As An Egalitarian Democrat The Talk Of The Kingdom Of God Troubled Me Until I Remembered Just WHO Would Be The King of It

THE KINGDOM OF GOD that a reader found troubling IS a troubling phrase for an egalitarian democrat.  It becomes less of a problem if you remember that The Kingdom of God wouldn't be a human kingdom ruled by a human being, it wouldn't be subject to the evils that human kingship inevitably include, the injustices that God had Samuel warn The Children of Israel would come with them adopting a monarchical system would not be part of it, there would certainly be no injustice under the rule of God, God wouldn't be a human king with all of the nastier aspects of human personality coming with making a human being king. Or, rather, allowing a human being to make himself king.  We're not God, in case you forget and you shouldn't because human kings, whether Nebuchadnezzar, Pharaoh, Henry VIII, the Czar, Bush II or Trump or whoever the next Republican-fascist Ameriking crowned by the damned Electoral College or by the imperial Supreme Court and abjectly, cowardly and opportunistically proclaimed Ameriking by the "free press" are anything but divine.  

The Kingdom of God like so many other such terms in Scripture,  is a human term that tries to give a hint as to things that are not part of human experience and culture.  There is no human term for what the Prophets are talking about when they talk about the ultimate good.  Those metaphors are given given in a time and in a place where largely uneducated People and what they could understand were the audience of and the vehicle to bring of the Gospel to human minds and history.  Just as metaphors fill the Prophesy in the Old Testament. I'm not sure, given what I've seen, that educated People are any more equipped to understand than uneducated People are.

As human cultures have changed and human experience has varied, those metaphors take more effort to understand. The conditions of human minds that are continually mistaking metaphors for what those are supposed to elucidate is probably related to the fact that any human king is going to be anything from highly fallible to resorting to evil to maintain power to what Trump would have been if he'd pulled off the coup that CNN under new management, looking for new audience members in the minority who are Republican-fascists seems to want its viewers to think isn't such a big deal.  

God's kingdom won't come through the use of fear and the violence which are behind any human monarchy and which even the best egalitarian democracy we ever manage to construct would still require as long as human moral failure is a fact.*  I would guarantee you that anything that claims to be The Kingdom of God among human beings could be known to be false through a use of violence and fear to enforce what it was.  If the Kingdom of Jesus could not be found on Earth, we should not expect any governance of humans in life as we know it should ever be mistaken for God's rule.  Such rule would not require a staff of thugs to enforce it with violence and threats (royals, nobles, knights, lower-level feudal functionaries, judges, "justices," etc.) the laws will be written on the hearts of all People and they will choose to follow it without violence and without threats.  Here they had to depend on the Czar being far off and of little power, the Kingdom of God will be based in the imminence of the experience of God.  

It may not be fashionable to read Scripture to consider some of that Kingdom talk was talking about a "Kingdom not of this world" in the afterlife but to place the entire scope of Prophesy here, on Earth in human experience in time.  But I don't think it works as anything but an unachievable aspiration within the human experience of the material realm in which we need what we need to live but, above and beyond that, we WANT and want and want ever more than we need and we want luxury and, most of all, status above others around us.  I don't see the Peaceable Kingdom on Earth though we are charged with trying our best to accomplish something far closer to it than has ever been accomplished in the past.  I do think that that is part of the use of the metaphor though putting it all in the afterlife is no where near ambitious enough in terms of human life and action here on Earth.

I think of the phrases in the prayer Jesus taught "Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done on Earth as it is in heaven," as about the only evidence given of The Kingdom that is had in mind might be achievable on Earth and the Kingdom would certainly be a result of us doing God's will, of following The Law.  What it would consist of in terms of human will and action is something I can't imagine, those having produced more hell than heaven in my experience but it would have to be something far different than in our history. Everyone having their daily bread would certainly be part of it. Even when People are motivated by the best of intentions and even love, humans carrying the Commandments out well, never mind perfectly, isn't anything I've seen.  The prayer, itself, tells us we are to forgive the wrongs done to us as we would want our wrongs forgiven by God, so it includes the acknowledgement that such wrongs will be inevitable.  We have to ask to be led away from temptation and delivered from evil by God, that we will all encur "debts" (so there will be need and inequality on Earth) or, in the Catholic metaphor that is translated into, "trespasses," into other people's things.  So I think what is meant by that phrase is that we have a moral obligation to make as much of the real Kingdom of God present in the world according to our limited abilities expanded by grace.   I think many of the metaphors in Scripture are better read as applying on Earth and that they are talking about heaven too. I don't think Isaiah's vision of herbivorous lions eating grass next to lambs meant that carnivores were going to all become vegans, think of the problem of the balance of nature and what would happen to the limited grasslands on Earth.  Though maybe they'll all stop having offspring that risks the result of more than replacement levels of reproduction.   See, metaphors for things we haven't seen or experienced. 

* The problem with the police isn't that they exist, the problem with policing is that its culture is  corrupted with racism and other forms of bigotry and an internal culture which encourages that.  Not a little of that the product of the gangsters who run police unions and their appeal to the worst among their members to maintain their power.  The fact that the Supreme Court and other courts have made the job of policing impossible due to their putting automatic and other powerful guns and weapons in the hands of those who commit mass murder has more than a little to do with the deterioration of policing in the United States.  A lot of that was encouraged by programs such as C.O.P.S. and entertainment shows which are entirely unrealistic and the fascist vision of the Dirty Harry franchise and its spin-offs.  The part that the civil liberties industry played in it by getting such things as the Miranda warning which the Roberts Court just knocked down is a minor mitigation compared with what the gun industry, fascists on the Supreme Court and entertainment have done.  The extent to which the ACLU participated in that through its myopic advocacy is probably of much lesser import but it is very real and, because of the court rulings it gets, not insignificant.

Not an insignificant part of it is a product of discriminatory hiring in the past and the present. No police force should look so little like the population it is supposed to serve and protect as so many do.

And then there is the actual system of education, the formation of minds of the population of the United States, media, especially entertainment media. I have marveled at the oddity that so many novels, TV shows, movies, etc. have policemen as central characters when they really aren't that big a percentage of the population. In some ways I think they have been made into a sort of unintentional report on the anxieties and mental debility of the largely white, largely male, largely middle-class or affluent writers, directors, producers and actors who run entertainment which is then presented to a less pathological population as sex-violence entertainment and so has infected its audience, including law enforcement officers with a higher percentage of evil than you'd expect from those choosing to go into a helping profession.  That's my theory of the origin of the epidemic of bad policing, including murder, that we see around us.  

Some of us started predicting such bad consequences in the shift in entertainment starting in the 1970s reaction to the civil rights and anti-war movements of the 1960s and early 70s and downward into the Hollywood-TV fascist chic that deserved to be called that in the 1980s during the Reagan years. The explosion in the number of channels on TV and now online has only made it ever worse. Digital gaming and whining by the likes of Incel boys has made even that much worse.  Entertainment corrupts except on the rare occasions it chooses to promote good. And so bad are the writers, etc. so much more used to cynical negativity than in charity are they that the results are usually cloyingly nauseating.  The percentage of it that is not garbage has certainly gone to less than one percent of it, now.  

Note: I was going to post this yesterday but events led me to hold it.  Re-reading it I've decided to post it today.