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THE TEACHINGS OF JESUS
CONCERNING HIS OWN MISSION. Frank H. Foster. Ready. THE KINGDOM OF GOD AND THE CHURCH. Geerhardus Vos. Ready. HIS OWN PERSON In preparation. GOD THE FATHER THE SCRIPTURES CHRISTIAN CONDUCT THE HOLY SPIRIT THE FUTURE LIFE THE FAMILY THE CHRISTIAN LIFE A Series of volumes on the " Teachings of Jesus " by eminent writers and divines. Cloth bound. I2mo. Price 75 cts each postpaid. AMERICAN TRACT SOCIETY. THE TEACHING OF JESUS CONCERNING THE KINGDOM OF GOD AND THE CHURCH By Geerhardus Vos, Ph. D. y D. D. AMERICAN TRACT SOCIETY 150 NASSAU STREET NEW YORK Copyright, JQOf, by AMERICAN TRACT SOCIETY f\ ^ \ ! ^ r: I CONTENTS PAGE I. INTRODUCTORY I II. THE KINGDOM AND THE OLD TESTAMENT 1 1 III. KINGDOM AND KINGSHIP. THE KINGDOM OF GOD AND THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN. ... 25 IV. THE PRESENT AND THE FUTURE KINGDOM 38 V. CURRENT MISCONCEPTIONS RE GARDING THE PRESENT AND FU TURE KINGDOMS 66 VI. THE ESSENCE OF THE KINGDOM : THE KINGDOM AS THE SUPREM ACY OF GOD IN THE SPHERE OF SAVING POWER 80 VII. THE ESSENCE OF THE KINGDOM CONTINUED : THE KINGDOM IN THE SPHERE OF RIGHTEOUSNESS. 103 v vi Contents PAGE VIII. THE ESSENCE OF THE KINGDOM CONTINUED : THE KINGDOM AS A STATE OF BLESSEDNESS. . . 125 IX. THE KINGDOM AND THE CHURCH. 140 X. THE ENTRANCE INTO THE KING DOM : REPENTANCE AND FAITH. 169 XI. RECAPITULATION 191 INDICES 195 CHAPTER I Introductory /N the body of our Lord s teaching as recorded in the Gospels the ref erences to the kingdom of God oc cupy a prominent place. According to the common testimony of the Synoptical Gospels Jesus opened his public ministry in Galilee with the announcement, that the kingdom was at hand, Matt. iv. 17 ; Mk. i. 15 ; Lk. iv. 43. In the last men tioned passage he even declares that the main purpose of his mission consists in the preaching of the good tidings of the kingdom of God. And not only does 2 The Kingdom and the Chiirch the conception thus stand significantly at the beginning of our Lord s work, it reappears at the culminating points of his teaching, as in the beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount and in the king dom-parables. Its importance will best be felt by considering that the coming of the kingdom is the great event which Jesus connects with his appearance and activity, and that consequently in his teaching, which was so closely dependent on his working, this event must also have a corresponding prominence. If this be true from Jesus own stand point, it is no less true from the stand point of his disciples. In their life likewise the kingdom of God forms the supreme object of pursuit, and there fore of necessity the theme about which before all other things they need care ful instruction. Again, the work of those whom Jesus trained as his special helpers in preaching related chiefly to this same subject, for he speaks of Introductory 3 them as scribes made disciples to the kingdom of heaven, Matt. xiii. 52. Better than by mere statistics showing the explicit references to the kingdom in our Lord s discourses can we along the above lines be led to appreciate how large a place the subject of our investigation must have had in his thought. It might be objected to all this, that in the version which the Fourth Gospel gives of Jesus teaching, the idea of the kingdom plays a very subordinate role, indeed occurs only twice altogether, viz., Jno. iii. 3, 5 ; xviii. 36. But this is a feature explain able from the peculiarity of John s Gos pel in general. Here the person of Jesus as the Son of God stands in the foreground, and the whole compass of his work is represented as given in and resulting from his person. Salvation according to the discourses preserved in this Gospel is made up of those primal elements into which the being of 4 The Kingdom and the Church Christ can be resolved, such as light, life, grace, truth. What the Saviour does is the outcome of what he is. In the Synoptists on the other hand the work of Jesus is made central and all-important, and especially during the earlier stages of his ministry his person and personal relation to this work are only so much referred to as the circumstances of the discourse make absolutely necessary. After all, however, this amounts only to a different mode of viewing the same things : there is no contradiction involved as to their inner essence. In a significant saying uttered even before the beginning of his great Galilean ministry our Lord himself has affirmed the identity of the kingdom with at least one of the concep tions that dominate his teaching accord ing to John, viz. , that of life. To Nicode- mus he speaks of the mysterious birth of water and the Spirit as the only entrance into the kingdom of God. Now, inas much as birth is that process by which Introductory 5 one enters into life, and since in the im mediately following context life is silently substituted for the kingdom, it is plain that these two are practically equivalent, just as the sphere of truth and the king dom are equivalent in the other passage, xviii. 36. With this accords the fact that in the Synoptical teaching the re verse may occasionally be observed, viz., that life is used interchangeably with the kingdom, cf. Mk. x. 17, with vs. 23. While thus recognizing that the king dom of God has an importance in our Lord s teaching second to that of no other subject, we should not go to the extreme into which some writers have fallen, of finding in it the only theme on which Jesus actually taught, which would imply that all other topics dealt with in his dis courses were to his mind but so many corollaries or subdivisions of this one great truth. The modern attempts to make the kingdom of God the organizing cen- 6 The Kingdom and the Church ter of a theological system have here exerted a misleading influence upon the interpretation of Jesus teaching. From the fact that the proximate object of his saving work was the realization of the kingdom, the wrong inference has been drawn, that this must have been also the highest category under which he viewed the truth. It is plain that the one does not follow from the other. Salvation with all it contains flows from the nature and subserves the glory of God, and we can clearly perceive that Jesus was ac customed consciously to refer it to this divine source and to subordinate it to this God-centered purpose, cf. Jno. xvii. 4. ;He usually spoke not of " the kingdom " absolutely, but of " the kingdom of God " land " the kingdom of heaven/ and these names themselves indicate that the place of God in the order of things which they .describe is the all-important thing to his mind. It is only with great artificiality that Introductory 7 the various component elements of our Lord s teaching can be subsumed under the one head of the kingdom. If any deduction and systematizing are to be at tempted, logic and the indications which we have of our Lord s habit of thought on this point alike require, that not his teaching on the kingdom but that on God shall be given the highest place. The relation observable in the discourses of the Fourth Gospel between the per son of Christ and salvation, is also the relation which we may conceive to exist between God and the kingdom. Because God is what he is, the kingdom bears the character and embodies the principles which as a matter of fact belong to it. Even so, however, we should avoid the modern mistake of endeavoring to derive the idea of the kingdom from the conception of the divine fatherhood alone. This derivation expresses an important truth recognized by Jesus himself, when he calls the kingdom a fatherly gift to the 8 The Kingdom and the Church disciples, Lk. xii. 32. But it represents only one side of the truth, for in the king dom other attributes of God besides his fatherhood find expression. The doc trine of God in its entire fulness alone is capable of furnishing that broader basis on which the structure of his teaching on the kingdom can be built in agree ment with Jesus own mind. On the other hand, it cannot be denied that in many respects the idea of the kingdom acted in our Lord s thought and teaching as a crystallizing point around which several other elements of truth nat urally gathered and grouped themselves in harmonious combination. That the idea of the church, where it emerges in his teaching, is a direct outgrowth of the development of his doctrine of the king dom, will appear in the sequel. But not only this, also the consummation of the world and the final state of glory were evidently viewed by him in no other light than as the crowning fulfilment of Introductory 9 the kingdom-idea. Still further what he taught about righteousness was most closely interlinked in his mind with the truth about the nature of the kingdom. The same may safely be affirmed with reference to the love and grace of God. The great categories of subjective reli gion, faith and repentance and regenera tion, obviously had their place in his thought as answering to certain aspects of the kingdom. Even a subject appar ently so remote from the kingdom-idea, in our usual understanding of it, as that of miracles in reality derived for Jesus from the latter the larger part of its meaning. Finally, the kingdom stood in our Lord s mind for a very definite con ception concerning the historical relation of his own work and the new order of things introduced by it to the Old Testa ment. All this can here be stated in general only ; our task in the sequel will be to work it out in detail. But what has been said is sufficient to show thatio The Kingdom and the Church there is scarcely an important subject in the rich repertoire of our Lord s teaching with which our study of his disclosures concerning the kingdom of God will not bring us into contact. CHAPTER II The Kingdom and the Old Testa ment f "*HE first thing to be noticed in i Jesus utterances on our theme is that they clearly presuppose a con sciousness on his part of standing with his work on the basis of the revelation of God in the Old Testament. Our Lord occupies historic ground from the outset. From first to last he refers to " the kingdom of God " as a fixed con ception with which he takes for granted, his hearers are familiar. In affirming that it is " at hand" he moreover as cribes to it the character of something IT 12 The Kingdom and the Church forming part of that world of prophecy, which moves onward through the ages to its divinely appointed goal of fulfil ment. It were utterly out of harmony with this fundamental principle of our Lord s kingdom-gospel to represent him as the founder of a new religion. His work was the realization of what in the ideal form of prophecy had been known and expected ages before. We simply here observe at a peculiarly vital point what underlies as a broad uniform basis his official consciousness every where. No array of explicit statements in which he acknowledges his accept ance of the Old Testament Scriptures as the word of God can equal in force this implied subordination of himself and of his work to the one great scheme of which the ancient revelation given to Israel formed the preparatory stage. Indeed in appropriating for himself the function of bringing the kingdom, in laying claim to the Messianic dignity, The Old Testament 13 Jesus seized upon that in the Old Testa ment which enabled him at one stroke to make its whole historic movement converge upon and terminate in himself. There is in this a unique combination of the most sublime self-consciousness and the most humble submission to the rev elation of God in former ages. Jesus knew himself as at once the goal of his tory and the servant of history. The Old Testament knows of a king dom of God as already existing at that time. Apart from the universal reign exercised by God as Creator of all things, Jehovah has his special kingdom in Israel. The classical passage relating to the latter is Exodus xix. 4-6, from which it appears, that the making of the covenant at Sinai established this relationship. In virtue of it, Jehovah, besides being Israel s God, also acted as Israel s national King. By direct revelation he gave them laws and by his subsequent guidance of their his tory he made his rule a living reality. 14 The Kingdom and the Church Even later, when human kings arose, these had no other rights from the point of view of the legitimate religion than those of the vicegerents of Jehovah. The meaning of this order of things was that in Israel s life all other interests, both public and private, were subordinated to and made a part of religion. Whilst else where religion was a function of the state, here the state became a function of religion. In itself this idea of a kingship exercised by the deity over the entire range of life was not confined to the sphere of special revelation. Melekh, king, was a common name for the god head among the Semitic tribes, so that to some extent, the principle of what we call " the theocracy "was known to them. But the relation which they imagined to exist between themselves and their gods was in Israel alone a matter of actual experience. A most vivid consciousness of this fact pervades the entire Old Tes tament. The Old Testament 15 In view of this it creates some surprise at first sight, that Jesus never speaks of the kingdom of God as previously exist ing. To him the kingdom is through out something new, now first to be real ized. Even of John the Baptist he speaks as not being in the kingdom, because his whole manner of work identified him with the preceding dispensation. The law and the prophets are until John : from that time the gospel of the king dom of God is preached, Lk. xvi. 16 ; Matt. xi. 13. There are only two pas sages in which the old theocratic order of things might seem to be referred to under the name of the kingdom. In Matt. viii. 12, Jesus calls the Jews " the sons of the kingdom." But this is prob ably meant in the sense, that in virtue of the promises they are heirs of the king dom, not in the sense of their having had the kingdom in actual possession before the coming of Christ. On the same prin ciple we must probably interpret Matt. 1 6 The Kingdom and the Church xxi. 43, where Jesus predicts that the kingdom of God shall be taken away from the Jews and given to a nation bringing forth the fruits thereof, the king dom being used for the title to the kingdom. Or, if the literal meaning of the words be pressed, it should be remem bered, that our Lord spoke them during the later stage of his ministry, at a time when through his labors the kingdom of God in its new and highest sense had been at least incipiently realized. The only indirect recognition of God s kingship under the Old Testament is found in Matt. v. 35, where Jerusalem is called "the city of the great King." When the question is put, how must we explain this restriction of the term by Jesus to the new order of things, the answer cannot of course be sought in any lack of appreciation on his part of the reasons which underlie the op posite usage prevailing in the Old Tes tament. Nor can the reason have lain The Old Testament 17 in a desire to accommodate himself to the contemporary Jewish conception, for, although the Jews at that time ex pected the kingdom from the future, they also knew it in another sense as already present with them through the reign of God in the law. The true explanation is undoubtedly to be found in the absolute, ideal character our Lord ascribed to the order of things associated with the name of the kingdom. To his mind it involved such altogether new forces and such unparalleled blessings, that all relative and provisional forms pre viously assumed by the work of God on earth seemed by comparison unworthy of the name. Thus, while he would not have denied that the Old Testament institutions represented a real kingdom of God, the high sense with which he had invested the term made it unnatural for him to apply it to these. And after all the Old Testament itself had pointed the way to this restricted 1 8 The Kingdom and the Church usage followed by our Lord. Side by side with the kingdom that is we meet in the Old Testament a kingdom yet to come. This is due to three causes. In the first place, among the Semitic tribes the kingship very often originated by some powerful personality performing great acts of deliverance and obtaining in result of this a position of preeminence, as we see it happen in the case of Saul. Thus, though Jehovah was King, he never theless could perform acts in the future, work deliverances for his people, such as would render him King in a new sense, cf. Is. xxiv. 21 ; xliii. 15 ; Hi. 7 ; Mic. ii. 12 ; iv. 6 ; Obad. 21 ; Ps. xcvii. 1 ; xcix. 1. Secondly, the suspension of the visi bly exercised rule of Jehovah during the exile naturally led to the representation, that he would in the future become King by resuming his reign. It is especially in the Book of Daniel that the idea of the future kingdom of Jehovah is developed in contrast with the world-monarchies The Old Testament 19 through which his kingdom appeared in abeyance for the present. Thirdly, the rise of Messianic prophecy had the natural result of projecting the true kingdom of God into the future. If not the present king was the ideal representative of Jehovah, but the future ruler as the prophets depict him, then, as a correlate of this, the thought would suggest itself that with this new ideal instrument the rule of God in its full ideal sense will first be realized. The expectation of the kingdom of God became equivalent to the Messianic hope of Israel. Now, inas much as our Lord knew himself to be the promised Messiah and knew that the Messianic King had had his typical pred ecessors under the Old Testament, we can indirectly show that the conception of the theocracy as a typical kingdom oi God cannot have been unfamiliar to him. In the Gospels both the thing and the name of the kingdom appear familiar to the people among whom Jesus taught, 2o The Kingdom and the Church cf. Matt. iii. 2 ; Mk. xv. 43 ; Lk. xiv. 15 ; xvii. 20. It would be rash, however, to infer from this, that Jesus simply accommodated himself in his mode of speech about the kingdom to the pre vailing usage of his time. The way in which he handled the conception in gen eral not only, but the very prominence to which he raised it, bore the marks of great originality and were productive of the most momentous changes from a religious point of view. This can be best apprehended if we place our Lord s usage by the side of that found in the contemporary Jewish literature. Here, as in the Old Testament, besides the divine kingship over the world both the present reign of Jehovah over Israel and his fu ture kingdom are referred to. In these references we notice two peculiarities. The first is that the kingdom itself is not strictly speaking represented as fu ture, but only the enforcement or man ifestation of the kingdom. God s rule The Old Testament 21 is ever existing, only at present it is not recognized. In the future the world will be made to submit to it, thus the kingdom is manifested. This peculiarity is the result of the one-sided manner in which the relation of God to his people and the world appeared to be bound up in the law. Hence the Jewish phrase, " to take up the yoke of the kingdom of heaven," meaning to vow obedience to the law. The second peculiarity consists in the rareness with which even in this qual ified sense the Jewish sources speak of God s kingdom as a future thing. In comparatively few cases, where the new order of things expected in the Messianic age is referred to, does the name king dom of God appear in connection with it. This cannot be accidental. Probably the reason is as follows : the conception which the average Jewish mind had framed of the new order of things and the interest which in its view attached to it, were not sufficiently God-centered to 22 The Kingdom and the Church favor the use of the phrase " kingdom of God/ The emphasis was placed largely on what the expected state would bring for Israel in a national and temporal sense. Hence it was preferably thought of as the kingdom of Israel over the other nations. Or the place of the kingdom- idea was taken by different conceptions, such as that of " the coming age," which were indefinite enough to leave room for the cherishing of the same self-centered hope. Now it is from a comparison with these two peculiarities that our Lord s prefer ence for the name " kingdom of God" re ceives its proper light. While to the mind of Judaism the divine rule is equivalent to the sovereignty of the law, Jesus, though not excluding this, knew of a much larger sphere in which God would through saving acts exercise his glorious prerogatives of kingship on a scale and in a manner unknown before. In his teaching the kingdom once more be- The Old Testament 23 comes a kingdom of grace as well as of law, and thus the balance so beautifully preserved in the Old Testament is re stored. The consequence of this was, of course, that great emphasis had to be thrown upon the newness of the kingdom, upon the fact of its being and bringing some thing more than the reign of law in which the Jews found their ideal. Thus the Lord s method of not calling even the Old Testament legal organization the king dom may have been partly due to a revolt in his mind from the Jewish perversion of the same. Further, by making the idea as prominent as he did in his teaching and at the same time speaking of it exclusively as the kingdom of God, our Lord pro tested against the popular misconception of it as a national kingdom intended to bring Israel supremacy and glory. Finally, through the enlargement which the idea of God s reign had undergone, so that it stood for a reign of saving grace as well 24 The Kingdom and the Church as of law, it became possible for our Lord to subsume under the notion of the king dom the entire complex of blessing and glory which the coming order of things would involve for the people of God, and yet to keep before men s minds the thought that this new world of enjoy ment was to be enjoyed as a world of God. Thus by bringing the name of " God s kingdom" and the whole content of the Messianic hopes of Israel together, he imparted to the latter the highest ideal character, a supreme religious consecra tion. CHAPTER III Kingdom and Kingship. The Kingdom of God and the King dom of Heaven W* ^HE Greek word Basileia used in I the Gospels for " kingdom " and the corresponding Hebrew and Aramaic words, such as Malkuth and Mem- lakhah, can, like many words in the Eng lish language, designate the same concep tion from two distinct points of view. They may stand for the kingdom as some thing abstract, the kingship or rule exer cised by the king. Or they may describe the kingdom as something concrete, the territory, the sum total of the subjects and, 26 The Kingdom and the Church possessions ruled over, including what ever of rights, privileges and advantages are enjoyed in this sphere. Now the question arises, in which sense did our Lord mean the phrase when he spoke of the "kingdom of God/ In the Old Testament where a kingdom is ascribed either to Jehovah or to some human power, the abstract sense is usually the one intended, although in some of the latest writings of the Old Testament ex amples of the concrete usage occur, with reference always, however, to human kingdoms. God s kingdom is here al ways his reign, his rule, never his do main. When Obadiah predicts " the kingdom shall be the Lord s," his mean ing is that in the future to Jehovah will belong the supremacy. That such was also the common Jewish usage in our Lord s time appears from the manner in which the supremacy of Israel over the nations is associated with the idea of the kingdom.
