Biblical Theology (Part 4) by Geerhardus Vos

The New Testament
ONE:
THE STRUCTURE OF NEW TESTAMENT REVELATION
There are three ways in which the structure of New Testament Revelation can be determined from within Scripture itself. To add ‘from within Scripture itself” is essential, for we dare not impose upon the divine process and its product a scheme from any outside source. If redemption and revelation form an organism, then, like every other organism, it should be permitted to reveal to us its own articulation, either by way of our observing it, or by our receiving from it the formula of its make-up, where at certain high-points it reaches a consciousness of its inner growth.
[1] From indications in the Old Testament
The first of the three ways spoken of runs through the Old Testament. The Old Testament dispensation is a forward-stretching and forward-looking dispensation. Owing to the factual character of Biblical religion its face is necessarily set towards new things. Prophecy is the best indicator of this, for prediction is not an accidental element in prophecy, but of its very essence. But more particularly eschatological and Messianic prophecy are pointed towards the future, and not merely towards the future as a relatively higher state, but as an absolutely perfect and enduring state to be contrasted with the present and its succession of developments. Here, then, the distinction between something old and something
new, both comprehensively taken, is in principle apprehended. The Old Testament, through its prophetic attitude, postulates the New Testament. And there are passages in which the term ‘new’ emerges in a semi-conscious manner, as it were, to give expression to the contrast between what is and what shall be [Isa. 65:17; Ezek. 11:19]. This technical use of ‘new’ has passed over even into the vocabulary of the dispensation of fulfilment [Matt. 13:52; Mk. 16:17; 2 Cor. 5:17; Rev. 2:17].
There is, however, one prophetic utterance in which this form of thought crystallizes into the phrase ‘New Berith’: Greek, ‘New Diatheke’. This is Jer. 31:31–34. Although here the correlative ‘Old Berith’ does not explicitly appear by the side of ‘New Berith’, still the idea itself is clearly given in the words: ‘Not according to the berith that I made with their fathers—to bring them out of the land of Egypt.’ As a matter of fact, in this prophecy, besides the name ‘New Berith’, the two most distinctive features of the new order of affairs are described. The one is: Jehovah will create obedience to the law through writing it in the heart. The other is: there will be complete forgiveness of sin. And, what most closely concerns our present purpose, the ‘newness’ is applied not merely in a general way to religious status, but is most specifically extended to the sphere of revelation and of knowlege of God: ‘They shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest of them.’
[2] From the teachings of Jesus
After Jeremiah the phrase does not recur in the Old Testament Scriptures. We first meet with it again in the words spoken by Jesus at the Last Supper. His blood He calls ‘my blood of the diatheke’ (Matthew and Mark), the cup ‘the new diatheke in my blood’ (Luke and Paul). It is evident that our Lord here represents His blood (death) as the basis and inauguration of a new religious relationship of the disciples to God. While the former relationship is not referred to as ‘the old’, the implied allusions to Ex. 24 and Jer. 31, even apart from the use of the adjective ‘new’ in Luke (and Paul, 1 Cor. 11:25)
reveal the presence in His mind of a contrast between something past abrogated and something new substituted. This is altogether independent of the choice between rendering diatheke ‘testament’ or ‘covenant’. On either rendering the contrast between two distinct dispensations of religious privilege is involved.
Further, it is not obscurely intimated, that the new order of affairs, so far from being in its turn again subject to change or abrogation, is of final significance. It reaches over into the eschatological state, which of itself makes it eternal. This may be gathered from Jesus’ solemn declaration about not expecting to drink of the fruit of the vine again, until He shall drink it new (Matthew adds ‘with you’) in the Kingdom of God (Luke, ‘until the Kingdom of God shall have come’). What we call the ‘New Covenant’ here appears at the outset as an eternal covenant. Into the question of what induced our Lord, who had never before made use of the concept in His teaching, but exclusively spoken of ‘the Kingdom’, to employ it at this one late point, we cannot here enter.
It ought to be further noticed, that the contrast here drawn is not in the first place a contrast of revelation. The words speak of a new era in religious access to God. Of a new period of divine self-disclosure they do not speak, although that, of course, is presupposed under the general law that progress in religion follows progress in revelation.
[3] From the teachings of Paul and the other Apostles
From Jesus we pass on to Paul. Paul is in the New Testament the great exponent of the fundamental bisection in the history of redemption and of revelation. Thus he speaks not only of the two regimes of law and faith, but even expresses himself in the consecutive form of statement: ‘after that faith is come’ [Gal. 3:25]. It is no wonder, then, that with him we find the formal distinction between the ‘New Diatheke’ and the ‘Old Diatheke’ [2 Cor. 3:6, 14]. Here also, to be sure, we have in the first place a contrast between two religious ministrations, that of the letter and that of the Spirit,
that of condemnation and that of righteousness. Nevertheless, the idea of difference in revelation, as underlying the difference in ministration between Moses and Paul, clearly enters. There is a ‘reading’ of Moses, that is, of the law, and a ‘speech’, a ‘vision’ of the Lord of glory [vss. 12, 14, 15, 16]. From the phrase ‘reading of the Old Diatheke’ in vs. 14, some have even inferred that the Apostle had in mind the idea of a second, a new canon to take its place by the side of the old. Vs. 15, however, shows that ‘reading of the Old Diatheke’ simply means reading of the Law, the Law being frequently in the Old Testament called by the name of berith, diatheke; hence in vs. 15 the ‘reading of Moses’ is substituted for the ‘reading of the Old Diatheke’.
The Epistle to the Hebrews gives us the clearest information in regard to the structure of redemptive procedure, and that particularly, as based on and determined by the structure of revelation. It is not necessary to quote single passages, the whole Epistle is full of it. We read here of the ‘New Diatheke’ [9:15]. The phrase ‘Old Diatheke’ does not occur, although other phrases, practically equivalent, do. How intimately to the writer the unfolding from the Old into the New is bound up with the unfolding of revelation, may be seen from the opening words of the Epistle. ‘God having spoken—spake—in a Son—whom He has appointed heir of all things, who—when He had in Himself purged our sins, sat down’, etc. The participle aorist ‘having spoken’ and the finite verb ‘spake’ link the old and the new together, representing the former as preparatory to the latter.
THE NEW DISPENSATION IS FINAL
It will be noticed that in Hebrews 1:1–2, as in the statements of the Old Testament, and of Jesus and Paul, the new dispensation appears as final. And this applies likewise to the revelation introducing it. It is not one new disclosure to be followed by others, but the consummate disclosure beyond which nothing is expected. After speech in ‘a Son’ (qualitatively so called) no higher speech were
possible. Paul also speaks of the sending forth of God’s Son from God as taking place in the pleroma of the time [Gal. 4:4]. Consequently there is nowhere any trace of the cumulative point of view: Prophets, Jesus, Apostles; the New Testament revelation is one organic, and in itself completed, whole. It includes the Apostles, who are witnesses and interpreters of the Christ, but does not have them ab extra added to itself as separate instruments of information. It is a total misunderstanding both of the consciousness of Jesus and of that of the New Testament writers, to conceive of the thought of ‘going back’ from the Apostles, particularly Paul, to Jesus. Such a thought is born out of the inorganic, arithmetical frame of mind, which knows only to work with addition of numbers, or at best with multiplication of witnesses. To take Christ at all He must be taken as the centre of a movement of revelation organized around Him, and winding up the whole process of revelation. When cut loose from what went before and came after, Jesus not only becomes uninterpretable, but owing to the meteoric character of His appearance, remains scarcely sufficient for bearing by Himself alone the tremendous weight of a supernaturalistic world-view.
As a matter of fact, Jesus does not represent Himself anywhere as being by his human earthly activity the exhaustive expounder of truth. Much rather He is the great fact to be expounded. And He has nowhere isolated Himself from His interpreters, but on the contrary identified them with Himself, both as to absoluteness of authority and adequacy of knowledge imparted [Luke 24:44; John 16:12–15]. And through the promise and gift of the Spirit He has made the identity real. The Spirit takes of the things of Christ and shows them unto the recipients. Besides this, the course of our Lord’s redemptive career was such as to make the important facts accumulate towards the end, where the departure of Jesus from the disciples rendered explanation by Himself of the significance of these impossible. For this reason the teaching of Jesus, so far from rendering the teaching of the Apostles negligible, absolutely postulates it. As the latter would have been empty, lacking the fact, so the former would have been blind, at least in part, because of lacking the light.
The relation between Jesus and the Apostolate is in general that between the fact to be interpreted and the subsequent interpretation of this fact. This is none other than the principle under which all revelation proceeds. The New Testament Canon is constructed on it. The Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles stand first, although from a literary point of view this is not the chronological sequence. Theirs is the first place, because there is embodied in them the great actuality of New Testament redemption. Still, it ought not to be overlooked, that within the Gospels and the Acts themselves we meet with a certain preformation of this same law. Jesus’ task is not confined to furnishing the fact or the facts; He interweaves and accompanies the creation of the facts with a preliminary illumination of them, for by the side of His work stands His teaching. Only the teaching is more sporadic and less comprehensive than that supplied by the Epistles. It resembles the embryo, which though after an indistinct fashion, yet truly contains the structure, which the full-grown organism will clearly exhibit.
The foregoing gives us the warrant for speaking of New Testament revelation and of its historic exposition, New Testament theology. It also explains to us the seeming disproportion in chronological extent of the Old Testament and the New Testament. This disproportion arises from viewing the new revelation too much by itself, and not sufficiently as introductory and basic to the large period following. Looking at it in too mechanical a manner, one might place the thousands of years of the Old Testament over against the scarce one hundred years of the life of Jesus and the Apostles. In reality, the New Testament revelation, being the final one, stretches over all the extent of the order of things Christ came to inaugurate, whence also the Diatheke which it serves is called an ‘eternal Diatheke’ [Heb. 13:20]. It is the eschatological Diatheke, and in regard to that, time- comparisons are out of place.
The dispropoition is felt somewhat over-keenly by us, because we lack the eschatological point of view, which regards Christ as the ‘Consummator’. Hence we are inclined to speak of the New
Testament in its canonical, literary sense, extending, say, from the nativity of Jesus to the death of the last writer in the New Testament Canon. Still, we know full well that we ourselves live just as much in the New Testament as did Peter and Paul and John. For clearness’ sake we may distinguish between the revelation-overture which opened the salvation-era, and the salvation-era itself, giving to both the name New Testament. In our Biblico-theological investigation the former alone is dealt with.
The first and great division within our field, then, is that between revelation through Christ directly and revelation mediated by Christ through the Apostolate. Calling this the overture of the New Testament dispensation, we can still distinguish certain preludes played before the setting in of the overture itself. All that precedes the public ministry may be considered in this light. The voices accompanying the Nativity, the preaching of John the Baptist, the baptism of Jesus by John, the probation (temptation) of Jesus, require preliminary attention before entering upon a survey of the revelation-content of His work. On the other hand, such matters as the question of development, and of the method of our Lord’s teaching, are so vitally interwoven with the substance of the message brought as to appear of far more than preliminary importance. And to a still stronger degree, of course, this applies to the teaching on the Old Testament and on the Nature of God. This yields the grouping of the table of Contents prefixed to the present volume.
IS A FURTHER REVELATION TO BE EXPECTED?
The question may be raised, whether, within the limits of the principles here laid down, there can be expected still further revelation entitled to a place in the scheme of New Testament revelation. Unless we adopt the mystical standpoint, which cuts loose the subjective from the objective, the only proper answer to this question is, that new revelation can be added only, in case new objective events of a supernatural character take place, needing for their understanding a new body of interpretation supplied by God.
This will actually be the case in the eschatological issue of things. What then occurs will constitute a new epoch in redemption worthy to be placed by the side of the great epochs in the Mosaic age and the age of the first Advent. Hence the Apocalypse mingles with the pictures of the final events transpiring the word of prophecy and of interpretation.
We may say, then, that a third epoch of revelation is still outstanding. Strictly speaking, however, this will form less a group by itself than a consummation of the second group. It will belong to New Testament revelation as a final division. Mystical revelation claimed by many in the interim as a personal privilege is out of keeping with the genius of Biblical religion. Mysticism in this detached form is not specifically Christian. It occurs in all types of religion, better or worse. At best it is a manifestation of the religion of nature, subject to all the defects and faults of the latter. As to its content and inherent value it is unverifiable, except on the principle of submitting it to the test of harmony with Scripture. And submitting it to this it ceases to be a separate source of revelation concerning God.
TWO:
REVELATION CONNECTED WITH THE NATIVITY
The law above spoken of is, we repeat, that the event precedes, the interpreting revelations follow. What happened was nothing else than what theology calls ‘the incarnation’. If nevertheless we prefer
to speak of ‘the nativity’, this is in recognition of the point of view from which the accompanying disclosures present it. Not first in later theology, but already in the subsequent course of revelation itself, the incarnation-point-of-view is adopted. It describes, as it were, a vertical movement from heaven to earth, from the divine to the human, in which the pre-existent Messiah appears entering into human nature, the super-historical descends into the stream of history. In the teaching of our Lord (even in the Synoptics) there are references and allusions to this; in the Johannine teaching (of Jesus) these are much more numerous and plain; with Paul the doctrine emerges in rounded-off explicit form; in the Prologue to the Fourth Gospel and his Epistles the Apostle John gives it classical formulation.
But these all mark later stages in the progress of New Testament revelation. Here, at the point where the event actually occurs, the movement is seen to partake of a horizontal character. Without in any way excluding or denying the other aspect of the occurrence, which veiled itself behind the curtain of mystery, it preferred to continue speaking in terms of prophecy and fulfilment, thus moving along the level pathway of history. What Jehovah had promised to the fathers of Messianic eventuation, that came here to pass; the ideality of prediction now assumed the concrete form of the actual. This is not identical with saying that what happened in the course of history was on that account purely natural. The historical can be supernatural, the supernatural can enter history, and so become a piece of the historical in its highest form. There is no mutual exclusiveness. It is pure prejudice, when historians lay down the principle that they are allowed to reckon with the natural only.
ASPECTS OF THE NATIVITY
The pieces pertaining to this group are: the annunciation of the angel to Joseph [Matt. 1:20, 21, 23]; the annunciation of Gabriel to Zacharias, Lk. 1:11–22; the annunciation of Gabriel to Mary [Lk. 1:26–38]; the prophecy of Elizabeth [Lk. 1:42–45]; the Psalm of
Mary (the ‘Magnificat’) [Lk. 1:46–55]; the prophecy of Zacharias [Lk. 1:68–79]; the announcement of the Angels to the shepherds, followed by the angelic song [Lk. 2:10–14]; the prophecy of Simeon (the ‘Nunc Dimittis’) [Lk. 2:29–35]; the prophecy of Anna [vs. 38]. The characteristic features of these pieces are as follows:
(a) There is in them a close adjustment to the Old Testament as to the mode of expression used. This feature brings out the continuity between the two revelations. The young dispensation begins with the speech of the fathers. This was inherently fit, but it likewise served the purpose of rendering the revelations more easily understandable by those to whom they were proximately addressed, people whose piety had been nurtured on the Old Testament. Thus the Magnificat is full of reminiscences from the Psalms, and from its Old Testament prototype, the prayer-song of Hannah, [1 Sam. 2:1–10].
(b) There is likewise a perceptible intent to fit the new things into the organism of the Old Testament History of Redemption. The nativity is connected with the house of God’s servant David, as was spoken by the holy prophets, [Lk. 1:69, 70]; it is the fulfilment of the oath sworn to Abraham, [vs. 73]; the prophecy of which it is the culmination extends from the beginning of the world, [vs. 70]. In David, Abraham, the Creation, the dominating epochs of the Old Testament are seized upon; the chronological nexus is, as it were, the exponent of the oneness of the divine work through the ages and of the divine purpose from the outset to lead up to the Messiah.
(c) The new procedure to be ushered in is throughout described as bearing a redemptive character. This is accomplished, first of all, by giving it, both in the objective announcement by God and in the subjective apprehension of those addressed, the background of a state of sin and unworthiness, and the corresponding signature of grace and salvation. God’s unique dealing with His people at this point is recognized as an act of sovereign mercy. This has found its typical expression in the words of Mary [Lk. 1:46, 51–53]. There is no trace of the view that anything well-deserving has evoked this
visitation of God, least of all anything resembling faithful observance of the law. The gulf between the better Israel of ancient times and the apostate Israel of the present is realized. Zacharias is told that the child to be born to him shall turn many of the children of Israel to the Lord their God, and shall go before Him in the spirit and power of Elias to turn the hearts of the fathers to the children. The source of all blessedness is sought in the berith, which is but another way of saying that it flows from the free promise of God. God fulfils what He promised to the fathers (the patriarchs) [Lk. 1:54, 55, 72, 73].
(d) Equally significant is the absence of the political element from these pieces. In itself this element would not have been objectionable, for under the Old Testament theocracy national and religious interests intertwined. The nearest to a reminiscence from this comes in Lk. 1:71, 74 (salvation from enemies through the Messiah), but even here this feature is purely subsidiary to the end named in vs. 75.
(e) The legalism of Judaism is nowhere in evidence. It must be granted that even in Judaism this figures scarcely as an end in itself. It served as a means for bringing about the Messianic blessedness. The Jewish self-righteousness rested on the deeper basis of egoistic eudæmonism. But the legalism had become so inveterate, that to a considerable extent the vision of the other world remained coloured by it. Still, its main significance pertains to the pre-eschatological period. The Jewish sequence is: Israel is first to fulfil the law, then, by manner of recompense, the Messiah, with all that pertains to Him, will appear. The new sequence is: first the Messiah will appear, as a gift of divine grace, and through Him Israel will be enabled to yield the proper obedience. The effect of this is twofold: by shifting the law from the beginning of the process to the end the Jewish self- righteousness is eliminated; by vindicating for the law its permanent place at the end, the ethical import of the salvation is emphasized. Of John the Baptist, Gabriel predicts that he shall turn many of the children of Israel to Jehovah their God [Lk. 1:16]. To Joseph it is
predicted that Jesus’ chief work will consist in saving His people from their sins [Matt. 1:21].
(f) The closeness of the bond with the Old Testament is shown through the prolongation into these early revelations of the two lines of ancient eschatological prophecy. The one of these moves towards the coming of Jehovah Himself in a supreme theophany. The other moves towards the coming of the Messiah. It is by no means certain that even in Old Testament prophecy these were mutually exclusive: one writer or prophet might, under certain circumstances, favour the one, and under other circumstances the other representation. And it is even possible, that as the concept of the Messiah expanded into the supernatural and super-creaturely, the combinableness and somewhat of the identity of the two were perceived. On the whole, however, they are like two separate streams. The full development of New Testament revelation has first fully disclosed their convergence through its teaching that in the divine Messiah Jehovah has come to His people.
In the pieces under review there is the beginning of this, but the coalescence has not yet fully been reached. It is to be observed that the two representations are so distributed, that in the circle of Mary and Joseph the Messianic kingship out of the line of David stands in the centre, whilst in the circle of Zacharias and Elizabeth the idea of Jehovah’s coming prevails, although not exclusively (for the former compare Matt. 1:20; 2:1, 5, 8; Lk. 1:32; for the latter Lk. 1:16, 17, 76). For the entrance of the Davidic strain into the Jehovah-coming complex compare Lk. 1:32, 69; 2:4, 11. It is in accordance with the assignment of this line to the Baptist’s family that the later word of God coming through John was so largely borrowed from Isa. 40. About ‘the Lord’ and ‘the mother of my Lord’ [Lk. 1:16, 17, 43] see later under the discussion of the name Kyrios.
Some intimation of the identity between Jehovah and the Messiah seems to be contained in the words of the angel [Matt. 1:21]. Here the name Jesus, to be given to the child, is understood in its etymological
sense: ‘Jehovah is Salvation.’ In itself, of course, this need not by any means imply that the Messiah, as personally identical with Jehovah, will be the Saviour. For this identical name had been borne under the Old Testament by purely human servants of God, not to mark them as Jehovah, but simply to render their work symbolic of the fact that Jehovah in His own Person provides salvation for Israel. And in the abstract it might have been not otherwise in the case of Jesus. This exegesis, however, overlooks the important fact, that Jesus bears the name, as is explicitly stated, because He (Jesus) saves His (Jesus’) people from their sins. We have, therefore, in close succession the statements, that Jehovah is salvation, and that Jesus saves, that Israel (Jehovah’s people) are Jesus’ people. On the other hand, the name Emmanuel in vs. 23 could be His merely on account of His being exponential of God’s being with His people; moreover the words in this verse are not words of the angel, but words of Matthew who is quoting Isaiah.
(g) There are certain intimations of the universalism (destiny to include other nations) of the Gospel in these disclosures. Simeon speaks of the salvation prepared by God as a light to lighten the Gentiles, side by side with its being a glory for the people of Israel [Lk. 2:32], and announces to Mary, that the child is set for the fall and rising again of many in Israel, and for a sign that shall be spoken against [vs. 34]; yea, intimates that a painful experience described as a sword piercing Mary’s heart will contribute somehow to these effects [vs. 35]. An illumination of the Gentiles seems to be foretold, which will have for its foil the darkness of the unbelief of Israel. Not as if this were in any sense the first disclosure of universalism in Scripture, far less of the propaganda of missions. But the Judaistic proselytizing implied that whosoever was adopted from among the Gentiles could attain to a share in the privileges of Israel only through becoming a Jew. Here the idea is that through the unbelief of the Jew the Gentiles will be brought in [compare Rom. 11:11ff.].
(h) As a last element lending distinctive character to these revelations, we must mention the supernatural birth of the Messiah
to be brought about without human paternity. We do not here discuss the objections raised against this event on historical grounds. That belongs to the department of Gospel History, as does likewise the critique upon the trends of thought and belief that, denying the fact as fact, are supposed to have produced the idea of the fact as a distinct phase in early Christology. All we propose here to deal with is what idea or ideas in the mind of God shaped the occurrence of the event, assuming it to have been an event in the way in which it is described as having come to pass.
Three elements offering an explanation have been thought of. The first concerns the sinlessness of the child through the estoppage of the transmission of sin. Reference to this may be found in Lk. 1:35, ‘that which is begotten of thee shall be called holy’, or ‘that holy thing which is begotten’, etc., provided ‘holy’ be taken in the ethical sense. It may, however, be taken in the sense of ‘consecrated’, in which case there would be no direct reference to the sinlessness of the child, although the ‘consecration’ would seem to presuppose the sinlessness. In so far we may assume that the action of the Holy Spirit spoken of had for one of its purposes the prevention of the transmission of the pollution of sin. But this does not yield an exhaustive explanation of the factors present, because the end could have been secured through some specific operation of the Spirit, not going to the extent of the elimination of the human paternity, unless the ground be taken (as it has been by some) that the paternal factor in the act of generation bears a special relation to the transmission of sin, not borne by the maternal factor. Discounting this, the fact that Joseph has nothing to do with the birth is too strongly stressed not to require some additional reason besides the motive just indicated.
We are thus led in the second place to think of the fitness which this mode of birth possessed for introducing into human nature One who was already antecedently in more than one sense ‘the Son of God’. It was eminently appropriate that the human paternity of Joseph should give way to the paternity of God. In Matthew there is no reference to the divine Sonship of the child. In 1:21, 23, it is simply ‘a
son’, that is a son of Mary. But in Luke, while ‘a son’ likewise occurs in 1:31, the other side of the child’s derivation is specified in vss. 32, 35; ‘the Son of the Highest’, ‘the Son of God’. And this is plainly brought into connection with the operation of the Spirit, represented more particularly as the transmitter of the power of the Highest overshadowing her, so that no doubt is left as to the specific paternity of God being involved to the exclusion of that of man.
The third point of view from which the event is regarded is that of carrying back the supernaturalism of the whole Person and work of Christ into the very origin of His human nature, as directly derived from God. If even in Old Testament history this principle finds expression as regards the typical work of redemption, how much more we may expect it here! Illustrated in the birth of Isaac after a symbolical manner, it certainly is eminently applicable, where He is introduced into human nature of whom Isaac was but the type. If it be objected that on this principle the supernaturalism of origin ought to have been made absolute through eliminating the maternity of Mary, as well as the paternity of Joseph, the answer is that the former could not be dispensed with, if the real connection of Jesus with our human nature was to be preserved and Docetism to be avoided. That this third point of view is not stressed in the narrative may be due to the prominence it later receives in the account of the baptism of Jesus.
THREE:
REVELATION CONNECTED WITH JOHN THE BAPTIST
It is customary to designate John the Baptist ‘the fore-runner’ of Christ. The word occurs in Heb. 6:20, although without reference to John, and in a sense in which it could not apply to him. Apart from the word, the idea that John, through his historic activity, prepared the way for the work of Jesus finds clear expression in Lk. 1:17, 76, even though here by ‘the Lord’ proximately Jehovah were to be understood.
This whole idea of a divinely-arranged connection is spurned by many modern writers. It is attempted to separate John as much as possible from Jesus. Contrary to the Gospel representation, it is assumed that the two represented separate religious movements, which continued to run parallel for a considerable time. The testimony of the Gospels excluding this is exscinded as follows. The Fourth Gospel, which even more strongly than the others, and with a degree of pointedness, affirms the subserviency of John to Jesus, is declared unhistorical in this respect as in most others. The view has been formulated by Baldensperger (The Prologue of the Fourth Gospel, 1898) that the large space devoted to John in John chapters 1–3 is due to the apologetic purpose of convincing the Baptist-sect of the writer’s day out of the mouth of their own master, that their place was within the Christian Church, even as John had said: ‘I am not the Christ.’ The stories of the Nativity in Luke which bring Jesus and John together from the earliest possible point through the relationship and intercourse of their families are held to be of a legendary character, and hence untrustworthy in the matter at issue. The pericope extract exclusive to Matthew [3:13–15], according to which John recognized in Jesus, as soon as the latter came to him,
the Greater One, which, if not implying momentary revelation, would have to rest on previous acquaintance and recognition, is refused credence, partly because not found in Luke, partly because believed to be, within the first Gospel itself, irreconcilable with the doubting enquiry sent by John to Jesus whether He was ‘the One to Come’, or were they to wait for another? [11:1–3]. Mark, it is claimed, has in all these respects the older and correct tradition, which understood the first contact between Jesus and John to have taken place, when the latter had begun his preaching, and Jesus came to him as one among the many desiring to be baptized.
