The teaching of Jesus concerning the Kingdom of God and the Church

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THE TEACHINGS OF JESUS
Edited by ]QKQl H. KERR, D. D.

THE TEACHING OF JESUS

CONCERNING

THE KINGDOM OF GOD AND
THE CHURCH

GEERHARDUS Vos. PH. D., D. D.

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 that

io 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 identical

Present 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, while

Present 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 the

72 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 people

The 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, wrhich 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 positive1
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 the

The 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 of

128 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.

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 the

160 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, /x€Ta/x«fXo/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, 25—31.

of God and of heaven, 31—37.

parables, 2, 56-57* D2-63i 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, 130—135.
Spirit of God, 98-102, 156.

Spiritual nature of the Kingdom, 39,49—57, 71—72.
Supernatural character of the Kingdom, 36, 73-77.
Supremacy of God in the Kingdom, 83—89.

198 Index of Subjects

T

Theocracy, 14.
Truth, 4, 5, 99.

U

Universalism, 69—70.

INDEX OF TEXTS

Matthew ii. 44

36

Matthew vi. 30

183

45

90

33 3i, 85,

87,

iii. 2

20

112,113,1

16,

iv. 17 i,

169

126

v. 6 113, 115,

I2O

vii. 7—11

183

8

I 2O

ii 69,

177

9 120,

133

12

no

IO

113

16

in

12

37

20

in

17

105

viii. 12

15

20

118

22 136,

173

23, 24

no

26

184

35

16

ix. 13

177

46

124

*• 39

*75

48 36,

106

41,42

123

vi. 9, 10

I31

xi. 5

93

IO

105

ii 49,59

12

130

12

54

2O

37

13

15

24

173

2O, 21

172

199

2OO

Index of Texts

Matthew xi. 25 188

Matthew xviii.

17 140,

27 134

167

28-29 J3°

18

148

xii. 28 31, 49, 91, 98

20

157

41 171

23

129

xiii. ii 57

xix. 25, 26

182

15 122

28

77,97

16,17 129

xx. 1-16

123

24-30 83, 151,

25

151

165-168

32

127

36~43 56

Xxi. 21, 22

180

41 49, 152, 161

29-32

171

43 31

31

31

44-46 128

43 i5, V

[, 69, in

47-50 83, 151,

xxii. 1—14

170

165-168

2

127

52 3, 46

21

164

xv. 13 no

xxiii. 23

no

xvi. 17 36, 1 88

xxiv. 30

97

18 140,153,154

47

123

J9 33, 49, J47-

xxv. 15

122

150

21-23

I23

25 i75

34

128

28 154

xxvi. 29

31

xviii. 3 175

64

154

6 184

xxviii. 19

69

Index of Texts

201

Mark

i. 15

i, 169

Luke i. 1 7

99

ii.

9

96

35

99

17

177

iv. 18, 19

94, 98

18-22

59

26, 27

69

iv.

10

57

43

i

26-29

74

vi. 32, 35

124

v.

34

130

vii. 50

130

vi.

12

177

ix. 27

154

ix.

I

154

xi. 13

100

17-24

179-181

20

49

35

151

32

172

43

176

xii. 32 8,

124, 127

X.

15

46

xiii. 3, 5

177

J7

5

xiv. 15

20

18

177

16-24

170

30

123

25-35

175

xi.

22, 23

1 80,

xv. 7, 10

172, 178

184

11-32

174

30

33>36

17

138

xii.

'3

68

18, 21

33

24

97

24

136, 173

30,31

109

32 i36>

138, i73

xiii.

IO

69

xvi. 1 6

i5,54

xiv.

9

69

xvii. 4

172

34

s?

6

180, 181

XV.

43

20

IO

122, 123

2O2

Index of Texts

Luke xvii. 20

20,51

John xiv. 9, 10, 20

189

xviii. 14

116

xv. 7, 16

189

xx. 25

I51

22, 23, 24

36

J33

189,

190

38

136

xvi. 8, 9

190

xxii. 31-34

186

30

189

32

172

xvii. 3

136

69

154

4 6

,88

xxiv. 19

99

II

190

47

177

25, 26

189

49

99

xviii. 36 3, 68,

164

37

190

John iii. 3, 5

3> J59

xix, II

164

H

189

Acts i. 8

99

21

190

ii. 36

H5

v. 42

190

x. 38

99

vi. 44, 45

190

5i

189

i Cor. xv. 23-28

46

69

189

25

90

vii. 29, 38

189

28

87

39

IOI

Hebrews xii. 2

120

viii. 24, 28

189

ix. 41

190

Revelation iii. 7

149

x. 14, 15

189

xi. 15

87

xi. 25

189

xiv. 6

*37

Exodus iv. 22

^

Index of Texts 203

Exodus xv.

90

Jeremiah xxxi. 33

"5

xix. 4-6

'3

34

129

Deut. xxxii. 6

131

Ezekiel xxxvi. 27

H5

Psalms xcvii. i

18

Daniel

18

xcix. i

18

ii. 44

36

45

9°

Isaiah xxii. 22

149

xxiv. 21

18

Obadiah 21

18,26

xliii. 15

18, 131

lii. 7

18

Micah ii. 12

18

Iv. i

115

iv. 6

18