Dr. Freeman

When it comes to the question of entering the Kingdom, we do have this memorable aphorism from Jesus: “Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life and only a few find it.”[1] So we enter the Kingdom through the narrow gate, which in contemporary terms means we are to live with Jesus’ paradoxes - the creative tension between opposing perspectives, and this is indeed the road less travelled…. and about as much fun as child birth.

So Jesus does not say that the Kingdom is “always already” within us, that it has always and already been there, and that we need simply awaken to what we have all along possessed. Were that the case, then the Kingdom would be a matter of Platonic “recollection,” of anamnesis, and entering the Kingdom would amount to nothing more than a kind of Neo-Platonic conversion, a turning in that recovers what we have always possessed but have lately forgotten. This is a very Greek metaphysical (and even an Eastern Enlightenment) view of things and essentially at odds with the temporality and historicity of biblical experience.

So I’m not sure it’s a good idea to simply conflate the Kingdom with either the Greek metaphysics of ‘recollection’ or Eastern Enlightenment teachings on ‘always already’ awareness… So while the Kingdom is indeed “entos humon”: inside you, within you – it is not simply that it has always been within us and we just need to remember something forgotten (in involution, etc) but it is already happening, right now, and you are in the midst of it. As Jesus says: “But if it is by the finger of God that I cast out devils, then the Kingdom of God has come upon you” (Lk. 11:20),

So it is more accurate to say that the Kingdom has “come upon us”, not that it has always been within us. The Kingdom is not always already present, but something that is happening now, something that has begun to happen today, with the advent of God’s rule that Jesus announces. It is a prophetic conception that God’s rule has come over us (ephthasen), and therefore an essentially historical conception- and not a Buddhist or Pagan theory about the make-up of the human soul which has driven off the highway of eternity into the ditch of time. So the proclamation of the Kingdom is not a theory about humans being always already perfect, but the announcement of an historical event, that the time of God’s reign has begun. Now, today… as a permanent challenge that is already beginning, where one becomes what one is not, and one ceases to be what one was. I have had a change of heart, I have been transformed. I have not become what I am but I have become something else, something new…