Kingdom and Kingship 27 We have already seen that the relative absence of the phrase " the kingdom of God " from the Jewish sources points to the same conclusion, for it was a lack of interest in the truth that Jehovah would be supreme that prevented this phrase from becoming popular. On the other hand, to Jesus the thought that God would rule was a glorious thought which filled his soul with the most sacred joy. In so far it is undoubtedly correct when modern writers insist that in interpreting our Lord s sayings the meaning " reign/ " kingship/ shall be our point of depart ure, and warn against the misleading as sociations of the English word " king dom," which in modern usage practically always means the territory or realm. Still it is advisable to proceed slowly here. Attention has already been called to the significant enlargement which Jesus in troduced into the current use of the phrase. If to him it covered all the priv- 28 The Kingdom and the Church ileges and blessings which flow from the coming reign of God, then it is plain how inevitably it would tend in his mouth to become a concrete designation. From meaning at first " a rule " it would begin to mean, if not a territory or body of subjects, at least a realm, a sphere of life, a state of things, all of these more or less locally conceived. To be sure, even so the connotation would always remain, that the kingdom thus understood is pos sessed and therefore pervaded by God, but after all the rendering "reign of God " would no longer apply. In point of fact a single glance at the Gospel-dis courses shows how utterly impossible it is to carry through the abstract rendering in each single instance where our Lord speaks of the kingdom of God. Briefly stated the matter stands as fol lows : In a few instances the translation " reign " is required by the connection, as when it is said " the Son of man shall come in his kingdom." In some other cases, Kingdom and Kingship 29 less rare than the foregoing, it is possible, perhaps slightly more plausible, to adopt the abstract rendering, as when we read of the kingdom "coming," "appear ing," " being at hand," " being seen," al though in these and other instances no one can maintain that the substitution of the concrete would make the sense un natural. While neither meaning is un suitable, one may in such cases for general reasons be inclined to believe, that the thought of a revelation of God s royal power lay uppermost in our Lord s mind. Then there are a great number, perhaps the majority, of passages in which the note of the concrete plainly predominates. When the figure is that of " calling" to the kingdom of God, of " entering " into it, of its being " shut " or of people being " cast out " from it, of its being " sought," " given," " possessed," " received," " in herited," everybody feels, that in such modes of speech not the exercise of the divine rule itself, but the resulting order 30 The Kingdom and the Church of things, the complex of blessings pro duced by it, the sphere in which it works, stand before the speaker s mind. Taking this into consideration we may say that, if hasileia is everywhere to be rendered by the same word, that word ought to be " kingdom." To introduce a distinc tion and translate in some cases " reign/ in other cases "kingdom," is obviously impracticable, because, as above stated, in a number of cases we have no data for choosing between the two. Even less satisfactory is the recent pro posal to translate everywhere " the sover eignty of God," for not only is this unsuitable for all sayings in which the con crete usage of the term is undoubtedly fol lowed, it also fails to express with fulness and accuracy the abstract sense where this may be recognized. Sovereignty denotes a relation existing by right, even where it is not actually enforced. In the case of God, therefore, it can be scarcely said to come. The divine hasileia in- Kingdom and Kingship 31 eludes, as we have seen, besides a right to rule, the actual energetic forth-putting of God s royal power in acts of salvation. Besides "the kingdom of God" we find "the kingdom of heaven/ The Evangelist Matthew uses this well-nigh exclusively ; only in vi. 33 ; xii. 28 ; xiii. 43 ; xxi. 31, 43 ; xxvi. 29, does he write "the kingdom of God " or "the kingdom of my" or "their Father," whereas " the kingdom of heaven oc curs more than thirty times in his Gos pel. In Chap. xii. 28 the use of " God " instead of " heaven " is explained by the preceding " Spirit of God ;" in the two other instances in Chap, xxi, no reason for the substitution is apparent. In Mark and Luke "the kingdom of heaven " is not found. This raises the question, which of these two versions more literally reproduces the usage of Jesus himself. In all probability Mat thew s does, since no good reason can be assigned, why he should have substituted 32 The Kingdom and the Church "the kingdom of heaven/ whilst a suf ficiently plausible reason for the opposite procedure on the part of Mark and Luke can be found, in the fact, that, writing for Gentile readers, they might think such a typically Jewish phrase, as " the kingdom of heaven " less intelligible than the plain "kingdom of God. " Of course, in holding this, we need not imply that in each individual case, where the first Evangelist has " kingdom of heaven," this phrase was actually employed by Jesus. All we mean to affirm is the general prop osition that Jesus used both phrases, and that in so far Matthew has preserved for us an item of information no longer ob tainable from the other two Synoptical Gospels. But what were the origin and mean ing of this phrase " the kingdom of heaven," and what light does it throw on our Lord s conception of the kingdom ? Among the later Jews a tendency existed to forego employing the name of God. Kingdom and Kingship 33 Various substitutes were current and " heaven " was one of these. Apart from the phrase under discussion, traces of this mode of speech are found in Matt. xvi. 19; Mk. xi.30; Lk. xv. 18, 21. It was a mode of speech which had arisen from the Jewish habit of emphasizing in the nature of God more than anything else his exaltation above the world and un approachable majesty, to such an extent even as to endanger what must ever be the essence of religion, a true communion between God and man. But this custom, though exponential of a characteristic fault of Judaism, had also its good side, else our Lord would not have adopted it. In his human nature Jesus had a profound sense of the infinite distance between God and the creature. Whatever there was of genuine religious fear and rever ence of God in the Jewish consciousness awakened an echo in his heart and found in him its ideal expression, from which all the one-sidedness that belonged to it 34 The Kingdom and the Church in Judaism had disappeared. If, there fore, Jesus spoke of God as heaven, this did not spring from a superstitious fear of naming God, but rather from a desire to name him in such a way as to call up at once the most exalted conception of his being and character. To do this the word "heaven" was eminently fitted since it draws man s thought upwards to the place where God reveals his glory in perfection. This can best be felt in another phrase which likewise among the Evan gelists Matthew alone has preserved for us, and which likewise our Lord had in common with the Jewish teachers of that age, the phrase "the Father in heaven" or " the heavenly Father/ If in this the name "Father" expresses the conde scending love and grace of God, his infinite nearness to us, the qualification " in heaven " adds the reminder of his infinite majesty above us, by which the former ought always to be held in balance lest Kingdom and Kingship 35 we injure the true spirit of religion. It may be affirmed, therefore, that, when Jesus referred to "the kingdom of heaven/ he meant this in no other sense than "the kingdom of God," except in so far as there was an added note of emphasis on the exalted nature of him whose kingdom this is. The word " heaven/ however, al though it primarily qualifies God and describes his greatness, not that of the kingdom, must also have been intended by our Lord to color the conception of the latter. If the king be one who concentrates in himself all the glory of heaven, what must his kingdom be ? We shall not go far amiss in saying that Jesus desired to awaken in his disciples a sense of the mysterious supernatural character, of the absolute perfection and grandeur, of the supreme value pertaining to this new order of things, and desired them to view and approach it in a spirit appreciative of these holy qualities. Al- 36 The Kingdom and the Church though the phrase " kingdom of heaven is not found in the Old Testament, the word "heaven " appears there already in significant association with the idea of the future kingdom. In Daniel it is said that " the God of heaven " will set up a kingdom, and this means that the new reign will take its origin in a supernatural manner from the higher world. To Jesus also " heaven " and the supernatural were cognate ideas, cf. Matt. xvi. 17 ; Mk. xi. 30. That the thought of the absolute perfection of the heavenly world as determinative of the character of the kingdom may well have been associated with the name "kingdom of heaven " in Jesus mind, appears from the close connection between the second and third petitions in the Lord s prayer : " Thy kingdom come Thy will be done, as in heaven, so on earth/ cf. also Matt. v. 48. For heaven as the sphere of supreme unchangeable values and the goal of aspiration we may refer to such Kingdom and Kingship 37 words as Matt. v. 12 ; vi. 20. In view of the profound significance which Jesus throughout ascribed to the contrast be tween the heavenly and the earthly world, it is hardly likely that heaven was to him a mere formal circumlocution for God. It meant not God in general, but God as known and revealed in those celestial regions which had been our Lord s eter nal home. Only with this in mind can we hope to understand something of the profound sense in which he called the kingdom " a kingdom of heaven." CHAPTER IV The Present and the Future King dom J" JTT E have already seen that our pis Lord makes a sharp distinction between the Old Testament or der of things and the kingdom of God, and in doing this conforms to that side of the Old Testament representation which itself looks upon the kingdom as future. Now the very important ques tion arises : how did he conceive of the coming of this kingdom both as to time and manner? Until not long ago the view quite generally prevailed and was 38 Present and Future Kingdom 39 thought to be in harmony with Jesus own teaching, that the coming referred to might be conceived of as a lengthy proc ess covering ages and reaching its consum mation by a sudden crisis at the end coin ciding with the second coming of Christ and the end of the present world. And this prolonged process, in distinction from the final crisis, was supposed to consist in our Lord s view of essentially inward, spiritual, invisible changes. The king dom, it was believed, comes when the gos pel is spread, hearts are changed, sin and error overcome, righteousness cultivated, a living communion with God established. In this sense the kingdom began its com ing when Jesus entered upon his public ministry, his work upon earth, including his death, was part of its realization, the disciples were in it, the whole subsequent history of the church is the history of its gradual extension, we ourselves can act our part in its onward movement and are members of it as a present organization. 40 The Kingdom and the Church In recent years, however, this view has been subjected to severe criticism by a certain group of writers and rejected as unhistorical. It is claimed, that Jesus took an entirely different view of the matter than that outlined above. Jesus did not for a moment think that by his prophetic activity or by any spiritual changes thus wrought among Israel, the kingdom would come. All that he meant to accomplish by his labors was merely preparatory to its coming : the people had to be made ready for its ap pearance. To introduce the kingdom was God s work, not his. No man could do anything towards either hastening or delaying it. And when it came it would come at one single stroke, by a sudden supernatural interposition of God, in a great world-crisis, consequently not for a part but with its whole content all at once, fulfilling all the promises, giving the signal by its arrival for the end of the present world. And this stupendous Present and F^lture Kingdom 41 event Jesus expected to happen in his lifetime, or, after he had attained to the certainty of his intervening death, at least within the time of the then living genera tion. Before endeavoring to test which of these two opposing views is in accord with our Lord s teaching, we must care fully note the real point of divergence between them and must also make clear to ourselves what issues are at stake in our decision in favor of the one or the other. The two views have this in common that they both recognize the coming of the kingdom in its final absolute sense to have been associated by Jesus with the end of the world. The older view therefore is inclusive of the more recent one, and the difference arises from the fact that the former affirms something more which the latter denies. The sole point in dis pute concerns our right to ascribe to Jesus such a conception of the kingdom that he could also find the beginning of 42 The Kingdom and the Church its arrival in the purely spiritual results of his labors and accordingly extend this gradual coming of it over an indefinite period of time. But this sole point at issue is fraught with the gravest consequences as it is decided one way or the other. For, first of all, it involves the question of the infallibility of our Lord as a relig ious teacher. If he expected and an nounced only one coming of the king dom and that to happen shortly within his lifetime or the lifetime of that generation then there is no escape from the conclusion that the outcome has proved him mistaken. Secondly, the distribution of emphasis in our Lord s teaching becomes essentially different if we adopt the most modern view on this matter. By common consent the center of gravity in his preaching, that to which he attaches supreme importance, is the kingdom. Now, if we may believe that this kingdom was to him in part identicalPresent and Fiiture Kingdom 43 with the existence of certain spiritual ; states, such as righteousness and com munion with God, then these receive with the kingdom the highest place in our Lord s estimation of values. If, on the other hand, these lie outside of the kingdom and are mere preparatory states, then they lose their central position and become means to an ulterior end consist ing in the kingdom. In the third place, the controversy affects the character of our Lord s ethics. The advocates of the recent view believe that Jesus conviction with reference to the rapidly approach ing end of the world largely colored his ethical views, in that it prevented him from developing a positive interest for the duties which pertain to this present life. Finally, the conception of our Lord s character itself may be said to be involved. Some at least who ascribe to him such high-strung expectations seek to explain this on the theory, that he was an ecstatic visionary person, rather than a man of 44 The Kingdom and the Church calm, equable spiritual temper. It thus appears that the aspect of our Lord s kingdom-doctrine now under discussion is interlinked with the gravest problems touching the value and authority of his character and work in general. It must be admitted that the Old Tes tament does not distinguish between sev eral stages or phases in the fulfilment of the promises regarding the kingdom, but looks upon its coming as an undivided whole. John the Baptist also seems to have still occupied this Old Testament standpoint. This, however, was due to the peculiar character of prophecy in general, in which there is a certain lack of perspective, a vision of things sep arated in time on one plane. We may not argue from this, that Jesus, who was more than a prophet and stood face to face with the reality, must have been subject to the same limitations. Nor are we justified in saying, that, because con temporary Judaism took such a view of Present and Future Kingdom 45 the matter, Jesus likewise must have held this. For, on the one hand, Juda ism was no norm for him ; on the other hand, within Judaism itself a distinction between successive stages in the fulfil ment of the Messianic promises had al ready arisen. We have seen that the Jews were accustomed to look forward not so much to an entirely new and first arrival of the kingdom, but rather to a manifestation of God s rule in a higher form. And even within the limits of this future manifestation of the kingdom stages had begun to be distinguished. The idea of a preliminary Messianic kingdom on earth lasting for a definite number of years, to be followed by the consummation of the world and an eter nal kingdom under totally new con ditions may possibly have been developed as early as our Lord s day. In the later teaching of the New Testament a some what similar distinction certainly exists, 46 The Kingdom and the Church as when Paul distinguishes between the present reign of Christ, dating from the resurrection, and the final state after he shall have delivered the kingdom to the Father, 1 Cor. xv. 23-28. The view, therefore, that the kingdom might be present in one sense, and yet have to come in another, did not lie beyond the doctrinal horizon of Judaism even, and we must a priori reckon with the possi bility that in some form or other this view may appear also in the teaching of Jesus. In point of fact certain statements of Jesus concerning the kingdom as an in ward spiritual state strongly resemble the Jewish representation, e. g. the words in Mk. x. 15 about " receiving the king dom of God " sound like an adaptation of the Jewish figure which speaks of " taking up the yoke of the kingdom of heaven/ cf. also Matt. xiii. 52. The difference between this Jewish rep resentation and Jesus idea of the prelimi nary kingdom lies in this, that according Present and Fitture Kingdom 47 to the Jewish view the kingdom is always there, it being only a question whether man will take it upon himself, whereas according to Jesus, who thought less of human efforts, but had a deeper insight into the sinfulness of man and a higher conception of what the true reign of God involves, even this partial kingdom must first come through an act of God before man can be invited to receive it. As to the other point of contact in the Jewish expectation, it should be remembered that the intermediate kingdom was to begin with the appearance of the Mes siah. If then Jesus regarded himself even while on earth as the Messiah and as engaged in Messianic work, which we have no reason to doubt, he must also have looked upon the stage of this earthly Messianic labor as a provisional stage of realization of the kingdom. Of course here again he transformed the Jewish conception by his spiritualizing touch into something entirely different and 48 The Kingdom and the Church infinitely higher than what it was be fore. Coming to the facts themselves we ob serve that no one denies the presence of the idea of a spiritual provisional king dom in the gospel record of Jesus teaching as it lies before us. The view that Jesus did not entertain this idea, of necessity involves ascribing to the Evan gelists an unhistorical representation of what our Lord actually taught. It is al leged that the gospel-tradition on this point was colored by the later develop ment of things, which showed that a long time had to intervene between the first and second coming of the Lord and therefore compelled the assuming of a provisional kingdom of protracted dura tion. Upon this critical phase of the question our present limits and purposes forbid us to enter. We only note it to remark that for those who hold to the historical trustworthiness of the Gospels no doubt can here exist. The present Present and Future Kingdom 49 spiritual kingdom is by common consent plainly recognized in such sayings as Matt. xi. 11 ; xiii. 41 ; xvi. 19. Apart, however, from critical attempts to eliminate this element from Jesus teaching efforts have been made to attain the same object by means of exegesis, and into these we must briefly look while examining the available evidence. Clearest of all seem the words spoken by our Lord in answer to the Pharisees who had accused him of being in league with Beelzebub : " If I by the Spirit (Lk. finger) of God cast out demons, then the kingdom of God has come upon you. " The underlying supposition of this ar gument is, that, where the kingdom of Satan is destroyed, there of necessity the kingdom of God begins. If the former already took place at that time, then the latter also had become a present reality. Now it has been urged, that this saying proves nothing in favor