**1. Introduction**

One is an evangelical Anglican, among the world's foremost New Testament scholars; the other is Orthodox, the nearest thing in eastern Christianity to a systematic theologian. Yet, both NT Wright and John Zizioulas share common concern about the loss of the eschatological dimension of Christian faith; both express the need to recover the fulness of the kingdom of God in Christian worship and life. Wright's overarching theme is that western Christian tradition has largely forgotten what the gospels are really about, namely, the "devastating and challenging" message of the advent of the kingdom of God and inauguration here and now of the age to come (Wright 2012, p. 37). As Zizioulas explains in many of his works, the same amnesia has impaired the celebration and understanding of Orthodox Christian worship—most particularly, the central act of worship, the Divine Liturgy—and dulled the impact of the devastating and challenging message of the kingdom on Orthodox believers. The Divine Liturgy has lost its power to shock, to announce the revolution consisting of the dethroning and reversal of the world's powers, the victory of God in Jesus, and the kingdom of God already present now in the fulness of the power of self-sacrificing love.

In this paper, we will use Wright's New Testament exegesis and presentation of the biblical understanding of the kingdom to assess—on the basis of Zizioulas' own critique—the Orthodox liturgical enactment of the kingdom and age to come. We will explore how Wright and Zizioulas describe the principles of a properly kingdom-oriented worship. Finally, we will examine Wright's critical realism as a potential model for understanding how enacting the age to come in worship could shape the kingdom narrative of its participants. Thus, while Wright's immediate goal in his engagement of the theme of the kingdom of God may be to correct a longstanding misreading of the New Testament, his teaching ultimately enables us to propose a way of accomplishing Zizioulas' hope of renewing the full narrative of the age to come in Orthodox worship.

**Citation:** Ready, Geoffrey. 2021. Renewing the Narrative of the Age to Come: The Kingdom of God in NT Wright and John Zizioulas. *Religions* 12: 514. https://doi.org/10.3390/ rel12070514


Academic Editors: Bradley Nassif and Tim Grass

Received: 28 May 2021 Accepted: 2 July 2021 Published: 8 July 2021

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**Copyright:** © 2021 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

#### **2. The Kingdom of God in Zizioulas and Wright**

#### *2.1. The Missing Kingdom Narrative*

Zizioulas follows liturgical theologians such as Alexander Schmemann in describing Orthodox Christian worship as eschatological, concretely symbolising our participation in the life of the age to come: it begins with "the invocation of the Kingdom, continues with the representation of it, and ends with our participation in the Supper of the Kingdom, our union and communion with the life of God in Trinity" (Zizioulas 2011, p. 39). Although it is "glaringly obvious" that the Divine Liturgy is an image of the kingdom of God, John Zizioulas laments the disappearance of the kingdom of God in Orthodox Christian consciousness "under the weight of other kinds of questions and other forms of piety" (ibid., p. 40). He notes that "our theology in recent years does not seem to have given appropriate weight to the eschatological dimension of the Eucharist" (ibid., p. 39)—clarifying elsewhere that by "in recent years" he means everyone since Maximus in the seventh century, and not a few before him! This loss of an eschatological consciousness has had "very grave consequences for the way the Liturgy is celebrated, the piety of the faithful and the whole life of the Church." It is a serious distortion of the Orthodox faith for "we are misled into notions alien to the true Orthodox tradition, often thinking that we are defending Orthodoxy, whereas in fact we are reproducing and promoting ideas foreign to its tradition" (ibid., p. 40).

Throughout his many works of New Testament scholarship, NT Wright echoes the same concern about the profound distortion of Christian faith that results from missing the eschatological dimension of the kingdom of God as a present and coming reality. Like Zizioulas, Wright insists that the full narrative is right in front of our eyes—in the gospels and other writings of the New Testament—but even the sincerest biblically grounded Christians miss it. The main cause of this blindness is an Enlightenment worldview founded on a split-level world similar to ancient Epicureanism: God lives in his heaven, away from human affairs on earth, and the goal of Christian faith becomes salvation conceived as ultimately escaping from this world and going to heaven. The result is a dichotomy between the sacred and secular, a focus on individual piety and salvation, and a reduction of the spiritual life to simply one strand of human existence. Through the lens of this distorted worldview, we miss the essential message of the kingdom of God and the whole of the gospel is reinterpreted. Even the "majestic creeds, full as they are of solemn truth and supple wisdom" prove to be of little use: written to safeguard against specific heresies, without a fuller liturgical and narrative context they do not expound the full story, let alone "the main thing the gospels are trying to tell us," and they even imply the kingdom only comes at the end of time (Wright 2012, p. 16). Echoing the grave consequences Zizioulas observes, Wright notes that this missing kingdom narrative affects everything, including "our discipleship, our preaching, our hermeneutics, and even our praying" (ibid., p. 20).