Others go even farther than this in eliminating from the record of the earliest preaching of John the reference to the Greater One as a reference to a Christ in general, interpreting it on the basis of the Christ-less eschatological programme, wherein Jehovah Himself appears in a supreme theophany. This would cut the connection not only between John and Jesus personally, but doctrinally between John and the Messianic hope. On such a supposition the impulse which, according to many writers, Jesus is believed to have at least received from the solemn occasion leading subsequently to His regarding Himself as the Messiah, is the only personal contact remaining.
The extreme step in this process of detaching John from Jesus is taken, where the spirit and content of the preaching of both are made of a conflicting nature. What John expected, it is held, bore strongly political features, and was for its coming dependent on the use of force. If this were according to facts, one might confidently say that John, instead of being the fore-runner, was in reality the fore- antagonist of the Saviour.
MATTHEW 11:2–19
The only apparent basis for these constructions being found in the passage Matt. 11:2–19, it seems best to define John’s position relative to Jesus’ work from the statements of Jesus’ discourse contained in
this passage. This is all the safer, since the unfavourable light in which John’s enquiry makes him appear would not be in keeping with the Baptist’s reputation in the early Church, and consequently must have had a solid ground in the tradition. The situation and the content of the enquiry are well known. Our interest attaches to Jesus’ discourse to the multitude after the messengers had returned to their sender, from vs. 7 onward. In the thrice-repeated question, ‘What went ye out to see?’, Jesus corrects, first, two erroneous, next an inadequate opinion about John, evidently formed in part under the influence of John’s inquiry. The first error is stated and rectified in vs. 7: the Baptist’s apparent doubt was not caused by fickleness on his part: he was not a reed shaken with the wind. The second misconception is stated and corrected in vs. 8: the vacillation was not due to the discomfort of John’s prison-life: he was not accustomed to the soft raiment worn in King’s houses. The third answer to the question recognizes that there was basal truth, only not full truth, in the people’s classification of the Baptist as a prophet. He was a prophet, only more than one.
Then Jesus proceeds to define in what this ‘more than a prophet’ consists. First of all he is a way-preparing messenger sent before the face of the Lord, something that only in a metaphorical sense could be said of the previous prophets: they wrote of Jesus, John is one of whom it was written of old. So far as this is the case he belongs half- way to the fulfilment-era. The culmination of Old Testament prophecy is in him, and this position entitles him to be called ‘greatest of them born of women’. As a messenger he comes immediately before the reality: all the prophets and the law prophesied (dealt with something future); John is Elias who was to come shortly before the coming of the day of Jehovah [Mal. 4:5]. Beginning with his days the Kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and the violent take it by force. Whatever the precise meaning of these figures in vs. 12 may be, it is clear, at any rate, that they imply the nearness, or even the presence of the Kingdom through the Baptist’s own work. Through him the Kingdom had passed out of the sphere of pure futurity belonging to it under the Old Testament; it had become
something actual engaging the thoughts and swaying the emotions of men. To have effected this was the great act of John, that which made him ‘more than a prophet’.
And yet our Lord intimates that there is a qualification to this: John himself could not be classified with the new dispensation come in through the work of Jesus: ‘He that is lesser (or least) in the Kingdom of Heaven is greater than he’ [vs. 11]. This statement does not mean that John was not what we call ‘saved’, nor could it possibly mean that John would be excluded from the eschatological kingdom, against which compare Matthew 8:11. The true interpretation is that the Baptist would not partake of the privileges of the already coming Kingdom of which others partook through their association with Jesus. He continued to lead his life apart, on the basis of the Old Testament.
This also affords the explanation of John’s somewhat impatient enquiry in regard to the Messianic authentication of Jesus. In it the Old Testament once more, as it were, voices its impatience about the tarrying of the Messiah. But as there, so here, the impatience centred on one particular point, the slowness of God’s procedure in destroying the wicked. John had been specifically appointed to proclaim the judgment-aspect of the coming crisis. Hence a certain disappointment at the procedure of Jesus. Thus interpreted the enquiry not only does not imply previous non-acquaintance between the two; on the contrary it proves that John had taken note of Jesus, and that there had been intercommunication; else such a message could not have been sent. Vs. 6 also proves previous recognition and appraisal up to a point, only with a certain continuance of the Old Testament perspective. Thus the peculiarity of the answer returned to John, with its exclusive emphasis on the beneficent aspects of Jesus’ work, is explained. These are not named merely as credentials, but equally much as characterizations. It was not Jesus’ task for the present to judge, at least not in that way. The judgment would come at a subsequent stage. After all, Jesus had not lost sight of John’s question. He answered it in the most delicate, yet forceful, way. As
the subsequent discourse reveals, His heart was full of appreciation of the greatness of John, and, as the Fourth Gospel proves, full of love for his person on account of the generosity of John’s self- effacement in the service of the Messiah [3:30; 5:35].
John’s appurtenance to the Old Testament is further borne out by Jesus’ parable in regard to the question of fasting [Mk. 2:18–22]. It is appropriate for John’s disciples to fast, because they have not arrived at that wedding feast of joy at which Jesus’ disciples are guests.
JOHN THE BAPTIST AND ELIJAH
Perhaps John’s entire external mode of appearance and life are connected with his place within the Old Testament. He was a life- long Nazarite. His desert-surroundings were significant, as of old connected with the preparation for repentance [Hos. 2:14, 15; Isa. 40:1–4]. He was a reproduction of Elijah, that great prophet of repentance [Matt. 11:14; 17:10–13]. In the first passage the words ‘if ye will receive it’ indicate that some doubted the character of John as fore-runner Elijah, and also that Jesus accepted it. But there was a difference, perhaps, between the conception that Jesus attached to the reappearance of Elijah and that of the Jews. The latter seem to have expected a literal resurrection of Elijah. Thus we can explain the statement of John about his not being Elijah [John 1:21]. He disclaimed being Elijah in that realistic Jewish sense, but would not have denied being so in the symbolic sense affirmed by Jesus, as little as he would have disclaimed that the prophecies of Isaiah and Malachi were being fulfilled in him.
Perhaps the text of the Septuagint furnishes evidence for the antiquity of the Jewish belief concerning the actual return of the prophet, for in Mal. 4:5 it renders ‘Elijah the Tishbite’, whereas the original has ‘Elijah the prophet’. The origin of the belief lay in the manner of Elijah’s ascent to heaven. The Evangelist Luke seems to recognize the symbolic significance of these externals about John, when he speaks of ‘the day of his showing unto Israel’ [1:80].
We thus see that John’s fore-running of Jesus was to all intents a fore-running of the entire Old Testament with reference to the Christ. And this applied not by any means to externals only; the real substance of the Old Testament was recapitulated in John. If we distinguish the two elements of law and prophecy, both were plainly summed up in the message: ‘Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.’ But the connection between the two is not that of the mere addition of two unrelated things; the conjunction ‘for’ indicates that the motive for repentance lies in the near approach of the Kingdom, because the latter means to John, first of all, judgment. Compare the fan in the hand, the axe at the root.
JOHN THE BAPTIST’S TESTIMONY TO JESUS
In the testimony of the Baptist to Jesus as the Messiah we must distinguish two stages, the one recorded chiefly by the Synoptics, the other by the Fourth Gospel. Between the two lies the baptism of Jesus by John. The characteristic features of the first stage are the emphasis on the judgment and on the judging function of the Coming One who, however, is not explicitly named the Messiah. The figures used to describe his superiority are such, that no one less than God, and yet some one different from Jehovah pure and simple, must be thought of [Matt. 3:3, 11, 12; Mk. 1:3, 7; Lk. 3:4, 16, 17]. The ‘fire’ specified as the one of the two elements in which the Coming One will baptize is undoubtedly the fire of judgment, not, therefore, a synonym, but the opposite of the Holy Spirit [cp. Matt. 3:10–12; Lk. 3:16, 17]; Mark omits reference to the ‘fire’, and names only the Holy Spirit [1:8]. If the Holy Spirit stands for the salvation-element, the fact results that John speaks of the judging and saving aspects of the advent as coinciding, a feature in which likewise he reproduces the Old Testament standpoint. The phraseology of this earlier stage of the preaching is largely derived from Mal. 4, that in which the Evangelists speak of it from Isa. 40.
JOHN’S BAPTISM
The baptism of John in general and the baptism of Jesus by John in particular should not be separated. At that time and later there were many circles in which baptismal rites were practised, but these were all subject to repetition, whereas John’s baptism was once for all [cp. Matt. 28:19; Acts 19:3; Heb. 6:2]. Its precedents and analogies will have to be sought in the Old Testament, not so much in the ceremonial lustrations of the Law, for these also required repetition, but rather, on the one hand in the washings preparatory to the making of the Old Covenant [Ex. 19:10, 14] and on the other in the great outpouring of water which the prophets announce will precede the eschatological era [Isa. 1:16; 4:4; Mic. 7:19; Ezek. 36:25–33; Zech. 13:1]. It ought to be noticed, that water appears in prophecy as a quickening, fructifying element, besides being the instrument of cleansing [Isa. 35:7; 41:18; 44:3ff.; Zech. 14:8]. It has been attempted to explain John’s baptism from these Old Testament antecedents, but these were in part prophetic, in part typical, so that for fulfilment or repetition specific supernatural injunction was required. John could not simply proceed on the basis of the Old Testament in such a matter, and this is recognized on all sides [John 1:25, 33; Matt. 21:25].
Least of all can we consider John’s baptism as a simple imitation of the so-called proselyte-baptism of Judaism. This was not at first a particularly outstanding rite, such as would have invited imitation on the part of John. It meant simply the application of the general Levitical law of cleansing to a proselyte, who, after having been circumcised, was still, owing to his previous contact with Gentiles, unclean, and so needed washing. And John scarcely went so far as to declare all those coming to him unclean pagans, to whom the principle of proselytism ought to be applied. Between Christian baptism and John’s there did actually exist a close connection, as will be presently shown.
The true import of John’s baptism must be inferred, partly from the descriptions given in the Gospels, partly from the general situation. Mark and Luke tell us that it was a ‘baptism of repentance unto
forgiveness of sins’. Matthew says that he baptized ‘unto repentance’, and that the people were baptized of him ‘confessing their sins’. According to the one statement (Matthew) confession of sin was the accompaniment of the act, according to the other (Mark and Luke) forgiveness of sin was the goal, but in this no real contradiction exists. It might appear contradictory, when Matthew makes the confession precede and the repentance follow the baptism; here the solution will lie in distinguishing between a more external acknowledgment of sin and a deepened, intensified repentance [Matt. 3:6, 11]. It is somewhat uncertain how the Marcan and Lucan phrase ‘baptism of repentance’ is to be understood. The construction allows of its being a general characterization of the baptism as something having to do with repentance in one way or another. A better view is to take the genitive as a genitive of purpose: baptism intended to produce repentance, which makes it agree with Matt. 3:11. If repentance was the expected result of the act, it is clear that the rite cannot have been a mere piece of symbolism, but must have constituted a true sacrament, intended to convey some form of grace. And with this also agrees John’s urging the people ‘to bring forth fruit worthy of repentance’.
Weiss has suggested that the ‘unto forgiveness’ of Mark and Luke must be prospective: with a view to future forgiveness, that is, in the judgment. Grammatically the phrase ‘unto forgiveness’ might, no doubt, mean this, but it yields an over-pregnant sense. The Old Testament already is full of the forgiveness of sin, and John’s work as the summing up of the Old Testament in itself could not have been entirely without it. The objection is made, however, that John pointedly contrasts what his baptism conveys, as ‘water’, with the reality of grace to be bestowed by the Spirit-baptism of the Coming One. But the Spirit covers more than forgiveness and, although the Baptist might, for the purpose of comparison, and, hyperbolically speaking, have put all the emptiness on the one side and all the fulness on the other side, this should not be literally understood, any more than when Paul and Hebrews seem to void the Old Testament of all grace. What John means is simply: compared with what the
Christ brings, my work is as water compared to the Spirit; it does not follow from this that in the sphere of types itself it had no other function than typifying.
Another question arising is of an opposite nature, namely, how, if John’s baptism be accorded real forgiveness of sin, it can be further distinguished from Christian baptism. On this question the post- Reformation Church has been divided. The Romanists, tending in their doctrine of the sacrament toward making the entire Old Dispensation purely typical, included in this opinion the baptism of John; the Protestant theology, both Lutheran and Reformed, with few exceptions, in reaction to the Romanist standpoint went to the opposite extreme and maintained that the baptism of John was fully identical with the Christian sacrament. Both positions are untenable: we shall have to say that John’s baptism, together with all the Old Testament rites, had real grace connected with it, but only the Old Testament measure and quality of grace. What it had not was the Spirit in the specific Christian conception; for the bestowal of that, and its connection with baptism, are dependent on the Pentecostal outpouring of the Spirit. Consequently the baptism administered in the time between by the disciples of Jesus must be classified with the baptism of John, as a continuation thereof, and not as an anticipation of Christian baptism.
How did John’s baptism symbolize? Some take the view that the symbolism lay in the immersion signifying the doing away with the old life of sin and the emersion as the entrance upon a new state of righteousness. But, if this were correct, it would separate John’s baptism entirely from all Old Testament precedents, for in the Old Testament symbolism of immersion is unknown. Even the washings of the entire body in certain instances of the ritual still remain washings; the immersion from a symbolic point of view is purely incidental. And on the other hand the spiritual things named, repentance and forgiveness of sin, point in the direction of cleansing. To this must be added that, through the medium of the water, there
is a symbolic reference to the quickening by the Spirit (cp. John 3:5, ‘born of water and the Spirit’].
Finally, for an adequate conception of John’s baptism it ought to be viewed against the eschatological background of the prevailing expectation of his time. The atmosphere was surcharged with the thought of the end. John’s baptism was specifically prospective to the fast-coming judgment and a seal of preparation for acquittal in this. The idea of baptism as a seal in this eschatological sense is something that has passed over to Christian baptism [cp. Eph. 1:13; 1 Pet. 3:21].
THE BAPTISM OF JESUS BY JOHN
Now, coming to the consideration of Jesus’ baptism by John in particular, the main thing to remember is that we may not arbitrarily cut this loose from the import of the baptism in general. It were foolish to say that John administered two baptisms, one for the people and one for Jesus alone, and that these two had nothing in common with each other. Still, it is possible to go so far in the opposite direction as to deny the sinlessness of Jesus. And that is forbidden not on doctrinal grounds merely; the dialogue between John and Jesus recorded in Matt. 3:13–15 historically excludes it. Besides, the revelation connected with the baptism proves that the latter was something quite unique by which it differed in principle from the rite performed on the average Israelite. The suggestion of Weiss that this unique element be sought in the symbolism of Jesus’ emerging from the life of privacy and entering upon a life of public service cannot be accepted, because it rests on the idea of submersion, and moreover would cut the bond between Jesus’ baptism and that of the others, to whom such an entrance on public service did not apply.
The passage Matt. 3:13–15, when carefully scanned, gives us the solution of this problem, as to how Jesus’ baptism could fit into the general scheme of John’s ministry, and yet remain free of those
elements in the latter relating to sinfulness and repentance. The dialogue with John brings out the following facts:
(a) John recognizes the rank and character of Jesus as putting Him beyond the need of his baptism; ‘John forbade Him’, vs. 14;
(b) this conviction of John is based on the Messianic position of Jesus; the words ‘I have need to be baptized of Thee’ cannot mean that Jesus should apply to John a water-baptism, thus merely reversing the roles; after John had just announced that the Greater One would baptize with the Holy Spirit, his confession of need of baptism by Jesus can refer to nothing else but that, and this involves the sinlessness of Jesus personally considered;
(c) John’s protest, as well as the ground on which he bases it, are endorsed by Jesus when He insists, saying, ‘Suffer it to be so now’; the term ‘suffer’ implies the absence of such subjective necessity as John had denied; it must be allowed for objective reasons;
(d) this objective necessity is something that operates, not for ever and under all circumstances, but just for the present situation, with a prospect half-opened, of future removal of the necessity;
(e) the reason for the present necessity consists, according to Jesus, in this, that ‘thus it behoves us to fulfil all righteousness’; ‘to fulfil all righteousness’ is not here identical with the stereotyped formula in which the doctrine of vicarious atonement has so aptly expressed the principle of Christ’s substitution for us in the keeping of the law. It should be taken in a less technical, popular sense; ‘righteousness’ is that which at any time, through the law or otherwise, is from Jehovah asked of Israel; in the present case this consisted in submission to the baptism of John, for this was not a matter of individual choice, but a national duty; both on Jesus and John (‘us’) this piece of righteousness had been imposed, and Jesus declares it a matter of duty to observe it;
(f) if, then, what is not incumbent on Jesus Himself in a personal capacity none the less appears a divinely imposed duty for Him because of his appurtenance to the people of Israel, there is no better formula for expressing this, than that He undergoes the baptism in virtue of his identification with Israel.
Adding to this that it is a temporary experience, we find ourselves as near as could be expected under the circumstances to an expression of the vicarious relation of Jesus to the people of God. And it is but one step beyond this, if, taking into account the general scope of John’s baptism, we should say that Jesus’ identification with the people in their baptism had the proximate end of securing for them vicariously what the sacrament aimed at, the forgiveness of sin. Even with regard to repentance we may reason analogously; for if Jesus bore sin vicariously, and received forgiveness vicariously, then there can be no objection on principle to saying that He repented for the people vicariously. All these things are, however, hinted at here in a more or less enigmatic statement. The full exposition, which will at the same time furnish a full confirmation of the correctness of our exegesis, can be obtained only in the later discussion of John 1:29, 36.
THE DESCENT OF THE SPIRIT ON JESUS
The baptism of Jesus was accompanied by two events of supreme importance—the descent of the Spirit and the announcement from heaven concerning Jesus’ Sonship and Messiahship. Since the latter has been more fully discussed elsewhere, we here confine ourselves to the observation, that the record does not lend itself to the theory of the baptism having been the occasion for the awakening of Jesus’ Messianic consciousness. In Matthew the statement is purely objective: ‘This is my beloved Son’, which indicates that at least according to this Evangelist the assurance in the voice was not for Jesus alone. Nor can the varying forms of description used (‘Lo, a voice from heaven’ … ‘there came a voice from heaven’ … ‘a voice came from heaven’) prove that the writers think of something
perceptible to Jesus only, the less so, since the coming up out of the water, and the opening of heaven, to which the hearing of the voice is parallel, do not give in any way the impression of a visionary setting. Matthew’s ‘He saw’ is certainly not meant of visionary perception, and Luke’s ‘in bodily shape like a dove’ speaks against the subjectivity of the optical phenomenon. From John 1:34 we learn that the occurrence had to be perceptible to John, as well as to Jesus, since the former had to bear record concerning it. We may also compare the terms in which Peter speaks about the analogous phenomena at the transfiguration [2 Pet. 1:17, 18]. Evidently the voice had a sacramental significance for Jesus, and, if for no other than this reason alone, had to be objective.
In a sacrament, however, as a rule something real is conveyed, besides the assurance given. And so here the voice was followed by the descent of the Spirit. There are according to the New Testament three epochal occasions when an operation of the Spirit in connection with Jesus took place. The first of these has already been touched upon in connection with the virgin-birth. The second is this event at the baptism. The third happened in the resurrection of our Lord, and falls under the head of apostolic teaching. Here we are concerned with defining as closely as possible the necessity and nature of the second impartation. From the time of its occurrence may be inferred that it has its specific bearing upon the public ministry of Jesus, just as the first had upon the origin and constitution of His human nature and the third endowment is related to the heavenly ministry of the Lord. It made Him ‘spiritual’ [Rom. 1:4; 1 Cor. 15:45].
Jesus did not, of course, receive the Spirit as the agent of sanctification, for that would presuppose sinfulness, nor is there anywhere a trace of such function in the Gospels. But He could and did receive the Spirit as a pledge of the Father’s approval of His mind and purpose expressed in submitting to the baptism, and of the effect God would give to it, when accomplished. In this there is an analogy
to what the sealing with the Spirit means in baptism to every Christian; only in Jesus’ case it was prospective.
Furthermore our Lord needed the Spirit as a real equipment of His human nature for the execution of His Messianic task. Jesus ascribed all His power and grace, the gracious words, the saving acts, to the possession of the Spirit [Matt. 12:28; Lk. 4:18; Acts 10:36–38]. And, through qualifying Him in this manner for achieving His Messianic task, the Spirit laid the foundation for the great Pentecostal bestowal of the Spirit afterwards, for this gift was dependent on the finished work. This explains the statement of the Baptist in John 1:33: ‘(God) said unto me, Upon whom thou shalt see the Spirit descending, and remaining upon Him, the same is He which baptizeth with the Holy Spirit.’ It is perhaps due to this thought, that the preposition here used is epi with the accusative, an unusual construction with a verb of rest; it seems to denote the intent of the Spirit permanently to remain directed to and identified with the Saviour. Matthew, Mark and Luke have eis, which may either mean the approach of the Spirit towards Jesus or the entrance of the Spirit into Him.
The difference between this spiritual endowment of Jesus and that received by the prophets of old ought to be carefully noted. In the Fourth Gospel it is explicitly stated that God gave the Spirit to Jesus, and that, because it was a case of giving, no measure could be applied to the gift [3:34]; likewise it is emphasized that the Spirit descending abode upon Him [1:33]. The same thought, that of the totality and undividedness of the gift may be found in the description of Luke to the effect, that ‘the Holy Spirit descended in a bodily form as a dove upon Him’ [3:22]. Whilst in Matthew and Mark the phrase ‘like a dove’ may be understood as an adverbial qualification of the verb ‘descending’, serving to denote the slow deliberate movement of the Spirit in His coming upon Jesus, the version of Luke leaves no doubt as to the objective form of appearance assumed by the Spirit on this occasion. The Spirit resembled a dove, not merely was His motion like that of a dove. But even the other construction, if followed in
Matthew and Mark, would not be without its own significance, for what descends deliberately intends to come to rest and abide.
In this, no less than in the totality of what descended, there was a difference from the ordinary prophetic bestowal of the Spirit. The prophets had visitations of the Spirit; the Spirit’s impact upon them was abrupt, not continuous; in the case of Jesus His entire life was equably in every word and act directed by the Spirit. For the rest, why the figure of a dove should have been chosen for the Spirit’s appearance, rather than that of some manifestation of light cannot be determined with certainty. The Old Testament nowhere compares the Spirit to a dove. It does represent the Spirit as hovering, brooding over the waters of chaos, in order to produce life out of the primeval matter. This might be found suggestive of the thought, that the work of the Messiah constituted a second creation, bound together with the first through this function of the Spirit in connection with it.
THE POST-BAPTISMAL TESTIMONY OF THE BAPTIST TO JESUS
There still remains to be discussed the post-baptismal testimony of John to Jesus. This is found in the Fourth Gospel. All the discourse of the Baptist here recorded revolves around Jesus and culminates in a triad of supreme declarations concerning Him. Foregoing to exegete all the statements, we confine ourselves to these outstanding deliverances, only adding the passage, disputed as to spokesmanship, at the close of chapter 3.
[1] John 1:15, 30
The first of the three declarations occurs in John 1:15, 30. It distinguishes in the Messiah’s career two stages: the stage in which He comes after the Baptist, that is to say, succeeds the latter in his public ministry; the stage in which He nevertheless preceded John in the latter’s appearance upon the scene; this can refer only to the Messiah’s activity under the Old Testament. The A.V. renders here ‘is preferred before me’, understanding it of rank, but between the two
clauses of chronological import this seems unnatural. Perhaps what has led to this rendering was the feeling that, in case the second clause applied to time, no proper distinction could be maintained between it and the third clause, ‘for He was before me’, because this likewise again speaks in terms of time. It had been overlooked, however, that though the second and third clauses sound very much alike in English, there is an important difference between them in the Greek: the middle clause reads, emprosthen mou gegonen, the final clause reads, hoti protos mou en. Both the prepositions and the verbs are different: emprosthen with the perfect of the verb expresses precedence in the sphere of becoming or appearing upon the scene, protos with the imperfect of the verb signifies absolute anteriority as to mode of existence; it relates to the eternal existence of the Lord, usually called his pre-existence [cp. John 1:1, 18]. On this view the conjunction hoti linking together clauses two and three is naturally explained: in Christ’s eternal existence before time lies the possibility of His appearance and activity under the Old Testament. There is, therefore, no repetition between clauses two and three.
It has been observed that, even in this statement that marks the farthest advance in the Baptist’s Christology, there is no loss of touch with the Old Testament. In Malachi, a prophetic book from which, as we have seen, so much of John’s imagery is taken, we find in chapter 3 vs. 1 the distinction of the three stages in the eschatological advent, as it were, in preformation: first we have ‘I send my messenger and he shall prepare the way before me’; this messenger was (in the fulfilment) John the Baptist; it covers, therefore, the public ministry of Jesus preceded by John’s; in regard to it John could say: ‘after me comes a man.’ But in the same passage of Malachi, the Lord, before whom the messenger goes to prepare His way, is in the immediate sequel called ‘the Messenger of the Berith, whom ye desire’; this refers to the figure otherwise called ‘the Angel of Jehovah’. Of the Angel of ehovah it was known that at various points He had appeared and interposed in Old Testament history; this contains, therefore, in principle the second affirmation of John, ‘came [or “became”] before me’. But in the prophet there is also an intimation of the third clause:
‘He was before me’, because ‘the Lord whom ye seek’, and who is come to His temple, is through apposition identified with the Angel of the Berith, at least, if ‘even the Angel of the Berith’, and not ‘and the Angel of the Berith’ be the correct rendering. In the latter case the epiphany of two persons would be foretold as occurring simultaneously, that of ‘the Lord’ and that of ‘the Angel of the Berith’. Still, even so, one would be justified in finding here an intimation of the close relationship between Jehovah’s advent and Jesus’ advent, something fitting well into the general tenor of the Baptist’s preaching from the beginning. The Old Testament already had made the Angel and Jehovah almost indistinguishable on certain occasions. If the one coming after John as to time of ministry was actually like both Jehovah and the Angel, then John could truly declare ‘He was before me’, in the most absolute sense.