of the usual con ception of a spiritual kingdom to be 50 The Kingdom and the Church gradually realized, because our Lord might look upon the casting out of de mons and other miracles as signals of the rapidly approaching final coming of the kingdom, the beginning as it were of the end. In answer to this we observe that, even if this were a correct interpretation, the presence of a certain element of grad- ualness in our Lord s conception of the matter would thereby be in principle ad mitted. The coming would not be en tirely abrupt, there would be not only premonitions but actual anticipations. But it is impossible to interpret the words in the above sense, because at an early point of his career our Lord looked for ward to his death as something that had to intervene before all things could be ful filled, so that he could not have regarded his conquest over the demons as imme diately preceding and heralding the end. His meaning must be, that when Satan s power ceases, a new order of things be- Present and Fztture Kingdom 51 gins, which in itself is equivalent to the rule of God. In one respect only it will have to be conceded that the saying un der discussion does not embody the full idea of the spiritual kingdom of God. It proves the actual presence of the king dom at the time of our Lord s ministry, but does not directly affirm that this kingdom has its reality in inward, invisible states. The casting out of demons like other miracles belongs rather to the out ward, visible sphere. The same qualification will have to apply to another passage at least in one of the two renderings of which it is cap able. According to Lk. xvii. 21 Jesus answered the question of the Pharisees as to the time of the appearance of the kingdom of God by declaring " behold the kingdom of God is eVro? vpuv." This may mean: "within you," or it may mean "in your midst." In the former case both the spiritual nature and the present reality are affirmed, in the 52 The Kingdom and the Church latter case only the presence of the king dom in some form at the time of speak ing is implied. Recently it has been as serted that on the rendering "in your midst " even the last-mentioned inference is not warranted, because our Lord speaks of the future, and means to say: at its final appearance the kingdom of God does not come so as to be subject to observation or calculation ; people will not be able to say, "Here or there/ lo, all at once it will be in your midst. But this is untenable because from other sayings we know, that the final com ing of the kingdom is preceded by certain signs and in so far is actually subject to observation and calculation. We must choose between the two ren derings given above, and of these the second, "in your midst," deserves the preference for two reasons : first, because it suits best the purpose of the question of the Pharisees, which was as to the time of the coming of the kingdom, not Present and Fiiture Kingdom 53 as to its sphere, and because of the unbelieving Pharisees it could scarcely be said that the kingdom was " within " them. Our Lord means to teach the enquirers that, instead of a future thing to be fixed by apocalyptic speculation, the coming of the kingdom is a present thing, present in the very midst of those who are cu rious about the day and the hour of its sometime appearance. Now this does not directly explain how the kingdom is present. The view remains possible that Jesus referred to miraculous works as one form of the manifestation of God s royal power, in which case this saying would not carry us beyond the foregoing about the casting out of demons. But the view is equally plausible, that he re ferred to the establishment of God s rule in the midst of Israel through the spiritual results of his labors. Another statement which clearly teaches both the actual presence of the kingdom and its spiritual form of exist- 54 The Kingdom and the Church ence is Matt. xi. 12 ; Lk. xvi. 16. Here " the law and the prophets " are said to extend until John, that is to say, the prophetic looking-forward dispensation of the old covenant reaches its close in John : from there onward begins a dis pensation in which the kingdom of God is the theme no longer of prophecy, but of gospel-preaching, therefore is no longer future but present. John him self is not in this kingdom while others are. This, of course, cannot apply to the final kingdom, for from this Jesus certainly could not have excluded the Baptist. It can only mean, that John does not share in the privileges made available in the new order of things in troduced by Jesus work, because he virtually continued to stand on the basis of the law and the prophets, on the basis of the old covenant. And these priv ileges to which John had no access cer tainly consisted not in the mere oppor tunity to witness the miracles of Jesus Present and Future Kingdom 55 as external acts ; a participation of in ward spiritual blessings must be referred to, for on account of this our Lord pro nounces the smallest or smaller in the kingdom greater than John, and we know from other sayings that Jesus measured true greatness in a different way than by contact with his miracles. The well known saying from the Ser mon on the Mount : " Seek ye first his kingdom and his righteousness and all these things ( i. e. food and raiment ) shall be added unto you," Matt. vi. 33, may also be quoted in this connection. Even though the view that righteousness is here present righteousness and as such a closer specification of the kingdom, should be subject to dispute, the fact re mains that the kingdom itself appears as a possession obtainable in this life. For food and clothing are here represented as something to be added not to the seek ing of the kingdom but to the kingdom itself, and it goes without saying, that this 56 The Kingdom and the Church is applicable only to the kingdom in its present state of existence. Most clearly, however, both the pres ent reality and the internal nature of the kingdom are taught in some of the great parables, Matt, xiii, Mk. iv. Lk. viii. In the parable of the wheat and the tares the kingdom appears as a state of things in which the good and the bad still inter mingle. The same is true of the parable of the fish-net. Here, then, obviously our Lord speaks of the kingdom in a form different from its final form, which is represented as beginning with the sepa ration between the two kinds. Now these two parables, and the interpretation of the second, especially in Matt. xiii. 36-43, are said to betray the influence of later conceptions. But what shall we say about the one of the mustard seed and the leaven ? It cannot be denied that Jesus here conceives of the kingdom as a grow ing organism, a leavening power, concep tions which will scarcely apply to anything Present and Future Kingdom 57 else than to a spiritual order of things. To interpret these as describing the immense contrast between the small beginning of things in Jesus miracles and the great world-renewing conclusion of his work soon to be witnessed is, it seems to us, a forced exegesis, which unnecessarily charges Jesus with an artificial use of these figures so exquisitely chosen and so strikingly applied on the common view. Finally, it should be noted that in con nection with these parables Jesus spoke significantly of " the mysteries " or " the mystery " (Mk.) of the kingdom of heaven. The most plausible explanation of this statement is, that it refers not so much to the parabolic form of teaching as to the principal idea embodied in some of these parables. What else could so suitably have been designated by Jesus "a mystery" in comparison with the Jewish expectations than the truth that the kingdom comes gradually, impercep tibly, spiritually ? 58 The Kingdom and the Church It appears from the foregoing that it is impossible to deny to our Lord the con ception of an internal kingdom which as such comes not at once but in a lengthy process. Some writers, recog nizing the necessity of this, are yet un willing to admit that it was a conception held by Jesus from the beginning of his ministry. In their opinion his mind un derwent a development on the subject ; beginning with the expectation of a kingdom to appear suddenly by an imme diate act of God, he afterwards became convinced that the opposition offered to his person and work rendered this im possible, that the kingdom of glory could not immediately be realized, and thus was led to believe, that only on its inter nal, invisible side the rule of God could even now be established. The opposi tion encountered would lead to his death, but death would be a transition to an exalted state, which would in turn be fol lowed by his coming with the clouds of Present and Future Kingdom 59 heaven and the establishment of the king dom in its full final form. A single glance at the Gospels, how ever, will show how impossible it is to distribute the sayings relating to the pres ent and final form of the kingdom in such a way as to make out a period at the beginning of which Jesus knew only the latter. Some of the clearest utterances regarding the spiritual coming of the kingdom belong to a comparatively early stage of his teaching, cf. Matt. xi. 11 ; Mk. ii. 18-22. Nor do the general argu ments adduced in favor of this hypothesis have sufficient force to commend it. It is true Jesus began with representing the kingdom as future, but this applied at the beginning equally to its spiritual, and to its visible, final realization. He urged the disciples continually to seek after the kingdom, but this only implies that within them it has to come ever increas ingly. He speaks of the eschatological kingdom as " the kingdom " absolutely, 60 The Kingdom and the Chitrch but this mode of speech is not confined to the early period of his teaching : it occurs also later at a time when he is ad mitted to have been familiar with the idea of an immanent kingdom. He could thus speak because only at the end of time will the kingdom in its ideal com pleteness appear. This does not ex clude that he recognized less complete embodiments of the kingdom-idea as present long before. Again it is true that he does not at first announce himself as Messiah, and from this the inference might be drawn that with his Messiah- ship he put also the coming of the kingdom into the future. This in ference would be correct, if restraint in the announcement of himself as Messiah had proceeded from the conviction that he was not as yet the Messiah, nor his present work Messianic work in the strict sense of the term. In point of fact Jesus kept his Messianic claims in the back ground for pedagogical reasons, whilePresent and Future Kingdom 61 perfectly conscious that he was exercis ing Messianic functions. The correct view on this point is that he distinguished two forms of Messianic activity, one on earth in humility, one from the throne of glory, and corresponding to this two forms of the kingdom,one invisible now, one visible at the end, and, thus under stood, the two-sidedness of his Messianic consciousness affords a striking parallel to the two-sidedness of his kingdom-con ception. On the whole, therefore, we have no reason to believe that in our Lord s subjective apprehension of the truth there was any appreciable progress on this important subject within the limits of his public ministry. In Jesus objective teaching, on the other hand, as distinguished from his subjective consciousness, a certain devel opment in the presentation of truth con cerning the kingdom cannot be denied. We are able to affirm this, not so much from a comparison of the utterances be- 62 The Kingdom and the Church longing to the earlier or later periods. This would be difficult since the material in our Gospels is not all arranged on the chronological plan. The fact appears rather in this way, that at two points in our Lord s ministry a certain phase of the doctrine of the kingdom is introduced with such emphasis as to mark it rel atively new. These two points are the occasion on which our Lord uttered the great kingdom-parables and the an nouncement of his passion near Caesarea Philippi. From the manner in which the great parables draw the distinction be tween the immanent and eschatologi- cal coming of the kingdom, and from the elaborateness with which Jesus here de scribes the gradual, invisible character of the former as resembling the process of organic growth, we are led to infer that previously this principle had not been accentuated in his teaching. This does not mean that he had hitherto ab- Present and Future Kingdom 63 stained from referring to the spiritual side of the subject. We have seen above that the opposite is true. It simply means, that up to this point, while sometimes predicat ing of the kingdom things true of it in its purely spiritual stage, sometimes predicat ing of it things of eschatological charac ter, he did not on purpose formulate the difference and the relation between the two, but treated the kingdom as a unit of which both classes of statements could be equally affirmed. The historical ex planation of this peculiarity is probably to be sought in our Lord s desire to keep in close touch during the first period of his ministry with the Old Testament type of teaching, which, as we have seen, did not as yet distinguish between periods and stages in the realization of the king dom. Thus in condescension to Israel he took up the thread of revelation where the Old Testament had left it, to give a new and richer development to it soon after in his epoch-making parabolic de- 64 The Kingdom and the Chztrch liverances. The new element introduced at the second critical juncture, in the re gion of Caesarea Philippi, concerns the re lation of the church to the kingdom and will be discussed afterwards in a separate chapter. It should be observed that our Lord s teaching relates to two aspects of the same kingdom, not to two separate king doms. The ancient theological distinc tion between a kingdom of grace and a kingdom of glory is infelicitous for this reason. In the parable the growing of the grain and the harvest belong together as connected parts of the same process. There is one continuous kingdom-form ing movement which first lays hold upon the inward spiritual center of life by it self, and then once more seizes the same in connection with its external visible embodiment. In the second stage the essence of the first is re-included and re mains of supreme importance. The im manent kingdom as at first realized con- Present and Future Kingdom 65 tinues to partake of imperfections. Hence the eschatological crisis will not merely supply this soul of the kingdom with its fitting body, but will also bring the ideal perfection of the inner spirit itself. Our Lord s doctrine of the two-sided kingdom thus understood is an eloquent witness to the unique energy with which he sub ordinated the physical to the spiritual, as well as to the sobriety with which he upheld the principle, that the physical is not to be despised, but appreciated in its regenerated form, as the natural and necessary instrument of revelation for the spiritual. CHAPTER V Current Misconceptions regarding the Present and Future Kingdom T CAVING found that both the im- J^ I manent and the eschatological conceptions of the coming of the kingdom are clearly represented in Jesus teaching and having in general defined the relation of the one to the other, we may now proceed to look at each sepa rately in order to guard against certain misconceptions to which both may easily become subject. A tendency exists with some writers, especially of the class who insist that Jesus had no other than the 66 Current Misconceptions 67 eschatological conception of the king dom, to identify the view ascribed to him with the current Jewish expectations. This would involve, that he was not only mistaken in regard to the time of the kingdom s appearance, but also held an inherently false idea regarding its nature, not having entirely outgrown the limita tions of his age and environment on this point. It has in all seriousness been as serted by a recent writer of this class, that the notion of the kingdom in the historic form in which our Lord embraced it, is that element of his teaching to which we cannot ascribe abiding value, that in the experience of Jesus himself it proved a delusion, that to his teaching on the fatherhood of God rather than to it is due the enrichment which our Lord wrought in the religious consciousness of humanity. This error results from the failure to recognize the immanent, spiritual aspect of the kingdom-idea as actually present 68 The Kingdom and the Church in Jesus teaching and the thorough re construction which in result of it the idea as a whole underwent. It was little more than the name that Jesus borrowed from the kingdom-expectation of Judaism ; whatever of the content of his own king dom-teaching he had in common with the eschatological belief of his time be longed to the purer and nobler type of Jewish eschatology, that built up around the idea of "the coming age/ And even the latter he lifted to an infinitely higher plane by subsuming it under the principle of the supremacy of God. So far as connected with the kingdom the Jewish hope was intensely political and national, considerably tainted also by sen suality. From all political bearings our Lord s teaching on the kingdom was wholly dissociated, cf. Mk. xii. 13 ; Jno. xviii. 36. There is no trace in the Gos pels of the so-called chiliastic expectation of a provisional political kingdom, that strange compromise whereby Judaism Current Misconceptions 69 endeavored to reconcile the two hetero geneous elements that struggled for the supremacy in its eschatological conscious ness. What formally corresponds in our Lord s teaching to this notion is the idea of the invisible, spiritual kingdom, and how totally different it is ! Equally broad and free is Jesus king dom-doctrine in its attitude towards the problem of Israel s national prerogative. Sayings like Matt. viii. 11 ; xxi. 43 ; xxviii. 19 ; Mk. xiii. 10 ; xiv. 9 ; Lk. iv. 26, 27, prove that he distinctly anticipated the rejection of many in Israel and the ex tension of the gospel to the Gentiles on a large scale. It is true these are all prophetic words. In his own pastoral activity he confined himself deliberately to the lost sheep of the house of Israel and kept his helpers within the same limits. But even so there is in his whole attitude as a teacher of Israel that which has been strikingly characterized as "in tensive universalism." In the Jew it is 70 The Kingdom and the Church the man he seeks and endeavors to save. The problems raised, the duties required, the blessings conferred are such as to be applicable to all without distinction of race, caste, or sex. Lk. xxii. 30 is sometimes quoted to prove that Jesus had not freed himself from the Jewish particularism. Though possibly the " judging " may have to be understood in the sense of " reigning," yet the words by no means imply the salvation of all Israel, nor do they exclude the calling of the Gentiles. They were spoken at a time when Jesus could no longer doubt that the masses of Israel would reject him. Besides the words are figurative, to judge from the context with its reference to " eating " and " drinking." All we can legitimately infer from them is that the apostles will have a position of preeminence in the kingdom. The third feature in which our Lord s kingdom-message differs from the Jew ish expectation consists in the absence of Current Misconceptions 71 the sensualistic element so prominent in the latter. True he speaks in connection with the kingdom of eating, drinking, reclining at table, inheriting the earth, etc., and it is said we have no right to spiritualize all this. But the Old Testa ment already used such forms of speech with the clear consciousness of their metaphorical character. Even in the apocalyptic literature this sense is not en tirely wanting, as the statement of Enoch xv. 11, " They will not partake of any food, nor will they thirst," shows. With reference to one point at least, Jesus pos itively affirmed that the sensual enjoy ments of the present life will cease in the world to come, Mk. xii. 25. On the other hand, we must remember that it is possible to go too far in the spiritualiz ing interpretation of this class of utter ances. We may not dissolve everything into purely inward processes and mental states, as modern theologians do when they say that heaven and hell are in the72 The Kingdom and the Ch^trch hearts of men. The eschatological king dom has certainly in our Lord s concep tion its own outward forms of life. These figures stand for objective, external real ities in which the body will have its own part and function. When our Lord speaks of earthly enjoyments, he means something that will be truly analogous to these and yet move on an altogether higher plane. Our difficulty lies in this, that we cannot frame a concrete con ception of outward forms of life without having recourse to the senses. But our difficulty does not prove the impossibility, nor does it prove that the same difficulty existed for Jesus, who was familiar with the heavenly world by experience. We believe, however, that there is greater need at the present day to guard against a misunderstanding of the other side of our Lord s kingdom-teaching, that which relates to the spiritual, in visible form of the kingdom. Modern writers do not always sufficiently em- Current Misconceptions 73 phasize that, notwithstanding its internal character, the kingdom remains to all intents a supernatural kingdom. It is easy to speak disparagingly of the gross realistic expectations of the Jews, but those who do so often attack under the pretense of a refined spiritualism the very essence of Biblical supernaturalism. After all deductions are made, it must be main tained that the Jews could not have cher ished this vigorous realism, had they not been supernaturalists at heart, trained in that great school of supernaturalism, the Old Testament. In this matter Jesus was in full agreement with their posi tion. The circumstance that some of the parables which deal with this aspect of the kingdom have been taken from the sphere of organic life has sometimes led to misconceptions here. The point of comparison in these parables is not the naturalness of the process but only its gradualness and invisible character. In 74 The Kingdom and