The Reign of God and Constantine’s Disputed Legacy: Religious Freedom, Sacred Empire, and the American Experience

Abstract

Every generation of Christians embraces Jesus’ prayer for the coming of the reign of God. In many contexts around the world today, hope for the realization of the reign of God offers Christians a basis for social engagement and, at times, for embracing religious pluralism. Chinese-American theologian C. S. Song places the reign of God at the center of his theology as the hermeneutical key to Jesus and Christian discipleship: “The reign of God was Jesus’ vision. It is a vision that has inspired countless men and women after him to live not just for themselves, but for their community and for God. From the standpoint of the Christian faith, that vision is the heart of life, both individual and communal.”1 For Song, the reign of God is a challenge to traditional powers: “The reign of God does not consist of concepts; it consists of power for the powerless and the disinherited.”2 In Sri Lanka, Protestant biblical scholar Lynn de Silva proposed the Kingdom of God as a way to integrate Buddhist and Christian perspectives into a united vision of human fulfillment: “In the idea of the Kingdom of God, I suggest, we have an answer to the Buddhist quest for self-negation as well as for a form of self-fulfilment, without one contradicting the other.”3