paradox—indeed the gospel’s core ‘scandal’—that one cannot relate to this king except as a crucified king (Ch. 8, ‘The crucified King’). This reader encounters this chapter as both brilliantly succinct (though its topic requires some 40 pages) but also patient of the complexities that attend to any discussion of the this most awful and mysterious core of the gospel. Without using the potentially off-putting term ‘theories of the atonement’, Seccome expertly walks us through them, reminding us after having done so that ‘(i)t is not an understanding of how the cross works which saves us, but its brute fact.’ One thinks of John Stott’s well-received The Cross of Christ, for one finds similar clarity here, in miniature.

Then, these words:

This is heady wine. Yet we must take care not to jump to the conclusion that the good news of God’s love is the gospel. God’s love is good news, and it is worth talking about, but the gospel is an announcement of a very special manifestation of that love. It is the announcement of the arrival of God’s kingdom, which is the kingdom of King Jesus, who is the crucified one, who dies “for us men and for our salvation”, who calls us to know him and share his kingdom for ever. The gospel of the kingdom is a message of the cross-shaped love of a Saviour who died on a love-shaped cross.

Naming the resurrection, the ‘leading edge of the gospel’ and sufficient in itself if its implications are fully explored to lead people to faith (Ch. 9 ‘Proof of the gospel’), Seccombe wants to persuade his reader that there is at the same time ‘more to the resurrection than a miracle and a demonstration of Jesus’ bona fides’.

The New Testament makes a number of statements to the effect that in some manner Jesus actually became Messiah through his resurrection. Looking forward, Jesus saw his death and subsequent resurrection and ascension as the glorification of the Son of Man, a reference to his elevation to dominion over the peoples of the world. He expected the kingdom of God to be established in power through his death and subsequent exaltation—within the lifetime of his disciples. When he appeared to them in Galilee after his resurrection he was able to announce to them that “all authority in heaven and earth has been given to me”. These are the words of a new king, and they are pure gospel.

If Seccombe’s readers will see him as daring in his suggestion that Jesus did not during the course of his incarnation know the timing of his kingdom’s full advent, he is conventional in his understanding of Trinitarian ontology. Having identified the exalted ‘name above every name’ that is given to Jesus as that of YHWH himself, Secommbe hurries to clarify that Jesus did not become God in his resurrection-ascension-enthronement. Rather, he was invested with messianic office and declared to possess a status that is no less than that of God himself.

For the duration of this dense and pregnant chapter, Seccombe argues that this resurrection power loosed in the kingdom by its newly enthroned king makes ‘heaven when you die’ a reduction of the Christian gospel so extreme as to be almost unrecognizable when placed alongside the biblical witness.

As this reader absorbs our author’s claim that ‘resurrection is the cutting edge of the gospel’, he wrestles with the sensation that Seccombe is not in fact distilling ‘gospel’ down to a simple core, as the book may have appeared to promise. Too many of the facets of the Jesus message have in seven chapters been named as critical, essential, central, and cutting-edge for that to be the case. Rather, he is attempting to shear Christian understanding and proclamation of all extraneous additions and limp-wristed concessions. He then gives us an exceedingly dense—and, yes, multiply layered—core of the gospel that does not align well with sloganeering. Yet the astute and gospel-saturated preacher can indeed make sure that this gospel core remains the preached core of his or her proclamation.

In his chapter ten (‘Your kingdom come’), Seccombe combats the urge to deal with the impression that ‘nothing has changed’ by assigning Jesus’ kingdom to a space in one’s inner world rather than accepting it for the …

… full this-worldly solution to the problems of history’ that Jesus claimed it would be. He reminds his reader that ‘Our Lord come! (Aramaic, Maranatha) is (the Jesus movement’s) earliest recorded prayer and that ‘(t)he New Testament closes with the promise of the ascended Lord himself, “Surely I am coming soon,” and the answering cry, “Amen, come Lord Jesus.”

The missing element in much modern and post-modern Christian understanding is hope, Seccombe alleges, in particular a hope that anticipates the full-bodied arrival of this kingdom.

Here and elsewhere, Seccombe’s writing shows him to be sensitive to the claims of honest skeptics, particularly in those areas where the Christian message seems to thrust forward an Achilles’ Heel of particular vulnerability. So why, he imagines his honest skeptic to ask, has this Jesus of yours disappeared from human view just when he has led us to expect the establishment of his kingdom? Where has he gone, and why?

The author’s response to this probing is subtle, and seeks to find a response not so much in contemporary conjecture as in the recorded teaching of Jesus and the early reflection of his disciples. From Jesus’ story about a nobleman traveling to a far country while leaving matters in the hands of his servants to his image of wheat and tares growing both robustly and together, to Paul’s assertion that something in Christ is at the time of his writing ‘incomplete’, Seccombe attempts to show the long period of Jesus’ ‘absence’ that is so familiar to us was foreseen by the earliest voices of the Jesus Movement. This time, for Seccombe, is a space opened up in history for ‘loving conquest’ (via the turning of hearts more than the unwilling submission of the recalcitrant) and gathering of the kingdom’s people in anticipation of Jesus’ ‘second coming’. He allows that the ‘mission’ of Jesus’ people occupies perhaps a larger space in history than either Jew or early Christian could have anticipated. Yet the Spirit of God’s/Jesus’ empowering presence allows believers-on-mission to experience the announced and coming kingdom even before final resistance to it is quieted and its promise become fully lived reality.