the Church the parable of the imperceptibly grow ing seed, Mk. iv. 26-29, rather the opposite is implied, viz., that God gives the increase without human intervention. Jesus performs all his work, even that pertaining to the immanent kingdom, in the Spirit, and the Spirit stands for the supernatural. That we must not identify the processes whereby this side of the kingdom is realized with purely natural processes can be best seen from the Fourth Gospel. Here the present life is equivalent to the immanent kingdom. But this present life appears to be thoroughly supernatural in its origin and character. Regeneration introduces into it. At a subsequent point of our enquiry, when discussing the relation of the church to the kingdom, it will appear still more clearly, that by its translation into the sphere of the internal and in visible the kingdom-idea has lost noth ing of the supernaturalistic associations Current Misconceptions 75 which belonged to it from its very or igin. The difference between the two stages of its coming does not lie in that the one is brought about by forces already present in the human world, whereas the other has to be accom plished by the introduction of new miraculous forces from above. It is a difference merely in the mode of opera tion and revelation of the supernatural common to both stages. The same omnipotent power at work through the ages will also effect the consummation at the end. But it will assume a new form when the end has come, so as to work instantaneously, and will draw within the sphere of its operation the en tire physical universe. It would not be in harmony with Jesus view so to conceive of it, as if by the gradual extension of the divine power operating internally, by the growth of the church, by the ever- widening influence of the truth, the king dom which now is will become all-corn- 76 The Kingdom arid the Church prehensive and universal and so of itself pass over into the final kingdom. This would eliminate all true eschatology and obliterate the distinction between the two aspects of Jesus teaching on the subject. The parables of the wheat and the tares and of the fish-net, while on the one hand they do imply, as we have seen, the higher unity of the entire movement, also imply on the other hand that its consummation does not spontaneously result from the preceding process, super natural though this be. The harvest is conditioned by the ripeness of the grain, and yet the ripeness of the grain can never of itself set in operation the harvest. The harvest comes when the man puts forth the sickle, because the fruit is ripe. So when the immanent kingdom has run its course to maturity, God will intervene in the miracle of all miracles. It would also plainly be im possible for the final kingdom to come in any other way than this. For this Current Misconceptions 77 final state of the kingdom presupposes great physical, cosmical changes, which no force working in the spiritual sphere can produce. It would be difficult to overestimate the vividness with which our Lord realized and the emphasis with which he describes the new and mar velous conditions under which the life of the blessed in the future kingdom will be lived. It is an order of things lying altogether above this earthly life, in which the righteous shall shine as the sun, in which all the prophets will be seen, in which the pure in heart shall enjoy the beatific vision of God, in which those who hunger and thirst after right eousness shall be completely filled. Surely to effect this there must take place a great crisis, a great catastrophe at the end which will be the very opposite of all evolution. Our Lord himself has marked its unique character by calling it the palingenesis, the regeneration, Matt, xix. 28. 78 The Kingdom and the Church Still further we must guard against con fining the internal, spiritual kingdom to the sphere of the ethical. This is an er ror which has had considerable vogue in recent times, owing to the fact that cer tain systems of theology constructed from a one-sided ethical point of view have adopted the kingdom-idea as their or ganizing center. The kingdom has been defined as an ethical community realized by the interaction of men on the prin ciple of love. This is erroneous in two respects. In the first place, according to our Lord the whole content of religion is to be subsumed under the kingdom. While it is true that the kingdom con sists in righteousness, it is by no means coextensive with the same, but consists in many other things besides. Such blessings as life, forgiveness of sin, com munion with God, belong to it just as much and have just as vital a connection with the kingdom-idea, as the cultivation of love, as will subsequently appear. And Current Misconceptions 79 secondly, all that belongs to the kingdom, the ethical and religious alike, is repre sented in Jesus kingdom-teaching, not as the product of human activity, but as the work of God. He nowhere says that men make the kingdom. In our Lord s Prayer the words : " Thy will be done " explain the preceding words "Thy Kingdom come," but both are petitions, in uttering which we are taught to look to God that he may set up in us his reign even in that form which will be revealed through our actions. CHAPTER VI The Rssence of the Kingdom : The Kingdom as the Siipremacy of God in the Sphere of Saving Power /T has been shown in the foregoing how our Lord designates the new order of things he came to introduce "the kingdom of God/ and that not merely in its final outcome but in its en tire course of development. The ques tion must next be raised, Why did he adopt this name, what is the appropriate ness of the designation to his own mind ? It certainly would be wrong to assume 80 The Sphere of Saving Power 8 1 that he used it from mere accommoda tion to a popular parlance, that it was in no wise suggestive to him of important principles and ideas. This is excluded by the fact pointed out above, that it was not by any means the most familiar of the names current among the Jews for the Messianic age. If Jesus nevertheless favored it above all others, he must have had a positive reason for this. Nor can we explain his choice from mere depend ence on the Old Testament. Jesus de pendence on the Old Testament was never a mere matter of form. He always sought in the form the substance, in the terms appropriated the great ideal prin ciples they were intended to express. We must therefore look for these. In looking for them we must not expect to find anywhere in his teaching a definition of the kingdom. Jesus method of teach ing was not the philosophical one of de fining a thing, but the popular, parabolic one of describing and illustrating it. 82 The Kingdom and the Church Paul, though speaking much less of the kingdom, has come much nearer to de fining it than our Lord, cf. Rom. xiv. 17. The absence of definition, however, does not involve a lack of order or correlation in the aspects and features described. In the great variety of statements made con cerning the kingdom the careful observer will not fail to discover certain general lines along which the description or com parison moves, certain outstanding prin ciples to whose elucidation it constantly returns. If we can ascertain these, we shall also have found the key to our Lord s own view about the deeper meaning of the name "kingdom of God." At the outset we must, reject as inade quate the favorite modern explanation that in the figure of the kingdom the point of comparison lies primarily in the mutual association of men so as to form a moral or religious organism. The king dom is indeed a community in which men are knit together by the closest of The Sphere of Saving Power 83 bonds, and especially in connection with our Lord s teaching on the church this is brought out. Taking, however, the kingdom-teaching as a whole this point is but little emphasized, Matt. xiii. 24-30, 47-50. Besides, this conception is not nearly wide enough to cover all the things predicated of the kingdom in the Gos pels, according to which it appears to con sist as much in gifts and powers from above as in inter-human relations and ac tivities. Its resemblance to a community offers at least only a partial explanation of its kingdom-character, and so far as this explanation is correct it is not ultimate, because not the union of men as such, but that in God which produces and underlies it, is the true kingdom-forming principle. The main reason for the use of the name by Jesus lies undoubtedly in this, that in the new order of things God is in & ^--"-^ some such sense the supreme and con trolling factor as the ruler in a human 84 The Kingdom and the Church kingdom. The conception is a God- centered conception to the very core. In order to appreciate its significance, we must endeavor to do what Jesus did, look at the whole of the world and of life from the point of view of their subserviency to the glory of God. The difficulty for us in achieving this lies not merely in that we are apt to take a lower man-centered view of religion, but equally much in that by our modern idea of the state we are not naturally led to associate such an order of things with the name of a kingdom. According to our modern conception, especially in its republican form, the in stitution of the state with its magistrate exists for the sake of the subjects, even the king, at least in a constitutional mon archy, may be considered as a means to an end. In the ancient state this is dif ferent. Here the individual exists for the state, and in the Oriental monarchy the state is centralized and summed up in the person of the ruler. The Sphere of Saving Power 85 Now whatever may be the merits or de merits of such a principle as the construc tive principle for our human political life, it affords obviously the only point of view from which we can properly con strue the fundamental relation between God and man. It was on the basis of such a conception of kingship, that from early times the relation of God to Israel had been expressed in the form of a royal rule. The primary purpose of Israel s theocratic constitution was not to teach the world the principles of civil govern ment, though undoubtedly in this respect also valuable lessons can be learned from it, but to reflect the eternal laws of re ligious intercourse between God and man as they will exist in the consummate life at the end. Judaism had lost the sense for this, had shifted the center of gravity from God to man ; in Jesus teaching the proper relation was restored. To him the kingdom exists there, where not merely God is supreme, for that is true 86 The Kingdom and the Church at all times and under all circumstances, 5 but where God supernaturally carries through his supremacy against all oppos ing powers and brings man to the willing recognition of the same. It is a state of things in which everything converges and tends towards God as the highest good. The closing words of the Lord s Prayer, according to the version in Matthew, are the purest expression of this kingdom-consciousness which Jesus desired to cultivate in the minds of his disciples : Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever." Even if these words should not be authentic, since they are wanting in the text of Luke, and in the text of Matthew in some im portant authorities, whence the Revised Version places them in the margin, still they retain their weight as a very ancient witness to the conception of the kingdom in the early church. It will be observed that Paul in 1 Cor. xv, where he speaks The Sphere of Saving Power 87 of the delivering up of the kingdom by Christ to the Father, describes the con tent of the final kingdom of God in pre cisely the same way as consisting in this that " God will be all in all" vs. 28, cf. also Rev. xi. 15. Because the kingdom is thus centered in God himself, it can be represented by our Lord as thejupreme object of human pursuit. This would plainly be impossible if the idea of the kingdom was conceived on any lower plane, for in that case some other object would be interposed between God and man as the absolute end of man s reli gious aspiration. Because the kingdom of God means the ideal of religion in this highest sense realized, Jesus de clared the scribe to be not far from the kingdom, because the latter recognized , the commandment to love God with all the heart, all the soul, all the strength, and all the mind as the supreme com mandment, Mk. xiv. 34. In Matt. vi. 33 the seeking after the kingdom is op- 88 The Kingdom and the Church posed to the seeking after earthly things, because it is at the bottom the seeking after God himself. And the same God- centered view, which thus finds expres sion in the thought of the kingdom, is also the highest aspect under which Jesus views his entire work in the discourses of the Fourth Gospel. Here Christ at the close of his ministry speaks to the Father : " I glorified thee on the earth, having accomplished the work which thou hast given me to do/ xvii. 4. We find, therefore, that though the name kingdom is absent, the main idea em bodied in it is found in John as well as in the Synoptists. The principle thus disclosed is of the greatest conceivable practical significance. It teaches that in the very order of things provided for the salvation of mankind, everything is in its ultimate analysis designed to glorify God. The kingdom is a conception which must of necessity remain unintel ligible and unacceptable to every view of The Sphere of Saving Power 89 the world and of religion which magni fies man at the expense of God. The supremacy of God in the king dom reveals itself in various ways. It comes to light in the acts by which the kingdom is established, in the moral order under which it exists, in the spirit ual blessings, privileges and delights that are enjoyed in it. The first constitute the kingdom a sphere of divine power, the second a sphere of divine righteous ness, the third a sphere of divinely be stowed blessedness. These rubrics are not, of course, so many sections into which the content of the kingdom can be divided, but rather so many aspects under which it may be considered. What is kingdom-power from one point of view is kingdom-righteousness from another and kingdom-blessedness from still a third. The exercise of power is needed to render possible the realization of righteousness, the realization of right eousness to render possible the bestowal go The Kingdom and the Chitrch of blessedness. Remembering the de scriptive character and the practical pur pose of our Lord s teaching we should not endeavor to draw any hard and fast lines, but make allowance for the easy passing over of one aspect into the other. The element of power is one of the earliest and most constant elements in the Biblical disclosure of the divine king ship. The Song of Moses celebrates Jehovah as King because he has glori ously overcome his enemies, Ex. xv. And from these ancient times onward the note of conquest is never absent from the Old Testament utterances regarding the kingdom. Especially in Daniel the kingdom is presented from this side, when it appears as a stone breaking to pieces the image of the world-kingdoms ii. 45. How familiar this idea was to the Apostle Paul we may gather from his words in 1 Cor. xv. 25, " For he (Christ) must reign, till he (God) hath put all his enemies under his feet." The Sphere of Saving Power 91 Here the kingship of Christ is equivalent to the process of subjecting one enemy after another. After the last enemy, death, has been conquered, there is no further need for the kingdom of Christ : hence it is delivered up to God the Father. Christ s kingdom as a process of conquest precedes the final kingdom of God as a settled permanent state. To the Jewish conception of the coming kingdom also this feature was essential. What our Lord did was to give to this Jewish mode of representation an in finitely higher content, while formally retaining it. He lifted it out of the po litical sphere into the spiritual. The con quests to which he refers are those over Satan and the demons, over sin and evil. It is kingdom against kingdom, but both of these opposing kingdoms belong to a higher world than that to which Rome and her empire belong. In the words, " If I by the Spirit of God cast out de mons, then the kingdom of God has 92 The Kingdom and the Church come upon you/ already commented upon in another connection, our Lord refers to the forth-putting of this divine conquering power as a sure sign of the coming of the kingdom. But we must broaden this idea : not merely the casting out of demons, all the miracles of Jesus find their interpre tation at least in part from this, that they are manifestations of the kingdom-power. It is a mistake to think that Jesus looked upon them exclusively as signs authen ticating his mission. Undoubtedly this was one of the purposes for which the miracles were intended, and it is brought out prominently in the Fourth Gospel. But in the Synoptists, where the teach ing of Jesus is centered in the kingdom- idea, the miracles do not appear primarily in this light. Here they are signs in a different sense, viz., signs of the actual arrival of the kingdom, because they show that the royal power of God is al ready in motion. He rebukes the peopleThe Spliere of Saving Power 93 because they can interpret the signs of the weather, but cannot interpret the signs of the times. These signs of the times are nothing else than the miracu lous works which prove the kingdom to be there. The forces which will rev olutionize heaven and earth are already at work. On the same principle Jesus answered the inquiry of John the Baptist, as to whether he were the one that was to come, or they should expect another, with a reference to his Messianic works : " The blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up, and the poor have good tidings preached unto them," Matt. xi. 5. The Messianic works are the works which inaugurate the kingdom. Still more clearly this appears from the discourse in the syna gogue at Nazareth recorded by Luke, which had for its text the prophecy of Isaiah : " The Spirit of the Lord is upon 94 The Kingdom and the Church me, because he anointed me to preach good tidings to the poor: he hath sent me to proclaim release to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord," Lk. iv. 18, 19. Here the accept able year of Jehovah, the year of jubilee, in which all things return to their normal, wholesome condition, is none other than the era of the kingdom, and by the be stowal of the blessings enumerated it comes. It will be observed that the miracles which Jesus wrought were with one ex ception beneficent miracles. To give a sign from heaven, a sign not possessing this beneficent character, he persistently refused. The true signs had to be king dom-signs, exhibitions of God s royal power. This power, therefore, has two sides : so far as the enemies of God are concerned, it is a conquering, destructive, judging power ; so far as man is con- The Sphere of Saving Power 95 cerned, it is a liberating, healing, saving power. In the casting out of demons both sides are revealed. In the other mir acles it is chiefly the beneficent side which finds expression. Jesus brings release to the captives and sets at liberty those that are bruised, for the satanic power not only renders man miserable but also re duces him to bondage, as is even exter nally indicated by the fact that the de mons control the physical organism of those possessed. The question naturally arises, how can this identification of the kingdom with the effects of a power working largely in the physical sphere be reconciled with the emphasis placed by Jesus upon the spiritual nature of the kingdom. The answer is that the physical evils which the kingdom-power removes have a moral and spiritual background. Satan reigns not merely in the body, nor merely in the mind pathologically considered, but also in the heart and will of man as g6 The Kingdom and the Church the instigator of sin and the source of moral evil. Hence Jesus made his mir acles the occasion for suggesting and working the profounder change by which the bonds of sin were loosed and the rule of God set up anew in the entire in ner life of men. Because this real con nection exists, the physical process can become symbolical of the spiritual. In the Synoptical Gospels, it is true, this is nowhere directly stated, although the external and the internal are sometimes significantly placed side by side as coordi nated parts of one identical work, Mk. ii. 9. In the Fourth Gospel, however, Jesus gives clearly to understand that the physical acts are intended to point to cor- 1 responding spiritual acts. The healing of the blind, the raising of the dead find their counterpart in what he does for the souls of sinners. On the other hand, it should not be overlooked that these physical signs have also a connection with the kingdom in the The Sphere of Saving Power 97 external sphere itself. The miraculous power is prophetic of that great kingdom- power which will be exerted at the end. It is especially in eschatological connec tions that a revelation of power is referred to, Matt. xxiv. 30; Mk. xii. 24. All the supernatural phenomena that accompa nied not merely the ministry of Jesus, but characterized also the history of the apos tolic church, must be interpreted in this light. It had to be shown immediately, that the work inaugurated by Jesus aims at nothing less than a supernatural re newal of the world, whereby all evil will be overcome, a renewal of the physical as well of the spiritual world, Matt. xix. 28. Because the Old Testament had treated these two as belonging inseparably together, and because in reality it would now appear that the two lay far apart in point of time, it was all the more neces sary that some solid anticipations of the eschatological change should be given. Verbal prophecy was not sufficient : a 98 The Kingdom and the Church prophecy in acts was required, and this the miracles furnished. In so far there is an element of truth in the modern view which represents Jesus as looking upon the miracles as the beginning of the final arrival of the kingdom. Here, as on other points, our Lord s teaching warns us against that excessive spiritualizing tendency, to which the external world becomes altogether worthless and indif ferent or even withdrawn from the direct control of God. The source of