[2] John 1:29, 36
The second outstanding piece of testimony from the Baptist’s mouth is that found in John 1:29, 36: ‘Behold the Lamb of God which takes away [or “takes upon Himself”] the sin [sing.] of the world’, or in the abbreviated form of the second quotation: ‘Behold the Lamb of God.’ This enunciates a doctrine not made particularly prominent in the Fourth Gospel, viz. that of the vicarious sin-bearing of Christ. There is on this account all the more ground for trusting its authenticity. To explain the utterance as faithfully reflecting the historic occasion on which it was made, we need only place it in the light of the great event with its accompaniments that had immediately preceded, the baptism of Jesus, provided always that there had actually occurred at the baptism what Matt. 3:14, 15 relates, discussed by us above. If that meant a vicarious interpretation of Jesus’ baptism, formulated in a dialogue between John and Jesus Himself, then certainly John, with the event that had just occurred vividly before his eyes, could hardly have spoken of it otherwise than is here done. It is the Baptist’s commentary on his own and also on Jesus’ act. Still John did not write this piece of commentary freely out of his own mind; he had
here, no less than in the case of the second utterance, the guidance of the Old Testament to rely upon.
Two precedents for the figure of the lamb have been found: that of the sacrificial lamb, and the representation as a lamb of the Servant of Jehovah in Isa. 53. Some writers posit an alternative, thinking that John must have had in mind either the one or the other. But, perhaps, even for Isaiah the combination already existed; far more easily could it enter the mind of John, who must have been familiar with both the prophecy and the ritual. It must be admitted, however, that in the prophecy the lamb does not at the outset appear with ritual associations. Its primary use is to depict the innocence, meekness, and willingness to render vicarious service for the people through suffering and death. The features of innocence and meekness are inherent in the character of the lamb generically, but they are with special emphasis suggested here, because, the people having been described as a wayward, wandering flock, the very quality of a lamb sets the servant in contrast with this sinful condition.
But it immediately appears that these traits of innocence and meekness are not intended for the general purpose of idealizing the character of the Servant, but for the specific purpose of showing Him both fitted and willing to bear the sin for others. This is the transition between vs. 6 and vs. 7 in the prophecy: because innocent He can bear sin of others, because meek He is willing to do so. And also his appurtenance (with a distinction) to the flock serves its purpose here: being of the flock He can suffer for the flock. The vicariousness of His suffering unto death is described in the most explicit of terms in vss. 5 and 6. So far, however, there is no need of thinking of sacrifice, for vicariousness is not ipso facto sacrificial. In vs. 10 it becomes different; here the word asham, ‘trespass-offering’, is explicitly named as summing up in itself the entire preceding statement: ‘when thou shalt make [or: He shall make] his soul a trespass-offering for sin’, etc. That the trespass-offering is chosen from among the various kinds of sacrifice is probably not accidental;
it was that kind of sacrifice in which the ideas of debt and restitution were inherent, so that the thought emerges of the Servant not merely atoning for the offences but also making good the obligation which, positively considered, was owed to God.
Now we must remember how in Isaiah the figure of the Servant only gradually detaches itself from the people of Israel, taken collectively, so that the exegetical dispute has arisen, whether He is meant for a separate person, or merely for an idealization of the people. This situation John must have found strikingly reproduced in the event of the baptism of Jesus. Jesus had come to him, acknowledging that personally He had nothing to confess. He had implied that it was different with His people, for whom a baptism of repentance unto forgiveness of sin had been ordained by God. He had further expressed the necessity of taking this baptism upon Himself on account of identification with the people. All this, dramatically enacted in the baptism itself, rose up for John as the precise fulfilment of the situation envisioned by the prophet Isaiah. How entirely the two concepts of ‘the lamb’ and that of ‘removing sin’ had grown together for John may be seen from the fact, that in the second utterance of the statement, vs. 36, the participial clause is omitted; it stood in no need of repetition; ‘the Lamb’ is ipso facto ‘the sin-bearer’. The relative clause is simply epexegetical.
As to the meaning of the participle airon there is a dispute, some giving it the sense of ‘removing’, others that of ‘taking upon oneself’, both of which senses it may express in the Greek. The English Versions choose the former, ‘which takes away’ (R.V. in the margin: ‘bears the sin’). But, if the words really express the situation John had just been witnessing, then the other rendering will have to be preferred. What Jesus had done in the baptism was not yet the actual removal of sin, but only as yet the taking of the sin upon Himself. To the other task his whole life was to be devoted. In Isaiah also we partly see the Servant depicted in assuming the sin of Israel, although here much of the real bearing enters into the description. The phrase ‘Lamb of God’ is the exact duplicate of the phrase
‘Servant of Jehovah’. It means the lamb performing this task of sin- bearing as belonging to and in the service of Jehovah.
Finally, the difference ought to be noted between the range covered by the act according to the Prophet and according to the Baptist. In Isaiah it is the sin of Israel, here it is the sin of the world. There is some doubt, however, here as in other passages of the Gospel, whether ‘world’ may not have to be taken qualitatively rather than quantitatively. Still, in Isaiah already the note of universalism is not entirely absent [cp. 52:15].
[3] John 1:34
The third great post-baptismal declaration of John recorded in the Fourth Gospel is found in 1:34; ‘And I myself have seen and have borne witness, that this is the Son of God.’ In this the Baptist reflects upon his fidelity in observing and answering by witness the signal set for him by God in the descent of the Spirit upon Jesus. The close junction of ‘seen’ and ‘borne witness’ describes the immediacy of the carrying out of the command: I no sooner saw than I witnessed. The pronoun of the subject is expressed, ‘I myself’, to indicate, on the one hand, that this was eye-witness testimony, on the other, that it was official testimony. The range of the title ‘Son of God’ has been considered elsewhere. That it cannot be lower in its import than the same title throughout the Gospel follows from the position that it has as the culminating piece of this first stage of witnessing, when compared with the statement of the author of the Gospel [20:31]. According to this statement the things recorded of Jesus were written to create belief in the divine Sonship of the Saviour. With this in view a series of episodes and discourses had been put in order. Obviously the John-the-Baptist section forms the first in this series, and therein lies the reason why it issues into the testimony about the Sonship under discussion. That it carried high meaning also appears from the first of the three declarations, in which nothing less than the pre-existence of the Messiah had been affirmed already.
John 3:27–36
In addition to these three supreme utterances there remains still the section 3:27–36 to be considered. This pericope falls into two pieces [vss. 27–30 and 31–36]. As to the former, here John the Baptist is by common consent represented by the Evangelist as the speaker. The occasion was the report brought to the Baptist by his disciples of the greater popularity of Jesus than that enjoyed by their Master. They do not take exception to Jesus’ higher status as such, but only to His becoming the rival of John in the latter’s own field through baptizing. This was correct as to the statement of fact, at least partially so [cp. 4:2]. Jesus exposes the absurdity of supposing the possibility of rivalry between Himself and John, thus vindicating the latter. Jesus stands so incomparably higher than all messengers of God that it could occur to John as little to conceive jealousy against Him, as the friend of the bridegroom (the presider at the wedding festivities) could do so with regard to the bridegroom. His work is to efface himself, and therein to find his supreme joy; cp. ‘my joy’ [vs. 29]. Notice that this figure of ‘the bridegroom’ reminds of Jehovah’s relation to Israel.
From John 3:31 onward it is uncertain whether the Baptist remains the speaker, or the Evangelist here takes occasion to insert some reflections of his own on the theme touched upon by the Baptist. Something may be said in favour of each of these views. There seem to enter into the discourse certain characteristic thoughts of Jesus and the Evangelist, who would, of course, in writing the Gospel remember what Jesus had said on various occasions. Such elements are: the descent of Christ from the supernal world, the experiential character of His knowledge of the things of heaven, His identification with God, so that to hear Him is to seal the veracity of God, His all- comprehensive authority in the sphere of revelation, the function of faith as mediating eternal life. Especially with the preceding Nicodemus-discourse there are striking points of contact in regard to some of these matters.
Over against this must be set the weighty consideration, that vss. 31– 36 are really needed to round off the argument of the Baptist on the absurdity of endeavouring to rival Jesus. The official impossibility of this had been shown in the preceding, but therein did not yet lie the highest reason for excluding such a state of mind. Of course, it remains possible that the Evangelist, perceiving the preliminariness and one-sidedness of the Baptist’s argumentation, proceeded out of his own fuller knowledge to round it off with this discourse upon the transcendent nature and origin (not merely office) of Jesus. If he has actually done so, he has done so with consummate skill, seizing upon several important points of contact in the foregoing with what he wished to say. But these same points of contact can just as well be made to prove that we are here still in the circle of thought of the Baptist. Hence the choice is difficult. It will be noticed that after vs. 30 no pronoun of the first person, which might help us to identify the speaker occurs, and this slightly favours attribution of the words to the Evangelist.
We here content ourselves with briefly enumerating these points of contact with the historical situation that gave rise to the entire discourse. ‘He that comes from above’ [vs. 31] reminds of vs. 27; the contrast to this is worked out in three statements: ‘he that is of the earth’ (earthly origin of John), ‘is earthly’ (earthly mode of existence of John),’ and he speaks of the earth’ (earthly mode of revelation- speech). Over against these three must be placed the reiterated ‘is above all’ which therefore requires to be unfolded for its full understanding in the three directions of the opposite; the absoluteness of Christ’s revelation is guaranteed by its experiential character, ‘what He has seen and heard’ [vs. 32, first half]; the tragical element of the situation is brought out in the remainder of this verse, ‘no man receives his witness’; this is the tragedy-note in John’s peculiar self-effacing attitude, which makes Jesus’ loving appreciation of his work all the more touching; at the same time the statement ‘no man receives’ involves a correction of the plaint of the disciples of John, ‘all come to Him’ [vs. 26].
It might seem an exaggeration, in view of the facts recorded in the Gospel itself in chapter 1, to say ‘no man receives his witness’; but how the latter is meant, vs. 33 explains: no one has received his testimony in that absolute, comprehensive sense that belongs to receiving the testimony of God; ‘for He whom God has sent speaks the words of God’ [vs. 34]; in this and the explanation of motive that is added to it the speaker seems to return to the reasoning from the official point of view observed in vss. 27–30; ‘for God gives not the Spirit by measure’; the correct interpretation of this has been above explained; it means, ‘when there is a giving of the Spirit in the literal sense of giving the entire Spirit involved, there can be no measure to this’ (notice the joining of the negation to the verb and the omission of the indirect object, making of it a general proposition); vs. 35, ‘the Father loves the Son and has given all things into his hands’ reminds most vividly of the voice from heaven at the baptism and the declaration of the election of Jesus to the Messianic office, which, as such, includes the committal of all things to the Son; finally vs. 36 draws from the foregoing objective characterization of Jesus and His office the practical consequence, that faith in Him is followed by eternal life, whilst unbelief with reference to Him results in exclusion from life and permanent abiding under the wrath of God. Here we seem to come closest to the teaching of Jesus and of the Evangelist in the Fourth Gospel. Notice how eternal life is placed in the present, and so is the wrath of God, for the wrath abides; both ‘shall not see life’ and ‘abides on him’ are to be understood eschatologically: the vision of life belonging to that final point, and the removal of the wrath at that point are denied.
FOUR:
REVELATION IN THE PROBATION OF JESUS
THE TEMPTATION IN THE WILDERNESS
What we usually call ‘the temptation of Jesus’ at first seems to lie like an erratic block in the forefield of his public ministry. On closer examination we discover it to be indispensably connected with both what precedes and what follows. Because this connection is not truly appreciated, doubt has arisen in regard to the historicity and objectivity of what offers itself as a real event. On the mythological principle of interpreting the Gospel history it has been declared an embodiment in story form of the idea, that a personal encounter between the Messiah and Satan is essential to the eschatological drama. Because this had to happen, according to theory, it must have happened to Jesus, if so be He was the real Messiah.
On this view Jesus Himself had nothing whatever to do with the conception or shaping of the account; mythology furnished the framework, whilst the concrete features were borrowed from Old Testament history. Not so far goes the parabolic theory in detaching the story from the actualities of the life of Jesus. Jesus according to this theory told the account to the disciples, not meaning it to be taken by them in a factual sense, but simply as a parable through which He endeavoured to convey to them an impression of the many tempting solicitations that beset Him during his career. The disciples misunderstood this intent and changed it into the account of a fact of single concrete occurrence. On this view Jesus had at least something to do with the production of the story.
Over against both these views we may, in order to uphold the historicity of the event as a single definite occurrence, place the testimony of Matt. 12:29. Here Jesus distinguishes between the entering into the strong man’s house and binding him, on the one hand, and the spoiling of the strong man’s goods, on the other. The
former is something that secures the possibility of doing something, the latter is the following up of that possibility in acts. The context makes clear what the spoiling of goods consists in: it refers to the casting out of demons. Consequently the binding of the strong man, as something lying back of this, must be understood of something done to him whose property the demons are. According to uniform New Testament teaching the demons are subjects of Satan. Now Jesus here uses parabolic language but this cannot in the least alter the fact that behind the parable thus framed there must lie a concrete situation. Although our Lord does not say in so many words, ‘I had to pass through a temptation before I could cast out demons’, nevertheless something quite definite must be referred to by Him, something that we can even, up to a certain point, locate in time, because it must have fallen before the first casting out of demons, and these acts marked the very beginning of His ministry.
Moreover a diluted interpretation of the parable such as in modern expositions is often met with, to the effect that a man must first conquer evil within himself, before venturing to attack it on the outside, does not fit well into the terms of the figure. The entering into the house of a strong man does not naturally describe the falling into temptation; it depicts something more active and deliberate. Those who refuse, on account of the parabolic nature of the speech, to bring it into connection with the very realistic, though mysterious, narrative of the temptation, are bound by their refusal to attempt some other explanation, if possible less modern-sounding than the one referred to above. And especially the parabolic view constitutes a serious danger to belief in the sinlessness of Jesus, because it implies that on repeated occasions He had to fight a moral battle out within Himself, before He could proceed to reap the fruits of the victory.
The same parable, however, which vouches for the historicity of the event, likewise vouches for its objectivity. Much confusion of thought is created here by a failure to distinguish between the objectivity and corporealness of such a transaction. The second involves the first, but this cannot be reversed: an encounter between persons,
especially in the supersensual world, can be perfectly objective without necessarily entering into the sphere of the corporeally perceptible. To what extent there was corporeal perceptibility in the event can only be inferred from the terms of its description, and not a priori decided from this parable. But objectivity is doubtless involved, because of the consequences; the casting out of demons appearing objective, the cause is naturally supposed to lie within the same sphere. And, all modern tortuous constructions notwithstanding, there can be no doubt that Jesus regarded the demons as actually existing supernatural beings, who could be spoken to and give answer, and exercised a wide sphere of baneful power. The reduction of all this to the rubric of superstition or psychological derangement is certainly not in accordance with the mind of the Evangelists. Any one who desires to dissociate Jesus from all these and other supernatural phenomena, must do so on the basis of a priori theological or philosophical premises, or because of the assumed identity of the recorded facts with phenomena in the sphere of paganism.
The passage in Matt. 12 yields still another item of information concerning the temptation of Jesus. His claim in the dispute with the Pharisees is that the casting out of demons is accomplished by the Spirit of God. The mention of the Spirit is here induced by the mention of Beelzebub, that is, Satan, in the charge of the Pharisees. But there is still another reason for the introduction of the Spirit here. In the accounts of the temptation we find the Spirit of God prominently referred to. Jesus was led up of the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the Devil (Matthew): the Spirit drives Him into the wilderness, apparently for the same purpose (Mark); Jesus, being full of the Holy Spirit, was led of the Spirit into the wilderness, being forty days tempted of the Devil (Luke).
From these statements we learn two things: first, that the Spirit leading Him into the temptation was the Holy Spirit in His Messianic aspect. The close sequence between the accounts of the baptism and that of the temptation puts this beyond all doubt. No sooner has
Jesus received the Messianic Spirit than the latter begins to function in that capacity by leading or driving Him into the temptation. The same Spirit who did this at the beginning afterwards enabled Him to cast out the demons. It was the execution of a definite programme in its very first beginning.
In the second place, something like this, done under the auspices of the Spirit, was a transaction behind which stood God Himself. For this reason it is useful to remind ourselves by our terminology, that, while this was on the one hand an act of Satan, it was on the other hand likewise the carrying out of a positive Messianic purpose of God. We can express this best by naming it from the point of view of Satan a ‘temptation’, from the point of view of the higher purpose of God a ‘probation’ of Jesus. And as regards Jesus, this eliminates every idea of the sole purpose of the event being a demonstration of His sinlessness. What had behind it a divine purpose cannot have been a mere experience to Jesus, something into which He was drawn unconsciously to Himself and through which He went unaware of its design. Of such an operation of the Spirit upon the Saviour, which would have made of Him a mere unwilling, unresponsive object of propulsion, there is nowhere any trace in the Gospels, and certainly Mark’s ‘drives Him into the wilderness’ is not meant by the Evangelist so to be understood, but only stresses the powerful action of the Spirit, to which Jesus responded with equal energy.
THE LORD’S TEMPTATION AND OUR OWN
Our failure to gauge correctly the significance of the event springs to no small extent from the inclination and habit of finding in it an analogy primarily to our own temptations. This being so we take it too negatively, and do not sufficiently place it in a class by itself. In our case temptation chiefly raises the question of how we shall pass through it and issue from it without loss. In Jesus’ case, while this consideration was not, of course, absent, the higher concern was not avoidance of loss, but the procuring of positive gain. And in order to
see this we must compare it to the one previous occasion in Biblical history, when a procedure with an equally double-sided purpose had taken place, namely, the temptation of Adam related in Genesis, chapter 3.
Nor is this purely a theological construction on our part; Luke at least seems to have something of this kind in mind, when first carrying back the genealogy (in distinction from Matthew) to Adam, and then immediately subjoining to it this account of the probation of the Second Adam. It should be remembered, however, that with the analogy there existed a difference between the two cases. Adam began with a clean slate, as it were; nothing had to be undone, whilst in the case of Jesus all the record of intervening sin had to be wiped out, before the positive action for the procuring of eternal life could set in.
The clearest philosophy of this difference is given us by Paul in Rom. 5 [cp. especially vs. 15]. This connection of the probation of Jesus with the atoning removal of pre-existing sin will likewise make plain to us that the temptation had to carry in itself for Jesus an element of suffering and humiliation on our behalf, and not merely the exertion of a strenuous will for obedience. Here again there is a difference between Jesus’ temptation and ours. To be tempted involves no special humiliation for us, because we are antecedently humiliated by the presence of sin in our hearts to which the solicitation merely has to address itself, which was quite different in the case of Jesus.
All that has been said does not take away the fact that there is an analogy between our temptations and that of Jesus. As is well known the Epistle to the Hebrews lays stress on this in the New Testament. ‘Tempted alike, [but] without sin’, that is to say, without sin resulting from the temptation in His case, which but too infrequently can be said of us. Still, the author of Hebrews has not particularly in mind the temptation at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, but rather that connected with the passion at the close [Heb. 5:7–9].
We are now prepared to define more precisely in which way the probation underlay the subsequent execution of Jesus’ redemptive work. Thus far we have only found that deliverance from demons is traced back to it. But we must further ask: on what principle? The principle is that of an anticipation of the fruits of Jesus’ work based on the partial anticipation in principle of the work itself. The casting out of demons was part of the spoil from the battle of His life, and yet it was done when the work was scarcely begun. In the Fourth Gospel this idea of anticipated fruition, both on Jesus’ and on the disciples’ part occurs not seldom, but here the same idea is found in the Synoptics. One might say, it is true that, after all, the casting out of demons represents but a small portion of our Lord’s saving work, too small indeed to suspend such a weighty construction on it. But perhaps He judged of that somewhat differently from what the modern mind is inclined to do. At any rate He has connected nothing less than the coming in of the Kingdom of God with this part of His ministry [Matt. 12:28; Lk. 11:20], and in all three of the Synoptics the antithesis between Satan’s and God’s kingdom is sharply brought out; where the former goes, the latter ipso facto rushes in [cp. vs. 30 in Matthew with vs. 23 in Luke].
THE SPECIFIC FORM ASSUMED BY OUR LORD’S TEMPTATION
We must now, in the next place, enquire what specific form the temptation or the probation assumed. Two possibilities suggest themselves: Jesus could be tempted in a matter not particularly belonging to his Messianic office, so that the sinful act held up before Him could have served as a temptation to any man standing under the ethical law. Or the suggestion made to Him could have been in some way connected with his Messianic calling, causing the sin, if committed, to be specifically Messianic sin.
The first two temptations plainly attach themselves to Jesus’ Messianic status, being introduced by ‘if thou be the Son of God’. In the third temptation this is not explicitly stated, but the obvious reason is that to mention in one and the same breath our Lord’s
divine Sonship and a matter of idolatry seemed out of place. The temptations, therefore, are Messianic. And yet the answers given by Jesus apparently proceed from the common human standpoint: ‘man shall not live by bread alone’; ‘thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God’; ‘thou shalt worship the Lord thy God and Him alone shalt thou serve’. Here no Messiahship whatsoever is referred to.
In this contrapointedness between temptation and answer lies the key to a correct understanding of what at bottom was taking place in this crisis. It will be noticed that Jesus, while not directly affirming his Messianic position, does not deny, nay, by indirection rather acknowledges it. It could have been easy for Him to bring the whole transaction to an end by saying: I am not the Son of God. The problem, however, resolves itself into this: how can Messiahship and submission to the ethical obligations of common human conduct go together? For in the abstract, Messiahship might be supposed to be exempt from certain restrictions imposed upon ordinary man. As a Messiah in the abstract, Jesus would have committed no sin, if, when hungering, He had turned stones into bread. He could have assumed a sovereign attitude towards nature, instead of submitting to its limitations. If He insists upon conducting Himself like a man, dependent for his support on God, He must mean that his Messiahship, while quite real, is nevertheless passing through a certain phase to which these creaturely limitations, attended by suffering, inseparably belong.
He existed as Messiah in a state of humiliation. After that had been passed through, a state of exaltation would follow, in which these various things now offered to Him as temptations would become perfectly normal and allowable. What was not inherently sinful became so in His case, because of the law of humiliation and service under which His life had for the present been put. The animus of the temptation, from Satan’s point of view, consisted in the attempt to move Him out of this spirit and attitude of service and humiliation, so as to yield to the natural desire for His Messianic glory without an interval of suffering. And this preliminary phase of Messiahship,
which Satan suggests He should overleap, coincided in general with the condition and experience of a suffering man under God. Hence while Satan counsels Him to act like a super-man, in principle like God, our Saviour, with His repeated stress on what a man is obligated to, repudiates such self-exaltation. It is highly significant in this connection, that the words wherewith Jesus repels the tempter are taken from the Torah, the Book of the Law (Deuteronomy), as though by thus placing Himself under the Law Jesus wished to remind Satan of the real matter at issue, the question of humiliation versus the assertion of the prerogatives belonging to a state of glory.
THE LORD’S TEMPTATIONS INTERPRETED
The above is a somewhat different interpretation of this crisis in the life of Jesus from that which may be met with in the stereotyped ‘Lives of Jesus’, or in the average moralizing versions of the Gospel stories. The theory ordinarily met with will have it that Jesus in these temptations repudiated the Jewish corruption and prostitution of the Messianic hope along the three lines of its principal perversion. In the first temptation, it is held, He spurned the idea of selfish exploitation of the Messiahship for the incumbent’s own ends or needs. The Messiah must not use His supernatural power for stilling His own hunger. His Messianic procedure must be altruistic through and through. In the second temptation Jesus waved aside the diversion of the Messiahship for selfish ambition, to be served by the assumption of the role of a wonder-working Messiah. And in the third temptation He was led to reject once for all the political, nationalistic associations of the idea, which, like the preceding two, made an appeal to the thirst for glory. We shall presently see that this view is not in accord with the replies Jesus made to the suggestions of the tempter. He, therefore, at any rate, did not so construe Satan’s design.
It is fortunate that in interpreting the individual temptations, we have available the answers of our Lord, enabling us to work our way back to the inner design of the temptation, for we may safely assume
that He meant to answer the tempter to the point. The meaning of the answer supplies the meaning of the Satanic suggestion. And besides this, since the words of the answers were taken from Scripture, and we may again safely assume that Jesus seized upon the real meaning and intent of the Scripture-passages, we can infer from a correct contextual exegesis of these what their point is, what consequently the point of Jesus’ answer was, and what, behind the latter, the point in Satan’s suggestion was.
DEUTERONOMY 8:3
In answering the first temptation our Lord quoted from Deut. 8:3: ‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God.’ In the context of these words Jehovah reminds the Israelites that, through feeding them supernaturally on manna, He meant to teach them the lesson of the ability of God to supply nourishment without the natural processes. There is no contrast here between spiritual food supplied by the Word of God and bodily food supplied in a physical way; in fact the experience of the Israelites would have been a poor method for teaching them that. Moreover in the discourse of Deuteronomy there is not the slightest point of contact for such an exegesis. The true meaning Jesus applies to Himself in essentially the same way which it applied to the Israelites. He had been brought by the Spirit into this situation, where God expected Him to hunger. Notice the occurrence of the words ‘to prove’, and ‘to humble’ in the context in Deuteronomy. And the probation consisted in placing before Him the necessity of exercising implicit trust in God as the One able to sustain His life notwithstanding the protracted fast. The ‘word proceeding from the mouth of God’ refers to the miracle-working word of omnipotence, the mere word requiring no natural means.
The best comprehensive term available for the state of mind revealed by Jesus is the word ‘faith’. Only we should remember what this so richly endowed term involved of content on the present occasion. For Jesus here to exercise faith went much further than to practise the
heroism of an endurance which will keep itself underneath the suffering. This forms part of the conception, indeed the Greek word hypomone, for ‘patience’, a species of faith, has been modelled upon it. But in the experience of Jesus, as in common Christian experience, the thing needed above all is the inner spirit of submission to God. The question was not in the first place what He should bear, pathologically considered, but how He should bear it. He had to work His way through this painful experience after an ideal fashion from a religious point of view.
And, once more, in this inward spiritual attitude the emphasis did not rest on the negative side only, it lay equally on the positive side. The temptation-suffering had to be borne with full appreciation, with full positive responsiveness to the plan of God. When Satan suggested that He should turn the stones into bread, he was endeavouring to move Jesus out of this faith with reference to His humiliation into an attitude of independent sovereignty, such as properly belonged to His exalted state only. Finally it should be noticed that what became a temptation was not the suffering of hunger only, but the danger of starvation, as also the quotation from Deuteronomy reads: ‘Man shall not live by bread only.’ Hence Mark and Matthew relate that angels came and ministered to Him.
