The Kingdom of God Is Within You

by

    I believe in the teaching of Christ.

    I believe that carrying out this teaching is feasible, is easy, and is joyful.

    I believe that this teaching gives what is good to all humankind, will save me from inescapable destruction, and give me what is best for me here. And for this reason, I cannot but carry it out.

-Leo Tolstoy, “What I Believe”

I said I was waiting for “the Kingdom of God.” That is a good place to begin, continue, or end any religious journey. My ongoing quest for the Kingdom of God has brought me back to Leo Tolstoy. (I am partial to the great Russians.) Published in 1894, “The Kingdom of God is Within You” was one of Tolstoy’s most important nonfiction works. Taking his title from Luke 17:21, he expounded upon his vision of non-violent Christianity, how Jesus meant to abolish war and violence of any kind and wrote that those who used the New Testament to justify war were misrepresenting the authentic message of the Gospel.  He understood Christ’s vision to be much larger than the church (especially the Russian Orthodox Church) had ever presented to the world. Those were contentious ideas in late 19th century Russia. The same holds true for early 21st America.

Tolstoy wanted to separate the teachings, theology, and bureaucracy of the Russian Orthodox Church (also the state church of the Russian Empire) from what he believed was the simple message of Jesus Christ; a teaching that had been lost in years of incomprehensible liturgy, schisms too numerous to count, and a theology that the vast population of ex-serfs could neither understand nor articulate.  That message was the Sermon on the Mount. There, he wrote, one would find the true Gospel. Embedded in the nonviolent and peacemaking message of the Sermon on the Mount, Tolstoy believed the world would find answers to the nationalism ravaging the world, the militarism rampant across the globe, and the hypocrisy within the church.

For the man who wrote the definitive account of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, he seems remarkably attuned to 21st America and Methodism’s struggles with disaffiliation. As Tolstoy reads the Gospels, he comes away with the notion that the church itself is a heretical creation. "Nowhere nor in anything, except in the assertion of the Church, can we find that God or Christ founded anything like what churchmen understand by the Church.” Tolstoy was questioning the religious and theological status quo and advancing a form of Christian anarchy, a Christianity without government, rules, denominations, and structures. Tolstoy may have been the greatest novelist in the world, but the Russian Orthodox Church didn’t care for his ideas on the Kingdom of God.

This wasn’t the first time Tolstoy had posited some novel ideas about religion.  In March of 1855, when he was an officer in the Russian army serving during the Crimean War, he made this entry in his diary:

Yesterday a conversation about divinity and faith led me to a great and stupendous idea, the realization to which I feel capable of devoting my entire life. This idea is the foundation of a new religion corresponding to the development of mankind – the religion of Christ, but purged of dogma and mystery, a practical religion, not promising future bliss but bliss on earth. I realize that to bring this idea to fruition will take generations of people working consciously toward this goal. One generation will bequeath this idea to the next, and one day, fanaticism or reason will implement it. Working consciously to unite people with religion is the foundation of the idea which I hope will occupy me.

In a sense, the next forty years of Tolstoy’s life are here. What began in the trenches of Sebastopol was ultimately realized in the publication of “The Kingdom of God is Within You” and a companion work, “What I Believe.” In 1901, his relationship with the Russian Orthodox Church would end with excommunication. Thus, it has always been. It is one thing to think about Jesus. It is another thing altogether to ask hard questions about Jesus and his relationship to an organization (the church) he did not create.

Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it. This is why we read Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. They speak through time. There may be an answer to our angst about disaffiliation living in the work of Tolstoy. Instead of making the complicated more complex, founding new denominations, and creating greater divisions on top of already vast socio-cultural divides, Tolstoy asked, “Why can’t we stop the whole malfunctioning machine?” What if we stepped off the roller coaster and asked, “Are there are safer and saner ways to do what we want to do?”

Perhaps the church, as currently constructed, is the problem. Maybe we don’t need repaired machines with new labels, new signs, new books, or lighthouses.  We need “a new religion, the religion of Christ, purged of dogma and mystery, a practical religion, not promising future bliss but bliss on earth.” We must know that the “kingdom of God is within us.” Perhaps I should pause here and wait for excommunication?

Seriously, I don’t want to disaffiliate. I want the whole dirty mess to end. As for the future, I’m more than willing to give a chance to Count Leo Tolstoy, author of War and Peace, Anna Karenina, and The Kingdom of God is Within You. What have we got to lose? Exile in Siberia…