Diagram showing the Kingdom of God

Right now postgrads are working particularly hard. In the UK, masters students have about a month left to submit dissertations, and many PhD students will be working to submit 2nd-year reports, trying to complete before funding runs out, or facing that final deadline. But the urgent can be the enemy of the important. Even if you have a deadline looming, read on… the Kingdom of God needs you!

When Jesus said “Seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness,”[1] he reinforced an important biblical notion for thinking about what we should do with our lives. Throughout the Bible God is represented as a sovereign ruler, and Jesus appears as a king qualified, by his unique life, death and resurrection, to rule the whole world in the age to come. A number of Jesus’ parables portray the Son of Man as a king or an employer who will hold his servants to account for their work [2]. Surely, then, it would be foolish for us to pursue our education and careers without realising that we are subjects of the world’s true King?

It seems to me, however, that this is what we typically do. Those of privileged to study at university are likely to have chosen a subject that interested us and/or was likely to give good job prospects. If we’re now pursuing more academic work, is this because we realised that we could best serve our King in this way? I hope it is, but we’ve no doubt encountered fellow-believers who struggle to appreciate this possibility. That’s because a prevalent view of how the work of believers and of non-believers stands in God’s eyes is often like that illustrated in diagram (1). In scholarship, as well as in education, business, finance, arts, media, government and so on, we easily accept the secularist dogma that religion is an inherently private matter that can only bring disruption in the public square. In religiously-neutral areas, believer and unbeliever will work in the same way, achieving the same results. Any notion of a Christian work ethic is essentially the same as what most unbelievers advocate: honesty, duty, respect and the like.

Serious young Christians are therefore encouraged to enter an area of work where everyone agrees that believers are uniquely qualified: the mission of the Church. Diagram (2) represents Christians’ prowess in such areas as evangelism, biblical studies, musical worship, youth ministry and apologetics. Theology and counselling might be more contested by the non-Christian, but they are widely taught in Bible colleges and seminaries in response to demand.

In fact, this dichotomy also reflects two streams of Christian thought. If you put every area of work – including biblical interpretation and theology – into scheme (1), you may be “liberal”. If you put every area of work – including scientific theorising and government – into scheme (2), you’ll probably be labelled “fundamentalist” sooner or later. So the easiest way to eschew these extremes is to follow a division of work like that outlined above: just be a dualist!

Is there another way? At FiSch we believe there is. Diagram (3) is meant to apply to every field of human endeavour – none of which is neutral. It represents the possibility that people who are entering the Kingdom of God – and Jesus’ parables make clear that we can’t be sure who they are – may please the King by all kinds of work done in His service. It recognises that not only today’s non-believers but even those who may never enter God’s rest can do work that honours and pleases the King (remember what God says of Cyrus[3]?). How much more should we who believe work and pray that our reasoningour theorisingour critiques and our creativity be inspired by the Spirit of the God who might one day say, “Well done, good and faithful servant”? [4]


[1] Matthew 6:33.   [2] e.g. Matthew 18:23ff, 20:1ff, 25:14ff, 25:31ff.  [3] Isaiah 44:28.  [4] Matthew 25:21.

Richard Gunton
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Richard Gunton

Richard is the Director of Faith-in-Scholarship at Thinking Faith Network. He also teaches statistics at the University of Winchester. His current passions include Reformational philosophy, history of sciences, ordination (the statistical sort), and wildlife gardening. He worships, and occasionally preaches, at St Mary's Church in Portchester. [Views expressed here are his own.]