DEUTERONOMY 6:16
In viewing the second temptation we again take our departure from the answer given by Jesus. This was taken from Deut. 6:16, where Moses says to the Israelites: ‘Ye shall not tempt Jehovah your God, as ye tempted Him in Massah.’ The event itself is described in Ex. 17, and again referred to in Deut. 9:22; 33:8. To tempt Jehovah has the meaning of ‘proving God’, that is, of seeking to ascertain by experiment whether His power to lead them to Canaan could be relied upon. It was a proving springing from doubt or outright unbelief. What happened at Massah figured in later times as the typical example of the sin of unbelief [Psa. 95:8; Heb. 3 and 4]. Our Lord plainly implies that casting Himself down from the height of
the temple, trusting that angels would intercept His fall, would not in principle differ from the conduct of these murmuring Hebrews in the wilderness.
At first sight this seems incomprehensible, because such an exhibition on the part of Jesus might be construed as diametrically opposite to the state of mind actuating the Israelites at Massah. It certainly required a degree of trust to perform the act commanded by Satan. And yet, while a momentary abandon to faith, the venture would have been inspired by the shrinking from a protracted life of faith. In the sequel our Lord would have been led on in His ministry, not by an ever-renewed forth-putting of the same act of trust that God would preserve Him, but by the remembrance of this one supreme experiment, which rendered further trust superfluous. It would have involved an impious experimenting with the dependability of God. Afterwards His sense of safety would have depended, not on the promise of God, but on the demonstration solicited by Himself. The answer, therefore, here also addressed itself in the most direct manner to what was the springing-point of the temptation: ‘Thou shalt not make experiments with Jehovah, thy God.’ This second temptation ranges itself by the side of the first, in that in the latter, safety from starvation, in the former, protection from outside danger were at issue.
DEUTERONOMY 6:13
The third temptation differs from the preceding ones in two respects. First, it suggests an open act of sin, whereas up to this point the sinfulness of the act was skilfully disguised, and represented as lying within the sphere of what the Messiah could legitimately do. Here the act counselled is an act of Satan-worship, sinful per se. And secondly, Satan now for the first time introduces the element of self- interest, having previously confined himself to the role of a disinterested spectator, counselling Jesus for the latter’s own good. In both these respects the third temptation moves on a lower plane of subtlety than the preceding two. It remains a mystery, how Satan,
after the two preceding repulses, could entertain any serious hope of success in this instance. And yet if, psychologically speaking, the attempt appears absurd, it must be acknowledged that the third temptation was a more fundamental one in that it uncovered the ultimate issue around which things had been revolving from the outset. The question at stake was, whether God should be God, or Satan should be God, and correspondingly, whether the Messiah should be God’s or Satan’s Messiah. For this is the deeper background which Satan’s conditional ‘if’ and his consequent promise about the gift of the glory of the kingdoms reveals to us. The two acts would not have been single, isolated acts of sin. They would have involved a transfer of allegiance on Jesus’ part from God to Satan. Hence our Lord’s summary dismissal of the tempter: ‘Get thee hence [or ‘behind me’], Satan.’ The appeal is made to Deut. 6:13 where all idolatry is on principle forbidden.
Although Satan in this third attempt, by coming out into the open and counselling something so flagrantly sinful, acted with desperately bad judgment, there are nevertheless some things to be taken into account, to render his conduct up to a certain point intelligible, if not intelligent. These are as follows:
(a) Satan seems to have counted on the effect of the suddenness of the assault; in the two preceding cases he had, as it were, submitted the case to Jesus for deliberate consideration; here he shows Him the object of attraction and fascination in a moment of time;
(b) he appeals to Jesus’ deep-seated instinct for obedience and service as evinced in the foregoing answers. This seems an attempt to betray Him into that form of religious subjectiveness, wherein it makes no longer much difference who or what the object of service is, provided there be scope for the unfettered assertion of the religious instinct. This, of course, gives rise to a pseudo-religion, in which the processes are governed by man and not by God. Religion is not worship or service in the abstract; it is worship and service of the true God, and according to His revelation specifically.
In the light of this the quotation from Deuteronomy, ‘the Lord thy God, and Him alone’, obtains a deepened meaning. Pagan religion at bottom always emancipates itself from this objective bond. In reality to call it ‘religion’, or to speak of ‘religions’, in the plural, is a misnomer. That ‘false religions’ exist at all is due solely to the fact that subjectively the need for religion is innate in the human soul.
TEMPTABILITY AND PECCABILITY
Our view taken of the temptation, while by no means solving all the mysteries of the event, nevertheless is adapted to throw some light on an obscure subject. Two problems meet here. The one is the problem of the temptability of Jesus. The other is the problem of His peccability. How could He be tempted? we first enquire; and then, the temptation being given, how could He sin? It is clear that the first problem in a sense supersedes the second. If a person is liable to being tempted by something, this would seem to involve an imperfection. The absolute goodness would be immunity to sin, such as God always possesses, and the saints in heaven have finally arrived at. As a matter of fact temptation has found entrance both in the First and in the Second Adam. And yet its entrance alone did not imply the presence of sin.
The solution lies in this, that the course of action made to appeal to them was not a course of action inherently sinful, but in the abstract innocent and allowable, and which became productive of sin only owing to the positive prohibition under which God had placed the act. Through the abstract innocence of the act it could enter the mind of man and become an object of desire or undecided contemplation, so long as the divine prohibition was not called to remembrance and defied. If ‘temptability’ merely means openness of mind to an, in itself, innocent act, the difficulty might perhaps seem to be removed by this. But it might be objected with considerable force that this touches the psychological approach to temptation only, and lies in reality this side of the actual temptation itself. The temptation would begin only when the clear-cut alternative presented itself before the
choosing mind—which shall it be, the taking of the thing in its innocence? or the rejection of it because forbidden by God?
And here the problem returns in all its acuteness: how could the preference of the taking to the obeying of the divine will be contemplated for a moment by the mind of a sinless person? For we must remember that the inclination of a sinless being is always towards God, and away from disobedience because of its love of God. What can we psychologically conceive able to overcome and reverse that? It is a problem that meets us already in the case of our first parents. But it presents a more difficult aspect yet in the case of Jesus. For Jesus differed from Adam in some respects, which make the counterbalancing factors for the repudiation of sin to be much more formidable, and in so far, the solvability of the problem to appear more impossible.
Jesus was not only innocent like Adam, He was possessed of and guided by the Spirit in all its fulness, and still further, if we accept the later teaching of the New Testament, His human nature was owned by the Person of the Son of God. To put the question under such circumstances seems to determine beforehand the negative answer, that He could not be tempted nor sin. The double mystery, therefore, that as to the temptability, and that as to the peccability of the Saviour, here appears as one in its root, and we simply must confess our inability to throw light upon it.
At the same time we should not let ourselves be taken in by the facile solution, which says: Jesus had a true human nature, and therefore, of course, He could be tempted and sin. This may have a certain relative value, because of the divine nature we a priori absolutely know, that it can be neither tempted nor sin. In that abstract, metaphysical impossibility the human nature of Jesus did not share. But the abstract, metaphysical possibility yields only an abstract, metaphysical contingency of being tempted and sinning. What is sought, where the problem is raised, is something different from that, namely, the psychological, ethical, religious conceivability of the
entrance of real temptation and sin. With an appeal to Jesus’ human nature as such nothing whatever is gained. To disillusion ourselves in regard to that, it suffices to remember that Jesus in His exalted state, and also the saints in heaven, possess a human nature, and yet are not thereby made capable of sinning.
The most current modern interpretation of the event meets with far greater difficulties in upholding the sinlessness of Jesus, than the one outlined above. The reason is that the Judaistic perversion of the Messianic idea, in the allurement of which is placed on this view the essence of the temptation, was not in itself an innocent thing. If Jesus felt the allurement exercised by it, and had to wage a battle against it, this seems to involve that He had to resist the seduction towards something wrong exerting power within Himself. A suggestion was injected into His soul, which was evil per se. It has been observed, however, that the same can not be evaded so far as the hypothetical part of the third temptation is concerned. But it was not the hypothesis here that made the appeal to Jesus. What was intended to appeal to Him was the rule over the kingdoms, and this again is not ipso facto sinful; on the contrary, it is something explicitly promised to the Messiah [cp. Psa. 2:8; 9; Rev. 11:15].
Still another objection to the popular view is that the replies of Jesus to Satan, if interpreted according to their true Old Testament import, do not contain a fitting refutation of the Satanic suggestion as the modern view understands them. That man shall not live by bread alone has nothing to do with the question of exploiting Messianic resources for selfish purposes. The bid for popular applause has nothing to do intrinsically with the prohibition of tempting God. Only in the third temptation does the quotation from the Old Testament fit better into the proposal of Satan.
The plan of temptation followed by Satan evinces, though not equal subtlety in all its parts, nevertheless a certain profundity of insight into the issues at stake, and a certain strategic eagerness to conquer Jesus, not at some subordinate point, but at the central, pivotal
position, on which the successful outcome of the plan of redemption depended. Satan knew very well that this pivotal point lay in Jesus’ absolute and resolute adherence to the principle of humiliation and suffering as the only road to victory and glory. It gave him, no doubt, a sinister satisfaction to attempt to overthrow the work of God and Christ at its very centre. Any kind of sin would have disqualified Jesus for His Messianic task, but the sin suggested here would have been a sin against the very heart and essence of the task.
FIVE:
THE REVELATION OF JESUS’ PUBLIC MINISTRY
[A] THE VARIOUS ASPECTS OF CHRIST’S REVEALING FUNCTION
In thinking of the revelation mediated by Jesus we are in the habit of confining ourselves to His walk and work on earth. This is not an adequate conception, because it leaves out of account that Jesus existed before He was born (pre-existence), and continued to exist after He had been removed from earth (post-existence), and that both of these states, by which his earthly life was surrounded, stood in close relation to the large scheme of divine revelation as a whole.
Jesus’ function while revealing God during His earthly life partook of a peculiar adjustment to other organs and epochs of revelation, through which certain limitations were imposed upon it, limitations that did not belong to the two surrounding states. During His earthly life He became One among many, a link, as it were, in the chain of revealing organs. He was not intended, nor intended Himself, to communicate the whole revealable volume of divine truth, so as to
make either what preceded or what followed dispensable. He did His part of the whole, presupposing what the Old Testament had done before, and reckoning with what the subsequent organs of New Testament disclosure of truth concerning the work enacted by Him would do after. In this sense He would be called both a Prophet and an Apostle. Only, in remembering this, it is necessary to add that the limitations under which Jesus put and kept Himself in this respect were of the objective, and not of the subjective kind. They were the result not of any inadequacy of knowledge, but of the enclosure of His function within a scheme extending in both directions towards Him and away from Him. Although He possessed the fulness of the divine truth within Himself, and could have let it shine out through His subjectivity, yet He forebore doing this, adjusting Himself to the process of which He was the acme and centre, a process requiring both preparation and following up.
It will be seen that, thus defined, the idea of limitation of content, inherent in our Lord’s earthly work, has nothing to do with the limitations which the theory of Kenosis assumes to have existed in Him. The latter are considered as subjective in nature arising from our Lord’s having laid aside, or having divested Himself of the use of, such transcendent attributes as omniscience and omnipotence, so that in consequence His teaching was not free from mistakes, nor His power equal to omnipotence. In our opinion no change had taken place in the Deity, and the human nature did not fall in any sense short of the requirements the work of revelation made upon it. The limitations in what He was sent to do left the completeness and perfection of what He could have done in their full integrity.
FOUR DIVISIONS OF REVELATION BY CHRIST
Jesus’ revelation-functioning during the Old Testament and after His ascension did not, however, complete the entire revealing task performed by Him, apart from his public ministry. For all this belongs to the sphere of redemption, and by the side of it we must place His mediation of the knowledge of God in nature. All that is
disclosed of God to the mind of man through nature comes by Him. And we must not conceive of this as something purely preliminary, ceasing as soon as his activity in the Old Testament began or His incarnation took place. It is being continued now and will be continued for ever, interlinked with all that of redemptive disclosure is superimposed upon it.
Enumerating them in order, we obtain four divisions of revelation ministered in by Christ:
(a) that in Natural, or, otherwise called, General Revelation, extending from the creation of the world forward indefinitely;
(b) that under the economy of the Old Testament, extending from the entrance of sin and redemption till the incarnation;
(c) the disclosure of God made during His public ministry on earth, extending from the nativity until His resurrection and ascension;
(d) the revelation mediated by Him through His chosen servants, extending from the ascension until the death of the last inspired witness, speaking under the infallible guidance of the Holy Spirit.
We find these four functions spoken of severally in the Prologue of the Fourth Gospel. It is usually understood that the Evangelist here subsumes them under the name Logos given to Christ. Logos means both reason and word, owing to the fine Hellenic perception, that the two processes of thinking and speaking are intimately related, thinking being a sort of inward speech, speaking a sort of outward thought. The Logos is, therefore, the outward Revealer of the inward mind of God. Some speculative theologians think that the idea does not relate to the process of speech ad extra at all, but describes the inward mode of existence of the Deity, on the principle that the Second Person of the Trinity is, as it were, the reverse, turned-round- side, of the First. Leaving this to one side, and confining ourselves to the sphere of revelation to the world, the question arises whether the
name relates to any part of revelation exclusively, or whether it comprehensively relates to every component part of the process.
The tendency was at one time to keep the term Logos within the range of nature-revelation in contrast to the redemptive disclosure of God. Such a view would rule out from it not merely the redemptive revelation of the New Testament, but likewise that of the Old Testament. It would not have been as Logos that the Son of God appeared to Israel or to the Church after the incarnation. All His revealing work consisted from the creation onward, and through all time, in mediating the natural knowledge of God; that is, so far as the name Logos is concerned, though, of course, under other designations, He was recognized as performing the task of redemptive Revealer.
This view is not a plausible one, because the very point of the Prologue seems to be to link the revelations in nature and in redemption together. But this last point is also lost to view where, as Zahn would interpret the Evangelist, the name Logos is entirely associated with the incarnate, redemptive revelation mediated by Jesus on earth. According to this writer Jesus did not become the Logos or Word as such until the incarnation. Especially the statement in vs. 14 causes great difficulty on this interpretation.
Among those who hold that there is reference to both nature and redemptive revelation there is still a further difference as to whether the Evangelist makes special reference to the Old Testament as a separate stage or not. This touches the exegesis of vs. 11, viz., whether ‘his own’ there means men in general, ‘his own’ in virtue of creation, or means the nation of Israel. In the former case the rejection of the incarnate Redeemer on a large scale by the world is referred to, in the latter case the rejection of the incarnate Redeemer by the people of Israel.
A careful exegesis of the Prologue leads to the conclusion that the following stages are part of the Logos-work of which John is
speaking:
(a) first the mediation to mankind of the knowledge of God conveyed through nature; this is a function which by no means ceased when the Logos became flesh, but is going on alongside of His incarnate, redemptive activity from the beginning onward till the end, as long as there shall be a world to need it;
(b) in the second place there is the redemptive revelation given to the Old Testament people of God; this had reference to redemption although it was mediated by the as yet un-incarnate Christ, so that as to the state in which the Logos mediated it there was as yet no difference between what He had been from the beginning of the world and what He was then;
(c) in the third place the Logos-function reached its climax, when the Word became flesh, and in this incarnate state, never to be laid aside again, issued the full interpretation of the redemptive work of God, either during His own earthly career in the state of humiliation, or during His exalted state, possessed since the resurrection and now brought to bear upon the redemptive revelation from heaven.
JESUS’ REVEALING WORK IN THE GOSPELS
We here address ourselves particularly to the last-mentioned stage of Jesus’ revealing work, that performed on earth and described and recorded in the Gospels. However, the mode of this is by no means uniform. In order to have a right understanding of it, we must draw certain distinctions, and not lose ourselves in the generality that Jesus was the Revealer of God on earth. The Gospels know and speak of two aspects or manners in which this took place. On the one hand Jesus disclosed God through what He was; His nature, His character were God-revealing; ultimately this involves and postulates His being divine in His nature, His being God. On the other hand Jesus also revealed God through the speech He brought from God, through the words He spake.
It goes without saying that these two modes were not sharply separated one from the other. The character-revelation never was entirely a mute one, unaccompanied by words; on the other hand the speech-revelation was in no small part a disclosure of character, first of the Speaker, and next of One duplicated. It is, therefore, not so much the absence or the presence of the thought of word-revelation, but rather the prominence of the thought of character-duplication in one of the sources that distinguishes the two aspects.
In the Fourth Gospel we find this thought in unique prominence. In the Synoptics it occasionally occurs, but what we mostly find there is the idea of revelation through direct speech concerning God. Matt. 11:27 furnishes an example within the Synoptics of the idea of God- disclosure by means of God-likeness, and for this very reason and its rareness in the Synoptics it has been called ‘The Johannine logion’. Certain peculiarities follow in the wake of each of the two aspects distinguished. In John, because the idea in the foreground is that of Person-disclosure, the object of the revelation appears pointedly personal: it is God, or the Father, whom Jesus reveals rather than a thing connected with God. In the Synoptics, on the other hand, objectively represented things, such as the Kingdom of God, righteousness, etc., are more in evidence, although of course, these appear at no point detached from God in such a way as would make them religiously indifferent, after the well-known modern fashion.
Further, in John, because of this object-concentration of the revealed content in God, great stress is laid upon the pre-existence in Heaven through which Jesus was pre-eminently qualified for showing what He had to show, namely God, for in Heaven the main object of His vision was precisely God [cp. 1:51; 3:2; 5:30; 8:38]. Besides the pre- existence, the idea of an uninterrupted coexistence, as a source of revelation-knowledge during even the earthly life, is expressed in some of such passages.
Still further, the Johannine revelation concept carries in itself a strong soteric element. Revelation is not merely the prerequisite of
salvation, as might more easily appear from the Synoptics; precisely because it confronts one directly with God in Christ it produces a transforming, cleansing effect through its own inherent action [8:32; 15:3]. The personally concentrated form in which the attributes and potencies of God are represented as incarnate in Jesus, fits in with this trend of thought. He is ‘the life’, ‘the light’, ‘the truth’ in Person.
Over against this complex of peculiarities in John we find in the Synoptics repeated references to the Spirit as the proximate source of the revelation conveyed by Jesus. The Fourth Gospel likewise mentions the Spirit, but not with such prominence in the same connection. The Baptist, while not recording the baptism directly, speaks of it as qualifying Jesus for conferring the Spirit upon others [1:33], but that is not quite the same as revealing through the Spirit. The emphasis on the divine nature has taken away the need of referring to this. Once, we find the characterization of the words of Jesus as ‘Spirit and life’ [6:63]. On the whole, the Spirit figures in John as a future gift, who will come after the departure of Jesus, and in that season will also act as the medium of revelation from Jesus to the disciples [16:13].
[B] THE QUESTION OF DEVELOPMENT
Having now reached the point where the public ministry of our Lord opens up to our investigation, we are brought face to face with the question, whether there is observable within this teaching a development. In order to ensure clearness we must at the outset distinguish between subjective development in the mind of Jesus, His knowledge of and insight into the truth having grown as He progressed in His ministry, and objective development, the presentation of facts and teachings having been subject to progress from season to season.
Speaking in the abstract, no a priori objection can be raised even against the subjective kind of development. Jesus had a true human nature, and human nature as such is subject to development, which,
however, is not equivalent to saying that it cannot exist under any conditions without development. The idea of evolution has taken such hold of the modern mind, and become so fascinating, that in many cases the existence of the gradual acquisition of knowledge by the mind of Jesus is simply assumed without enquiring into the concrete evidence. As a matter of fact evidence for this assumption does not exist, so long as the faultless nature of the content of the teaching is maintained. There is no point in the life of our Lord at which the inflow of a new substance or principle of thought can be traced. A breach between foregoing and following is nowhere perceptible. The incidents near Caesarea-Philippi have sometimes been seized upon to bear out such a construction, but, as afterwards will be pointed out, there was here no evidence of advance in enlightenment in the mind of Jesus, nor even an injection of something totally new into the minds of the disciples. The point of the episode is not that a confession took place of something wholly unknown before.
Still, progress in objective teaching there was, if not particularly here, yet at other points. The necessity for this would rise from the capability of apprehension in the disciples, which was less at the beginning than afterwards, and from the unfolding of the situation of the public ministry of our Lord, in which the opposition of His enemies was one of the chief determining factors, humanly speaking.
Our position, therefore, is: subjective development is allowable, but not actually proven; objective development in the teaching is necessary, and capable of being pointed out. However, to prevent misunderstanding, we must add to this a somewhat more precise statement. Suppose subjective development were actually discovered, we could not grant that such development might be of every imaginable kind. We must distinguish progress from error to truth, and again progress from partial to more comprehensive and adequate apprehension of the truth. The former would be irreconcilable with the faultlessness of Jesus’ teaching, the latter might be in perfect consonance with it.
Now, in consulting the modern discussions of the life and teaching of Jesus, we find that, as a matter of fact, the occasions where a progress of subjective insight into the truth is ascribed to Him are precisely of this kind, that He is assumed to have advanced from error to elimination of error. And this is not confined to matters of relatively smaller importance, such as questions of history and criticism, for these things are deemed nowadays often so trivial as to have lain entirely beyond the need of correction, and Jesus is easily allowed to have shared in such things the common opinions of His time and never to have developed away from them in His entire life. The points singled out, in regard to which the error-eliminating development is by preference affirmed, are rather the cardinal and most weighty subjects of His teaching. We are asked to believe that our Lord, about such matters as the Kingdom of God, His Messiahship, and the necessity or significance of His death, held not only different but contrary convictions at various points. The advocates of this belief frequently do not take pains to base it on evidence; it is simply taken for granted after the most facile manner.
It needs no pointing out that where this is done, both the presence of the divine nature in the Person of Jesus and the infallibility of His human nature have been in principle abandoned. He has become a teacher like every eminent teacher. A prophet He hardly can on such a supposition be called, for with the prophetic office infallibility was generally associated, and this opinion was doubtless shared by Jesus Himself. The consciousness of Messiahship could not possibly have lived in such an atmosphere, for, if even the Baptist was greater than every prophet, how much more Jesus, in His revelation- consciousness, must have considered Himself the summit of stability and reliability as to absolutely representing God always.
All that has been said above relates to the public ministry of Jesus only, for this alone is the section of Jesus’ life which the record enables us to observe. As to His preceding private life there must have been psychical and ethico-religious development. The information we have on this is exceedingly scanty. It is confined to
the statements in Lk. 2:49–52. All the rest remains withdrawn in secrecy, and it would require a great deal of critico-historical self- confidence to construct on so small a basis what has been not infrequently called ‘a biography of Jesus’, or in a somewhat more modest language ‘a life of Jesus’.
[C] THE METHOD OF JESUS’ TEACHING
The question of allowable development leads on directly to that of the method of teaching. For it is obvious that in the point of method, more than anywhere else, a degree of variableness and adjustability to the development of the situation is to be observed. That the method of Jesus’ teaching bore a specific character is certain, but the peculiarity can be more easily observed by putting the question in the negative: by the absence of which features was the method employed most clearly recognizable?
The features absent are systematizing, doctrinal-cohesive presentation of truth. This can be best realized by comparing the teaching of Paul, which while in no wise unduly theological, comes much nearer to doctrinal organization than does that of our Lord. The Jewish teaching of Jesus’ time possessed likewise more of a systematic character than His. This was imparted unto it by the strict lines of the system of the Law within which it moved, but it was, from a theological point of view, shallow, and contained more flagrant inconsistencies than Paul’s teaching has ever been charged with. In the whole range of Jesus’ teaching there is practically nothing that approaches a definition of any subject, not even in regard to the Kingdom of God, which Paul a couple of times comes near to defining.
Now that which makes up for and corresponds to the absence of this abstract element is the concrete, imaginative way of handling principles for illustration’s sake. The philologists say that all language has this concrete, physical background, so that there is really no spiritual thing or process that did not originally find
expression through a material analogue. We cannot name or discuss the simplest thing but we speak in figures. Only we no longer realize it. The language, through oblivion of its own ancestry, has gradually raised itself to the plane of the spiritual world. But conscious employ of figurative modes of expression is something different, because it is intentional. It compares things in the visible, natural sphere to things in the invisible, spiritual. Of this consciously-comparative way of speaking there are several forms, to distinguish which is the business of rhetoric. Without binding ourselves to technical classification we here simply describe the use made of these various forms in our Lord’s discourse. The generic name, under which these forms are usually classified in the Gospel exposition is that of ‘parables’. It is better, however, to restrict this name to a species of the genus.
SIMILITUDES
The simplest forms of the whole group are what we call, or some books call, the simile and the metaphor. These are at one in comparing a single thing or person to a thing or person in a different sphere. But they differ in that the simile makes the comparison explicit, whereas the metaphor, by naming the thing to be compared outright with the name of the comparing figure, keeps it implicit. ‘Herod is like a fox’ would be a simile; ‘go and tell that fox’ is a metaphor. Such likenings of single things to single are rare in the Gospels. The parabolic comparison has this for its peculiarity, that it likens not single things one to the other, but some relation between certain items to some relation between other items. The figure is: as A is related to B, so C is related to D. From the fig tree we, no less than the disciples, can learn her parable: when the branches become tender (A), summer is nigh (B); even so when the eschatological premonitions occur (C), the end of the world is approaching (D). Care must be taken not to find (A) likened to (C), nor (B) likened to (D). Comparisons of this kind belong to the class of parables in the more restricted sense. For the sake of distinguishing them, however, we shall call them similitudes, because they call attention to the
similarity between ever-recurring processes or sequences in nature and sequences in the redemptive world.
PARABLES PROPER
The second group in the circle of parables we designate by the name of parables proper, because to this class of comparative representations the name of ‘parable’ has become more popularly attached. These differ from the similitudes, in so far as they are clothed in the form of a story, the introductory formula being expressible by ‘once upon a time’, ‘a sower went out to sow’. Although the process is here no less than in the similitude-group an ever-recurring process, yet for rhetorical effect it is pictured as a single event. The narrative-character thus imparted renders these parables-proper like unto fiction-stories designated as ‘fables’ in ancient literature. The difference lies in this, that the pagan fables introduce as their personages animals. Animals play next to no role in our Lord’s parables, most of these being taken from the vegetable kingdom, but cp. Matt. 23:37; Lk. 13:34. Furthermore, the animals used for the furnishing of the pagan fable act unnaturally, from the animal point of view; having been put there in the place of men they are bound to forget their own nature, and must play out the role to the end. And from this again results the feature that the speaking and acting animals adopt a serio-comical behaviour. This last- mentioned feature is entirely absent from Jesus’ parabolic teaching as from His teaching in general, for irony, which can here and there be detected, should not be confounded with comedy.