this kingdom-power is according to our Lord s teaching the Spirit. In the saying Matt. xii. 28 the point evidently is, that where the Spirit of God operates, there the kingdom of God comes. To his being anointed with the Spirit Jesus ascribes all his power to do miracles, Lk. iv. 18. To accuse him of casting out demons in league with Beel- ; zebub is to blaspheme the Spirit, cf. for the interchangeableness of the concep tions of "Spirit" and "power," such pas- The Sphere of Saving Power 99 sages as Lk. i. 17, 35; xxiv. 19, 49; Acts i. 8 ; x. 38. Indeed our Lord s references to the Spirit as the author of saving acts are almost entirely connected with his miracles. Still it would be inaccurate, as is sometimes done, to deny to Jesus the idea, so beautifully worked out by Paul, that the Spirit is the source of the moral and religious renewal of man, the author and bearer of the entire Christian life with all its graces and virtues. In the Fourth Gospel the presence of this idea is acknowledged by all. Here our Lord \ teaches that man must be born of water ! : and the Spirit in order to see and to enter the kingdom of God. In the closing discourses of this Gospel the work of the Spirit as guiding all the disciples into the knowledge of the truth is made very prominent, and the knowledge of the truth in our Lord s Johannine teaching distinctly includes its moral and spiritual saving apprehension and appropriation by the disciples, so that the Spirit is here ioo The Kingdom and the Church brought into direct connection with the ethical and religious life of man. Even from the Synoptical sayings the same idea is not entirely absent. Though the Spirit may work in the sphere of the miracles, yet these miracles are wrought for the moral purpose of overthrowing the kingdom of evil. The Spirit leads Jesus into the wilderness to be tempted of Satan and thus appears as pursuing the end of the Messiah s moral victory over the Prince of Evil. Satan exerts an evil influence over man in the moral and re ligious sphere, consequently on the prin ciple of opposition the Spirit of God must have been believed to exert a good in fluence. Probably also the saying of Jesus, that the heavenly Father out of his goodness is ready to give the Spirit to his children, Lk. xi. 13, does not have exclusive reference to the Spirit as the source of miracles. Thus we see that the first outlines of the doctrine of the Spirit, as afterwards developed in apostolic The Sphere of Saving Power 101 revelation, are already drawn by Jesus. The full disclosure of this doctrine could not be expected then, because the full bestowal of the Spirit could not come until after the Saviour s death, Jno. vii. 39. But in his Messianic works Jesus exhib ited in a revelation of facts the funda mental part taken by the Spirit in the sal vation of man. Thus Jesus stands at the transition point between the Old Testa ment doctrine of the Spirit on the one side and the full apostolic unfolding of the doctrine on the other side. In the Old Testament the emphasis still rests on the charismatic character of the Spirit s work as qualifying the office-bearers of the theocracy for their task. Jesus began to show how the official Spirit, w r hich be longs to him as Messiah, becomes a source of communication of the Spirit to others, and that not merely for the per formance of supernatural works but also for conferring the religious and moral blessings of the kingdom. The part, IO2 The Kingdom and the Church however, of our Lord s teaching in which the connection between the Spirit and the internal aspect of the kingdom finds clearest expression, and which approaches most closely to the apostolic type of doctrine, is that relating to the church. With this we shall deal in a later chapter. CHAPTER VII The Essence of the Kingdom con tinued : The Kingdom in the Sphere of Righteousness /N regard to the relation between the kingdom and righteousness three lines of thought can be distinguished in the teaching of Jesus. According to the one the ideal fulfilment of the will of God in man s moral life is in itself a revelation of the divine supremacy, and the act of declaring man righteous in it self a prerogative of the divine kingship. According to the other the righteousness needed by man appears as one of the 103 IO4 The Kingdom and the Church blessings which God in his kingdom be stows. According to still a third repre sentation the kingdom is given as a reward for the practice of righteousness in this life. Each of these we shall consider separately. According to the Old Testament and the Semitic conception generally, the kingship and the exercise of legislative and judicial authority are inseparably united. The modern distribution of these several functions of government over distinct institutions is entirely un known. The king gives laws and exe cutes laws. "To judge" and "to reign " are synonymous expressions. This should be kept in mind in order to apprehend correctly the first aspect of our Lord s teaching on righteousness as related to the kingdom. Righteousness is always taken by Jesus in a specific sense which it obtains from the refer ence to God as Lawgiver and Judge. Our modern usage of the word is often The Sphere of Righteousness 105 a looser one, since we are apt to associ ate with it no further thought than that of what is fair and equitable, in herently just. To Jesus righteousness meant all this and much more than this. It meant such moral conduct and such a moral state as are right when measured by the supreme norm of the nature and will of God, so that they form a repro duction of the latter, a revelation, as it were, of the moral glory of God. When the disciples are exhorted to let their light shine before men that these may see their good works and glorify the Father in heaven, this thought is ex pressed in terms of fatherhood, but the conception of glory involved is closely allied to that of kingship. In the Lord s Prayer the petition " Thy kingdom come " naturally leads on to the petition 1 Thy will be done, as in heaven, so on earth/ so that the fulfilment of the will of God is obviously regarded as one of the principal forms in which his king- io6 The Kingdom and the Church ship is realized. Its consummate expres sion this principle finds in the command ment : " Ye therefore shall be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect/ Matt. v. 48. The sayings just quoted affirm not merely that the norm of right eousness is to be found in God, they like wise imply that the aim of righteousness, the final cause of obedience, lies in God. Righteousness is to be sought from the pure desire of satisfying him, who is the supreme end of all moral existence. In both these points our Lord s teach ing on righteousness was no less vitally connected with his conception of the di vine kingship than with that of the divine fatherhood. And in both respects we must place his teaching over against the principles and tendencies which were at work in the Jewish ethics of the time, in order fully to appreciate its profound significance. The characteristic faults of the Jewish ethics were formalism, casu istry, an inclination to emphasize the pro- The Sphere of Righteousness 107 hibition rather than the commandment, and, worst of all, self-righteousness and hypocrisy. These faults proceeded from a twofold source. On the one hand, Judaism had virtually become a worship of the law as such. The dead letter of the law had taken the place of the living God. The majesty and authority of the holy nature and perfect will of God were no longer felt in the commandments. On the other hand, the Jewish law-ob servance was self-centered, because it was chiefly intended to be the instrument for securing the blessedness of the coming age. Where the norm of righteousness is a deified law rather than a personal law giver, and where the supreme motive for obedience is a self-interested one, there inevitably the faults above enumerated must make their appearance. God being kept at a distance, no strong need will be felt for yielding more than compli ance with the law in the outward act. io8 The Kingdom and the Church Because the ultimate root in which all the commandments are one in the nature and will of God is lost sight of, the law will become a mere aggregate of unre lated precepts, a collection of statutory ordinances, for adjusting which to the compass of the entire outward life a com plicated system of the most refined casu istry will be required. Because the con trolling motive is self-centered, the escape from transgression will form a more serious concern than the positive 1 fulfilment of what the spirit of the law demands. Finally, where the moral life is thus concentrated on the outward con duct, where the conscience does not search and judge itself in the presence of the personal God, who knows the heart, there the sins of self -righteous ness and hypocrisy find a fertile soil for development. Such was the moral consciousness in which our Lord wrought a revolution by enunciating the twofold principle The Sphere of Righteousness 109 above stated. He once more made the voice of the law the voice of the living God, who is present in every com mandment, so absolute in his demands, so personally interested in man s conduct, so all-observant, that the thought of yielding to him less than the whole inner life, the heart, the soul, the mind, the strength, can no longer be tolerated. Thus quickened by the spirit of God s personality, the law becomes in our Lord s hands a living organism, in which soul and body, spirit and letter, the greater and smaller commandments are to be distinguished, and which admits of being reduced to great comprehensive principles in whose light the weight and purport of all single precepts are to be intelligently appreciated. The two great commandments are to love God supremely and one s neighbor [ as one s self, Mk. xii. 30, 31. The prac tical test of conduct is to do unto men all things whatsoever one desires to have no The Kingdom and the Church done to one s self, for this is the sum mary of the law and the prophets, Matt, vii. 12. In case of conflict the mere ceremonial must give way before the ethical, Matt. v. 23, 24. There are com mandments in reference to which it is sufficient to say that they should not be left undone, such as the tithing of mint, anise and cummin, and there are com mandments of such supreme and intrinsic importance as to demand in men a posi tive and energetic determination to do them, viz., the weightier matters of the law, justice, mercy and faith, Matt, xxiii. 23. Because righteousness is a matter of immediate, personal concern between the soul and God, it can rest on nothing else than the divinely revealed command ments, and no human tradition can bind the conscience : " Every plant which the heavenly Father planted not, shall be rooted up," Matt. xv. 13. Finally, what alone can impart value in the sight of God to any act of obedience is theThe Sphere of Righteousness 1 1 1 sincerity of the heart from which it pro ceeds. Righteousness must be fruit, the organic product of the life and character, exponential of what is within, Matt. vii. 16, 20 ; xxi. 43. All this was the result of bringing men face to face with God as the righteous Lawgiver and King, personally cognizant of every man s conduct. In view of it, it is hardly necessary to observe that our Lord also represents God as the supreme Judge of the moral life. To be right eous is strictly speaking equivalent to being justified of God. And this ref erence to the judgment of God is to Jesus not a subordinate matter, it is an essential ingredient of his conception of righteousness. The process of moral action does not appear complete to him until it receives in the divine justifying sentence its crown and consummation. The right to hold accountable and judge ranked clearly in his mind among the highest of God s royal prerogatives. On 112 The Kingdom and the Church this point he carefully preserved the valuable kernel of truth contained in the exaggerated Jewish ideas about the forensic relation between God and man. While making much of the divine love, our Lord did not suffer his emphasis on this to obscure the important principle of the divine justice. In correcting the one-sidedness of Judaism, which had no eye for the grace of God, he did not fall into the opposite extreme of reducing everything to the love of God. On the contrary, in his teaching the two divine attributes of love and justice are perfectly balanced. In the well-known saying of Matt. vi. 33 we can observe the close con nection he assumed between the king ship of God and his forensic righteous ness. The disciples are here urged, first to make God s kingdom the object of their pursuit, and then, as a closer speci fication, to seek God s righteousness. By the latter is meant either the exercise of God s justifying righteousness on The Sphere of Righteousness 113 man s behalf, or that righteousness as a human state, which is counted before God. On either view, the kingship of God and the exercise of forensic right eousness are intimately associated. The supreme importance which Jesus in virtue of this God-centered concep tion attached to righteousness may be in ferred from the fact that its pursuit is spoken of in equally absolute terms as the seeking of the kingdom. It is the high est concern of the disciple. He must hunger and thirst after it, treat it as the very sustenance of his life, the only thing that will satisfy his most instinctive desires. He must submit to persecution for its sake, Matt v. 6, 10. All this becomes intelligible only on the assumption that to Jesus the question of right and wrong was not a purely moral, but in the deepest sense a religious question. His teaching on righteousness means the subsumption of ethics under religion. We need not wonder that with such a H 1 1 4 The Kingdom and the Church sublime conception of what righteous ness implied, even this aspect of the kingdom, in which formally at least, it closely resembled the Jewish idea of the already existing reign of God through the law, appeared nevertheless to Jesus as something future. The kingdom had yet to come, because it consisted in an observance of the law conformed to an altogether new ideal, practised in an al together new spirit. Something far greater and higher stood before his mind than had ever been contemplated by the mind of Judaism. Thus the God-cen tered ideal of righteousness itself prepared the way for the second line of thought traceable in our Lord s teaching on the subject, viz., that righteousness is one of the blessings to be bestowed in the king dom. For this there was an Old Testa ment basis. The prophets had predicted that the lawgiving function of Jehovah s kingship would enter upon a new stage in the Messianic age. According to The Sphere of Righteousness 115 Jeremiah God will then write his law upon the hearts of the people, xxxi. 33. According to Ezekiel he will make Israel to walk in his statutes, xxxvi. 27. The prophecies in the second part of Isaiah s book promise an impartation of righteous ness to the people of God as a result of a new marvelous disclosure of Jehovah s own righteousness in the future. Jesus, who derived so many evangelical ideas from the last-mentioned source, may have had these prophecies in mind, when in the Sermon on the Mount he spoke of such as hunger and thirst after righteous ness, Is. Iv. 1. At any rate the other beatitudes show that the state of mind here described is a receptive rather than a productive one. The hungering and thirsting stand on a line with the poor and the meek, they are conscious of not possessing the desired good in them selves and look to God for supplying it. When they are satisfied, this is due not to their own effort but to an act of God. 1 1 6 The Kingdom and the Chiirch The same thought is indirectly expressed in the " seeking " of righteousness com manded in Matt. vi. 33. In the parable of the Pharisee and publican the term " justification " is applied to an acceptance of man by God not based on self-right eous works, but on penitence and trust in the divine mercy. It would be historically unwarranted to read into these utterances the whole doctrine of the imputed righteousness of Christ. It was impossible for Jesus to develop this doctrine with any degree of explicitness, because it was to be based on his own atoning death, which still lay in the future. Our Lord speaks of a state of righteousness before God to be con ferred as a part of the coming kingdom. How far this will be done by imputation, how far it will also be done by changing the heart and life of men so as to pro duce works which God will be able in principle to approve in his judgment, which of these two will be the basis of The Sphere of Righteousness 1 1 7 the other is not clearly explained. Our Lord s doctrine is the bud in which the two conceptions of a righteousness im puted and a righteousness embodied in the sanctified life of the believer still lie enclosed together. Still it should not be overlooked, that in more than one re spect Jesus prepared the way for Paul by enunciating principles to which the latter s teaching could attach itself. He emphasized that in the pursuit of right eousness the satisfaction of God should be man s supreme concern. This, car ried out to its ultimate consequences with reference to sinful man, could not but lead to the conception of a righteousness provided by God himself in the perfect life and atoning death of Christ. He also affirmed that the righteousness re quired of the disciples was of an infinitely higher kind than that possessed by the Scribes and Pharisees, something as new and unprecedented as the kingdom itself, and thus raised the problem as to how this 1 1 8 The Kingdom and the Church unique standing before God was to be acquired. Still further, he gave to un derstand that this righteousness was at tainable by the disciples only, so that it must be held to rest on a previous state of acceptance by God, determined by his fatherhood and grace. The third representation connects the kingdom with righteousness practised in this life as a reward. Here obviously the kingdom denotes not the kingship of God, but the entire complex of resulting blessings, and that as they will be be stowed in the last day. Thus in Matt, v. 20, the possession of a righteousness exceeding that of the Scribes and Phari sees appears as a prerequisite for enter ing the kingdom. The same idea un derlies the numerous passages that speak of a future reward. It has been asserted that Jesus retained this whole line of thought, because he had not fully eman cipated himself from the fundamental error of Judaism, according to which The Sphere of Righteousness 1 1 9 everything in religion revolved around the ideas of merit and reward. The charge, if well-founded, would be a se rious one, for the principle in question, far from appearing in isolated sayings only, prevades the entire teaching of Jesus. The disciple s life is depicted throughout as a labor in the vineyard, at the plow, in the harvest-field, in the household. Treasures can be laid up in heaven. In order to solve this difficulty it is necessary sharply to distinguish. The first thing to remember is that we have no right to declare the desire for re ward as a motive in ethical conduct unworthy of a high standard of morality and therefore unworthy of the better element in our Lord s own teaching. This would be the case only, if it figured as the only or the supreme motive, and if other motives of a disinterested God- centered kind did not exist side by side with or above it. If our Lord appealed 1 20 The Kingdom and the Church to the fear of punishment as a deterrent from evil, why should he not have ap pealed to the desire for blessedness and reward as an incentive to the good? May we not believe that Jesus himself was strengthened in enduring his suffer ing by the prospect of the promised glory ? cf. Heb. xii. 2. Does anybody think that in his case this interfered in the least with his making it his meat and his drink to do the Father s will ? Secondly, it should be emphasized that the stimulus afforded by the promise of reward need not appeal to the lower, sensual instincts, as but too often it did in the Jewish mind, but may equally well address itself to the highest, spiritual de sires. In this respect our Lord s teach ing moves on the highest conceivable plane. The pure in heart shall see God, those that hunger and thirst after right eousness shall be completely satisfied with the same, the peacemakers shall be called sons of God. These second clauses The Sphere of Righteousness 1 2 1 in the beatitudes describe the essence of the final kingdom in which the reward will consist. They show, therefore, that the reward towards which Jesus points his followers is not something morally or spiritually indifferent, but the highest enjoyment of what here already consti tutes the natural blessedness pertaining to the internal kingdom. Thus the re ward bears an organic relation to the conduct it is intended to crown. Still further, we must observe that there is a fundamental difference between the manner in which Judaism conceived of the principle of reward and Jesus conception of the same as regards the necessity with which this principle was believed to operate. According to the Jews this was a legal necessity ; the ful filment of the law being inherently worthy of and entitled to the reward following it. Hence also there existed between the two a ratio of strict equiva lence, so much being given for so much. 122 The Kingdom and the Chitrch Jesus plainly taught that between God and man no such commercial relation can exist, not merely because this is im possible on account of man s sin, but for the deeper reason, that God s absolute sovereignty precludes it even under the conditions of human rectitude, because God as God is entitled, apart from every contract or stipulation of reward, to all the service or obedience man can render. The disciples are " unprofitable serv ants," even after they have done every thing required of them, Lk. xvii. 10. They are " unprofitable " not in the sense that their labors are useless, but in the sense that they can do no more for God their owner, than he can naturally ex pect of them. In the parable, the talents, for the increase of which the servants are rewarded, are not originally their own but entrusted to them by their Lord. As a