Christians have often been lamentably slow to grasp the…

““Christians have often been lamentably slow to grasp the profound secularity of the kingdom as it is proclaimed in the Gospels. Because Matthew (though not Mark or Luke) uses the phrase "the kingdom of heaven" - and perhaps because the greatest number of parables of the kingdom do indeed occur in Matthew - we have frequently succumbed to the temptation to place unwarranted importance on the word "heaven." In any case, we have too often given in to the temptation to picture the kingdom of heaven as if it were something that belonged more properly elsewhere than here. Worse yet, we have conceived of that elsewhere almost entirely in "heavenly" rather than in earthly terms. And all of that, mind you, directly in the face of Scripture's insistences to the contrary. In the Old Testament, for example, the principal difference between the gods of the heathen and the God who, as Yahweh, manifested himself to Israel was that, while the pagan gods occupied themselves chiefly "up there" in the "council of the gods," Yahweh showed his power principally "down here" on the stage of history. The pagan deities may have had their several fiefdoms on earth - pint-size plots of tribal real estate, outside which they had no interest or dominion, and even inside which they behaved mostly like absentee landlords; but their real turf was in the sky, not on earth. Yahweh, however, claimed two distinctions. Even on their heavenly turf, he insisted, it was he and not they who were in charge. And when he came down to earth, he acted as if the whole place was his own backyard. In fact, it was precisely by his overcoming them on utterly earthly ground, in and through his chosen people, that he claimed to have beaten them even on their heavenly home court. What he did on earth was done in heaven, and vice versa, because he alone, as the One Yahweh, was the sole proprietor of both. In the New Testament, that inseparability of heavenly concerns from earthly ones is, if anything, even more strenuously maintained. The kingdom Jesus proclaims is at hand, planted here, at work in this world. The Word sown is none other than God himself incarnate. By his death and resurrection at Jerusalem in A.D. 29, he reconciles everything, everywhere, to himself - whether they be things on earth or things in heaven.””

— Robert Farrar Capon