Someone once again asked me a question, and once again I had enough time on my hands to write a needlessly long piece in response.
On the Kingdom of God
The place of the Kingdom of God in both theology and history has long been contested. As an historical artifact the idea of God’s Kingdom has been a powerful political force. Benedict Viviano, in his book The Kingdom of God in History, traces four separate streams of thought on the Kingdom, represented by four different ancient theologians:
According to Irenaeus, the Kingdom of God is a yet-future apocalyptic reality that will be manifested in some sort of material, this-worldly way by God himself. It’s interesting to note that in Eusebius’ church history Irenaeus (and Papias before him) are chided for the “erroneous” doctrine that the millennium would be a literal 1000 year period of Christ’s literal reign on the literal earth.
According to Eusebius, the Kingdom of God is identical with the reign of Constantine over the newly Christianized Roman Empire. In a broader sense this stream of thought equates the Kingdom with this or that political project. Europe’s political history is rife with examples of this (note, e.g., that the German word Kaiser and Russian word Tsar are forms of Caesar, conjuring images of post-Constantinian Rome).
According to many within the Roman Church (following, in an attenuated way at least, Augustine), the Kingdom just is the church. Everything about the rule and reign of God is already manifest in the ministry of the church.
According to Origen, the Kingdom of God is identical with the rule and reign of God in the hearts of believers. For Origen, this was a mystical inner union with God. In the European academy in the 19th century, Jesus’ proclamation of the Kingdom was understood to be merely the proclamation of a new ethic of love and peace.
As a matter of historical theology (and just plain history) all of this is fairly interesting. For the believer, though, the most important question to ask is what Jesus actually taught and believed about the Kingdom of God, given that this theme is the most conspicuous aspect of his teaching ministry.
To simplify research on the Kingdom in recent theology, I’ll simply note the paradigm shift in thinking that occurred at the end of the 19th century in Germany. Liberal theologians of the old style, like Albrecht Ritschl and Adolf von Harnack, taught that Jesus’ preaching on the Kingdom was merely ethical in orientation. Like Origen all those years before, and Immanuel Kant in more recent times, they saw the Kingdom manifest in the Christian’s inner transformation lived out within the Christian community. In that way, the “Gospel” of this “Kingdom” would reshape the world in a more ethical and humane community of brotherly love. All of this changed with the work of Johannes Weiss (who was, ironically, Ritschl’s son-in-law). In 1892 he published a little work called Jesus’ Proclamation of the Kingdom of God in which he argued that Jesus saw the Kingdom as an imminent though not yet present apocalyptic reality that would be brought to earth by no one but God himself (in keeping with Jewish apocalyptic thinking). As far as Jesus was concerned, “this age” was about to be brought to nothing; the “coming age” would shake the very foundations of the earth. This was confirmed by Albert Schweitzer’s magisterial (though ultimately flawed) survey of 19th century “lives of Jesus” literature, The Quest of the Historical Jesus. The old liberal consensus had been turned on its head; the remaining question was what to do about it.
I figure that that’s enough table setting. What caused this shift in perspective? We can start, I suppose at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry. Having been baptized and tempted in the wilderness, Jesus emerged on the scene, proclaiming the “gospel of God” and saying: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the Gospel” (Mk 1:15). The key word here is “at hand,” ēngiken. The old liberals thought that this word meant that Jesus was claiming that the Kingdom was already present (an understanding argued for by C.H. Dodd in the 20th century). Weiss argued, correctly in my view, that this couldn’t be what Jesus was saying. For one, the force of the verb most certainly denotes nearness, not full presence. Restricting ourselves to the usage of engizō in the Synoptics, we see that thrice in Matthew Jesus says that the Kingdom is “at hand” (3:2; 4:17; 10:7). The season for fruit “drew near” (Matt 21:34). As Judas and the band of officials were approaching to arrest him, Jesus told his disciples that “the hour is at hand” for the Son of Man to be betrayed (Matt 26:45), and that his betrayer was “at hand” (26:46). Jesus “drew near” to a city gate (Lk 7:12). The verb is used in a transitive sense in Lk 10:9, that the Kingdom of God had “come near” to the town that accepted the gospel and the healing that came with it. Yet the Kingdom is certainly not fully present in or identical with that healing; it would be strange to see the Kingdom of God as having come in all its power and fullness in a town that had reject Jesus’ Kingdom emissaries and was left yet standing. Luke 10:10-12 is best read as a threat of yet-future judgment. So we see that in many instances engizō denotes the physical or temporal nearness, even the imminence of something, but not full presence. And so it is with the Kingdom of God in the preaching of Jesus. The Kingdom has drawn near, but there is still time to repent. The simplest argument for the apocalyptic nature of Jesus’ Kingdom concept, though, comes from the Lord’s prayer. Jesus taught his disciples to pray to their Father: “your Kingdom come” (Matt 6:10a). What else could this mean but that the Kingdom wasn’t present yet?