Several things about Seccombe’s treatment of ‘(j)ustification by faith’ (the title of the book’s twelfth chapter) are worthy of mention in a review like this one. The first is that the topic comes up in the twelfth chapter rather than in the first or second. By itself this is a signal in the current climate of discussion that Seccombe does not stand with those who risk reducing the gospel to this doctrine. The second that it is inevitable that mention of and even a swipe at N.T. Wright should be forthcoming.

Seccombe’s approach to this core doctrine of the Protestant Reformation—the author would certainly speak of its rediscovery rather than its invention during the Reformation—may best be summarized by this paragraph:

Justification by faith, then, is implicit in the gospel. It may or may not be stated or explained. It is not the centre of the gospel. The gospel announces Christ’s kingdom and victory, but also declares “repentance and forgiveness of sins in his name”. Justification is about forgiveness of sins; it is what God does to un-disqualify—actually, to re-qualify—the person who believes in Jesus. Justification does not come through believing in justification by faith, but by believing in Jesus. A person who hears the gospel of Jesus’ kingdom and trusts in him will be justified, even if he or she has never hard of justification by faith. The call of the gospel is to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ. If we do, we will be saved, even if at the beginning we are hardly aware of the extent of our gain.

It is also possible that this paragraph captures better than any other Seccombe’s work as a pastoral theologian, to say nothing of his winsome and gently daring way with a pen.

Seccombe’s final chapter (Chapter 13, ‘Gospel life’) examines the nature of law, principally in the Old Testament. He places such legislation in the context of other inputs into the ethical life of ancient Israel, such as that nation’s wisdom tradition. Yet the law was deficient, both intrinsically in its incapacity to forge true righteousness and experientially, in Israel’s repeated transgression of it.

The New Testament, for its part, does not present a codified ethical system. ‘The new Christian wants Jesus’ words, not an ethical theory. These were willingly supplied by the Gospel writers.’ Nor were Jesus’ apostles stingy about offering their own, Jesus-derived ethical instruction.

Seccombe seems burdened not to deprive simple, saving faith from its primordial position in Christian experience. Yet he recognizes, that as the follower of Jesus goes on in his or her new life, he longs for more instruction on how to live. And he finds it in Scripture, even if what he discovers there is not an ethical code that per se defines or sketches the boundaries of life in Christ.

It would take a whole book to unwrap the world of early Christian ethics thoroughly’, Seccome writes, suggesting that this is not a book that he has written. ‘What we have done should be sufficient to to establish the rightness of speaking of “gospel ethics” and show that this is no peripheral aspect, but the fundamental principle of true morality … The gospel is the announcement of a ‘new covenant” order: a new King, a kingdom, and a people. It defines a new reality, which requires a new response in human behavior and striving. The gospel offers amnesty and membership to all who will embrace Jesus as King and Lord. This alternative kingdom will ultimately issue into a new world: “new heavens and a new earth where righteousness dwells.” For the moment, it is represented in communities of kingdom-loving people following Jesus in the midst of suffering and righteousness. Their hope is lit with the dawn of the coming kingdom, and their way of life strains forward to what shall be.

Again, Seccome is averse to any notion that ethical behavior defines the gospel or Christian life; that human communities achieve the gospel’s intrinsic ethical standard; and that for these reasons ethics is somehow moved to the margins of the gospel and of Christian experience.

Two brief appendices sort through the lexical and theological morass that leads us to the English words ‘gospel’, ‘righteousness’, and ‘justify/justification’. In the latter case, Seccombe argues strongly that the traditional view still holds water, alluding to the ‘imputation’ of righteousness to justified human beings though—so far as I can tell—without using the word.

What, then, has David Seccombe given to us in these 304 words of winsome prose?

In this reader’s view, The Gospel of the Kingdom should hold a prominent place on the list of resources that might guide a reader or a group of readers into a fuller understanding of the nature of Jesus’ announcement that God’s kingdom has arrived. I can’t think of a better ‘advanced introduction’ to this core of Christian life and understanding.

Secondly, Seccombe’s book aims at and hits a homiletical target. That is, any Christian preacher might well place this book alongside, say, John Stott’s The Cross of Christ as an advanced (again) primer for how to preach the kingdom that Jesus announced. Secccombe has in common with Stott a knack for taking complexity into full account while communicating a truth that must not become complex upon every declaration of it.

Thirdly, Seccombe’s book is recurrently refreshing. Even when the space he allows himself for thinking creatively—from time to time one feels he is writing as an act of thinking-out-loud—occasionally risks a loss of clarity, one comes away feeling that he is hearing something new. Or perhaps hearing something old in a new way.

Finally (though in no exhaustive sense), Seccombe’s work makes for a very good read. One can imagine sitting late into the night alongside the man, perhaps consuming a pint or two in the mix, and heading home with the heady sense that one has had a very fine conversation.

This, when such important and theological realities are in the mix, is an accomplishment of ample proportions. Perhaps more than two have been at that table.