result the relation of pure equiva lence between what is done and what is received is entirely abolished. The The Sphere of Righteousness 1 23 reward will far exceed the righteousness which precedes it. He that is faithful over a few things will be set over many things, nay over all things, Matt. xxiv. 47; xxv. 21, 23. He who receives a prophet or a righteous man obtains a re ward as great as that of the prophet and the righteous men, Matt. x. 41, 42. Restitution will be a hundredfold for things given up, Mk. x. 30. And the parable of the laborers in the vineyard teaches that in its ultimate analysis the re ward is a free gift, whence also the one who has labored but a little while can receive the full wages, Matt. xx. 1-16 ; cf. Lk. xvii. 10. We see, therefore, that Jesus, though giving a large place to the idea of reward in his teaching, keeps this idea in strict subordination to the two higher princi ples of the divine sovereignty and the divine grace, in other words to the di vine kingship and the divine fatherhood. In the latter respect as well as in the 1 24 The Kingdom and the Ch^lrch former the relation between God and the disciples does not admit of the giving or receiving of rewards on the strictly commercial basis. The Father, as Father, gives to the little flock the kingdom, and in general bestows good gifts upon his children. What can be called wages from one point of view is a gracious gift from another, cf. Matt. v. 46 with Lk. vi. 32, 35. The reward serves simply the purpose of affording an incentive to the disciples zeal. Though the king dom itself is inherited by all, and inherited by grace, there will be individual degrees in the glory which it involves for each disciple, because the ultimate issue can not but be determined by the progress in righteousness made here below. CHAPTER VIII The Essence of the Kingdom con tinued : The Kingdom as a State of Blessedness have already seen, that not the thought of man s welfare, but that of the glory of God was supreme in our Lord s teaching concern ing the kingdom. While emphasizing this, we must not forget, however, that to him this thought was inseparably con nected with the idea of the greatest conceivable blessedness for man. That God should reign was in his view so much the only natural, normal state of 125 1 26 The Kingdom and the Church things, that he could not conceive of any true happiness apart from it, nor of it without a concomitant state of happi ness for those who give to God the first and the highest place. This is in general the connection between the kingship of God as a rule over man, and the king dom of God as a possession for man, a connection not obscurely indicated in the saying, Matt. vi. 33. With the king ship of God all other things must come, for, as Paul later expressed it : "If God be for us, who shall be against us ? " That this thought is not more fre quently and more directly formulated admits of easy explanation. In deriv ing the state of blessedness from the character and will of God it was so natural to think of the divine father hood as its source, that the reference to God s kingship would scarcely sug gest itself. Accordingly we find that the kingdom as a state of blessedness is represented as the Father s gift to the A State of Blessedness 127 little flock rather than that of the King, Lk. xii. 32; cf. also Matt. xx. 32. It was quite possible, however, to reach the idea of blessedness by way of direct inference from that of the divine king ship. The Oriental king often bestows with royal munificence all manner of gifts upon his subjects. Illustrations of this both from sacred and other history will easily occur. Thus Jesus also speaks of the kingdom under the figure of a banquet prepared by the king as a mar riage feast for his son, Matt. xxii. 2. Nor should it be forgotten that the kingdom had been for Israel the instru ment of gracious help in times of dis tress and a source of great national pros perity. The kingship had been in its ideal intent, and to some extent, at least in its better days, also in effect a demo cratic institution, to which the poor and the oppressed and miserable looked for aid and protection. There was there fore an easy transition from the idea of128 The Kingdom and the Church kingship to that of grace and salva tion. The inestimable value of the kingdom from man s point of view finds clearest expression in the parable of the treasure in the field and the pearl of great price. In both cases it is emphasized that the finder sells all his possessions in order to secure this one transcendent good, cf. Matt. xix. 12 ; Mk. ix. 43-47 ; Lk. xviii. 29. That God himself regards the king dom in this light appears from the fact of his having prepared it for his own from eternity, Matt. xxv. 34. The prepara tion from eternity shows, that the king dom is the supreme embodiment of the divine gracious purpose. Hence also the kingdom is said to be "inherited." Be cause the kingdom thus includes all that is truly valuable and precious, our Lord in connection with the kingdom-parables pronounces the disciples blessed who see and hear the truth concerning it. In do ing this they are brought into immediate A State of Blessedness 129 contact with the fulfilment of all the Old Testament promises. What many proph ets and righteous men in vain desired to see and hear, is theirs in actual possession, Matt. xiii. 16, 17. Looked at concretely, the blessings in which the kingdom consists are partly negative, partly positive in charac ter. Negatively, the kingdom includes the deliverance from all evil. Fore most among the blessings pertaining to this side stands the forgiveness of sins. Prophecy had already spoken of this as an important element in the blessedness of the Messianic age, Jer. xxxi. 34. That Jesus considered this not merely as a prep aration for the kingdom, but counted it of the very substance of the same may be seen from Matt, xviii. 23 ff., where the kingdom of heaven is likened unto a cer tain king, who graciously forgives the debt of his servant and releases him. Hence also the sequence in the Lord s Prayer, where the petition for the com- 130 The Kingdom and the Church ing of the kingdom is followed first by that for the accomplishment of the will of God and next by that for the forgive ness of debts. Positively there corre sponds to this the gift of righteousness, which cannot but carry with itself a sense of the highest spiritual delight and satis faction for those who obtain it. The mind relieved from the burden of sin and assured of the divine acceptance enters upon a state of profound peace and rest, Matt. xi. 28, 29 ; Mk. v. 34 ; Lk. vii. 50. The positive side of the blessedness re ceived in the kingdom is chiefly described in the two important conceptions of son- ship and of life. On these, therefore, we must briefly dwell at this point. While the two attributes of kingship and fatherhood mark two distinct elements in Jesus conception of God, he certainly did not place them wide apart, much less regard them as intrinsically opposed to each other. The ease with which he passes over from the one to the other, A State of Blessedness 131 e. g., in the opening words of the Lord s Prayer, shows that to his mind the two are perfectly harmonious attributes of the divine nature. There is a sense in which the effects of God s fatherhood can bej subsumed under the kingdom-idea. As on the one hand the kingship might frequently originate through extension of the patriarchal authority beyond the lim its of the tribe, so on the other hand the king could continue to sustain the relation of a father to his people. In point of fact the Old Testament represents Je hovah as by one and the same act becom ing Israel s King and Israel s Father, viz., by the deliverance of the exodus, Ex. iv. 22 ; Deut. xxxii. 6 ; Isa. xliii. 15. That the place which belongs to son- ship as one of the blessings of the king dom is not always recognized with suffi cient clearness finds its explanation in a widely current misunderstanding of our Lord s teaching on sonship. He is fre quently interpreted as teaching the in- 132 The Kingdom and the Church discriminate sonship of all men. Sonship then would be something which did not in any sense originate with the redemp tive relation to God or with the kingdom of God. It is easy here to go to an ex treme as well in absolutely denying as in indiscriminately affirming that our Lord made men the sons of God by nature. Some of his utterances, like the parable of the prodigal son, plainly imply that notwithstanding the sinner s estrange ment from God a filial relationship con tinues to exist. The whole trend of his teaching is that redemption restores what has been disturbed by sin. But, granting this, we must not overlook two important considerations which would inevitably lead him to emphasize the newness of the sonship which is enjoyed in the re demptive state. On the one hand, Jesus had too profound a knowledge of the se riousness of sin not to recognize that it must render man unworthy and incapable of sonship in the full, original sense. On A State of Blessedness 133 the other hand, he had also too high a conception of the transcendent perfection of the kingdom not to find in it in this respect as well as in others something that would far surpass any religious priv ilege that man could call his own by nature. The kingdom neutralizes the effects of sin, but it does far more than this. It carries man to the highest limit of knowledge and love and service and enjoyment of God of which he is capable, and nothing less than the attainment of this our Lord associates with the term "sonship." The words recorded in Lk. xx. 36, " They are equal unto the angels ; and are sons of God, being sons of the resurrection/ suffice to show that sonship to God appeared to him as the acme rather than as the common level of re ligious privilege, cf. also Matt. v. 9. And not only the sonship of man, even the fatherhood of God admits of this high and exclusive application. For Jesus constantly speaks to the disciples of " your 134 The Kingdom and tJie Church Father," Matt. vi. 32. " The Father " in the Synoptical Gospels always denotes God in relation to " the Son/ i. e., Jesus specifically. In the Fourth Gospel, where "The Father" is also used with reference to the disciples generally, this is not based on a conception of universal fatherhood, but on the thought that the relation originally existing between God and Jesus is extended to the disciples likewise. This, therefore, is the most emphatic assertion of the unique value of sonship. And this value was not confined in our Lord s estimation to the moral sphere, as one-sided modern representa tions sometimes make out. Sonship in volves more than moral likeness to God, although this is of course one of its chief elements. Its rich religious meaning may be best perceived from the jubilant words in which Jesus speaks of his own filial relation to the Father, Matt. xi. 27, which, while unique in one sense, must yet bear a general resemblance to A State of Blessedness 135 the sonship of the disciples. The most perfect mutual knowledge, the most di rect communion of life, the most absolute unity of purpose, the joint possession of consummate blessedness and peace be tween God and man, all this forms part of the sonship in which the kingdom consists. The highest gift that can be bestowed on the pure in heart is that in the final kingdom they shall have the beatific filial vision of God face to face. The second comprehensive term by which Jesus describes the blessedness of the kingdom is that of life. The Old Testament idea of life has for its promi nent characteristics not so much the ele ments of growth and activity but rather those of prosperity and happiness in the possession of the favor of God. To this our Lord in his Synoptical teaching in the main adheres ; only, in harmony with the prevailing Jewish usage, he projects the idea into the future, life being here 136 The Kingdom and the Chtirch equivalent to the sum total of the bless ings and enjoyments of the final kingdom. Still even in the Synoptical teaching we find life occasionally spoken of as a pres ent religious possession, and, therefore, as in its very essence a spiritual state, Matt. viii. 22 ; Lk. xv. 24, 32 ; xx. 38. A present kingdom necessarily carries with itself a present enjoyment of life. And in the same degree as this is the case life also tends to become a life in the sub jective sense of the word, a name for the believer s spiritual growth and activity, something to be " lived" as well as "inherited." In the discourses of the Fourth Gospel we can clearly observe how our Lord developes the idea in these two directions. His classical definition of life is found in the so-called high- priestly prayer : to know the only true God, and him whom he did send, even Jesus Christ, Jno. xvii. 3. The knowl edge of God here spoken of is, of course, something which in principle A State of Blessedness 137 is already imparted in the present, although its consummate possession still lies in the future. It is a knowledge which is far more than mere intellectual cognition : it includes that practical ac quaintance, that affectionate apprehen sion, which arise from congeniality of nature and the highest spiritual love. Hence what introduces into it is not a process of instruction, but a birth from above, or a re-birth, whereby the funda mental character is changed, so that from flesh, which naturally lives for this lower, earthly, sensual world, it becomes spirit, which naturally lives for the world of heaven and for God. Because Jesus is the personal representative and em bodiment of this heavenly life on earth, he is the way unto God, Jno. xiv. 6.xiv. 6. We see, therefore, how thoroughly this life, which constitutes man s blessed possession of the kingdom, is dominated by the thought of communion with God, 138 The Kingdom and the Church as its chief source of enjoyment. In principle, however, the same thing is implied in some of the Synoptical say ings cited above, which approach the conception of life as something to be developed in man. When the prod igal in his hunger remembers the riches of his Father s house, he is said to have "come to himself." His return to the Father is described as a change from death into life : " This thy brother was dead, and is alive again, and was lost and is found," Lk. xv. 32. Thus the re- adoption to sonship and the restoration to life are seen to coincide. If Jesus found in both the essence of the king dom-privilege and kingdom-blessedness, which can be enjoyed on earth, we cannot doubt, that he also regarded them as supreme among the treasures and delights of the final kingdom. As the point of departure for his kingdom- conception lay in God, in the active ex ercise of God s royal sway, so its point A State of Blessedness 139 of arrival lies in God, in God s gift of himself to man for everlasting possession. It is the teaching of Jesus, as well as of Paul, that from God and through God and unto God are all things. CHAPTER IX The Kingdom and the Church rHE conception of the kingdom is common to all periods of our Lord s teaching, that of the church emerges only at two special points of his ministry as recorded in Matt. xvi. 18 and xviii. 17. The second of these two passages refers to the church quite incidentally, and, even if it speaks of the Christian church and not, as some have thought, of the Jewish ecclesiastical or ganization, throws no further light on the conception. The first on the other hand deals with the church for the ex- 140 The Church 141 press purpose of introducing it as some thing new, of describing its character and defining its relation to the kingdom. We are fortunate in having so explicit a statement of our Lord on this important matter. The subject should, of course, be approached historically. We must ask ourselves what there was in the situation of that particular juncture of our Lord s ministry that will account for this solitary and significant declaration about the church. Simon Peter had just made his important confession, " Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God/ Our Lord thereupon announces that upon Peter, as the first confessor of his Messiahship in the face of the unbelief of the majority of the people, he will build his church, his eccksia. The sup position is not that Peter has here for the first time reached this conviction regard ing the Messianic dignity of Jesus, nor even that here for the first time utter ance was given to such conviction. Un- 142 The Kingdom and the Church less we must disbelieve all our Gospels, both had taken place on earlier occasions. But the momentous significance of the present confession lay in this, that it was made at a juncture where many, who had previously followed Jesus, had for saken him. It is the rock-character, the steadfastness of Peter that is praised by Jesus, that, when others wavered, he had remained true to his conviction. The revelation he had received from the Father in heaven was not the first disclo sure of Jesus Messiahship, but a revela tion which enabled him, in distinction from the multitude, to discern in Jesus the true attributes of Messiahship, not withstanding the outward appearance to the contrary. Peter s confession, therefore, was dis tinctly a confession which stood in con trast with the rejection of Jesus by others. From this we may gather, that the church of which Jesus speaks will have for its peculiarity the recognition of the The Church 143 Messiahship of Jesus in contradistinction from the denial of this Messiahship by those without. But this follows not only from the situation in which the words were spoken, we may also draw the same conclusion from the tenor of the words themselves. When Jesus says "I will build my church/ he evi dently places this church over against another, to which this designation does not apply. The word Ecclesia is the rendering of the Hebrew words Qahal and Edah, which latter were the standing names for the congregation of Israel. In such a connection "my church " can mean nothing else than " the church which by recognizing me as Messiah will take the place of the present Jewish church." It would be a mistake, however, to suppose that the new church will rest exclusively on a subjective belief regard ing the Messiahship of Jesus. Our Lord says emphatically " I will build/ and 1 44 The Kingdom and the Church thereby appropriates for himself the objective task of calling this church into existence by his Messianic acts. Though Peter confessing be the foundation, the church is not of Peter s or of any human making, the Lord himself will build it. And not only this, he will supremely rule in it, for out of the fulness of his authority he immediately proceeds to in vest Peter with the power of the keys : "I will give unto thee." Objectively con sidered, therefore, the church is that new congregation taking the place of the old congregation of Israel, which is formed by Jesus as the Messiah and stands under his Messianic rule. Even this, however, does not fully ex haust the import of our Lord s statement. It will be noticed, that he refers both the building of the church and the ex ercise of his authority with regard to it to the future : " I will build " and " I will give." At the present time of speaking the church is not yet ; if its The Church 145 origin and government depend on the Messiahship of Jesus, then clearly this Messiahship must here be taken in a specific sense, the realization of which also still lay in the future. Our Lord can refer to nothing else than the new exalted, heavenly state upon which his person and work would enter through his death and resurrection and seating at the right hand of God. In order to understand this we must remember that Jesus, while in one sense conscious of having Messianic authority and doing Messianic work already here on earth, yet in another sense regarded the exer cise of his Messianic function as begin ning with his state of glory. It was en tirely in harmony with Jesus own point of view when Peter later declared that God by the resurrection had made him both Lord and Christ, Acts ii. 36. Now in this sense we can say that according to our Lord s teaching the church could not begin until after he should have en- J 146 The Kingdom and the Church tered upon the exalted stage of his Messiahship. That Jesus speaking in terms of the future has reference to this and nothing else, may also be gathered from the following fact: The Evan gelist tells us that from that announce ment concerning the church onward, Jesus began to show unto his disciples that he must go unto Jerusalem, and suffer many things of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and the third day be raised up, Matt, xvi. 21. Plainly then in his mind there was a connection between the results of his suffering and the origin of the church. So far we have considered our Lord s words exclusively in their reference to the church and not inquired into their bearing upon the doctrine of the king dom. We now observe, that the church, here for the first time formally intro duced, is most closely related to the king dom, which had hitherto occupied the The Church 147 foremost place in Jesus teaching. For immediately after the declaration con cerning the building of the church, our Lord continues to say unto Peter : " I will give unto thee the keys of the king dom of heaven ; and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven ; and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven," vs. 19. It would not be impossible, of course, to give a plausible interpretation of this connection on the view, that the church and the kingdom are separate things. Understanding the kingdom as the final kingdom, and the power of the keys as the power to give or deny en trance, the sense might be that to Peter, as the foundation of the church, and therefore to the church, had been given the power in some way or other to open or shut the gates of the heavenly king dom. On this view the church would be distinct from the kingdom as here spoken of, would indeed stand related to 148 The Kingdom and the Church it as a gate-keeper stands to a house. This is, however, scarcely a possible ex egesis so far as the words of the second declaration themselves are concerned. The binding and loosing do not refer to heaven itself, as if heaven were shut or opened, but refer to certain things lying within the sphere of heaven, and not of heaven alone but of earth likewise. The figure of binding and loosing will have to be understood in a different sense. We have the choice between in terpreting it of the binding and loosing of sin, i. e. the imputation and forgive ness of sin, and interpreting it as an in stance of the common Jewish parlance which employed " to bind " in the sense of " to forbid/ " to loose " in the sense of "to allow/* The former might seem to be favored by Matt, xviii. 