SPECIALIZATION-PARABLES
The third group of so-called parables may be called specialization- parables. Their use rests on the employment of the specialization- principle in our Lord’s teaching in a wider sphere, outside of the strictly so-called parabolic material. By the specialization-method of teaching we understand that a lesson or principle, instead of being abstractly described, is placed before us in a single instance of its
working. Thus the internal character of righteousness and sin is vividly illustrated in the Sermon on the Mount by specialization of the various cases of adultery, murder, etc. A little later on, the injunction as to what is to be taken on the propaganda-journey and what is to be left behind serves a similar purpose [Matthew 10]. Now this specialization-method can, instead of being introduced straightforwardly, just as well be presented in the parable form, and then results the specialization-parable. A clear instance of this is the parable of the Pharisee and the publican. Here not one process is taken out of the sphere of nature and another out of the spiritual sphere; both transactions belong to the same spiritual sphere, and by typifying the way in which the thing ought not to be done, and ought to be done, the lesson is carried home to the mind. These specialization-parables have this in common with the parable-proper group, that they likewise borrow the form of fiction: ‘Once upon a time a Pharisee and a publican went up’, etc.
THE ‘ALLEGORICAL’ METHOD
The question has been raised, whether Jesus, besides these parabolic forms of teaching, also employed what is called the ‘allegorical’ method. For practical purposes we may call an allegory a story in which not one central point of comparison is intended to be brought out, but in which around this one point there is intentionally and ingeniously woven a web of detail-comparisons in the two processes placed side by side. We cannot a priori exclude the employment of this method; in the Old Testament there are striking examples of it; use had been made of it in the ancient Stoic philosophy; further in the Alexandrian-Jewish Philonic speculation; then in the medieval theology, and up to most modern times in all sorts of curious twists of mysticizing. In all these successive streams of allegory the ostensible purpose has been to foist a group of ideas upon an underground of thought by nature foreign to it. The tradition became so luxuriant that even in Romanist circles the further employment of it had to be barred by setting up the rule: Theologia parabolica non
est argumentativa. For the loose elaboration of ideas it might be useful, but not for strict theological reasoning.
But, if all parabolical reasoning in the reproduction of our Lord’s teaching is to be avoided, it becomes very questionable whether enough material of an unparabolic nature will remain to determine the main strands of His teaching by it at all. Protection, therefore, should not be sought in a surrender of all the parables to theological non-use, but in a careful safeguarding of the rules under which the use of this kind of the material can be safely conducted. One great rule has been framed for this purpose in modern times. It consists in insisting that in every parable there shall be recognized only one point of central comparison, and that all the further correspondences that may by ingenious exegesis be woven around this shall be deemed to lie outside the proper scope of the parable, and not entitled to authority from the intent of the framer, being from His point of view purely accidental. B. Weiss has in his commentaries on the Gospels most rigidly insisted upon this rule. Julicher has in his classic work on the parables gone one step further, in that he makes the presence of allegorical elements an infallible test of the spuriousness of the parts in which they occur, and thus is led to remove considerable material from the text as originally strange to Jesus.
This ‘puristic’ position is not in accord with the general tenor of Jesus’ teaching. So far as we can observe, the question of rhetorical form possessed no independent interest for Him; if the form shines through its excellence, this is due not to conscious intent, but simply to the innate beauty of the vision of truth and of all things in Jesus’ mind. Moreover, we have examples in the Gospels where the purity of form is sacrificed to the exigency of inculcating some principle of truth that could only through allegorical pressure be worked into the framework of the parabolic setting: Mk. 2:19, 20 and Matt. 22:2–14 [cp. Lk. 14:16–24]. On the other hand there are cases where the allegorical possibilities of a parable are intentionally destroyed, not because of rhetorical objection to them, but for the sole reason that
they detract from the singleness of purpose pursued in the parable. This is plainly observable in the parables of the unrighteous judge, of the unrighteous steward and of the wise and foolish virgins.
Of course, rhetorically considered, the allegory stands lower than the parable, because it is difficult to shape the account of happenings along two parallel lines belonging to two different spheres in such a way that the items in one series shall naturally correspond to those in the other series. An allegory always partakes of a certain unnaturalness; its composition requires a prolonged fashioning and arranging of the material except in the case where there exists a sort of pre-established harmony between the two lines of occurrence, the one having been shaped in the mind of the Creator of the two spheres with special analogy to the other, as in the case of the operation of fatherhood in the parable of the prodigal. Compare Ezekiel 17 for the inevitable unnaturalness in the ordinary allegory. Our Lord’s parabolic teaching bears all the signs of unpremeditation and instantaneousness of utterance.
THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE PARABOLIC TEACHING
We next enquire into the philosophy of the parabolic teaching. One of the purposes it served was doubtless to render the truth more vivid through putting it in concrete form. Still, this is nowhere stated in so many words by Jesus. We must infer it from the general use to which such a form of representation was put by others at that time, for example, by the Jewish teachers.
Another purpose which can be observed in the working is the employment of the parable to intercept prejudice. Whilst the abstract formulation of some principle apt to create offence would as a rule have set the prejudice in motion before the subject could be dispassionately considered, the bringing of it forward in parabolized form invests it with a degree of innocency, so as to induce the mind to assent within the terms of the figure, an assent which it cannot
easily withdraw when the equivalence of the lesson outside and inside the parable is reflected upon.
Still a third purpose of parabolic speech, and this is something far more strange to the modern mind, is that spoken of by Jesus in Matt. 13:13–16; Mk. 4:11, 12; Lk. 8:10. According to this statement the aim of parabolic teaching is to veil the truth, lest it should become clear and yield benefit to those unworthy of its reception. The difference between ‘because they seeing, see not’ (Matthew) and ‘that seeing they may see, and not perceive’, ‘that seeing they might not see’ (Mark, Luke) ought to be noticed.
Besides the rhetorical point of view, we can study the philosophy of the parables also from a theological point of view. It would be wrong to assume that the parables which Jesus spoke were nothing more than homiletical inventions, not based on any deeper principle or law. It would be more correct to call them spiritual discoveries, because they are based on a certain parallelism between the two strata of creation, the natural and the spiritual (redemptive) one, because the universe has been thus constructed. On the principle of ‘spiritual law in the natural world’, the nature-things and processes reflect as in a mirror the supernature-things, and it was not necessary for Jesus to invent illustrations. All He had to do was to call attention to what had been lying hidden, more or less, since the time of creation. This seems to be the meaning of Matthew’s quotation from Psa. 78:2 [Matt. 13:35]. The marvellous acquaintance of Jesus’ mind with the entire compass of natural and economic life, observable in His parables, may be explained from this, that He had been the divine Mediator in bringing this world with all its furnishings into being, and again was the divine Mediator for producing and establishing the order of redemption.
This fact underlies as a broad substratum all the parables in the Synoptics. In John this mode of teaching recedes somewhat into the background. Examples of parables in John are: 3:8; 11:9, 10; 12:24; 13:10; 16:21. But it is precisely in John that the theological principle
of the duplex structure and stratification of the universe is explicitly enunciated. The great contrasts governing the teaching here, both of Jesus and of the Evangelist, are expressed in the terms ‘earth’ (opp. ‘heaven’); the ‘world’ (opp. ‘not this world’); ‘the earthly things’ (opp. ‘the heavenly things’); ‘the things beneath’ (opp. ‘the things above’). Between these fundamental contrasts the relation prevails that in order of thought and pre-eminence the heavenly things precede. They form the original, the opposites are the copies. Practically speaking, the higher sphere is that whither all religious tending and striving must be directed. Hence the ‘supernaturalism’ of Jesus’ Gospel and of His Person, as determining that of the Gospel, finds most pointed expression in John. One might call it the anti- evolutionistic document in the Scriptures, par excellence, so far as ethics and religion are concerned [8:23].
‘TRUE’ AND ‘TRUTH’ IN THE FOURTH GOSPEL
The difference between the higher things and the lower things is not Platonically conceived, as though there were more reality of being in the former than in the latter. Both are equally real. The difference comes in through an appraisal of quality. The technical term in John to mark the contrast is that of aletheia, ‘truth’. The things in the supernal world possess the quality of ‘true things’. It should be carefully noted that ‘true’ in such a connection does not have the ordinary sense of ‘exact agreement with reality’, for ‘truth’ thus understood is something located in the human mind subjectively, since in the mind alone such a thing as ‘agreement’ can exist. The true things in this specific Johannine acceptance have the truth inherent in themselves as an objective characteristic. They are true intrinsically. The intrinsic truth residing in them is just the specific character they bear as part of the supernal heavenly sphere.
The usage is found both in the discourses of Jesus and in the reflections upon them by the Evangelist. The Logos is ‘the true light’, that embodiment of the quality of light of which all other lights in the world are but copies and derivatives [1:9]. On the same principle
Jesus calls Himself ‘the true bread’, ‘the true vine’ [6:32, 33; 15:1]. The adjective that is used in such statements is not the ordinary form alethes, but the stronger form alethinos. One might say that the entire supernal sphere is made up of ‘alethinities’. The objectivity of the concept becomes most apparent by observing that this heavenly truth is, as it were, condensed, incorporated in the heavenly Logos: He is the truth, not, of course, because He is veracious and reliable, but simply, because He has the reality of heaven in Himself. Almost a definition of the idea in this sense is found in connection with ‘the true bread’ [6:32, 33]: ‘My Father gives you the true bread from heaven, for the bread of God is He which comes down from heaven and gives life unto the world.’ Even to God Himself can the predicate alethinos be applied [17:3]. He is the only God having the reality of the essential Godhead in Himself.
Besides this peculiar meaning of truth, there is found in John’s Gospel also the ordinary sense of the word ‘veracious’ [3:33]. As an Old Testament coloured usage, there occurs further the equivalence of ‘true’ to ‘morally good’ [3:20, 21], where ‘doing evil’ and ‘doing the truth’ appear as opposites.
There are certain passages in the Gospel usually misunderstood, because of ignorance or non-regard of the peculiar notion of ‘truth’ commented upon. In 1:17: ‘The Law was given through Moses; grace and truth came by Jesus Christ’, the wrong inference may be easily drawn, that the Law contained not the truth. The meaning simply is, that it did not yet bring that full disclosure of the heavenly reality in Christ, which is ‘the truth’. It contained the shadows and types, not as yet the antitypical revelation. ‘Not-true’ here is not the equivalent of ‘false’, as though a Gnostic idea came to the surface, an interpretation plainly excluded by the phrase ‘through Moses’ (not ‘by Moses’). The giving of the Law by God through the mediation of Moses is presupposed. In the other member of the statement, ‘came by Jesus Christ’, the preposition ‘by’ is used.
In 4:23 the worship of the Father ‘in Spirit and truth’ bears no immediate reference to the sincerity pertaining to worship, for that, Jesus would probably not have denied to the Jewish or the Samaritan worship. It relates to the worship no longer bound by typical forms as to place and time and ceremony. In the place of these will come a worship directly corresponding in an unshadowy form to the heavenly original of God, who is Spirit. When the Jewish worship in Jerusalem and the Samaritan worship are, in this one respect of typical locality, placed on a line, this does not intend to place them on a line in all other respects, for Jesus says to the woman: ‘Ye worship ye know not what: we [including Himself with the Jews] know what we worship: for salvation is from the Jews.’
Again in 14:6: ‘I am the way and the truth and the life’, truth has the same sense of heavenly reality. The question was as to the way to heaven. Jesus answers Thomas by saying that He Himself is the way. The two following concepts, ‘the truth’ and ‘the life’ explain the first; Jesus is the way to heaven, because in Him the heavenly substance is present, and more specifically, because the heavenly life is present. Therefore, in the contact with Him lies the solution of the problem raised by Thomas: ‘No one comes unto the Father, but by me.’
Outside of the Fourth Gospel this peculiar connotation of ‘the true substances’ occurs mainly in the typological system of the Epistle to the Hebrews; compare 8:2, ‘a minister of the true tabernacle’. In the Gospels, the only occurrence of it outside of John is in Luke 16:11, ‘who will commit to your trust the true (riches)?’
[D] JESUS’ ATTITUDE TOWARD THE SCRIPTURES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
It is extremely important to obtain from Jesus’ own, inside point of view a definite understanding of His attitude and relation to the Old Testament. The emphasis should not lie in the first place on the testimony He bore to the truthfulness and value of the Scriptures then in existence. This is of great apologetic value, but it is not
something in which Jesus stood alone. Every orthodox person, Jewish or Christian, shared that with Him. In His treatment of the Bible Jesus was the most orthodox of the orthodox. The ascription to Him of a laxer or freer attitude in this matter rests, as we shall presently show, on a lack of discrimination. What is sometimes half- contemptuously called a ‘Bible-religion’ was characteristic of His piety. But there was something in His consciousness about the Scriptures that was specifically His own, something which not even Paul nor any other New Testament teacher or organ of revelation could have shared with Him. Jesus, besides deriving much material from the Old Testament, and besides being aware that all His teaching was in strict conformity to the Old Testament, held a conviction that went far beyond this, and in regard to which it would be preposterous for any Christian to say that he could apply the same thing to himself.
What we mean is this, that Jesus regarded the whole Old Testament movement as a divinely directed and inspired movement, as having arrived at its goal in Himself, so that He Himself in His historic appearance and work being taken away, the Old Testament would lose its purpose and significance. This none other could say. He was the confirmation and consummation of the Old Testament in His own Person, and this yielded the one substratum of His interpretation of Himself in the world of religion. At the same time it is proof of the realistic view He took of the Old Testament religion. Neither that, nor His own religion, was a religion of nature pure and simple; it was a religion of factual redemptive interpositions on the basis of a previous, but obscured, natural knowledge of God. To interpret the central religion of Jesus as a species of religious love for nature may be Rousseau-esque or Renan-esque; it is neither Old- Testament-like nor Jesus-like.
A ‘RELIGION OF THE BOOK’
To what extent our Lord’s religion was a ‘religion of the Book,’ i.e., of the contents of a Book and of the language of a Book, can be shown
in more than one way:
(a) His discourse is full of words, phrases, forms of expression, derived from the Scriptures. These are frequently not formal enough to call them intentional quotations; nevertheless their Biblical origin lies on the surface. An instance is the description of the unbelieving people as ‘a wicked and adulterous generation’ [Matt. 12:39; 16:4]. Numerous also are the conscious quotations. About these there are two peculiarities … they emerge with frequency where our Lord’s teaching is recognized as moving on its highest levels; the higher it soars, the nearer it comes to the world of thought and the speech of the Old Testament. The beatitudes in the Sermon on the Mount furnish examples. Compare with the individual beatitudes: Psalm 17:15; 25:13; 37:9; 73:1, and many Psalter passages that turn the conception of poverty into a religious sense [cp. Isa. 57:15; 61:3]. The other peculiarity of the conscious quotations lies in this, that our Lord makes use of them in the supreme crises of His life. Psa. 42:6, 11; 43:5, He quotes in Gethsemane; from the cross He prays in the words of Psalm 22:1; 31:5;
(b) Jesus treats the Scriptures as a ‘rule of faith and practice’. His gravest charge against the Pharisaic tradition-mongering is that for the sake of tradition it neglects the commandment of God. To the Sadducees He declares that their denial of the resurrection springs from not knowing the Scriptures. In His Sabbath-controversy with the Pharisees He appeals to the divine declaration in Hosea, ‘I desire mercy, and not sacrifice’. His principle that marriage should be indissoluble, He bases on the Genesis record of how it was at the beginning;
(c) Jesus authenticates His own Messianic character and work by pointing out in them the fulfilment of Old Testament prophecy [Mk. 9:12; 12:10; 14:21, 27, 49; Lk. 4:17–19; 22:37; 24:25–27; John 3:14; 5:46].
In some of these passages the word dei, ‘must’, is made use of. Proximately this ‘must’ relates to the necessity of Scripture- fulfilment, although, of course, Scripture being the expression of the mind and purpose of God, the necessity is in its last analysis derivable from the latter. In this respect Jesus does not essentially differ from those whose treatment of prophecy is often stigmatized as literalistic and mechanical. He did not scorn appeal to the letter, where it was strikingly effective. At the same time, however, the Old Testament was to Him an organic expression of the truth and will of God. The great circumstances of the progressive development of revelation He took into account in measuring the applicability of rules of Scripture; His method for keeping the new situation in touch with ancient revelation was not the allegorical method. His hermeneutics were simple and straightforward. The danger of allegorizing His words lies at the present day among the ranks of those who, having inwardly departed from the Gospel teaching, nevertheless desire to make use of the prestige of His name for supporting their quite differently oriented notions. The percentage of ‘liberal’ sermons committing this sin of allegorizing is far greater than that of those who seek to give the truth greater effectiveness by means of allegorizing hermeneutics. A mistake committed for the sake of the Gospel is less flagrant than one perpetrated in the propagation of error, but, of course, it is still a mistake.
Finally it will be observed that in all His numerous appeals to Scripture our Lord proved the protagonist of those who make of the Scriptures an open book, a book for the people. As a matter of fact, in His life-time the tendency to make of it a book for the learned chiefly was already at work owing to the inherent trend of legalism and traditionalism; our Lord did not consider the common people as those ‘who know not the Law’ [John 7:49];
(d) While in all the above groups of cases our Lord’s attitude towards the Old Testament can be determined indirectly, through observing the use He makes of it, there is a more direct way through noting His explicit deliverances on the character and provenience of Holy
Scripture. In the parable of Dives and Lazarus He implies that Moses and the Prophets bear as plainly and incontrovertibly the signature of the supernatural on their faces as one risen from the dead or come back from Hades would [Lk. 16:29–31]. According to John 5:37–39 the Jews are blamed for not finding eternal life in the Scriptures, for the reason that they do not read them from the point of view of their fulfilment in Him. John 10:35 affirms in so many words that the Scripture cannot be broken. The underlying supposition of all arguing from Scripture as, in common with others, our Lord practised it, consists in this, that the Word of God has received from Him the quality of unbreakableness: not to believe involves an attempt to break something that God has declared sure;
(e) Exceedingly eloquent is, in this connection, that His opponents, who were over-eager to collect data for His heterodoxy, never made an attempt to cast suspicion on His attitude toward Scripture.
CERTAIN CRITICAL CLAIMS DISPROVED
The data just given, though obviously decisive, have nevertheless been called in question in view of certain statements in the Fourth Gospel which are interpreted as evidence of the semi-Gnosticizing character of this document. It is scarcely necessary to argue with those who bring this charge because they themselves do not believe that the statements appealed to are authentic statements of Jesus, the Fourth Gospel being in their opinion a late unhistorical product. Still, for those who place belief in the Gospel, the passages concerned may be briefly touched upon.
From the Prologue 1:17 is quoted. The charge of the falsehood of the Old Testament can be discovered here only through overlooking the peculiar meaning of ‘truth’ previously commented upon. The same applies to the alleged denial of the truth of the Jerusalem worship; this lacks the truth, not because it is false, but because it is typical, in still being bound to one definite place. Also the statement in 10:8, in which Jesus declares all that came before Him to have been thieves
and robbers, has been interpreted in the Gnostic sense that a huge system of falsehood underlay the Old Testament. In all probability Jesus here refers to the leaders of the nation opposing Him, or to the false Messianic claimants that had preceded Him.
Another ground for denying Jesus’ acceptance of the authority of the Old Testament is found in the utterances in which He declares certain institutions of the Old Dispensation abrogated, or at least capable of perfection. The questioning about fasting raised between His disciples and those of the Pharisees and of the Baptist can scarcely be brought under this head, because fasting was not prescribed by the Old Testament, except for the Day of Atonement, and what Jesus was questioned about evidently had reference to a much wider practice. Still, it is noteworthy that in His double parable about the old garment and the new wine Jesus puts the entire question on a wider basis, so as to make of it a question of suitability of forms of religion in general, when the Old is compared with the New (Mk. 2:21, 22]. The passage Mk. 7:14–19, in regard to what things defile man, shifts the rule from the outward to the inward, and thereby virtually abrogates the Mosaic regulations for ceremonial cleanness, as is possibly meant by the phrase ‘purging all meats’. Our Lord further speaks of a fulfilment of the Passover in the Kingdom of God [Lk. 22:16].
The saying of the Sermon on the Mount, that He came ‘to fulfil’ may also be quoted in this connection, but in regard to it, all depends on the sense given the verb ‘to fulfil’, discussed below. It will be observed that in none of the instances quoted does Jesus criticize the Old Testament mode of life as though having been wrong for its own time, but only supersedes it as unsuitable for the incoming era. And the main point to observe is that He nowhere criticizes the abrogated modes of life on the ground of their not having been instituted by God. Yet this might have been expected, had it been the real ground of His setting these things aside, for He was most unsparing in His rejection of the traditional accretions of the Law, which He characterized as plants not planted by God [Matt. 15:13]. The
supposition throughout is that God Himself, through Moses, gave these rules of life. They share with every part of the Old Testament in the quality of divine provenience.
Still, it did not follow that, because God had through revelation given a law, it therefore had to remain in force in perpetuum. The only question was who had the proper authority in this matter of regulating anew the mode of life in the theocracy, and plainly here the Messianic authority of Jesus Himself was taken by Him into consideration. Therein lies the reason why, even in the Sermon on the Mount, He modifies some of the ethical and social rules of life by His emphatic ‘I say unto you’. The question is a question of the ‘I’, who speaks thus.
And still further we should notice that in this general programme of change and development Jesus never loses sight of the continuity that ought to exist in Revelation. The old is not ruthlessly sacrificed to the new, purely on account of the latter’s newness. The idea is always that the old had the seeds of the new in itself. For this reason also a revolutionary discarding of the Old Testament is out of the question. The clearest proof for the maintenance of this identity between the two dispensations is in John 2:19–21. Here Jesus declares that the temple to be destroyed by the Jews will be raised up again in His raised body. As the former was a symbol of the Old, so the latter is the vital centre of the New, but the identity persists.
The statement from the Sermon on the Mount that Jesus came not to destroy but to fulfil must likewise be interpreted on the principle of continuity. This is so, no matter whether ‘to fulfil’ be given the sense of ‘rendering more complete’ or whether it be understood to mean ‘to carry into practice’. It has been claimed that the former is required here, because of ‘fulfilling’ being the opposite to ‘destroying’, which it could be only in case it signified rendering more perfect. The rejoinder is that destroying can be a true opposite to putting into practice, in other words that disobeying can be a true equivalent to destroying, namely, in cases where the disobeyer sets himself up as
an example in virtue of his position of leadership. That this usage is quite conceivable appears from Gal. 2:18, where the same word kataluein is applied to Peter, not because he had failed to perfect the law, but because he had set a bad example in not consistently observing it. The term ‘to fulfil’ would, when used of the prophets, naturally have the meaning of carrying into reality, and no one would think of making it signify ‘to improve’; in fact the whole idea of improving the Prophets lies wholly outside the mind of Jesus.
Now in regard to the meaning of ‘to fulfil’ in Matt. 5:17–18, the Law cannot be separated here from the Prophets, for it will be noticed that we are not dealing in this verse with an instance of the common phrase, ‘the Law and the Prophets’, covering the entire Old Testament. If that were the meaning one could at least render ‘to improve’ the Old Testament. But this is impossible on account of the disjunctive ‘or’ between ‘the Law’ and ‘the Prophets’. Strictly translated the sentence reads: ‘Think not that I came to destroy either the Law or the Prophets; I came to fulfil both the Law and the Prophets.’ Thus read, the words leave no room for the idea of improving upon the Law.
The self-consciousness of Jesus is placed in a strong light by His attitude towards so large a part of the Old Testament institutions. As has been shown, He ascribed the entire content of the Scriptures to revelation from God. And yet, in the face of this, He does not hesitate to reconstruct the practice of religion on a comprehensive scale. He could do so out of the consciousness of co-equal authority with God in the sphere both of revelation and of reorganizing the religion of Israel. In connection with this we must keep in mind that what He came to usher in was the eschatological state, in regard to which as Messiah He had full jurisdiction. Interesting further is the fact of His not arguing about the matter, but settling it with supreme authority. Paul had to labour and argue from the Old Testament itself to surmount the law-structure of the Old Testament. Jesus speaks as One who is sovereign in the sphere of truth, because He is King in the realm of realities to which the truth belongs.
[E] JESUS’ DOCTRINE OF GOD
The question is frequently put, whether Jesus brought a new doctrine concerning God. Did He preach a God different from the God of the Old Testament? If so, then He also brought a new religion, for the one without the other is unthinkable. Much confusion of thought on this point is due to lack of proper distinction. Jesus was a true Revealer, and, since all revelation from a Scriptural point of view ultimately has God for its object, it was inevitable that Jesus should have made some contributions to the doctrine concerning God. So taken, the affirmation of the newness of his ‘theology’ is quite debatable.
Unfortunately the idea, where met with, in but too many cases bears a quite different complexion. The newness of teaching ascribed to Him in this field is not a newness of enlargement or additional clarifying of content, but a newness of rejection and correction of what had prevailed before. The Old Testament, we are told, contained quite faulty ideas about the nature of God. Especially the notions there found in regard to the ethical nature of God lie still in conflict with belief in Jehovah’s absolute power, and autocratic caprice, nay, even with the husks of physical representations concerning His nature. It is clear that such a renewal of the doctrine of God cannot be credited to Jesus by any one believing in the reality and consistency of revelation.
But it is also clear that this opinion has not been formed by interrogating Jesus Himself in regard to the Old Testament doctrine of God, but that it is the result of a comparative study of the Old Testament doctrine and teaching of Jesus. It follows a procedure that may eventually lead to the correction of Jesus’ own views in the matter. While to the science of comparative religion such a method cannot be forbidden, it is not the method of Biblical Theology. What we are concerned about is how the teaching of the Scriptures on the divine nature appeared to Jesus. We must endeavour to look at this subject, as at other subjects, from within His mind. Nor can we
consider every utterance of Jesus involving criticism of current ideas about God as tantamount to a criticism of the Old Testament doctrine of the nature of Jehovah. The Old Testament and Judaism are not to be identified. The latter our Lord not seldom found fault with; that He did so with the former remains to be proved.
