Look, There's the Kingdom

Leo Tolstoy is best known as a novelist. He authored War and Peace in 1869 and Anna Karenina in 1877. But in 1894, he wrote a fascinating book called The Kingdom of God Is within You. It contains a very false but interesting idea, one that would go on to get a lot of traction in the twentieth century.

Tolstoy writes in the book of the distinction between the Jesus who comes to us in the Sermon on the Mount and the Jesus who comes to us in the Apostles’ Creed. “One cannot believe in both,” Tolstoy says. “And churchmen have chosen the latter and have chosen the Jesus of the creed. People who believe in a wicked and senseless God who has cursed the human race and devoted His own Son to sacrifice and a part of mankind to eternal torment. Those people cannot believe in the God of love.”

In Tolstoy’s view, in the Sermon on the Mount, we have the God of love and we have Christ. We don’t have a Christ who came and lived a sinless life, died on a cross, rose again, and ascended into heaven, and who is coming back physically and visibly in the future at His second coming. That’s not the Christ that Tolstoy believed in. To Tolstoy, the Christ of the Sermon on the Mount has already come back. This Christ’s kingdom is not some future thing; it is not a new heavens and new earth; it is here on this earth. This kingdom involves a remaking of this earth and it has more to do with social justice and social equality than with righteousness.

This is the kingdom of God that Tolstoy said is the focus of Jesus Christ, but unfortunately, it’s a false idea. But that didn’t stop it from taking hold in the twentieth century. One of the significant figures in America who promoted this idea was Walter Rauschenbusch. He studied at Rochester Theological Seminary in New York and he was there as a theologian in the 1880s and 1890s, which saw the rise of German higher criticism and its view of the historical Jesus versus the Jesus of faith.

Rauschenbusch applied this view in his own work in the 1900s and 1910s to argue that the kingdom of God is on earth and that it is about social equality. This idea spawned what we sometimes call the social gospel movement. This was a significant movement in America especially but also in other parts of the world. It dominated many of the denominations. Rauschenbusch was part of the American Baptist Churches and a significant figure in that group, and in the early 1900s he was out promoting this social gospel. Much of the view’s success had to do with the optimism of the turning of the twentieth century—it was called “The Christian Century”—that expected that people would finally be able to put all of society’s ills behind them because the kingdom of God is here and it is now.

Well, that is a false idea. Sadly, Leo Tolstoy tried to promote it. He should have stuck with novels rather than writing about the kingdom of God.