18, where the same expressions occur and the connection leads us to think of the process of church discipline. In Matt, xvi, on the other hand, there is nothing The Church 149 to indicate that the figure has this re stricted sense, on the contrary, everything points to the most generalizing inter pretation that can be put upon it. The keys spoken of are in all probability not the keys of the outer door, but the keys pertaining to the .entire Jdouse, the keys not of the gate-keeper, but of the house- steward, and therefore symbolize the ad ministration of the affairs of the house in general, cf. Isa. xxii. 22 ; Rev. iii. 7. But, whichever of these two last men tioned views we may adopt, in either case the kingdom of heaven appears as something existing, in part at least, on earth. Peter receives the keys of the kingdom to bind or loose on earth. What he does in the administration of the kingdom here below will be recog nized in heaven. Now this promise immediately following the declaration concerning Peter as the foundation rock of the church, it becomes necessary to assume that in Jesus view these two 150 The Kingdom and the Church are identified. The force of this will be felt by observing that in the two state ments made the figure is essentially the same, viz., that of the house. First the house is represented as in process of build ing, and Peter as the foundation, then the same house appears as completed and Peter as invested with the keys for ad ministering its affairs. It is plainly ex cluded that the house should mean one thing in the first statement and another in the second. It must be possible, this much we may confidently affirm, to call the church the kingdom. It is another question, to which we shall presently re vert, whether the kingdom can under all circumstances be identified with the church. The kingdom as the church bears the features of a community of men. It ap pears as a house. This character be longed to the Old Testament church for which that of Jesus is substituted, it also finds expression in the very name ecclesia, The Church 151 which designates the assembly of free citizens called together to deliberate and take action in matters pertaining to the commonwealth. There are traces in Jesus earlier teaching of his having viewed the kingdom under this aspect as an organism of men, although the rep resentation is by no means prominent. Sayings like Matt. xx. 25 ; Mk. ix. 35 ; Lk. xx. 25, at least suggest the idea of the kingdom as a society based on a totally different principle from that governing the kingdoms of this world. In point of fact, Jesus gathered around himself a company of disciples, and it is plausible to assume that he found in their mutual association the beginning of what the kingdom of God was from its very na ture intended to be. The two parables of the wheat and the tares and of the fish-net equally imply the thought that the kingdom is an aggregate of men, though their point does not lie in this thought as such, but in the inevitable in- 152 The Kingdom and the Church termingling of the good and bad until the end. The nearest approach to the later declaration about the church occurs in the expression "his kingdom " of Matt. xiii. 41. This " kingdom of the Son of man " agrees with the " church of Jesus/ in that both phrases make the kingdom a body of men placed under the Messiah as their ruler. From the foregoing it appears, that, if the church represents an advance be yond the internal, invisible kingdom, which had hitherto figured so largely in our Lord s teaching, the advance must be sought in something else than the mere fact of its being a body of disciples. The advance lies in two points. In the first place, the body of disciples pre viously existing must now take the place of the Old Testament church and there fore receive some form of external or ganization. This the kingdom had not hitherto possessed. It had been in ternal and invisible not merely in its es- The Church 153 sence, but to this essence there had been lacking the outward embodiment. Jesus now in speaking of the house and the keys of the house, of binding and loosing on earth, and of church discipline, makes provision for this. In the second place, our Lord gives to understand that the new stage upon which his Messiah- ship is now about to enter, will bring to the kingdom a new influx of super natural power and thus make out of it, not only externally but also internally, that new thing which he calls his church. It is possible to find this referred to in the words about the gates of Hades, which immediately follow the Lord s declaration that he will build his church. According to some, these words imply a conflict between Hades as the realm of death and the church as the sphere of life. They then would mean that death will not be able to conquer the church, or that the church will be able to con quer death, and the ground for this 154 The Kingdom and the Church promise would be that Jesus will soon win a victory over death and fill his church with unconquerable life, Rev. i. 18. Probably, however, the correct ren dering is " the gates of Hades shall not surpass it." The gates of Hades seem to have been a figure for the highest conceivable strength, because no one can break through them. On this rendering our Lord simply means to say that the church will not be excelled in strength by the strongest that is known ; the fig ure is a further elaboration of the idea that the church is built upon a rock. There are, however, other sayings be longing to the same closing period of our Lord s ministry, in which he predicts the coming of the kingdom with a new, previously unknown power. In Matt. xvi. 28 ; Mk. ix. 1 ; Lk. ix. 27 ; Matt. xxvi. 64 ; Mk. xiv. 62 ; Lk. xxii. 69, Jesus speaks of a coming of the Son of man in his kingdom, of a coming of the kingdom of God with power, which The Church 155 will take place in the near future, so that some of the people then living will wit ness it. A common way of interpreting these sayings is to refer them to the final coming of the kingdom at the end of the world. Those, however, who adopt this view, must assume that our Lord was mistaken as to the nearness of the event in question and hence give up the infalli bility of his teaching. Another exegesis is quite possible. We can interpret these sayings of the coming of the kingdom in the church. The strong terms in which they are clothed do not absolutely forbid this. It must be acknowledged that these terms resemble the language in which elsewhere the final coming of the king dom is spoken of. It is a coming of the kingdom with power, a coming of Jesus in his kingdom, even a coming of Jesus with the clouds of heaven. But these expressions become more easily explain able, if we endeavor to realize what the 156 The Kingdom and the Church church in her first appearance was to be, and how the immediate future presented itself to Jesus from his own personal point of view. In the early church there were to be many extraordinary manifestations of the Spirit s power, so extraordinary indeed as to anticipate in some respects the phenomena that will be observed at the end of the world. And, even apart from this, the presence of the Spirit in the church in its more ordinary form of operation is something sufficiently marvelous and stupendous to justify the strong terms employed. The church actually has within herself the powers of the world to come. She is more than the immanent kingdom as it existed before Jesus exaltation. She forms an intermediate link between the present life and the life of eternity. Here we can best observe how thoroughly supernaturalistic our Lord s conception of the church-form of the kingdom is. And our Lord looked upon the appear- The Church 157 ance of this church from a point of view that was peculiarly his own. He was to be its Lord and King. Now to him there was not that sharp division be tween the church-kingdom and the final kingdom which there is for us who live on earth. For him the consummation of the kingdom in which all is fulfilled began with his resurrection and ascension. It is therefore not unnatural that he should speak of this approaching state in terms, which, in themselves considered, might make us think of the final coming of the kingdom. Besides these passages we have the statement of Matt, xviii. 20, in which our Lord promises to be present in the midst of his disciples in a peculiar man ner, and which throws light upon the idea of a coming of his which shall pre cede the final coming. But especially do the Saviour s last discourses preserved for us in the Gospel according to John afford us help in apprehending his 158 The Kingdom and the Church meaning on this point. Here he plainly represents himself as coming to the dis ciples in the Spirit, and that in a way quite distinct from the manner in which he will come at the end of the world. It is a coming which the disciples will witness, whilst to others he will not re veal himself. It cannot be said to refer to the bodily appearances of Jesus after the resurrection, for it is intended to re sult in an abiding presence. Here, there fore, we have something quite analogous to the Synoptical statements previously quoted, the only difference being that the conception of the kingdom itself is wanting here as elsewhere in John. From what has been said it appears that every view which would keep the kingdom and the church separate as two entirely distinct spheres is not in harmony with the trend of our Lord s teaching. The church is a form which the kingdom assumes in result of the new stage upon which the Messiahship of Jesus enters The Church 159 with his death and resurrection. So far as extent of membership is concerned, Jesus plainly leads us to identify the in visible church and the kingdom. It is impossible to be in the one without being in the other. We have our Lord s ex plicit declaration in Jno. iii. 3, 5, to the effect that nothing less than the new birth can enable man to see the kingdom or enter into it. The kingdom, there fore, as truly as the invisible church is constituted by the regenerate ; the re generate alone experience in themselves its power, cultivate its righteousness, enjoy its blessings. It is, of course, quite possible, while recognizing this identity of extent, to make distinctions as to the point of view from which the regenerate are called the kingdom and the church. Various attempts in this direction have been made. It may be said that the kingdom designates believers in their re lation to God as ruler, the church be lievers in their separateness from the160 The Kingdom and the Church world and their organic union with one another. Or, that the church designates believers in their attitude of worship to wards God, the kingdom, believers in their ethical activities towards one an other. Or again, that the church desig nates the people of God from the point of view of their calling to be God s in strument in preparing the way for and introducing the ideal order of things, the kingdom, the same people of God so far as they possess the ideal order in princi ple realized among themselves. These and similar distinctions have their doc trinal usefulness and are unobjectionable, so long as they do not obscure the fact that the kingdom, as well as the church, is circumscribed by the line of regenera tion, and that the invisible church itself is that which determines its inner es sence, its relation to God and Christ, a true kingdom, since it consists of those over whom the Messiah rules as the rep resentative of God. The Church 161 But what about the relation of the visible church to the kingdom ? Here again we must first of all insist upon it, that our Lord looked upon the visible church as a veritable embodiment of his kingdom. Precisely because the invisible church realizes the kingship of God, the visible church must likewise partake of this character. We have seen that the power of binding and loosing given to the church is described under the figure of the keys of the kingdom of heaven. Our Lord in conferring this power acts in the capacity of King over the visible church. In Matt. xiii. 41 the kingdom of the Son of man, out of which the an gels in the last day will remove all things that cause stumbling and them that do iniquity, is nothing else but the visible church. The visible church is con stituted by the enthronement of Christ as the King of glory. Out of the fulness of his royal authority he gave immediately before ascending the great commission 1 62 The Kingdom and the Church to preach the gospel and disciple the nations and instituted the sacrament of baptism. We must say, therefore, that ( the kingdom-forces which are at work, the kingdom-life which exists in the in visible sphere, find expression in the kingdom-organism of the visible church. c That Christ is King in this church and all authority exercised within any church- body derives from him is an important principle of church government, which those who endeavor to distinguish be tween the kingdom of God and the visible church do not always sufficiently keep in mind. From this, however, it does not neces sarily follow, that the visible church is the only outward expression of the in visible kingdom. Undoubtedly the kingship of God, as his recognized and applied supremacy, is intended to pervade and control the whole of human life in all its forms of existence. This the par able of the leaven plainly teaches. These The Church 163 various forms of human life have each their own sphere in which they work and embody themselves. There is a sphere of science, a sphere of art, a sphere of the family and of the state, a sphere of commerce and industry. Whenever one of these spheres comes under the controlling influence of the principle of the divine supremacy and glory, and this outwardly reveals itself, there we can truly say that the kingdom of God has become manifest. Now our Lord in his teaching seldom makes explicit reference to these things. He contented himself with laying down the great religious and moral principles which ought to govern the life of man in every sphere. Their detailed application it was not his work to show. But we may safely affirm two things. On the one hand, his doctrine of the kingdom was founded on such a profound and broad conviction of the absolute supremacy of God in all things, that he could not but look upon every 164 The Kingdom and the Church normal and legitimate province of human life as intended to form part of God s kingdom. On the other hand, it was not his intention that this result should be reached by making human life in all its spheres subject to the visible church. It is true that under the Old Covenant something of this nature had existed. In the theocracy the church had domi nated the life of the people of God in all its extent. State and church were in it most intimately united. Jesus on more than one occasion gave to understand that in this respect at least the conditions of the Old Covenant were not to be per petuated, cf. Matt. xxii. 21 ; Jno. xviii. 36 ; xix. 11. And what is true of the relation between church and state, may also be applied to the relation be tween the visible church and the various other branches into which the organic life of humanity divides itself. It is en tirely in accordance with the spirit of Jesus teaching to subsume these under The Church 165 the kingdom of God and to co-ordinate them with the visible church as true manifestations of this kingdom, in so far as the divine sovereignty and glory have become in them the controlling prin ciple. But it must always be remenv bered, that the latter can only happen, when all these, no less than the visible church, stand in living contact with the forces of regeneration supernaturally in troduced into the world by the Spirit of God. While it is proper to separate be tween the visible church and such things as the Christian state, Christian art, Chris tian science, etc., these things, if they truly belong to the kingdom of God, grow up out of the regenerated life of the invisible church. As already stated, this is a subject on which our Lord s teaching does not bring any explicit disclosures and which can only be treated by way of inference. It has sometimes been thought that the parables of the wheat and the tares and 1 66 The Kingdom and the Church of the fish-net contain an explicit declara tion concerning the kingdom as a wider sphere than the church. This is assumed, because these parables imply that in the kingdom the good and the evil are to be allowed to intermingle, which cannot be the rule in the church, as the obligation r to exercise church discipline plainly shows. Historically interpreted, how ever, these parables do not warrant such an inference. The current doctrine of the kingdom, shared up to that point by the disciples, assumed that the very first act of God at the coming of the kingdom would consist in an absolute and eternal separation between the good and the evil. This assumption was natural so long as no distinction between the two stages of the history of the kingdom had been made. When Jesus introduced this distinction, it became necessary to emphasize that not everything which was true of the final appearance of the king dom could therefore also be predicated The Church 167 of its present, invisible mode of coming. As a warning to this effect these two parables must be interpreted. Our Lord desires to make plain that, while the kingdom is now actually com ing, a complete separation between the evil and the good cannot be effected until the end of the world. During the pres ent age the kingdom must partake of the limitations and imperfections to which a sinful environment exposes it. Of the church, as the externally organized king dom, this is eminently true. It exists upon the field of the world. At no time until the very last will it be entirely puri fied of all evil elements. This truth, however, in no wise interferes with the possibility nor absolves from the duty of church discipline. The process to which our Lord refers in Matt, xviii. 17 is not intended for effecting an absolute sepa ration between the good and the evil, and thus rendering the church as ideally pure as she will be in the final state of the 1 68 The Kingdom and the Church kingdom. Its proximate end is the self- preservation of the church in that state of holiness which befits her profession, and would be destroyed by the exercise of religious fellowship with such as re main unrepentant in the face of open sin. Its ulterior end is remedial, consisting in the salvation of the sinner thus left to himself. Both ends can be pursued without forgetting or denying the lesson taught in the parables, that it is not given to men to judge the heart, and that God alone in the day of judgment will infal libly remove from the church all elements which, while simulating its outward ap pearance, do not belong to it in the inner spiritual reality. CHAPTER X The Entrance into the Kingdom : Repentance and Faith ~~1ROM the beginning our Lord s fi announcement of the nearness of the kingdom was linked with the demand for repentance and faith, Matt. iv. 17 ; Mk. i. 15. This was not acci dental, but an inevitable result from the nature of the kingdom. Repentance and faith are simply the two main aspects of the kingdom, righteousness and the saving grace of God, translated into terms of subjective human experience. Be cause the kingdom is in its very essence a 169 1 70 The Kingdom and the Church kingdom of righteousness, therefore it is impossible for any one to be truly in it without having previously repented. Because the kingdom intrinsically con sists in the exercise of the divine saving grace and power, therefore it requires in every one who is to share its benefits that responsive and receptive attitude towards these divine attributes which is called faith. The relation of repentance to the king dom is strikingly defined in Matthew s version of the parable of the marriage feast, xxii. 1-14. Comparing this with the form in which our Lord uttered the same parable on a previous occasion, ac cording to Lk. xiv. 16-24, we find among other changes the significant touch added of the man without a wed ding garment. It is plain from the na ture of the invitation, that what this wedding garment stands for is not to be regarded as in any way entitling the bearer to a place at the feast. Those Repentance and Faith 171 who come are taken from the highways and hedges, from the streets and lanes of the city and compelled to enter. They are received, therefore, without merit on their part, on the principle of free grace. Nevertheless, when once within, it is in dispensable that they should wear the garment appropriate to the occasion. Thus repentance and righteousness, while they do not in any meritorious sense earn the benefits of the kingdom, are yet indispensable concomitants of the state in which alone these benefits can be received. Our Lord s idea of repentance is as profound and comprehensive as his con ception of righteousness. Of the three words that are used in the Greek Gos pels to describe the process, one em phasizes the emotional element of re gret, sorrow over the past evil course of life, /xTa/xfXo/Acu, Matt. xxi. 29-32 ; a second expresses reversal of the entire mental attitude, /xeraz/oew, Matt. xii. 41, 172 The Kingdom and the Church Lk. xi. 32 ; xv. 7, 10 ; the third denotes a change in the direction of life, one goal being substituted for another, emcrrpe^o/Acu, Matt. xiii. 15 (and par allels) ; Lk. xvii. 4 ; xxii. 32. Repent ance is not limited to any single faculty of the mind : it engages the entire man, intellect, will and affections. Nor is it confined to the moral sphere of life in the narrower sense : it covers man s entire religious as well as his moral relation to God. Repentance in the conception of Jesus is wide enough to include faith, Matt. xi. 20, 21. Here as elsewhere, what strikes us most is the God-centered character of our Lord s teaching on the subject. The state from which a re pentance must take place is condemned, because it is radically wrong with refer ence to God. The sin of the prodigal has for its central feature the abandon ment of the Father s house. The sinful are like wandering sheep, like lost coins, representations which imply a detach- Repentance and Faith 173 ment of the spiritual consciousness from its center in God. The strongest way of expressing this is to designate the state of man without repentance a state of death, Matt. viii. 22 ; Lk. xv. 24, 32. And Jesus does not look upon this state as a godless state in the purely negative sense of the word. Where the love of God is absent, there an idolatrous love of the world and of self enters, and a positively offensive and hostile attitude towards God results. It is very significant that Jesus, in speaking of the two masters, does not say that to love the one is to neglect the other, or to hold to the one is to renounce the other, but employs positive terms in both clauses, " Either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will hold to the one and despise the other," Matt. vi. 24. Man is so necessarily bound to God in his inmost consciousness, that absolute indifference or neutrality are excluded. In the crisis of repentance the offense 174 The Kingdom and the Ch^lrch against God and the need of God are that upon which the repenting consciousness is focused. The sorrow of true repent ance is one which arises from conviction of sin. It is also a sorrow after God, such as proceeds from a sense of spiritual desti tution. Both principles are well brought out in the parable of the prodigal son, the discourse in which Jesus has so marvel- ously described the psychological process of repentance. The prodigal " comes to himself/ Previously he had been out of himself, had not known and felt himself in the simple truth of his funda mental relation to God. He realizes that he perishes with hunger, whilst in his Father s house there is bread enough and to spare. In his confession the of fense against God is significantly placed before that against the human father. Again, in the new life which follows re pentance the absolute supremacy of God is the controlling principle. He who repents turns away from the service of Repentance and Faith 175 mammon and self to the service of God. Our Lord is emphatic in insisting upon this absolute, undivided surrender of the soul to God as the goal of all true re pentance. Because this and nothing less is the goal, he urges the necessity of a constant repetition of the process. Even to his followers he said at a compara tively late stage of his ministry, " Ex cept ye turn and become as little chil dren, ye shall in no wise enter into the kingdom of heaven/ Matt, xviii. 