There is sufficient proof for the very opposite. This follows from the absence of any instance of criticism on this point. It follows further from His belief in the divine origination of the Old Testament, for if the Scriptures are from God, and yet contain an inadequate view of God, it is God Himself who has in them misrepresented Himself. This is evidence from silence and indirection, but positive statements are not lacking. When asked by the scribe as to the supreme commandment in the Law, and summing up its purport from Deut. 6:4, 5, Jesus quotes not only this summary of the perfect religion, but prefaces it, as is done in Deuteronomy by the description of God: ‘Hear, O Israel: Jehovah our God is one Jehovah’ (or, according to another rendering of the Hebrew: ‘Jehovah is our God, Jehovah is One’). The connection of thought implies that the idea of Jehovah here enunciated is adequate for basing on it the ideal religion expressed in the commandments [Matt. 22:37–38; Mk. 12:29–30; Lk. 10:27].
In arguing with the Sadducees Jesus recognized the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob as His God [Lk. 20:37]. The argument is not chronological, as if hinging on the fact that still in Moses’ time God called Himself the God of these patriarchs, which would further imply that at that point in history the patriarchs were still living, as to their souls at least. So understood the argument would not settle the point at issue between Jesus and the Sadducees, proving only that up to the time of Moses the patriarchs still possessed immortality of soul. The argument rests on the pregnant meaning of the phrase, ‘the God of’. This avowal of Jehovah with reference to a person establishes a bond of such intimate communion that it becomes impossible to Him, as it were beneath his honour, to surrender such a person to death, even so far as the body is
concerned, from which fact again follows the resurrection of all those of whom God calls Himself their God. So Jesus Himself explains this meaning in verse 38: ‘For He is not a God of the dead, but of the living, for all live unto Him.’ God is so constituted in His nature that of those religiously attached to Him eternal life and ultimate resurrection of the body can be confidently expected.
It has been asserted that Jesus, in thus identifying His idea of God with that of the Old Testament naïvely seized upon that in the Old Testament which was congenial to Himself, brushing all the rest aside as of no particular importance. That He should have unconsciously done so can, of course, neither be proved nor disproved, since it touches a process in His sub-conscious mind. On the other hand, that He should have held such a discriminating opinion with clear consciousness of what it involved is incredible because of His emphatic acceptance of the entire Old Testament as the Word of God. Jesus could not have retained His obvious reverence for the Scriptures, had He felt the necessity of rejecting a large part of their teaching, and that on such a central topic as the nature of God.
JESUS’ TEACHING ON THE DIVINE FATHERHOOD
In the centre of our Lord’s doctrine of God is usually placed His teaching on the divine Fatherhood. This is quite correct, seeing the important place and space it as a matter of fact occupies. It is necessary, however, at the outset to warn against certain misconceptions and mistaken corollaries that have fastened themselves upon this fact, largely relative to the absolute originality with which Jesus is supposed to have conceived the idea. As to the question of originality, we must not lose sight of the Old Testament, nor entirely of the circle of thought in Judaism. In both the idea was known, although, of course, in the one differently coloured from that in the other. The Old Testament predicates Fatherhood of Jehovah in the following passages: Ex. 4:22; Deut. 1:31; 8:5; 32:6; Isa. 1:2; 63:16; Jer. 3:19; Hos. 11:1; Mal. 1:6. But over against this claim of
continuity it is urged that the connection is purely formal, because Jesus combined with the name a totally different idea from that in the Old Testament. The points of difference stressed are three in number.
(a) Firstly, in the Old Testament, we are told, the Fatherhood describes the action of Jehovah only. He treats Israel as a father a son; it does not describe God’s nature as paternal love in its inwardness.
(b) Secondly, the idea is in the Old Testament limited in its range, being applied to Israel only, and that in a collective capacity, not individually to the single Israelites,
(c) Thirdly, in the Old Testament the Fatherhood, or love of God, is placed by the side of other attributes, such as are not only different from but some of them directly contrary to His love, whereas in the teaching of Jesus the Fatherhood of love appears as the sole make-up of the divine character, all the other attributes being derivable and actually derived from it: God here is nothing but love.
These three contentions may be briefly answered as follows:
(a) The first rests on the correct observation, that in the Old Testament the description of God proceeds from the outward to the inward, whereas in the New Testament the opposite movement is to some extent observable. This is due to the general movement of the revelation-process. But the Old Testament does not confine itself to externals in its delineation of the divine character. Such a passage as Ex. 34:6, 7 is as near to character-description as anything in the New Testament. And on the other hand, there is much in the teaching of Jesus describing character, including love, which is concretely expressed, illustrated by action. So abstract a statement as ‘God is love’ comes as late as the Epistles of John. Jesus speaks of the idea largely in parables.
(b) The absolute extension of the range of God’s Fatherhood to all individuals, and that in virtue of creation, rests on a mistaken interpretation of Jesus’ thought. The Fatherhood of God and the sonship correlated with it are redemptive ideas. The best proof for this lies in their occasional eschatological application, for eschatology is simply the crowning of redemption [cp. Matt. 5:9; 13:43; Lk. 20:36]. That it belongs to the members of the Kingdom of God may also be inferred from the regular addition of the possessive pronouns ‘your’ and ‘their’, to the word ‘Father’ [cp. especially Matt. 6:32]. Where these are absent, and the simple article is used, ‘the Father’ is the correlate to Jesus, ‘the Son’ specifically, and not to the children of God in general [Matt. 11:27; 28:19; Mark. 12:32].
True, in the Fourth Gospel ‘the Father’ not seldom occurs with reference to the disciples, but throughout this Gospel the idea is prominent that Jesus introduces the disciples into his own relation (religiously considered) with God, so that, properly paraphrased, this Johannine ‘the Father’ means: ‘He who is My Father, and through Me now also yours.’ And in the Fourth Gospel an explicit denial of the sonship of the Jewish enemies of Jesus occurs [8:42]. The restriction of the idea of sonship carries with it that of the idea of Fatherhood.
It has been contended that God is never said to become Father, whilst of men it is said that they become the children of God, but this is not strictly true, because to God paternal acts, such as the impartation of life and adoption into sonship, are predicated which imply His becoming Father to believers in a very real sense. The question whether the love of God with reference to all men is affirmed in Jesus’ teaching is an altogether different question. If it be answered in the affirmative, it will be necessary to distinguish clearly between the general love and the paternal love, the latter being reserved for the members of the Kingdom. In the Old Testament both the Fatherhood and the love are confined to the chosen people. Sometimes Ex. 4:22 is appealed to as implying the sonship of other nations, because Israel is called God’s ‘first-born son’, which is
supposed to signify that the others, though not ‘first-born’, are yet real sons of the second rank. But this is extracting altogether too much from a figure. The sonship of the others would have no particular bearing on the demand made upon Pharaoh. The simple meaning is that Israel is as precious to Jehovah as a first-born is to his father.
The places in the teaching of Jesus where a divine Fatherhood without reference to Kingdom-membership is found, do not on closer examination bear out this idea. In Matt. 5:45 Jesus enforces the command to love one’s enemies with the reminder that God makes His sun to rise on the evil and good, and His rain to fall on the just and unjust alike. The argument, however, is not based on the idea that God is a Father to the good and the evil, and the just and the unjust alike, but on the principle that He is Father to the disciples, who therefore must copy their Father’s character in showing goodness or kindness, irrespective of moral or religious excellence, to their fellowmen; the Fatherhood is introduced for the sole purpose of binding the disciples to reproduction of the divine character. Hence also the saying does not read: ‘their Father’, but ‘your Father’ sends sunshine and rain. Matt. 6:26 in the same manner speaks of the goodness of God towards the birds of heaven, and He is in that connection called ‘your heavenly Father’; in this case also not to describe God’s relation to the birds as one of Fatherhood, but simply as one of perfect goodness and kindness, from which fact then the disciples may gather all the stronger assurance of His provision for them, because they are more than just birds in their relation to God, namely, His children; here again note the pronoun ‘your’.
The parable of the prodigal illustrates, not the procedure of God to utter aliens, but to publicans and sinners who had wandered out of the sphere of redemptive sonship, which did not detract from God’s cherishing His Fatherhood towards them. On the other hand, in the case of the Syro-Phoenician woman, who showed through her great faith that she possessed the spiritual qualifications, our Lord
nevertheless insists upon the prior privileges of Israel by speaking of the crumbs that fall from the master’s table. The indiscriminate extension of the idea from the redemptive sphere to the sphere of natural religion in its sinful state, while seemingly offering the advantage of an appeal of emotional strength to a wider range, at the same time loses much of the content stored up in the idea. One may say to all men that they are children of God, but in doing so one tells them less than what the idea conveys on the other view.
If in the foregoing respect the idea does not depart in principle from the Old Testament lines, remaining restricted as before to the people of God, nevertheless the range is greatly enlarged, because the range of the people of God is also greatly extended. From before being national it now becomes ethico-religious. And with this inevitably goes another change towards individualization. In the Old Testament it is not the individual, but the nation that is named ‘the son of God’; by Jesus every disciple is so named. Still, even for this the basis was not altogether lacking in the Old Testament. The Messiah sustains a relation to Jehovah that is altogether individually conceived at the first, though its further purport relates to the people [cp. Psa. 2:7]. In Psa. 89:26 He is even represented as crying unto Jehovah, ‘My Father’, a unique instance in the Old Testament, since all the other invocations of God with the Father-name are instances of prayer by the congregations [Isa. 64:8]. In Hos. 1–3 there occurs a plural, ‘the children of God’ [1:10; cp. 11:1, ‘I called my son out of Egypt’]. In ‘the children of Israel’ no stress should be laid on the plural, because ‘children of Israel’ was the common name for the nation.
It should be remembered that the Fatherhood of God has not merely had its range enlarged, but that it was the very idea of fatherhood being more profoundly and individualistically understood, which has itself been the means for bringing this about. Herein lies precisely the difference between the practical utilization of the kingship idea and the fatherhood idea. The latter serves for the address in prayer, which is mostly individual, whereas in the kingship-address the recognition of sovereignty prevails. With absolute sharpness,
however, this distinction between the two cannot be drawn, for the simple reason that to the antique Biblical consciousness the notion of fatherhood has a strong element of authority in it, and, on the other hand, the idea of kingship is more closely wedded to that of benevolence than we would feel, who are apt to cry out against a ‘paternal government’. In the parable the king provides a banquet; for the authority of the father Mal. 1:6 may be compared. Still further we should remember that the individualistic background of the Messiahship would also inevitably work to the same effect in individualizing the Fatherhood for believers, since the New Testament, particularly the Fourth Gospel, is familiar with the thought of the assimilation in status of the Messiah’s followers with Himself.
JESUS’ STRESS ON THE DIVINE MAJESTY AND GREATNESS
Next to the benevolent side of God, expressed in His Fatherhood and love, the transcendental aspect of the divine nature is strongly recognized in the teaching of our Lord. By this we understand the divine majesty and greatness, usually summed up in the name of the incommunicable attributes. This side may not receive the same stress as the other, for the reason that the Deistic tendencies of Judaism could be relied upon to provide for this even more than was necessary. Nevertheless as an indispensable element in religion it appears in full vigour. Jesus upholds even in the closest approach to God the necessity of remembering that He is God. If calling God Father, the one praying must do so with the prefix ‘heavenly’ before it. Also the very first petition following this in the Lord’s prayer, ‘Hallowed be thy name’, embodies the same idea.
It is necessary to keep these two elements of the love of God and of His heavenly majesty jointly in mind, in order to avoid onesidedness; they must likewise be conceived as interacting. God’s majesty and greatness impart a specific character to the divine love. Love from and towards man are different from the same feeling as exercised between God and man. Much modern sentiment that is called
religion has in effect ceased to be such, because it is brought down to the level of interhuman friendly and benevolent relations in which at the best the one party may be more influential than the other. Religion is something different from goodwill towards God.
Another interaction between the two aspects of the divine nature consists in this, that the consciousness of the greatness and omnipotence of God alone can make the benevolent aspect a source of help and salvation for man. The over-emphasis thrown on the divine love, to the exclusion of almost every other thing, has sometimes resulted in the practical exclusion of all soteric dependence on God. A God assuring us of the extension towards us of all the fulness of His love, and yet leaving us uninformed or unconvinced, or even sceptical in principle concerning the so-called transcendental or metaphysical side of His nature, would not be to us more than a human father or mother in some extremity, that is to say, He would not be from the standpoint of our need a God at all.
THE RETRIBUTIVE RIGHTEOUSNESS OF GOD
Besides the Fatherhood and the transcendent majesty of God there is still a third aspect of the divine nature to be considered. This is what we may call the retributive righteousness. It is by no means a negligible element in the divine character. Those who, dealing with the conception Jesus framed or had of God, leave it out of account, work with very inadequate material. This would not have to be the case, if, as some allege, it could be regarded as a deduction from the love of God in the consciouness of Jesus. But not only is there no evidence to that effect; the nature of the two conceptions is such as to render deduction from the one to the other, in either direction, inconceivable. To be sure, as regards the benevolent side of the retribution, this could be derived from the love of God for the disciples, and on that ground even included in the effects of the divine Fatherhood. The doctrine of reward within the Kingdom rests on that principle, as we shall soon see.
It is quite different with the penal side of the principle of retribution. Had Jesus only spoken of temporary punishment, and implied a limit to the state assigned in the judgment to the wicked, in that case also penal retribution, being interpreted on the basis of discipline, might be considered an outflow of God’s Father-love. But the opposite is true; what Jesus teaches on this subject lies altogether in the other direction; it is not for the vindicatory punishment, but for the chastisement-punishment that one has to look for explicit evidence among His words. Eternal punishment cannot be a manifestation of love; far less, of course, can it be the expression of love towards those who suffer it. There is no escape from the acknowledgment of this fact, except by assuming that the doctrine in question did not belong to Jesus’ original, heart-rooted conviction, being at bottom only a lingering remnant of the Judaistic past, in which for many ages this bitter root of retribution had been nourished. This again is contrary to the facts viewed without prejudice. Of a perfunctory use of the idea in question there is nowhere any trace. On the contrary, the most solemn words, carrying upon their face the evidence of profound personal conviction, are used in dealing with this subject [Matt. 18:6; Mk. 9:42; Lk. 17:2]; especially the words about the traitor Judas are here to be noted [Matt. 26:24; Mk. 14:21].
We shall simply have to posit two principles here in Jesus’ doctrine of God, neither of which permits of reduction to the other. A dualism, however, in the strict philosophical sense, this cannot be called. For that, it would be necessary to prove that love logically excludes righteousness and vice versa. The signature of the divine inner life as Jesus portrays it, is not one of abstract uniformity, but one of great richness and multiformity, allowing of more than one motive force.
It must be acknowledged that, taking all in all, there is a preponderance in bulk and emphasis on the side of the divine love. Nevertheless this phenomenon also should be historically explained and not be abused for reducing everything in Jesus’ message to the one preaching up of love. The historical reason is not difficult to
discover. In Judaism the principle of the divine love had become eclipsed, and the opposite principle of retribution exalted at its expense. God had become lowered to a commercial level of one who exploits man on the basis of quid pro quo. Over against this it was necessary to maintain the balancing doctrine that God takes a personal, affectionate interest in man, so as to make religion a matter of love; of God’s giving of Himself to man, no less than of the keeping of man strictly to account. Jesus thus brought forward that side of the divine character which was suffering eclipse in the consciousness of the age to which He was addressing Himself. It would be a poor application of this method were we to condense the entire gospel to love and nothing else. Since at the present time the atmosphere is surcharged with the vague idea of an indiscriminate love, and all punitive retribution held at a discount, it is not following the example of Jesus to speak of nothing but the divine love to the obscuring of all the rest. We must put the stress where the decadence of the religion of our times has failed to put it, yet always so as to keep from discarding the other side. Thus alone can the mind of Jesus be faithfully reproduced.
[F] JESUS’ TEACHING ON THE KINGDOM OF GOD [1] The Formal Questions
THE KINGDOM IN THE OLD TESTAMENT
According to the Synoptics the first message of Jesus at the opening of His public ministry concerned ‘the Kingdom of God’. It was a message used before Him by John the Baptist, into whose perspective it especially fitted. The ‘repent ye’, preceding it, points to the judgment by which the coming Kingdom is to be introduced. Consequently the message is to all intents an eschatological message, and the Kingdom of which it speaks an eschatological state of affairs. As to the formal phrase, this is used already by the Baptist as something familiar to his hearers. It is not, however, a phrase of Old Testament coinage. While the idea occurs in the Old Testament, the
finished phrase is not there as yet. Probably it is of Jewish provenience; exactly how old it is we cannot tell.
Though prominent in the Synoptics, the phrase is almost absent from John’s Gospel. Aside from 18:36, where the reference is to the Kingdom of Jesus, rather than to the Kingdom of God, John 3:3, 5 is the only place where it occurs. This phenomenon is due to the Christological structure of the Gospel which resolves the content of what Jesus brings into the constituents of His Person, such as ‘life’, ‘light’, ‘truth’, ‘grace’. The most prominent of these is ‘life’. In the one passage of its occurrence the equivalence of life and Kingdom lies on the surface, because the figure of entrance into the Kingdom is made equivalent to the idea of entrance into ‘life’, which is ‘birth’. The same equivalence also meets us in Mk. 10:17. This becomes explainable there, because the life is more unequivocally represented as the eschatological state of life, whereas in John it is rather two-sided. Another equivalent appears in Lk. 4:19, 43, ‘the acceptable year of Jehovah’, that is, the year of Jubilee, where, unlike to Matthew and Mark, ‘the Kingdom of God’ is not named as the first theme of preaching.
In the Old Testament the thing later called the Kingdom of God relates, as to substance, to two distinct conceptions. It designates the rule of God established through creation and extending through providence over the universe. This is not a specifically redemptive Kingdom idea [cp. Psa. 103:19]. Besides this, however, there is a specifically-redemptive Kingdom, usually called ‘the theocracy’. The first explicit reference to the redemptive Kingdom appears at the time of the exodus, Ex. 19:6, where Jehovah promises the people that, if obeying His law, they shall be made to Him ‘a Kingdom of priests’. This relates to the proximate future, when the law shall have been promulgated. It speaks of a present Kingdom from the Old Testament point of view. Still, the Old Testament likewise speaks of the Kingdom as a futurity. It may seem strange that what one has, one should still look forward to, and that not as a matter of relative improvement, but as a matter of absolutely new creation. The
explanation of this apparent contradiction must be sought along three lines.
(a) First, we must remind ourselves of the prevailingly abstract meaning which in the Old Testament the several words for ‘kingdom’ possess. Through substituting ‘kingship’ and then remembering that kingship means the performance of great acts of salvation for a people in which a relation of leadership is established, we can more easily understand how there may be a future aspect to the Kingdom of Jehovah: He will in an unprecedented sense make Himself the Saviour of and Ruler of Israel. Thus Saul and David attained to the kingship. Still, this might have led no farther than speaking of a re- enforcement of the Kingdom, had not in course of time the content of the eschatological hope become wedded to the future great self- assertion of Jehovah. A new Kingdom-appearance that had such associations amounted practically to a new Kingdom.
(b) Secondly, there were times in the history of Israel when the theocratic Kingdom, while never actually abrogated, was nevertheless to such an extent in eclipse, that a bringing in of the Kingdom of God de novo could properly be spoken of. The period of the captivity furnishes an example for this. Here again the hope of return never remained a hope of a return to conditions of the past pure and simple, but drew to itself the hope of the realization of the whole world to come, eschatologically conceived; hence not a return of the Kingdom, but the arrival of the same was felt to be the fitting manner of description.
(c) Thirdly, Messianic prophecy led to a similar way of speaking. The expected Messianic King is to be the perfect, ideal representative of Jehovah, who is the ultimate King at all times. But when Jehovah, in His kingship, will be perfectly and ideally represented by His Vice- regent, the Messianic King, and the latter will at the same time bring to realization the entire eschatological hope, then the representation of the Kingdom of God coming first in the future loses the strangeness that otherwise might have gone with it.
Jesus attaches Himself to this eschatological Old Testament manner of speech. The Kingdom of which He announces the nearness is that Kingdom which lay in the future in the Old Testament perspective. At His time the Jewish theocracy was still in existence, but He is so eschatologically oriented as never to refer to that as ‘the Kingdom of God’. Even Matt. 8:12 and 21:43 need not be understood that way. Of this—from the Old Testament standpoint—future Kingdom He speaks at first as a unit without distinction as to parts or stages. But in the unfolding of His ministry, the Old Testament future thing resolves itself into two distinct phases or stages. He is in process of making the Old Testament futurity present, but in another sense it still remains future, even from His present point of view. Consequently the phenomenon of the Old Testament repeats itself: there are two Kingdoms, the one present, the other future, but both these have been obtained through the redivision of the one as yet undivided Old Testament eschatological Kingdom.
Such is the relation of the Kingdom-teaching of Jesus to the Old Testament. There is not quite the same resemblance between it and the contemporaneous Jewish ideas on the subject. In Judaism the Kingdom-idea had not been able to keep itself free from the faults that had invaded the Jewish religion generally. Judaism was a religion of law. So the Kingdom came to mean a more perfect enforcement of the legalistic principle than could be attained in the present state. Still, a difference in principle this could not make; the Kingdom, even in its future consummation, was bound to appear less new than it did to Jesus, who filled its content with concrete acts of unprecedented grace. Besides, the Kingdom remained to the Jews in its essence particularistic. Proselytism did not do away with the fact that pagans, in order to partake of its benefits, would previously have to become Jews through circumcision. The Kingdom-hope of the Jews was also politically-nationalistically coloured, whereas in the teaching of Jesus its tendency was in the direction of universalism. Finally, there was a considerable mixture of sensualism in the Jewish eschatology. Here the discrimination is more difficult to make. It mainly consists in this, that what to the Jews was a species of literal
sensualism, was to Jesus an exemplification of His parabolic frame of mind, which makes the heavenly enjoyments, while retaining their full realism, yet processes of a higher, spiritualized world, in which even the body will have its place and part.
THE KINGDOM IN THE GOSPELS
The word basileia, used in the Gospels for ‘Kingdom’, either with ‘God’ or with ‘Heaven’ as its accompanying genitive, is capable of two renderings. In its abstract usage it denotes the sway, the exercise of royal rule. Side by side with this goes the concrete sense of whatsoever things go towards the making up of an organization called a kingdom. More particularly the things entering concretely into the making up of a kingdom are of three kinds. One can speak of a certain extent of territory as a kingdom; or, a body of subjects can be called by that name; or again, a complex of rights, benefits and treasures can be so designated. Now the question arises: When speaking of the Kingdom of God, did Jesus mean the phrase to be taken abstractly or concretely? Did He mean the sway of God, or did He mean the concrete embodiment of that sway, or its precipitate in resulting realities?
It is natural in seeking to answer this question, first of all to consult the Old Testament usage. The Old Testament, where the Kingdom- idea is referred to Jehovah, knows only the abstract sense, with the sole exception of Ex. 19:6, above commented upon. While the word mamlakhah is predominatingly concrete, and in that sense not seldom used of pagan kingdoms, yet there is no case on record of its application in the same way to the Kingdom of God (except in the Exodus passage). The two other words, malkhuth and melukhah, are mostly abstract, and in that sense freely applied to the Kingdom of Jehovah.
To judge from Jesus’ closeness of touch with the Old Testament we may a priori be disposed to assume that to Him likewise the abstract idea of ‘kingship’ would furnish the starting-point. Still, the instances
where this usage is beyond all question are far from numerous. On the principle of opposites we can gather this meaning from the passage Matt. 12:25, 26, where the kingdom of Satan appears to mean his authority, his rule, although the words ‘city or house’ might seem to point in the other direction. ‘The coming of the Son of man in his basileia’ predicted in Matt. 16:28 also seems to require the abstract understanding. Perhaps the small representation of the abstract meaning may be due to the fact of its latent presence in quite a number of cases, where we cannot tell whether it or the concrete sense is intended.
There is a group of sayings in which the phrase ‘Kingdom of God’ is joined to predicates of ‘coming’, ‘appearing’, ‘being near’, and similar terms of approach, and, although in such connections the concrete meaning is by no means excluded, yet on the whole the abstract sense seems the more suitable one. Side by side with this group, however, there is an even larger one in which the figures used require the concrete conception in order to visualize them. Thus we find the phrases ‘to call into’, ‘to enter into’, ‘to receive’, ‘to inherit’, ‘to be cast out from’ the Kingdom of God, and others like these. The background of such language is local, and therefore concrete. Nor is it difficult to explain this transition from the preponderatingly Old Testament abstract employment of the term to the prevailingly concrete one in the mouth of Jesus. The shifting of the centre of gravity from law to grace has naturally brought this about. As soon as we fill our religious imagination with the palpable realities of redemption, these join themselves together to form the structure of a concrete organization or milieu of life; the Kingdom of God becomes incarnate. This was what happened to Jesus through His preaching of the gospel of grace, and we shall afterwards find it confirmed in His condensation of the Kingdom-idea into that of the Church.
Alongside of the phrase ‘Kingdom of God’ we find in the Gospel according to Matthew the companion phrase ‘Kingdom of Heaven’. Outside of Matthew, except John 3:3, 5 in a rather uncertain variant reading, the Matthaean phrase nowhere appears. It is not however
the exclusive name of the Kingdom in Matthew, for ‘Kingdom of God’ is likewise found [6:33; 12:28; 19:24; 21:31]. Resembling the expression ‘Kingdom of Heaven’, the term ‘Father in Heaven’ is also peculiar to Matthew, with the single exception of Mark 10:25. Luke employs once the analogous designation, ‘the Father from Heaven’ [11:2]. Among the passages where Matthew uses ‘the Kingdom of God’ there is only one [12:28] where the context supplies an explanation for the usage. In the other cases it is impossible to discern the reason for the divergence. Still further peculiar to Matthew is the use of ‘the Kingdom’ without any genitival determination. This sounds almost like our modern colloquial manner of speaking of ‘the Kingdom’. Finally, observe that in the remainder of the New Testament the expression ‘Kingdom of God’ is used exclusively; for example, in Romans, 1 Corinthians, Galatians, 1 and 2 Thessalonians, 2 Timothy.
