"Kin-dom."

Without God, everything is permitted.

— Dostoyevsky

It has become customary in some church circles to replace the word “kingdom” with “kin-dom,” to emphasize our shared relational matrix as co-siblings in Christ.  I get that.  And I agree, mostly.  Seen horizontally, we are all equal before God.  There should be no castes or pecking orders, no superiors and subordinates, no insiders and outsiders.  All are included, accepted, and welcome.  We are all made in the Image of God.  We are all therefore kin, which is to say, of one family of humanity and creation.

I suspect many also feel some frustration with the term “kingdom.”  The word has a history of being used to justify and prop up earthly royalty and, by extension, the hegemony of rich, white, males.  That is reprehensible and toxic to community and faith. 

But “kin-dom” is not an accurate translation of the Greek word in the New Testament, basileia, which denotes the realm of a monarch.  Basileia or “kingdom” adds a vertical dimension, allowing us to see our equality in terms of one universal authority, who is God, the Creator.      

The problem with kin-dom is that it can ignore and even deny that there is any vertical dimension at all.  It says the world is flat, and we are all equals to each other in a distributed network of mutual and reciprocal interaction.  Which would be great, if it could stay that way.  

But “kin” means family, and families are not necessarily about equality or justice.  Families are quite complicated and too often include domineering characters, codependencies, and so on.      

Plus, if “kin-dom” does mean equality, acceptance, and inclusion, we have seen that, left to our own devices it is hard to sustain.  For we are not in fact all born equally gifted and able.  Those who come into life better endowed with strength, attractiveness, intelligence, and ability, start rising above others and inevitably abuse their status.  Any thought of equality quickly disappears in an environment where the strong are not accountable to anyone above or beyond themselves. 

In a one-dimensional, flat equality, the fortunate start asking: “Who says we should all be treated equally?  Who says we are all kin, related to each other and responsible for each other?  Why should I not use what I have to get more for myself?  Why should I not take what I can get?  Why should I not rise above and even dominate those who are weaker, less attractive, and less bright?”  In the flat model, a pyramidal structure of human society automatically and paradoxically develops.  We end up with the system that opens the Book of Exodus, which is the beginning of the biblical story.  It has Pharaoh at the top, and Hebrew slaves at the bottom.  It is Empire: a kind of kin-dom, but headed by an abusive, manipilative, violent father.

The result of this settling of power into the hands of a few was not just the horrible oppression and exploitation of the lowest caste, it also resulted in the environmental disasters of the ten plagues afflicting Egypt.  

For true equality to be developed and sustained, a society has to take steps to ensure that the weak, the poor, and the marginalized are lifted up, and the well-endowed are emptied and brought down.  Language that recognizes the vertical dimension of our life creates justice.  We talk about how we are all “under” God as king in order to counteract the coagulation of power in the hands of the strong.  We recognize, accept, and obey an authority above the human ego.  We have to acknowledge a responsibility to something other than our own power, greed, lust, gluttony, and desire. 

That something is, in a sense, everything.  By that I mean that the accumulation of power in the hands of a few is mitigated by the acknowledgement of a Higher Power who made, owns, and gives being and value to all things.  We have to affirm one God, in whom all things and people are essentially one, and one common pattern/wavelength/voiceprint that weaves everything together in a united whole.  We are responsible to maintain that inclusive wholeness.  When we don’t, when we assert our independence and seek domination or gain for ourselves, we create an imbalance in the whole.  This will cause us suffering when that balance inevitably restores itself.

It is therefore necessary that we recognize and submit to a personal power higher than the ego, and a political power higher than Pharaoh/Empire and its demands.  The existence and will of this power is applied by means of a law which is above all.  We see this, of course, in the giving of the Torah.  But Torah is not independent of the deeper, unwritten laws of nature.  Indeed, the regulations of the Torah are intended to realize obedience in human society to the deeper and higher laws of creation.

So true kin-dom or commonwealth, a shared gathering of equals, depends on realizing that we are all accountable to each other because we are all made by one God in whose being we somehow share, “who is above all and through all and in all” (Ephesians 4:6).

I don’t know if using the word kin-dom is sustainable.  But if we use it we have to understand that it unites us to each other only under or before the living One who makes and holds everything in being, who is the God of love.

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