3. From this necessity we must also explain the uncompromising manner in which Jesus requires of his disciples the renun ciation of all earthly bonds and posses sions which would dispute God his su preme sway over their life, Matt. x. 39 ; xvi. 25; Lk. xiv. 25-35. The state ments to this effect are not meant in the sense that external abandonment of these things is sufficient or even required. The idea is that the inward attachment of the soul to them as the highest good 1 76 The Kingdom and the Church must be in principle destroyed, that God may take the place hitherto claimed by them. Within the kingdom they are entitled to affection on the disciple s part in so far only as they can be made subor dinate and subservient to the love of God. The demand for sacrifice always presupposes that what is to be renounced forms an obstacle to that absolute devo tion which the kingdom of God re quires, Mk. ix. 43. That not the external possession but the internal entangle ment of the heart with temporal goods is condemned, Jesus strikingly indicates by the demand " to hate" one s father and mother and wife and children and brethren and sisters, yea and one s own life also. The energetic determination of the will to forego even the pleasures of natural affection, where they come in conflict with the supreme duty of the kingdom, is thus described and the word " hating" chosen on purpose to express that in such cases an internal change of Repentance and Faith 177 mind alone, not a mere external act, can make man fit for the kingdom of God. Matt. x. 37 gives us Jesus own interpre tation of such seemingly harsh sayings. Jesus affirms the necessity of repent ance for all men, Mk. vi. 12 ; Lk. xiii. 3, 5 ; xxiv. 47. In an indirect way the universal need of it is shown by his utterances on the universality and per vasiveness of sin. Even to the disciples it can be said without qualification, " If ye then, being evil, etc.," Matt. vii. 11. None is good save one, even God, Mk. x. 18. It is true Jesus draws a distinc tion between "righteous" and "sin ners," Matt. ix. 13 ; Mk. ii. 17. But the context shows that this distinction is drawn from the point of view of the judgment pronounced by men on them selves, not from the objective standpoint of Jesus own knowledge of them. These statements were made in answer to the charge of the Pharisees that Jesus ate with publicans and sinners. The L 178 The Kingdom and the Chiirch Saviour means to say that, if their com parative estimate concerning themselves and these degraded people be correct, there is all the more necessity for his associating with the latter in order to save them. Perhaps the reference to the ninety and nine righteous persons, which need no repentance, in Lk. xv. 7, 10, must be explained on the same principle. The connection between faith and the saving grace and power of God in the kingdom is just as close and vital as that just traced between repentance and right eousness. It is a striking fact that in the Synoptical Gospels nearly the whole of our Lord s teaching on faith attaches itself to the performance of miracles. This implies that the miracles were emi nently adapted to bring out the inner essense of faith and to reveal the true reason for its necessity. They embody that aspect of the kingdom to which faith is the subjective counterpart. Now Repentance and Faith 179 the miracles almost without exception have two features in common. In the first place, they are transactions where the result absolutely and exclusively de pends on the forth-putting of the di vine supernatural power, where no hu man effort could possibly contribute anything towards its accomplishment. And secondly, the miracles are, as we have seen, healing miracles in which the gracious love of God offers itself to man for his salvation. Faith is the spiritual attitude called for by this twofold element in the saving work of God. It is the recognition of the divine power and grace, not, of course, in a purely intellectual way, but prac tically so as to involve not only convic tion of the mind but to carry with it also the movement of the will and the affections. How faith stands related to the saving power of God is most clearly illustrated in the narrative Mk. ix. 17-24. When the disciples could not heal the 180 The Kingdom and the Chztrch child with the dumb spirit Jesus ex claimed, "O unbelieving generation." The father says, after describing the se verity of the case, " But if thou canst do anything, have compassion on us and help us." To this Jesus replies, " If thou canst ! all things are possible to him that believeth." This ascribes to faith something that can be affirmed of God alone, viz., absolute omnipotence. Else where also this principle is emphasized by our Lord, Matt. xxi. 21, 22 ; Mk. xi. 22, 23 ; Lk. xvii. 6. The explanation lies in this that faith is nothing else than that act whereby man lays hold of, ap propriates for himself the endless power of God. If faith were a human endeavor, something working by its own inherent strength, then it would be indeed rea sonable to say with reference to the one exercising it, " If thou canst/ On the other hand, if the innermost meaning of faith consist precisely in this, that man with an utter renunciation of his own Repentance and Faith 181 strength, casts himself upon the strength of God, then plainly all further concern about what is possible or impossible, every " If thou canst," is out of place. Hence also faith is not a quantitative matter, as it would have to be, were it a principle of human endeavor ; faith like a grain of mustard seed will accomplish the greatest conceivable results, because, small though it be, it nevertheless, pro vided it be genuine faith, connects man with the exhaustless reservoir of divine omnipotence, Lk. xvii. 6. This line of reasoning, however, is not applicable to the miracles only. The miracles illustrate the saving work of God in general. All salvation partakes, humanly speaking, of the nature of the impossible, can be accomplished by God alone. Jesus answers the question of the disciples, " Who then can be saved ?" with an appeal to the almighty power of God, " With men this is impossible, but with God all things are possible," Matt. 1 82 The Kingdom and the Church xix. 25, 26. All genuine saving faith is as profoundly conscious of its utter de pendence on God for deliverance from sin as the recipients of our Lord s mi raculous cures were convinced that God alone could heal their bodies from dis ease. But faith is more than a conviction regarding the necessity and sufficiency of the divine power. It also involves the recognition of God s willingness and readiness to save, is a practical ap propriation of the divine grace. Thus there enters into it an element of trust. Jesus never encouraged the exercise of faith as a mere external belief in super natural power. The performance of a sign from heaven, which men might have witnessed without such trust in God or himself, he persistently refused. Where there existed an antecedent hin drance to the exercise of this trust, he would not even perform any healing mir acles. He, who truly believes, vividly Repentance and Faith 183 realizes that God is loving, merciful, for giving, glad to receive sinners. Faith transfers to God what human parents ex perience in themselves with reference to their own children, the desire to help and supply, Matt. vii. 7-11. Not to trust would be to ascribe to him the evil disposition of sinful men towards one an other. This reliance of faith is not con fined to the critical moments of life, it is to be the abiding, characteristic inner disposition of the disciple with reference to every concern. To trust God for food and raiment is as truly the mark of the disciple in the kingdom as to de pend on him for eternal salvation, Matt, vi. 30. Faith in those on whom the wonderful cures were wrought may have manifested itself at first as a momentary act, but Jesus frequently called the atten tion of such people to what faith had done for them, thus suggesting that this faith could be made fruitful also on fu ture occasions. Of the disciples he ex-184 The Kingdom and the Chiirch plicitly required faith as an abiding dis position of trust. When in the storm they came to him saying, " Save Lord, we perish," he rebuked them because they were without confidence in his presence with them as a source of ab solute safety. Being in its very essence trust, faith nec essarily rests in a person. It is not con fidence about any abstract proposition, but reliance upon a personal character and disposition. The disciples are urged to have "faith in God/ Mk. xi. 22. But, inasmuch as Jesus is the revelation and representative of God, nay, one with God, he also is the personal object of faith. It is true, in the Synoptical Gospels this is explicitly stated in one passage only, viz., Matt, xviii. 6, "These little ones that believe on me." But this almost entire absence of the formula is easily explained. It was the result of Jesus method of not directly proclaiming at first his own position in the kingdom, Repentance and Faith 185 but rather of allowing it to be gradually inferred from practical experience. It does not prove the assertion of some modern writers, that in the gospel, as Jesus preached it, there was no place for his own person, that it was merely a gos pel about God. Though not frequently in so many words, yet in acts we find our Lord seeking to elicit and cultivate a personal relationship of faith between the disciple and himself and in himself with God. Conscious of being the Mes siah, he could not help assigning to him self a place in the gospel, and viewing himself as in a real sense the object of religious trust. This appears from his saying to Peter shortly before the passion, " Simon, Simon, behold Satan asked to have you, that he might sift you (no tice the plural pronoun) as wheat : but I made supplication for thee, that thy faith fail not." Here the crisis of our Lord s suffering is represented as the great testing crisis of true discipleship. 1 86 The Kingdom and the Church Satan will in it sift the true disciples from the false. The true will approve themselves in this, that, when everything goes against Jesus, their faith fails not. And, on the other hand, when Peter s faith begins to fail, this is described as a de nial of Jesus ; faith, therefore, must in volve the opposite of denial, an avowal, a personal bond of identification between the master and the disciple, Lk. xxii. 31- 34. And it is psychologically inconceiv able that in those who were helped by the miracles of Jesus, faith should not have assumed the form of personal trust in him as the instrument of the saving grace and power of God. Faith in God and faith in Jesus here inevitably coalesced. Faith is not represented by our Lord as an arbitrary movement of the mind, which would be independent of the deeper-lying dispositions and tendencies of life. Jesus knows of antecedent states of heart by which faith and unbelief are determined. The unbelief of the Repentance and Faith 187 Jews he explains from the fact of their being " offended " in him. What Jesus was and did and taught stood at almost every point in direct antithesis to what they expected their Messiah to be, to do and to teach. But these expectations and beliefs of the Jews were deeply rooted in their general religious state and character : their unbelief, therefore, resulted from the fundamental disposition of their hearts. They that refuse faith do so, because they are an evil and adul terous generation. If they were what they ought to be and had not broken the pledges of their covenant mar riage to God, if their attitude towards God were normal, they would believe on him whom God had sent. And all this is true likewise of faith. In its ul timate analysis faith is, according to Jesus, a divine gift. Faith must be the work of God in man, because only so can it be in harmony with itself as the recog nition that we owe everything to God s 1 88 The Kingdom and the Church working for us and in us. It is the Fa ther who reveals to the babes what he hides from the wise and understanding, Matt. xi. 25. Jesus prays for Peter, that his faith fail not : that which we pray for we affirm to be dependent on the opera tion of God. When Peter makes his confession, "Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God," Jesus declares that not flesh and blood has revealed this unto him, but the Father in heaven. In the discourses of the Gospel accord ing to John, several important points of our Lord s doctrine of faith are brought out with greater clearness and explicitness than in the Synoptical statements. Faith here is from beginning to end faith in Jesus, and not merely in Jesus as the in strument of God, but as the image and incarnation of God, so that to believe in him is to believe in God. Consequently this faith in Jesus is also more clearly represented as a comprehensive faith in him as a Saviour for life and death, for Repentance and Faith 189 time and eternity, and not merely faith in Jesus as helper in a concrete case of dis tress. Still further our Lord here by anticipation describes how faith will stand related to his atonement and resurrection, how it will become faith in the heavenly, glorified Christ, Jno. iii. 14 ; vi. 51 ; vii. 29, 38; xi. 25; xv. 7, 16; xvi. 23, 24. Because the testimony of Jesus concern ing himself in this Gospel is so much fuller and richer, faith is more closely identified with knowledge, Jno. vi. 69 ; viii. 24, 28 ; xiv. 9, 10, 20 ; xvi. 30. We have already seen above, however, that knowledge here means far more than intellectual cognition. It implies prac tical acquaintance, confidence and love, Jno. x. 4, 14, 15 ; xvii. 25, 26. Finally, our Lord is here much more explicit on the causes of faith and unbelief than in the more popular Synoptical teaching. Faith and unbelief are experimental states and acts in which the whole spiritual condition of the individual comes to 190 The Kingdom and the Church light. Not to believe is the great sin, because the deep inherent sinfulness of the heart displays in this sin its true character of hostility towards God, Jno. ix. 41; xv. 22, 24; xvi. 8, 9. In the same manner faith is the outcome of an inward condition of the heart. This our Lord describes as a doing of the truth, a working in God, a being of the truth, a having of the love of God in one s self, a hearing from the Father, a learning from him, a being drawn by the Father, a having been given by the Father to the Son, in virtue of which believers are Jesus* own sheep even before he manifests him self to them, Jno. iii. 21 ; v. 42 ; vi. 44, 45 ; xvii. 11 ; xviii. 37. In all these respects the teaching of Jesus here recorded is not in contradiction with, but simply the legitimate expansion of that delivered to us in the three other Gospels. CHAPTER XI Recapitulation JTJ^AVING reached the end of our i i discussion we may now endeavor briefly to formulate the impor tant principles embodied in our Lord s teaching on the Kingdom of God and the Church. They are the following : In the first place, the kingdom-con ception involves the historic unity of Jesus* work with the Old Testament work of God. These two constitute one body of supernatural revelation and redemp tion. Secondly, the doctrine of the kingdom stands for the principle that the Chris- 191 192 The Kingdom and the Church tian religion is not a mere matter of sub jective ideas or experiences, but is related to a great system of objective, supernatural facts and transactions. iThe kingdom means the renewal of the world through the introduction of supernatural forces./ Thirdly, the kingdom-idea is the clearest expression of the principle that in the sphere of objective reality, as well as in the sphere of human consciousness, everything is subservient to the glory of God. In this respect the kingdom is the most profoundly religious of all biblical con ceptions. Fourthly, the message of the kingdom imparts to Christianity, as Jesus proclaims it, the professed character of a religion of salvation, and of salvation not primarily by man s own efforts but by the power and grace of God. The kingdom rep resents the specifically evangelical ele ment in our Lord s teaching. The same principle finds subjective expression in his teaching on faith. Recapitulation 193 Fifthly, Jesus doctrine of the king dom as both inward and outward, com ing first in the heart of man and after wards in the external world, upholds the primacy of the spiritual and ethical over the physical. The invisible world of the inner religious life, the righteous ness of the disposition, the sonship of God are in it made supreme, the essence of the kingdom, the ultimate realities to which everything else is subordinate. The inherently ethical character of the kingdom finds subjective expression in the demand for repentance. Sixthly, that form which the kingdom assumes in the church shows it to be in separably associated with the person and work of Jesus himself. The religion of the kingdom is a religion in which there is not only a place but in which the central place is for the Saviour. The church form of the kingdom rightly bears the name of Christianity, because in it on Christ everything depends. M 194 The Kingdom and the Church Finally, the thought of the kingdom of God implies the subjection of the entire range of human life in all its forms and spheres to the ends of religion. The kingdom reminds us of the absoluteness, the pervasiveness, the unrestricted dominion, which of right belong to all true religion. It proclaims that religion, and religion alone, can act as the supreme unifying^ cen tralizing factor in the life of man, as that which binds all together and perfects all by leading it to its final goal in the serv ice of God. THE END. INDEX OF SUBJECTS A Age, the coming, 22, 68. B Basileia, 25. Beatitudes, 2, 121. Blessedness, 89, 125-139. C Chiliasm, 45, 68. Church, 8, 102, 140-168. Community, the Kingdom as a, 82, D Death, of Jesus, 50, 146. Demons, 49, 50. Development in Jesus conception of the Kingdom, 58-64. E Ethics of Jesus, 43, 103-124. of Judaism, 106-108. 95 1 96 Index of Subjects F Faith, 9, 178-190. Fatherhood, 7, 34, 130-135. Final kingdom, 8, 17-19, 21, 40. Forgiveness of sin, 129-130. G Grace, 4, 9, 23, 123. J John the Baptist, 15, 44, 54. Judaism, its conception of the Kingdom, 19-22, 26, 27, 45, 67-72, 85. its ethics, 106-108. K Kingdom and kingship, 2531. of God and of heaven, 3137. parables, 2, 56-57* D2 - 6 3i 73~74- the preliminary, 45. the present and the future, 38-41, 64, 65. Knowledge, 99, 136-137. L Law, 13, 17, 21, 22, 107-111. Life, 4, 5, 74, 135-139- Love, 9. Index of Subjects 197 M Malkuth, 25. Memlakhah, 25. Messiahship, 12, 47, 60-61, 141-145. Miracles, 9, 92-95, 178-181. o Old Testament, 9, 11-19, 44? 54? 81. P Paul, his conception of the Kingdom, 46-82. Power, of the Kingdom, 90-102. Prophecy, Messianic, 19. R Regeneration, 4, 74, 77, 137, 159- Repentance, 9, 169-178. Resurrection of Jesus, 146. Reward, 118-124. Righteousness of the Kingdom, 9, 89, 103-124. S Sermon on the Mount, 2. Sonship in the Kingdom, 130135. Spirit of God, 98-102, 156. Spiritual nature of the Kingdom, 39,4957, 7172. Supernatural character of the Kingdom, 36, 73-77. Supremacy of God in the Kingdom, 8389. 198 Index of Subjects T Theocracy, 14. Truth, 4, 5, 99. U Universalism, 6970. INDEX OF TEXTS Matthew ii. 44 36 Matthew vi. 30 183 45 9 33 3i, 85, 87, iii. 2 20 112,113,1 16, iv. 17 i, 169 126 v. 6 113, 115, I2O vii. 711 183 8 I 2O ii 69, 177 9 120, 133 12 no IO 113 16 in 12 37 20 in 1 7
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