‘THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN’
The question arises what this—to us somewhat mysterious—term ‘Kingdom of Heaven’ signifies. The genitive has been explained as a genitive of origin or quality, to mark the Kingdom off from earthly kingdoms. But this was so obvious in itself as to need no special affirmation in the absence of some definite historical occasion suggesting a special reminder. B. Weiss has assumed that this was actually the case, because, through the destruction of Jerusalem the expectation, hitherto cherished, that the centre of the coming Kingdom would be in Palestine, had become untenable, and the inference drawn that henceforth the centre would have to be located in heaven. This theory is not plausible; it cuts every connection between Jesus and this name. It would not have been self-evident that, Jerusalem being destroyed, it could no longer play any role in eschatological developments. The Jews for a long time after the fall of the city—and for that matter even today—counted on the rebuilding of the holy city, and in all likelihood Matthew, provided he did indeed cherish this attachment for an earthly centre of the Kingdom in Zion, would have reconciled the historical facts with his
eschatological hope after the same manner. The theory also leaves unexplained the lack of uniformity in Matthew’s use of ‘Kingdom of Heaven’ in preference to ‘Kingdom of God’.
By far the best explanation of the phrase is that suggested by Schurer et al. On this view it attaches itself to the Jewish custom of using the word ‘Heaven’, together with other substitute terms, in place of the name of God, because the latter had in its various forms become an object of increasing avoidance. ‘Heaven’ thus simply meant ‘God’ by a roundabout manner of speaking. Traces of such usage may be found in other connections in the New Testament; the prodigal says to his earthly father, ‘I have sinned against heaven, and in thy sight’; here ‘heaven’, in parallelism with the natural father, can only mean God. The question Jesus propounded to His critics: ‘The baptism of John, was it from heaven or from men?’ is to be explained on the same principle.
The adoption of this view, however, does not necessarily involve the conclusion that Jesus used ‘Heaven’ for ‘God’ from the same superstitious motive as had brought the custom into vogue among the Jews. Their scrupulosity was deistic in principle; the same feeling that induced them to keep God from degrading contact with the creation was here applied even to the name of God. Nevertheless there was in this Jewish avoidance an element of praiseworthy religious devotion; the proper estimate of God’s exaltation above the world found expression in it. While this feeling in its commendable motive was shared by Jesus, it did not operate in His case to the point of eliminating the other names of God. In fact His plain aversion to the Jewish deism, and His desire to emphasize the close communion between God and man led in the opposite direction.
Even to the Jews, perhaps, ‘Heaven’ was not quite a mere substitute for ‘God’, but has its peculiar associations. One of these was the association of the supernatural; to say ‘God has done a thing’, and to say ‘Heaven has done a thing’ could have between them a perceptible shade of difference. God does all things, but what Heaven does is
done supernaturally. ‘The Father in Heaven’ also can carry the same association [Matt. 16:17].
If ‘Heaven’ be taken in this way as a substitute for the name of God, it will be seen that in the phrase ‘Kingdom of Heaven’ it does not directly qualify the Kingdom. It means the Kingdom of Him who can be called ‘Heaven’. Still, so far as ‘Heaven’ has any specific connotations, such as majesty, supernaturalness, perfection, these will unavoidably go to colour the conception also of the Kingdom belonging to this God.
MODERN THEORIES OF ‘THE KINGDOM’
It has been stated above that, in the hands of Jesus, that which was from the Old Testament, and even John the Baptist’s, point of view an undivided unit, unfolded itself into two phases or stages, distinguished as the present and the eschatological Kingdom. The view long prevailing, and still prevailing, is that Jesus through the labours of His ministry began to realize the Kingdom on earth, that this was a gradual process, that the labour on the Kingdom, to which His followers devoted themselves after Him, and which is still continued by us, is actual Kingdom-producing labour, and that this will go on through the ages of history up to the point set by God for the termination of this world-order, at which point through a catastrophe of world-transforming character the eschatological Kingdom-state will be introduced.
Those who favour the pre-millenarian construction of prophecy and history insert between these two stages a third intermediate one. With this, however, we are not at present concerned. Confining ourselves to the present gradual, and the future catastrophic realization of the Kingdom, we note that in recent times the former of these two has been denied to Jesus as an integral element of His thought. For convenience’ sake we may call the advocates of this view the ultra-eschatologists. The difference between their construction and the older belief does not concern the eschatological issue of the
Kingdom-process. In regard to this the two views are in agreement. But in regard to what this was to be preceded by in the opinion of Jesus there is difference.
The ultra-eschatologists deny the existence in Jesus’ mind of the whole idea of a preliminary, gradual Kingdom. They reconstrue his expectations after this fashion: His own work was to Him not essentially different from that of John the Baptist, being of a purely preliminary character. It was not His task to set up the Kingdom; this implies denial of His Messianic consciousness. It was exclusively the work of God; at the appointed moment, all at once, and in its entire compass the Kingdom would appear and with it the end of this present world and the beginning of the other, eternal order of affairs. Jesus expected that this would happen during the course of His earthly life, or, should His death intervene, at least during the life- time of that generation.
This modern view has some extremely serious implications. It does away with the infallibility of Jesus, because things have not come to pass in accordance with the programme outlines; it shifts the emphasis in His teaching from the present-spiritual to the external- eschatological, making the former no more than a means to the latter, which alone deserved to His mind the name of ‘the Kingdom’. It would have tended, had it really existed in His mind, towards minimizing the importance of present-world morality. Finally, it is apt to engender doubt as to His mental equilibrium, seeing that a man so absorbed by these radical other-worldly, fantastic speculations, could not have possessed a well-balanced psychical temper; He becomes a subject for psychiatric investigation.
In all the points where the theory registers denials we must part ways with it. On the other hand, in regard to the points in which it and we agree, we cannot deny it a certain credit, because it has revived interest in the matter of specific eschatology as an absolutely necessary thing. One sometimes meets with a type of Christian perspective which imagines that, by the steady advance of Christian
processes of reformation and regeneration, supernaturally carried on, this world can be in course of time brought to a point of ideal perfection, so as to need no further crisis. A certain aversion to the supernatural as such frequently contributes toward the denial of that condensed supernaturalism called eschatology.
Over against this it is ever necessary to remind ourselves that abrupt eschatology is inherent in the Christian scheme. It was prepared under the auspices of this, born under them, and must in the end stand or fall with the acceptance or denial of them. This is generic eschatology. A simple consideration of the factors in the case suffices to show how indispensable it is. Even if by persistent application of the gradual processes in the most intensive missionary propaganda, it were possible to convert every individual in the world, this would not provide for the conversion of the generations passed away in the course of history, and which none of our means of grace can reach. And, even discounting this, the conversion of all individuals would not make of them perfectly sinless individuals, except one were to take refuge in the doctrine of perfectionism. The sum total of men, therefore, living at any time would, in order to form part of a perfect world, stand in need of a marvellous soteric and ethical transformation, such as would rightly deserve the name of eschatology. But even this would not exhaust the factors necessary for the establishment of a perfect order of affairs, because the present physical state of the world with its numerous abnormalities, including human physical weaknesses and defects, would render the continuance of such a state of perfection impossible. Thus there would be created as a further element in generic eschatology the need of a transformation of the physical universe, including the resurrection of the body.
Because this status of the question is so inadequately realized, the delusion has sprung up that what is needed to provide for all these elementary redemptive changes is pre-millenarianism. But pre- millenarianism is only a species of eschatological construction, and not the genus. To say we must have this species of the thing or we
have nothing, is a disturbance of all the normal proportions in this matter. It is making illegitimate use of one special scheme, so as to obscure feeling for the generic scheme, which has by far the more ancient credentials, and into which every pre-millenarian scheme will have to be fitted in order to deserve the name of being Christian. Still, as a matter of fact, the pre-millenarian scheme has rendered service through reminding people of the need of a series of supernatural interpositions to carry the world to its ultimate destination. The trouble is that, if certain types of post-millenialism leave too little room for eschatology, pre-millenarian schemes bring in too much.
While we cannot expect the gradual development of the spiritual Kingdom to pass over automatically into the final state, there is nevertheless a fixed connection between the stage the former shall have reached at a certain point (known only to God), and the sudden supervention of the latter. The best confirmation of this principle is taught in the parable of the imperceptibly growing seed. The wheat grows up gradually, while the man sleeps and rises night and day, and he knows not how. But when the fruit is brought forth, immediately he puts in the sickle, because the harvest is come [Mk. 4:26–29]. The condition of ripeness in the grain determines the arrival of the harvest, but the grain cannot harvest itself; for that the interposition of the sickle is required [cp. Also Matt. 13:39–41; 47– 50]. It will be observed that this feature is not allegorically forced upon the parable, but is inherent in its very structure.
THE TWO-SIDED CONCEPTION OF THE KINGDOM
We must next examine the evidence from the words of Jesus for the view that His conception of the Kingdom was, or perhaps came to be, two-sided, containing first the idea of a present, inwardly-spiritual development, and secondly, that of a catastrophic ending-up. It is denied by no one, not even the ultra-eschatologists, that both these ideas are present, side by side, in the Gospels. No argument is needed to prove that. It is alleged, however, that the instances where
the idea of the not-yet-eschatological existence appears, present later modifications of the original, purely eschatological idea as voiced by Jesus. The belief had been at first, both to Him and His first followers, that the Kingdom, in its full eschatological manifestation, was at hand. When the arrival of this tarried, and yet the words of Jesus could not be disavowed, a compromise was made to this effect, that the Kingdom had indeed come, and was present, only it had come and was present in the form of the Church. Thus the idea of a Church-Kingdom entered into the Gospels. It does not reflect in any sense the thought of Jesus, but only the later transformation of it, which the course of historic development had made it necessary to resort to. It will be observed, however, when we come to survey the material, that some of the sayings have the mark of authenticity so clearly written on their face as to allow of no such secondary origin.
Since there is agreement in regard to the authenticity of the eschatological conception, it is unnecessary to discuss passages. The most superficial inspection of the following will suffice: Matt. 8:11; 13:43; Mk. 14:25; Lk. 13:28, 29; 22:16. Especially with reference to his own future state of glory Jesus uses the term ‘Kingdom’ in this consummation-sense [Matt. 19:12; 20:21; Lk. 23:42]. Indeed the terms employed are obviously synonymous with other unequivocally eschatological terms, such as ‘the coming aeon’ [Matt. 12:32; 19:28; Mk. 10:30; Lk. 18:30]. And what ought to be noticed particularly is that in several of these sayings, not some such phrase as ‘the consummation of the Kingdom’, but the simple affirmation of the coming of the Kingdom is employed. This tends to show that in the usage of Jesus the Kingdom meant at first the final Kingdom, and the coming of that the real coming.
In examining the evidence for the other aspect two points should be kept in mind: (a) Is the Kingdom spoken of a present one to the time of the speaker? (b) Is it referred to as consisting in internal-spiritual realities? We rapidly run over the passages. Matt. 12:28 corresponding to Lk. 11:20; here Jesus affirms that the driving out of the demons by the Spirit signifies the coming of the Kingdom. The
underlying principle is that in the world of spirits there is no neutral territory; where the demons depart, the divine Spirit enters. The statement cannot be robbed of its force by making ‘come’ mean ‘come nigh’; nor should it, on the other hand, be forced to mean ‘has come by surprise’, for, while such is the connotation of the verb phthanein in the older Greek, it need not be in the later period. The passage, therefore, teaches a present Kingdom realized through the expulsion of demons, but casts no further light on the character of the Kingdom-state thus called into being.
The next passage examined is Lk. 17:21: ‘The Kingdom of God is entos you.’ The preposition entos here used has two meanings: it can signify ‘in the midst of’, but also ‘within’. The passage is usually rendered with the latter meaning of the preposition. This would yield both the present existence and the spiritual make-up of the Kingdom. The objection has been raised that our Lord could not have said to the Pharisees that the Kingdom was within them, and further that the question put to Jesus as to the ‘when’ of the Kingdom would on such a view not have received any answer. Neither of these two arguments is conclusive. ‘Within you’ need not exactly mean within the persons addressed; the pronoun in such a way of speaking can be enclitic; the sense then would be equivalent to ‘within people’. As to the second objection, we find that Jesus not seldom shifts a question from one sphere to another. Here He might properly have done so in order to intimate that not the ‘when’ but the ‘where’ is the all- important issue. In favour of ‘within you’ the following may be urged: Luke, for ‘in the midst of’ has always another expression, namely, the prepositional phrase en meso. Our passage would be the only one in Luke where entos were employed for that purpose. On the other hand, where the idea of ‘interiority’ is to be stressed entos appears, not only with Luke but likewise in the Septuagint. The passages quoted to support the meaning ‘in the midst of’ are all taken from the older Greek, not from the Hellenistic period. We are, therefore, warranted in giving the preposition entos here a peculiar colouring of inwardness.
Thirdly we look at the parallel passages Matt. 11:13; Lk. 16:16. Here Jesus declares that since the days of John the Kingdom suffers violence and is taken forcibly by violent men. Whatever the precise meaning of this parabolic saying may be, it certainly describes the actuality of the Kingdom since the days of John. In the Lucan parallel the same idea is expressed by representing the Kingdom as ‘preached’, that is as the object of an evangel. An evangel usually has reference to a present thing, and here must have so all the more, because of its opposite, ‘the Law and the Prophets are until John’. The prophesying and typifying has given way to the proclamation of the fulfilment. Further, of a similar import is Matt. 11:11; Lk. 7:28. Our Lord, by denying that John himself is within the Kingdom, implies that such a being within was at that time a possibility; it was only John’s peculiar position that kept him out.
In the fourth place we may appeal to the Kingdom parables [Matt. 13; Mk. 4; Lk. 8]. Here both the present reality and the spiritual nature of the Kingdom are plainly described. The ultra-eschatologists deny the force of this evidence, because here particularly they discover the hand of the traditional revisers, who brought the Church under the wing of the Kingdom. Their claim is that not so much in the parables themselves, but rather in the interpretations added, these de-eschatologizing features are in evidence. Or, where it is difficult to remove all traces of the idea of a present existence, they endeavour to change the subject of the comparisons, proposing to read: ‘the preaching of the gospel is like, etc.’ But the implications of presence are not confined to the interpretation of certain parables; they are scattered through the entire group, and as to changing the introductory formulas, this is forbidden by the highly idiomatic character of the latter in certain cases [cp. Mk. 4:11; Lk. 13:18].
Another method of neutralizing the evidence is more of an exegetical nature; it is proposed to reduce the presence of the Kingdom affirmed by Jesus to the presence of the premonitory signs or first slight beginnings; and in some of the parables, that have been immemorially quoted in proof of the present-Kingdom doctrine, the
entire purport of the parable is changed, its point being sought in the contrast between the small first indications of something extraordinary approaching, and the tremendous mass at the end. But with this interpretation a certain degree of gradualness is in principle conceded, and the parables, especially those taken from the vegetable sphere, appear ill-adapted to describe the explosive character of the terminal events. Finally in Lk. 18:17 a clear distinction would seem to be drawn between the ‘receiving of the Kingdom as a little child’ and the ‘entering into the Kingdom’. These two figures appear as exactly suited for describing the two distinct aspects in the Kingdom-movement, the gradual and spiritual on one hand, and the conclusive one on the other hand.
In the sixth place, Matt. 6:33 puts side by side the seeking after the Kingdom and the obtaining of such earthly things as food and raiment, which will be added unto the Kingdom (not unto the seeking after the Kingdom). According to Lk. 4:18–21 the contents of the ‘acceptable year of Jehovah’ are being realized through the activity of Jesus: ‘this day is the Scripture fulfilled in your ears.’ Further, Matt. 9:15; Mk. 2:19 represents the joy of the Kingdom- season as to such an extent present that it renders fasting inappropriate for the disciples. Finally, according to Matt. 13:16; Lk. 10:23, Jesus, turning to the disciples, pronounces them blessed for seeing and hearing those things which many prophets and kings had desired to witness but not attained unto.
For the sake of clearer distinction a brief formula of the difference between these two aspects of the Kingdom may be framed. The difference is as follows:
(a) The present Kingdom comes gradually, the final Kingdom catastrophically;
(b) the present Kingdom comes largely in the internal, invisible sphere, the final Kingdom in the form of a world-wide visible manifestation;
(c) the present Kingdom up to the eschatological point remains subject to imperfections; the final Kingdom will be without all imperfections, and this applies as well to what had remained imperfect in the spiritual processes of which the present Kingdom consisted, as to the new elements which the final Kingdom adds.
The stress on the present-spiritual Kingdom idea has exposed the concept to considerable misinterpretation, along the line of naturalizing the process of its coming. Especially the parables taken from the vegetable realm have tempted to this. But the point in these is not the naturalness of the development; it is only the gradualness, and gradualness and supernaturalness are not mutually exclusive. The first phase of the Kingdom-forming movement is just as supernatural as are the events at the end of the world, only they are not as conspicuously so. It is an offshoot of this misunderstanding, when the Kingdom-complex is too much restricted to ethical thoughts and processes. The Ritschlian School has made of the Kingdom almost exclusively an association of men interacting on the principle of love. This is not wrong in itself, but as a definition of the Kingdom it is utterly misleading, because it virtually dereligionizes the idea, and moreover shifts the realization of the Kingdom almost entirely from the work of God to the activity of man. Man brings in the Kingdom according to this view. According to Jesus’ conception the opposite is true, to such an extent in fact that our Lord hardly ever represents Himself as the Realizer of the Kingdom. Both these faults, as they hang together, can only be corrected together through explaining that the specifically religious belongs just as much to the Kingdom-circle as the ethical. Forgiveness of sin, communion with God, divine sonship, eternal life, these and other things are as truly ingredients of the Kingdom as the activities of men along the line of what is now, with a semi-Christian connotation, called ‘service’.
[2] The Essence of the Kingdom
After having discussed the formal questions we now find ourselves face to face with the problem: What reasons induced our Lord to call
the new order of things that He came to announce and to introduce by the name ‘the Kingdom of God’? Other names were in themselves conceivable, so far as the religious substance was concerned. We cannot explain the use from the Old Testament, for there the formal name does not occur. Nor does current usage in our Lord’s time on the principle of accommodation help us out, for to the Jew ‘the Kingdom of God’ was not then the most favoured phrase for designating the content of the eschatological hope. Other names, such as ‘the coming world’, ‘the coming age’ were preferred, possibly because to the deistically inclined consciousness of Judaism they less focused the concept on God and left more room for thinking of what it would mean for Israel.
And right here we discover the true meaning of our Lord’s preference for the name. It sprang from His theocentric frame of mind, which is but another way of saying that it is a religious conception through and through. The intent with which it was used by our Lord was precisely the opposite to that half-conscious feeling that it somehow affords an opportunity to remain within the circle of religion and yet have less of the obsession of God in religion. To Jesus it meant: ‘of God the Kingdom’; to not a few at the present day it apparently means: ‘the Kingdom (of God)’. And to Jesus it was far less an ideal, and far more of an actuality, than it is felt to be by the modern mind. ‘The Kingdom of God’ is not His destiny nor His abstract right to rule —His sovereignty—it is the actual realization of His sway. In this sense, and in this sense only, can it ‘come’; God possesses His sovereignty from the beginning, and that cannot ‘come’. The proposal to bring the name nearer to the general understanding by substituting ‘the sovereignty of God’ leads on the wrong track, because sovereignty is only de jure, and not always de facto, and also because sovereignty, being an abstract conception, could not mark the distinction between the abstract and the concrete Kingdom.
‘Of God the Kingdom’, then, means the actual exercise of the divine supremacy in the interest of the divine glory. Passages like Matt. 6:10, 33; Mk. 12:34 bear out this central idea [cp. also 1 Cor. 15:28].
This divine supremacy constituting the ideal state of religion branches out in several directions. At first, so long as the thing is considered in the abstract, it can be compared to a bundle of rays of light and action proceeding from and held together by the hand of God. But this is only provisional; the goal is that all these exercises of divine supremacy shall find their unitary organization in one royal establishment. The three principal spheres in which the divine supremacy works toward this end are the sphere of power, the sphere of righteousness and the sphere of blessedness. These will be briefly discussed in succession.
DIVINE SUPREMACY IN THE SPHERE OF POWER
The power element is already prominent in the Old Testament idea of the Kingdom of Jehovah. In the Gospels we meet it at the close of the Lord’s Prayer, where ‘power’ is the first specification of what the Kingdom consists in: ‘Thine is the Kingdom, [even] the power….’ Though this closing doxology is not found in Luke, and is absent from some good manuscripts also in Matthew, nevertheless it remains a valuable witness to what was associated with the Kingdom-idea in the minds of those using this very ancient prayer. According to Matt. 12:28, the casting out of demons is an exhibition of divine Kingdom-power (cp. Luke ‘the finger of God’), no less indeed than an assertion of Messianic sovereignty. The miracles in general likewise find their explanation from this point of view. Besides being credentials of Jesus, and beneficent actions of His grace, they are chiefly ‘signs of the times’, that is, signs of the arrival or nearness of the Kingdom, just as the symptoms of the sky are to the wise signs of the weather of the morrow. They are both symbolic of spiritual transactions and prophetic of things pertaining to the eschatological Kingdom. Mark 2:9 points to the present time, but on the whole the miracles rather point forward to the crisis at the end.
The Kingdom-making power is associated with the Spirit; of the qualification of Jesus by the Spirit for His words and works, mention has been made already. The direct connection of the Spirit with
effects in the ethico-religious sphere is not frequently touched upon in the Gospel teaching [cp. Lk. 11:13]. It was reserved for Paul to work out this part of Christian doctrine after the actual outpouring of the Spirit. To Jesus the Spirit is the Author of revelation and of miracles, and remains this even in the Fourth Gospel where He is promised as the substitute of the departed Jesus. The position of Jesus in the development of pneumatology as between the Old Testament and Paul can be broadly defined as follows: In the Old Testament the Spirit is the Spirit of the theocratic charismata, who qualifies prophets, priests and kings for their office, but is not communicable from one to the other. Of this charismatic Spirit Jesus has received the fulness, and, having the fulness, dispenses of it to His followers, first partially and by means of promise, then in greater fulness by way of fulfilment at Pentecost.
Now since the Spirit He dispenses is not only His own as an external possession, but, having become through the resurrection thoroughly incorporated into His exalted nature, He gives, when He gives it, of His own, and the union effected between Him and the Spirit and through the Spirit and believers, acquires the character of an organic mystical union, so that to be in the Spirit is to be in Christ. And the further result is that, the entire Christian life being to Paul a life of communion with Christ, it also becomes necessarily a life lived in and inspired by the Spirit in all its strata and activities.
Another approach to this experience of a wholly Spirit-filled life lies through the conception of the eschatological state as the state in which the Spirit is the pervasive element and characteristic force. And since the earthly life is a real anticipation of the eschatological state, first-fruits and earnest and seal of the same, then the equableness of Spirit-endowment and Spirit-influence pertaining to the one naturally comes to pertain to the other also.
FAITH AS RELATED TO THE KINGDOM’S POWER
To the Kingdom as power answers faith as the correlate of this power. The correlation is not complete, since faith bears a distinct relation to the divine grace, no less than to the divine power. Ii the Gospels, that of John excepted, faith mostly emerges in the miracle contexts, and should therefore be studied in close dependence on what the miracles are. It is, as it were, the subjectivity corresponding to the objective fact of the miracle. The question to ask therefore, is what peculiarity inheres in the miracles, which makes them draw to themselves the functioning of faith. Two points come under consideration here.
First, the miracles are beneficent, saving acts, which has the result of making them an exhibition of the divine grace and evoking in the recipients the mental state of trust. This, however, important though it be, should not receive the main stress. The miracles are beneficent, but this is an aspect they have in common with other aspects of the work of God. What is unique to the miracle is the assertion of absolutely divine supernatural power. The efficient cause of the miracle is something that man can contribute nothing to, because it is wholly dependent on the putting forth of the direct supernatural energy of God. Hence it is emphasized that the miracles are done by ‘a word’; that is the word of omnipotent power, the mere word [Matt. 8:8, 16]. The relation of faith to the omnipotence of God is strikingly illustrated in the episode, Mk. 9:17–24. Jesus here remonstrates with the suggestion of the father, ‘if thou canst do anything’, with the reply, ‘what! if thou canst!’, thereby declaring that, since it is a question of divine omnipotence, all mention of adequacy of power ought to be eliminated from the outset. Before God there exists no ‘if thou canst’.
In this dependence on the omnipotence and grace of God lies the religious rationale of faith. Faith is the practical (not purely reasoning) recognition on the part of a man that the saving work of the Kingdom is exclusively a divine work. Faith is not to be considered under the aspect of a magical compulsion, far less of an ex-parte human contribution to the accomplishment of the result, for
if the latter were the case, faith would carry within itself an inner antinomy, being on the one hand a recognition that God alone must work, on the other hand an urge to fulfil at least a preliminary condition. We are told that Jesus could do no miracles where faith was absent, that a mere sign from heaven as such He could not give, and yet at the same time we are told that the miracles were to act as stimulators of faith. The solution lies in a distinction between two kinds of unbelief. Where the absence of faith amounted to deep- seated distrust of the divine method of saving, the mere doing of miracles could not have acted as an inducement of faith. It might have convinced of the presence of a supernatural power, but would have related the latter neither to God nor to Jesus, but to some demonic agency [Matt. 12:24]. Ii such a case, Jesus would do no miracle, because no true full-orbed faith would have resulted. Where it was a mere question of the absence of evidence, there the miracle could play its proper part to stimulate faith. What Jesus affirms of the demon cases is equally true of the miracle of salvation in general [Matt. 19:26]. Such things are possible to God and to God only. Faith, being the work of God, is something to be prayed for by Jesus on behalf of one in danger of losing it [Lk. 22:31, 32; Mk. 9:24].
In the principle that faith is a work of God, the other fact is given of its not being the mere arbitrary choice of man who simply wills or refuses to exercise it. It has behind it a motivation. Nor can it be explained as the upwelling of an irrational mystical urge, such as would need no rational motive. Faith presupposes knowledge, because it needs a mental complex, person or thing, to be occupied about. Therefore, the whole modern idea of preaching Jesus, but preaching Him without a creed, is not only theologically, not merely Scripturally, but psychologically impossible in itself. In fact knowledge is so interwoven with faith that the question arises, whether it be sufficient to call it a prerequisite, and not rather an ingredient of faith.