Wright and Zizioulas are agreed that Christians have strayed away from the eschatology of the early church and inadvertently fallen into a form of gnosticism or Platonism, "substituting 'souls going to heaven' for the promised new creation" (Wright 2016, p. 147). Wright points to the misunderstanding of ΊΝχ ΅ϢЏΑΓΖ (literally "life of the age") as an everlasting life understood as "timeless heavenly bliss," rather than as the long-promised age to come in which God would decisively act to bring "justice, peace, and healing to the world as it groaned and toiled within the 'present age'" (Wright 2012, pp. 44–45). We need to realise instead that *heaven* is not our destined place outside of space and time, but it refers rather to "God's space" and earth to "our space" and that heaven and earth, "made from the start to overlap and interlock, did so fully and finally in Jesus" (Wright 2016, p. 162). The kingdom of heaven therefore means God's rule coming to earth—"Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven" (Matthew 6.10, RSV)—not that good people will go in the future to some kind of disembodied heaven. For Wright, to screen out the inauguration in Jesus of God's kingdom coming on earth as in heaven is not only to adopt a form of gnostic detached spirituality rejected by the early church, but it also

leads us away from our true image-bearing vocation as humans to "live as worshipping stewards within God's heaven-and-earth reality" (ibid., p. 77).

Where Wright sees a creeping in of ancient errors under modern cultural worldviews unleashed by the Enlightenment, Zizioulas delves directly into the philosophical underpinnings of the missing kingdom narrative. As early as the third century, in authors such as Clement and Origen of Alexandria, Zizioulas sees the development of a Christian gnosticism in which salvation "no longer means the hope of a new world, with a new community and structure" but rather "purifying the soul so that it may be re-united with the Logos who is before all society and before the created and material world" (Zizioulas 2008, p. 129). Christianity is transformed from its purpose of gathering a community "imaging the future kingdom" (ibid., p. 130) into a matter of personal spirituality, of individual piety—the "going to heaven" business, Wright laments. For Zizioulas, this individualistic spirituality, which he admits has sadly dominated since the third century, is theologically and philosophically grounded in a view of causality that looks to what comes *before*, rather than to the *eschaton* and "the future recapitulation of human history" (ibid., p. 131). He turns to Maximus for the solution, for in the seventh century confessor he finds a renewed eschatology and emphasis on the future kingdom of God that radically overturns the Greek notion of causality (Zizioulas 2011, p. 42). Zizioulas refers to Maximus' *Scholia on Dionysius' Ecclesiastical Hierarchy,* in which Maximus follows Dionysius in calling the rites of the liturgy images (εικóνε*ς*) of what is true: they are "symbols," not "the truth," for "what is accomplished visibly" represents "the things that are unseen and secret, which are the causes and archetypes of things perceptible." In other words, the "perceptible symbols" are the effect, whereas the "noetic and spiritual" realities are the causes (ibid., p. 44). Zizioulas points out that at first blush this seems to fit that common reading in Orthodox thought in which the liturgy celebrated on earth is *symbolic*, imaging forth the true heavenly and eternal liturgy: "one seems to be moving in an atmosphere of Platonism." However, Maximus ends his passage on a surprising note, saying: "For the things of the Old Testament are the shadow; those of the New Testament are the image. The truth is the state of things to come." In this phrase, Zizioulas detects in Maximus a new philosophy of causality and an *eschatological ontology* in which the eucharistic liturgy and the church are founded neither in a cosmological past nor in a Platonic type of ideal reality, but "in a 'reality of the future', in the Kingdom which is to come" (ibid.). In other words, the "eschaton projects an image of itself backwards" (Zizioulas 2008, p. 137) and what is enacted in the Divine Liturgy is "*what is to come*, *He who comes*, and the *Kingdom* which He will establish" (Zizioulas 2011, p. 45).

For Zizioulas, Maximus' eschatological ontology restores the understanding of the church, constituted by the eucharistic assembly, as the image of the kingdom of God from a dangerously Platonic model to a solidly biblical one. Like Wright, Zizioulas is keen to resist and roll back the Platonising trends in Christian theology to return to a fully biblical eschatology and theology of the age to come. Despite the worrying developments in third century Alexandria and their ongoing distorting effect on Christian faith, for Zizioulas it is Maximus who ensures that the biblical understanding of the kingdom is "securely established on an ontological basis: the Eucharist is not simply connected with the Kingdom which is to come, it draws from it its being and truth" (Zizioulas 2011, p. 45). He therefore frequently laments that Christians approach worship without any eschatological awareness. He especially criticises Orthodox clergy who "dangerously distort" the Divine Liturgy's eschatological character and destroy "the 'image' of the Kingdom that the Liturgy is meant to be," saying that it "would take an entire volume to describe what our Liturgy has suffered at the hands of its clergy" (ibid., p. 46). With that grim warning in mind, we now turn to what Zizioulas and Wright describe as the principles of a properly kingdomoriented worship.
