Common errors in understanding the Kingdom

Don Carson  |  Features
Date posted:  1 May 2008
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What are the most common errors that people make when it comes to understanding and proclaiming the kingdom?

I shall list a handful. They are in no particular order of importance, primarily because several of these interpretive errors belong to distinctive groups.

To rank the importance of the error would require ranking the influence of each group — and that, of course, is an entirely different question. But several of these errors have something in common: they are errors because they succumb to reductionism. They rightly see some corner of the truth, but then absolutise it in such a way that they fail to see how ‘kingdom’ is, linguistically speaking, a tensive symbol, with a very broad array of referents and overtones in the Bible.

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