The very names by means of which Jesus would have to be presented to people are nuclei of creed and doctrine. If it were possible to
eliminate this, the message would turn to pure magic, but even the magic requires some name-sound and cannot be wholly described as preaching without a creed. The vogue which this programme has acquired is to some extent due to the unfortunate, and altogether undeserved, flavour clinging to the term ‘creed’, as though this necessarily meant a minutely worked out theological structure of belief. That is not meant, but belief there must be before faith can begin to function, and belief includes knowledge [Matt. 8:10; Lk. 7:9]. This knowledge may have been gathered gradually, almost imperceptibly, from countless impressions received during a briefer or longer period of time, but epistemologically it does not differ from any other kind of mental act however acquired. To be sure, mere knowledge is not equivalent to full-orbed faith, it must develop into trust, before it is entitled to that name.
How closely faith is connected with the cognition-complex of the soul can best be gathered from our Lord’s statements on the causes of unbelief. So far as these are not due to mere absence of informative knowledge, they can be reduced to the one case of ‘being offended’. The Greek for this term is skandalizesthai. The skandalon is the chip of wood that holds the bait in a trap and causes the animal to be caught. Metaphorically speaking and with reference to faith, the offence is a temptation to unbelief. The peculiar feature of this representation is that Jesus has placed the ‘offence’ in Himself. There is something in His Person and claims and activity and ideals that becomes to his opponents an occasion for unbelief. The reason for this is that in all these respects He is diametrically opposite to what the Jews expected their Messiah to be and to do. They had their own preconceptions and ideal preferences about the Messiahship, and about the coming era of which this formed the centre. But these preconceptions and preferences were by no means so detached from their internal state of mind as to be innocent. The offence, therefore, was in the last analysis engendered by their nature, and thus the unbelief to which it gave rise was an outcome of their corrupt state of heart.
The psychology of the action of faith receives light from the verbal constructions used for describing it. The verb is pisteuein, the adjective is pistos, but in the Gospels this occurs only in the negative form of apistos: the positive has the passive sense of ‘believed in’, ‘reliable’. Oligopistos means ‘short of faith’, not in the sense of lacking volume, but rather in the sense of not reaching far enough to attain the end. Of the prepositions used, en seems to be the least informing, since neither to the modern mind, nor to the Greek mind, either classical or Hellenistic, is it an indigenous, intelligible construction. Perhaps it derived from the Hebrew preposition beth, which had its own idiomatic local associations. The preposition eis is construed, of course, with the accusative; its meaning may be that of mental projection, ‘towards’ the object of faith, or that of local entrance into the object, ‘to exercise faith into Christ’. The latter would be a more Johannine and Pauline than a Synoptical idea. Epi has two constructions, one with the dative, and one with the accusative; the former expresses the idea of believing ‘on the ground of’ (a connotation given by some also to en), the faith rising, as it were, out of the evidence; the latter resembles closely the construction with eis, except that the projection of the believing mind upwards towards the object of faith enters as a peculiar shade of colouring.
‘FAITH’ AS USED IN JOHN
The Johannine teaching on faith has certain sharply outstanding peculiarities which may here be briefly enumerated:
(a) Faith is throughout related to Jesus, co-ordinately with God, on account of the idea of Jesus’ being the duplicate of God. In the Synoptics Jesus is not mentioned as the personal object of faith, except in Matt. 18:6; Mk. 9:42 (with somewhat uncertain text). The wrong inference that Jesus did not consider Himself the object of faith, or as a factor in salvation, has been drawn from this, but the inadequacy of the argument is clear from the fact that with reference to God also there is only one such explicit passage [Mk. 11:22], so
that in point of statistics there is no difference. In John 14:1 (where the imperative rendering is to be preferred) the implication seems to be that the disciples, who through the tragic experience of the passion might be in danger of losing their faith in Christ, should, as it were, recover it through vigorously asserted faith in the Father. It is of course psychologically inconceivable that those who had been healed by Jesus should not have developed an attitude of trust towards Him.
(b) Faith is more a continuous, habitual relation between Jesus and the believer; in the Synoptics it appears mostly as a momentary act in those upon whom the miracles are wrought. Even here, however, attention is called by Jesus to the fact that what faith has done once it will do again; ‘thy faith hath made thee whole’. In the storm Jesus remonstrates with the disciples for not having considered His presence with them a guarantee of continuous safety. Also the figure of ‘shortness’ of faith points to the nascent idea of faith as a habit, afterwards so fully worked out by Paul. Thus faith begins to cover the entire religious life as its indispensable basis.
(c) Faith, as by anticipation, lays hold of the glorified Jesus; it works in the present with the same effects as it will work in the future: Jesus is the bread of life; the cleansing of sins is given now.
(d) There is a most intimate association between faith and knowledge. This does not rest on any philosophical, particularly Gnostic, concept of the process of salvation. The knowledge is a practical knowledge of acquaintance and intimacy, more of the Shemitic than of the Hellenic type, as it is said of the sheep that they are known by the shepherd and know the shepherd’s voice. Besides believing and knowing there is still a third term descriptive of close and intense religious occupation, namely, ‘to behold’, literally ‘to gaze upon’ (theorein). Interesting is the application of these several terms to the several subjects and objects of the act. In regard to Jesus’ relation to the Father the verb ‘to believe’ is never found, the relation evidently being too direct and intimate for that. The Father
‘knows the Son’ and the Son ‘knows the Father’. Of the relation between Christ and the disciple, all three—’to believe’, ‘to know’, and of the Holy Spirit, ‘to behold’ and ‘to know’ Him, not to believe on Him, are found.
(e) The doctrine as to the connection between unbelief and its source is more clearly set forth in John than in the Synoptics. Unbelief is shown to spring from a radically wrong attitude of man’s nature towards God, for which even the name ‘hatred’ is not shunned. Unbelief is called ‘the sin’, not, as is sometimes imagined, as if under the regime of the gospel all other sins were discounted, and a totally new record begun in which only faith and unbelief would henceforth be decisive factors. Underlying the phrase ‘the sin’ is rather the recognition that in unbelief the deep inherent character of sin as a turning against God reveals itself.
(f) As to the sources of faith, these are described in four ways:
(a) faith is the result of a course of conduct; those believe who do the truth and walk in the truth, etc.;
(b) going farther back, it is the result of right spiritual perception wrought by God; they believe who have learned it or heard it from the Father;
(c) going still farther back, faith is the outcome of a state of being, described as being in the truth;
(d) finally, going back to the ultimate source: believers are those, who on the principle of sovereign election, have been given by the Father to the Son, or drawn to the Son by the Father.
These various terms are so strong as to have given rise to the charge that the Gospel is infectedwith Gnosticism, a heresy which distinguished between those who are not capable of salvation, on the one hand, and such as are not in need of salvation, on the other hand. But the Gospel has behind it a full and strong recognition of
the Old Testament, from which an antecedent attitude towards the truth as determinative of the subsequent attitude towards Jesus can be explained.
DIVINE SUPREMACY IN THE SPHERE OF RIGHTEOUSNESS
The second line along which the supremacy of God in the Kingdom is worked out by Jesus is that of righteousness. Before all else it is necessary to fix sharply the Biblical concept of ‘righteousness’, common to both the Old Testament and the New Testament. Now, notwithstanding all our acquaintance with the Bible, we are hindered from correctly apprehending this by the common-parlance use the word has developed on the basis of legal tradition. Right is, according to the latter, what is equitable. The concept is framed on the mutual delimitation of rights between man and man; God does not enter into it, except indirectly as the guardian or champion for what ought to prevail inter-humanly.
At bottom this conception is, of course, a pagan one. According to Scripture ‘righteousness’ is that which agrees with and pleases God, and exists for His sake, and can only be adjudicated by Him. He is first of all, and above all, the interested Person. Without reckoning with Him in the three relations named there can be no actual existence of righteousness. There might be good or evil intrinsically considered as to results, but to speak of righteousness would under such circumstances have no meaning. And this God-referred righteousness is by no means a small department of religious life. Ethically considered, it covers all converse with God; to be righteous acquires the meaning of possessing and practising the true religion: righteousness is equivalent to piety. Our Lord’s teaching on righteousness partakes throughout of this general character. Righteousness is from God as its source, it exists for God as its end, and it is subject to God as the ultimate Justifier.
This Scriptural idea of righteousness, however, stands in the closest connection with the Scriptural idea of the Kingdom of God. In the
American political system there is no such intimate union between kingship and judgeship; the law-giving and executive functions are assigned to separate organs in the body politic. To the ancient (Shemitic) consciousness the King is ipso facto the Lawgiver and the Executor of the law [cp. Psa. 72; Isa. 33:22]. Far more also than we can imagine, the King is the centre of political life, for whose sake the state and the subjects exist. Modern individualism was not known. If we subtract from the words of Louis XIV their proud flippancy, the statement, ‘L’état, c’est mei’ would most nearly express the idea. This is not from our point of view good politics. But in religion it is not only allowable; it is the only principle on which a truly religious relation can be built, and revelation has made use of this monarchial and King-centred state of affairs to build up its doctrine of the Kingdom of God in the sphere of righteousness.
We must now trace the presence of these ideas in the teaching of our Lord on the subject. This will be most conveniently done by defining the close identity and association affirmed by Him as between the Kingdom and righteousness, because in this way the theocentric character of His idea of righteousness will soon appear to be naught else in substance than His theocentric conception of the Kingdom.
This is observable along three lines:
(a) first the Kingdom (Kingship) of God is identified with righteousness. They are concurrent, or mutually in-existent, because the doing of righteousness amounts to the practical recognition and furtherance of His Kingship. The best example of this is in the sequence of the two petitions of our Lord’s prayer: ‘thy Kingdom come’ and ‘thy will be done’. Here in all probability both ‘coming’ and ‘being done’ are, in harmony with Western exegesis, to be understood eschatologically.
(b) In the second place, righteousness appears as a consequent to the Kingdom, one of the many gifts which the new reign of God freely bestows upon its members. The Old Testament had already held this
new kind of righteousness in prospect. Jeremiah promises that Jehovah will write His Law upon the hearts of the people, and Ezekiel predicts that Jehovah will make them to walk in His statutes. That according to Jesus’ conception the participants of this righteousness sustain a receptive attitude towards it appears from Matt. 5:6. It would, of course, be very easy, but none the less anachronistic, to import into this line of teaching all the Pauline ideas, according to which righteousness is the one great central gift in the life of the Christian, that on which everything else is based. As a matter of fact the parable of the Pharisee and the publican invites one to do this: the publican went home justified and not the Pharisee, because the former professed not to possess any subjective righteousness, and the Pharisee was rejected because of his consciousness of possessing much. As a matter of fact the principle of the Pauline doctrine and that of Jesus thus appear identical. The difference lies in two things: Jesus treats the entire gift as an undifferentiated unit, whereas Paul has learned to distinguish between the objective righteousness which becomes ours through imputation and the subjective kind which becomes ours through the inworking of the Spirit. But at bottom both are one as the gift of God, and according to Paul the latter comes as the fruit of the former. The second thing in which a difference is perceptible concerns the terminology. What Paul calls justification, Jesus calls entrance into the Kingdom or becoming a son of God. Righteousness is with Paul largely objective status, with Jesus largely subjective condition.
(c) In the third place the sequence between the two is reversed, righteousness coming first and the Kingdom as the ensuing reward. This is, of course, to be understood of the eschatological Kingdom, which is in such sayings promised as a recompense for the practice of righteousness in this life. It comes in appearance nearest to the Judaistic position, and has been consequently criticized not seldom as a remnant in our Lord’s religion of the self-righteousness of Judaism. One need not wonder at this, when observing that in Matt. 6:5, 6, a reward is set even upon the proper observance of prayer. It has been attempted to remove words of this kind as non-cognate to
the general religious mentality of Jesus. This affords no relief because the idea appears interwoven with so much of our Lord’s practical exhortations, all labour in the Kingdom being represented as a labour behind the plough and in the vineyard, so that the matter, considered as a flaw, would vitiate a large strand in Jesus’ teaching.
In order to reach clearness on the question we must first disabuse ourselves of the modern idea, as though every thought of reward in ethical relations were unworthy of the sacredness of ethics. This is an opinion ultimately based on the philosophy of the autonomy or deification of ethics, and behind that on the principle of unmotived free will. Man is not such an autonomous being that he can afford to scorn a reward from God, provided the idea of meritoriousness be kept absent from it. If that were man’s normal ethical attitude, then man would be in ethics like unto God. Of Jesus Himself it is said that the idea of reward attracted and sustained Him and determined the result of His work [Heb. 12:2].
An important further consideration is, whether the reward promised is in principle of a lower, less noble nature than the conduct on which it is suspended. This is actually the case in Judaism, but the contrary is true of Jesus’ teaching. Compare the conjoined clauses in the beatitudes. It is also of importance to note, whether the attraction of the peripheral reward operates to the exclusion of the supreme reward in the possession and enjoyment of God Himself, in which respect again the beatitudes may be consulted. Judaism put the doctrine of reward on a commercial (and therefore self-righteous) basis. It was a matter of man paying so much and getting back a proper equivalent. This principle of quid pro quo is destructive of the religious relation. Moreover it was applied equally to both rewards and retributive punishment. Of this there is no trace in the teaching of Jesus. He treats the idea of punishment of sin as something inseparable from the ethical nature of God, but does not affirm anywhere that God, by force of the same principle, must reward the practice of what is good. On the contrary, the servants who have done all that was required of them are still unprofitable servants
(which is a different thing from saying that they are useless servants). The thought is that having served God to the full they are not inherently entitled to any reward; and, because the reward is not of necessity, neither can it be of exact equivalence: those that have worked a short time receive the same wages as those who have laboured long. On the basis of economic equity this would be disastrous, but on the basis of righteousness sovereignly applied it serves to bring out that important principle.
OUR LORD’S CRITIQUE OF JEWISH ETHICS
This is the place to insert a brief survey of our Lord’s critique of Jewish ethics, which occupies considerable space in the Gospels. The Jewish ethic suffered from two fundamental defects: its tendency towards Deism and its infection by self-centredness. From these two main defects resulted the following serious faults:
(a) Externalism: the law was not obeyed with the idea of the super- vision of God in mind; the service of the Law had taken the place of the service of the living God [Gal. 2:18–21].
(b) The breaking up of the Law from a well-organized state to a state of utter disorganization; great principles were not distinguished and in the light of these the minor questions judged; on the contrary, every single commandment was reduced to a level of casuistry. Over against this Jesus knows of the greater and the lesser commandment, of the things that ought to be done, and other things not to be left undone.
(c) From the same source sprang the negativism that so largely characterized the Judaistic law-practice. The main concern was not to attain the positive end of the Law, but rather to avoid negatively the disasters feared from non-observance; the system degenerated into a system of avoidance.
(d) The self-righteousness so severely castigated by Jesus grew on the same root, for where God is not recognized as the Inlooker into
the moral process, it becomes relatively easy to believe that the essence of the Law has been kept, whereas in reality only the surface, that which falls under man’s observation, has been skimmed.
(e) Last of all, from this delusive sense of performance springs the fault of hypocrisy, meaning by this here the objective kind of hypocrisy, discord between the heart and the outward life, which can, however, exist without conscious knowledge of the same on the hypocrite’s part, which latter we call subjective hypocrisy.
REPENTANCE
Connected with our Lord’s teaching on the righteousness of the Kingdom is His teaching on repentance. Just as His teaching on faith is the correlative of the power-aspect of the Kingdom, so that on repentance corresponds to the righteousness-aspect of the same. Hence the preaching began with the demand jointly for repentance and faith in the gospel. In this there is a perpetual witness to the constancy of the assumption of sin as the background of the offer of the gospel. The necessity for repentance as essential to participation in the Kingdom is not, however, of a meritorious significance. The man cast out from the feast on account of not having a wedding- garment, was excluded because his condition was not appropriate to the feast, not because he had not deserved the feast, for all the guests were taken from the highways and hedges [Matt. 22:11–13].
The state of mind described by what is theologically called repentance can be best ascertained from the Greek words found for it in the Gospels, although the possibility must be always reckoned with that the terms may have become stereotyped terms not any longer connoting consciously the original associations. These terms are the following:
(a) metamelesthai (impersonal) literally ‘after-sorrow’. It denotes the emotional element of regret for a past act or course of action. Because of its emotional associations it has sometimes been thought
to describe repentance as a superficial experience. This is incorrect; the experience can be superficial, but likewise can be profound, and when profound, can be taken in bonum sensum, as what Paul calls the ‘sorrow after God’, or in malum sensum, as when Judas is said to have ‘repented himself’. In the bad sense it describes what is named ‘remorse’, literally the ‘backbiting’ of the soul upon herself; the noun to this is metameleia.
(b) metanoein, a change or rather reversal of nous; nous does not narrowly signify the mind, but the entire conscious life, will and affections included. In this word the preposition meta does not have, as in the preceding term, the temporal sense of ‘after’, but the metaphorical sense of ’round about’. The noun corresponding to this is metanoia. The terms are always used of saving repentance, that which is elsewhere called ‘a repentance not to be repented of’ [2 Cor. 7:10].
(c) epistrephesthai, ‘to turn one’s self about’. This describes not, as the two preceding terms do, an inner state of mind reflecting upon its past, or an inner change of mind turned into its opposite, but the turning of the will towards a new, opposite goal. It corresponds, strictly speaking, rather to ‘conversion’ than to repentance.
The specific character of Biblical repentance, as distinguished from experiences so named in paganism, lies first of all in the comprehensiveness of the turn of mind. It is ‘after-sorrow’, or reversal of consciousness, or redirection of the life upon an opposite goal, with regard to the whole content of the ethico-religious life. To the non-Christian mind repentance took place from one act to another, or from one course of action to another only. The cause of this difference is found in the lack on the pagan side of a comprehensive conception of sin. Where ‘sin’ in its comprehensive sense is not known, there real repentance cannot develop, even as a conception.
Secondly, and as a necessary result of the foregoing, the demand for repentance is addressed to all men. The disciples are not exempt from the clause ‘if ye being evil’ at a late point of their association with Jesus [Lk. 11:13]. Repentance must be preached among all nations [Lk. 24:47]. That Jesus sometimes seems to establish a difference between some to whom He feels called to preach and the greater number of those who need no repentance, and calls the latter in such a connection ‘righteous’ is to be understood from the standpoint of the estimate such people are apt self-righteously to put upon themselves [Mk. 2:17].
Even more specific than this is the God-centred character of the experience. Its point of departure, that from which the repentance takes place, is always something considered in its relation to God. The idea is religious, not world-ethical. The technical term for this state rendering repentance necessary is ‘being lost’, i.e. missing in one’s normal relation to God. Those in need of repentance are like lost sheep, lost coins; the sin of the prodigal consists at bottom in this, that he has left the father’s house. In the same way God is the central object on whom the repenting consciousness is focused; it is the offence offered to Him that stands in the foreground of the sorrow experienced.
Finally, the new direction of life which the repentance brings about finds its explanation in the absolute and exclusive subjection of the whole life with all its desires and purposes to God. In this connection there are found in the Gospels many apparently extreme sayings in regard to giving up all human interests and ties even of the most sacred nature, nay, of life itself, for the sake of a single-minded devotion to God. Such statements are not to be understood purely paradoxically. However, they are qualified in their range of obligation by Jesus Himself. Our Lord says: If thy hand, thy foot, thine eye offend thee, cut it off, pluck it out; it is only when these natural things become occasions for failing in the whole-souled devotion to God, that their absolute renouncement is demanded. From this, however, it follows that an abstract rule of universal
surrender of such things cannot be laid down. It is the inner pseudo- religious attachment to something outside of God that must be given up in the interest of the true religion. And, on the other side, the facile excuse should not be too frequently urged that outward surrender is in no case needed, for in some situations this external renunciation may be the very thing needed to bring about the internal detachment of the soul which the Kingdom requires from all other things.
DIVINE SUPREMACY IN THE SPHERE OF BLESSEDNESS
In the third place, the Kingdom of God is the supremacy of God in the sphere of blessedness. The connection between God’s kingship and blessedness is partly of a generally eschatological character, partly of a specific kingdom-eschatological character. It is inherent in the eschatological conception of things that the final, perfect order of things shall also be the order of things productive of the supreme state of happiness. From the point of view of the kingship it ought to be remembered that in the Orient the royal office had attached to it the regular belief and expectation that it existed for conferring blessedness upon the subjects of the realm. The thought of blessedness involved can be indiscriminately derived from the Fatherhood and from the Kingship of God; even the entire Kingdom can in this way be explained as a gift to the disciples from the divine Fatherhood [Lk. 12:32]. On account of the blessedness involved the Kingdom appears under the figure of a treasure or a precious pearl, in each case it being explicitly stated that the finder sold all he had in order to possess himself of the coveted object, which means, of course, that it was more precious than all other values combined.
The blessedness conferred by and with the Kingdom can be classified under the heads of a negative and of a positive blessedness. There are three principal ideas, that of salvation, that of sonship, and that of life. The idea of salvation is from the nature of the case both negative and positive, with the emphasis oscillating from the one side to the other. The idea of life is positive, and so is that of sonship.
KINGDOM AND CHURCH
The one subject remaining concerns the organization of the Kingdom into the form of the Church. The one clear case of development in our Lord’s objective teaching on the Kingdom subject is to be found here. The two points on which the Caesarea-Philippi epoch shows an addition and an advancement are the providing of the Kingdom with an outward organism, and the endowment of it with a new dynamic of the Spirit. At all times there have been those who depreciated the Church in favour of the Kingdom. The reasons for such an attitude are varying. Sometimes ‘anti-sectarianism’ comes into play, and the ignoble sound of the word alone works havoc with verities of the gospel teaching. At other times it is pre-millenarianism, which desires to put off the Kingdom state to the ultimate temporal dispensation and consequently feels interested in keeping Kingdom and Church apart. On the other side undue identification of the Kingdom with the Church in every respect indiscriminately is insisted upon, as in Romanism where the Church visible draws under its power and jurisdiction every phase of life, such as science, art and others.
Sometimes theologians endeavour to make a distinction in this matter between the so-called visible and invisible Church, identifying the latter with the Kingdom, whilst excluding the former from it. And sometimes the exclusion goes farther, when to the Church only the character of a means to an end is conceded, whilst the Kingdom is regarded as the summum bonum and end in itself. The above- mentioned motive of anti-sectarianism is apt to ally itself with such an attitude, for disrespect is more easily entertained and cultivated where means rather than ends are in view.
A close study of the pericope Matt. 16:18–20 will show what value, if any, is to be allowed to these varying positions. We notice, first, that the Church and the Kingdom of God do not appear here as separate institutions. The figure of which our Lord avails Himself for speaking of the Church and speaking of the Kingdom closely unites the two.
On Peter, confessing His Christhood and divine Sonship, He promises to build up the Church in the near future. This is the structure in building, vs. 18. In vs. 19, however, still using the same figure of building, He promises to Peter the keys of administration in this structure when completed. Undoubtedly then, the Church and the Kingdom are in principle one, and all such distinctions as are above enumerated break down before the simple logic of this unavoidable exegesis. So much is certain at least, that the Church is included in the Kingdom, and that it were foolish to seek to escape the reproach of the former in order to gain the imaginary distinction of the latter. And this does not merely render part of the Church Kingdom-territory, for example, the invisible Church; it will have to be extended likewise to the visible Church, for only with regard to that can ‘keys’ of administration and the functions of binding and loosing be spoken of.
It will be noticed that Jesus speaks of ‘His Church’. The idea is not that hitherto no Church has existed. ‘His Church’ should be understood in contrast to the Old Testament Church organization which had now come to an end to make place for the Messiah’s Church. This is the inner connection between the Church doctrine enunciated and the prediction of His suffering and death interwoven with it. In His rejection the Old Testament Church abrogated itself. The future is spoken of, because the new dynamic could not enter into the Church until after His exaltation.
This dynamic seems to be referred to in the statement about ‘the gates of Hades’ in vs. 18, at least on one interpretation of this figure, according to which Hades is depicted as a citadel from which a host of warriors stream forth, the corresponding picture to be supplied being that of the citadel of the Kingdom from which a power will issue overcoming the power of death. The underlying idea would be that Jesus through His resurrection will so fill His Church with unconquerable life, infusing it into her by the Spirit, that death will be wholly conquered by the Church [Rev. 1:18]. The other exegesis attaches itself to a proverbial use made of ‘the gates of Hades’ to
describe figuratively the strongest structure conceivable, since from these gates no one has ever succeeded in escaping. Applied to the Church the figure would then mean that she is the strongest structure in existence, and would be simply a pendant to the characterization of Peter as a rock. The former view is to be preferred in a context where so many novel and weighty ideas emerge.
Besides this description of the Church in the figure of a building there are other sayings of our Lord which are sometimes quoted to establish a close connection between the Church and the Kingdom. Jesus speaks in several statements, belonging to this closing period of His life on earth, not only of a coming of Himself, but also of a very near coming of the Kingdom. The language is such that it could be readily applied, both as to nearness and forcibleness, to the eschatological coming of the Kingdom. The implication would then have to be that He did not anticipate a protracted existence of the Church in this world, but looked forward both to His own coming and to that of the consummate Kingdom as shortly to supervene. This, of course, would carry with it His fallibility in regard to this central topic of the eschatological hope. On the other hand, there are several sayings, especially in the closing discourses of the Fourth Gospel, in which a corning of Himself in invisible form, intended for the disciples, is referred to in semi-eschatological language. If there could be such an anticipated coming of Himself, distinct evidently from the eschatological coming, which is by no means eliminated from the Fourth Gospel teaching, then there can be no objection on principle to applying this same idea to the Kingdom-Church.
In conclusion we should observe that the Matthew pericope, as little as any other New Testament passage, gives countenance to the idea of the Church as a mere instrument of propaganda or an institute of missions, or whatever goal to which she may stand in a vital relation. The Church is all these things in part, but no one can truthfully say that these objectives are exhaustive of the purpose of existence of the Church. The conception of a thing as a mere instrument for endlessly reiterated self-reproduction is a hopeless conception in itself, for why
should one exist to make others or an organism of others in perpetuation or extension of what exists at the present time, if this process is to have no fixed end? This whole view is a virtual denial of the eschatological setting of Biblical religion. The Church was born in and stands in the sign of consummation and rest as well as of motion. She consists not of mere doing, but likewise of fruition, and this fruition pertains not exclusively to the future; it is the most blessed part of the present life. And the best proof for the Church as an end in itself lies in the inclusion of the Church in the eschatological world, for that world is not the world of things aimed at, but of things attained unto.