It seems certain to me, on the basis of all this, that Jesus saw the Kingdom as something not yet present, though in some sense imminent or approaching. But what did Jesus think the Kingdom was? What would it do? To this end, Jesus’ explanation of the Parable of the Weeds in Matthew 13 is illustrative. At the “end of the age” a great harvest would pluck all the sons of the evil one out of the Son of Man’s kingdom and throw them into the fiery furnace, and “the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father” (v. 43). All law-breakers would be purged, and all causes of sin done away with (v. 41). This is nothing less than the judgment on the nations. Daniel is instructive here. Nebuchadnezzar’s dream saw a stone representing God’s rule and reign destroying a grand statue representing Babylon and the kingdoms of this world (Dan 2). One day the eschatological Son of Man would receive this Kingdom from the Ancient of Days (Dan 7). I’ll also note that in the Ancient Near East (including Israel) the exercise of justice and righteousness was seen as the purview of the king. Isaiah looked forward to a day when the Lord would execute perfect justice and righteousness through the shoot of the stump of Jesse, a new Davidic King (11:1-10). It seems obvious to me that Jesus was self-consciously appropriating this Old Testament background in his own proclamation of the nearness of the Kingdom of God. Only this time, the evidence of God’s rule and reign was nearer than ever in his own person and ministry; the Lord had come to visit his people, to proclaim both judgment and salvation. The Kingdom was near, very near. What would the people do?
I apologize for the length of this essay, but some thorny issues remain. If all of this is so obvious, then why didn’t scholars pick up on it? Much of this has to do with (now-outdated, in my opinion) methods for distinguishing between authentic and fabricated sayings of the Jesus of history. Weiss thought that the interpretation and framing of Jesus’ Kingdom Parables presented by Matthew the Evangelist were tendentious, not reflecting Jesus’ historical setting but rather the theological convictions of the early church. In Weiss and Schweitzer’s own reconstructions of Jesus’ ministry and early Christianity, Jesus believed that the Kingdom of God would come in his lifetime, that is, that history would end and the new age would be ushered in in its entirety before the very eyes of his disciples. Obviously, history did not end in Jesus’ lifetime. So the Gospel writers, writing decades later, tried to frame Jesus’ teaching about God’s Kingdom in such a way as to avoid this embarrassment. So in the very interpretation of the Parable of the Weeds I cited earlier, Jesus seems to hint in Matt 13:41 that the Kingdom was already present when the judgment started! But this contradicts so much of Jesus’ other teachings on the Kingdom. What do we make of this?
This, I think, is where this material starts to preach. I noted earlier that “to come near” is used to denote both spatial and temporal nearness. Weiss and Schweitzer read the nearness of God’s Kingdom as temporal, that is, that Jesus believed in the Kingdom’s imminent arrival in a matter of years. I don’t think this is necessarily the case. Perhaps what Jesus really meant was that the Kingdom had come near spatially, that heaven and earth were closer then than they ever had been before. The Kingdom is imminent in that it can break in at any time. Jesus demonstrated this in his authority over the demons and “the ruler of this age.” But did Jesus really think that coming age would break in its fulness in his (earthly) lifetime? A good amount of evidence weighs against this. For one, Jesus seemed to believe that he would leave behind him lasting communities. We see this, for instance, in his teaching on the church in Matthew 18, material which I see no reason to dismiss as inauthentic. Ultimately, most “scholarly” decisions about the authenticity of this or that Gospel saying or pericope are based on little more than conjecture. Weiss maintained his thesis that Jesus’ ministry was thoroughly and entirely apocalyptic by 1) dismissing other material as later redactive activity and 2) attributing Jesus’ “over-realizations” of the Kingdom at times to an excess of prophetic excitement. This sort of psychologizing of Jesus I don’t particularly care for.
I’ll sum all this up. The Kingdom of God is the yet-future promise of the full rule and reign of God manifest on earth through the perfect execution of justice and righteousness through Jesus, the promised Davidic King. And yet, evidence of this can be seen already through the ministry and healing of Jesus and in his work through the church. The church and the Kingdom are note identical, though, as Dr. Smith would say, the church is the only human community with a future. It’s also not the case then that the Kingdom can be brought to earth by any human effort; it is God who brings the Kingdom, we merely pray for its coming. So the Kingdom is not identical with any human political project or empire. It is also not the case that the Kingdom is identical with the restoration of the human heart promised in the gospel (though it is only restored humans who will be able to enter the Kingdom, those who have been “born again” you might say). This (admittedly uneasy) synthesis of the already and the not-yet that has become so popular in evangelical theology was won through years of scholars asking and answering hard questions about the Kingdom. And there’s certainly more I could have touched on: Bultmann’s demythologization of New Testament eschatology, recent advancements in historical Jesus studies, the relationship between the gospel and the Kingdom (which is noted but not really explained at length in the Synoptics or John). But I suppose everything I’ve written here is a start.
Hope this helps,
Evan