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 Teachings of Jesus 
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THE TEACHINGS OF JESUS 
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 THE TEACHING OF JESUS 
 
 CONCERNING 
 
 THE KINGDOM OF GOD AND 
 
 THE CHURCH 
 
 Geerhardus Vos. ph. d., d. d. 
 
THE 'teachings OF JESUS 
 
 CONCERNING 
 
 HIS OWN MISSION. Frank H. Foster. Ready. 
 
 THE KINGDOM OF GOD AND THE CHURCH. 
 
 Geerhardus Vos. Ready. 
 
 HIS OWN PERSON In preparation. 
 
 GOD THE FATHER 
 
 THE SCRIPTURES 
 
 CHRISTIAN CONDUCT " 
 
 THE HOLY SPIRIT 
 
 THE FUTURE LIFE 
 
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 THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 
 
 A Series of volumes on the " Teachings of Jesus " 
 by eminent writers and divines. 
 
 Cloth bound. I2m6. Price 75 cts each postpaid. 
 
 AMERICAN TRACT SOCIETY. 
 

 THE TEACHING OF JESUS 
 
 CONCERNING 
 
 THE KINGDOM OF GOD 
 AND THE CHURCH 
 
 Geerhardus Vos, Ph. D., D. D. 
 
 AMERICAN TRACT SOCIETY 
 
 150 NASSAU STREET 
 NEW YORK 
 
Copyright, igo^, by 
 AMERICAN TRACT SOCIETY 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. Introductory i 
 
 II. The Kingdom and the Old 
 
 Testament ii 
 
 III. Kingdom and Kingship. The 
 
 Kingdom of God and the 
 Kingdom of Heaven. ... 25 
 
 IV. The Present and the Future 
 
 Kingdom 38 
 
 V. Current Misconceptions Re- 
 garding THE Present and Fu- 
 ture Kingdoms 66 
 
 VI. The Essence of the Kingdom : 
 The Kingdom as the Suprem- 
 acy of God in the Sphere of 
 
 Saving Power 80 
 
 VII. The Essence of the Kingdom 
 continued : The Kingdom in 
 THE Sphere of Righteousness. 103 
 
 V 
 
vi Contents 
 
 PAGE 
 
 VIII. The Essence of the Kingdom 
 CONTINUED : The Kingdom as 
 A State of Blessedness. . . 125 
 IX. The Kingdom and the Church. 140 
 X. The Entrance into the King- 
 dom : Repentance and Faith, 169 
 
 XI. Recapitulation 191 
 
 Indices 195 
 
CHAPTER I 
 
 Introductory 
 
 /N the body of our Lord's teaching 
 as recorded in the Gospels the ref- 
 erences to the kingdom of God oc- 
 cupy a prominent place. According to 
 the common testimony of the Synoptical 
 Gospels Jesus opened his public ministry 
 in Galilee with the announcement, that 
 the kingdom was at hand, Matt. iv. 17 ; 
 Mk. i. 15 ; Lk. iv. 43. In the last men- 
 tioned passage he even declares that the 
 main purpose of his mission consists in 
 the preaching of the good tidings of the 
 kingdom of God. And not only does 
 
2 The Kingdom and the Church 
 
 the conception thus stand significantly at 
 the beginning of our Lord's work, it 
 reappears at the culminating points of 
 his teaching, as in the beatitudes of the 
 Sermon on the Mount and in the king- 
 dom-parables. Its importance will best 
 be felt by considering that the coming 
 of the kingdom is the great event which 
 Jesus connects with his appearance and 
 activity, and that consequently in his 
 teaching, which was so closely dependent 
 on his working, this event must also have 
 a corresponding prominence. 
 
 If this be true from Jesus' own stand- 
 point, it is no less true from the stand- 
 point of his disciples. In their life 
 likewise the kingdom of God forms the 
 supreme object of pursuit, and there- 
 fore of necessity the theme about which 
 before all other things they need care- 
 ful instruction. Again, the work of 
 those whom Jesus trained as his special 
 helpers in preaching related chiefly to 
 this same subject, for he speaks of 
 
Introductory 3 
 
 them as scribes made disciples to the 
 kingdom of heaven, Matt. xiii. 52. 
 Better than by mere statistics showing 
 the explicit references to the kingdom in 
 our Lord's discourses can we along the 
 above lines be led to appreciate how large 
 a place the subject of our investigation 
 must have had in his thought. 
 
 It might be objected to all this, 
 that in the version which the Fourth 
 Gospel gives of Jesus' teaching, the 
 idea of the kingdom plays a very 
 subordinate role, indeed occurs only 
 twice altogether, viz., Jno. iii. 3, 5 ; 
 xviii. 36. But this is a feature explain- 
 able from the peculiarity of John's Gos- 
 pel in general. Here the person of 
 Jesus as the Son of God stands in the 
 foreground, and the whole compass of 
 his work is represented as given in and 
 resulting from his person. Salvation 
 according to the discourses preserved 
 in this Gospel is made up of those 
 primal elements into which the being of 
 
4 The Kingdom and the Church 
 
 Christ can be resolved, such as light, 
 life, grace, truth. What the Saviour does 
 is the outcome of what he is. In the 
 Synoptists on the other hand the work 
 of Jesus is made central and all-important, 
 and especially during the earlier stages 
 of his ministry his person and personal 
 relation to this work are only so much 
 referred to as the circumstances of the 
 discourse make absolutely necessary. 
 
 After all, however, this amounts only 
 to a different mode of viewing the same 
 things : there is no contradiction involved 
 as to their inner essence. In a significant 
 saying uttered even before the beginning 
 of his great Galilean ministry our Lord 
 himself has affirmed the identity of the 
 kingdom with at least one of the concep- 
 tions that dominate his teaching accord- 
 ing to John, viz., that of life. To Nicode- 
 mus he speaks of the mysterious birth of 
 water and the Spirit as the only entrance 
 into the kingdom of God. Now, inas- 
 much as birth is that process by which 
 
Inti'oditctory 5 
 
 one enters into life, and since in the im- 
 mediately following context life is silently 
 substituted for the kingdom, it is plain 
 that these two are practically equivalent, 
 just as the sphere of truth and the king- 
 dom are equivalent in the other passage, 
 xviii. 36. With this accords the fact 
 that in the Synoptical teaching the re- 
 verse may occasionally be observed, viz., 
 that life is used interchangeably with 
 the kingdom, cf. Mk. x. 17, with vs. 
 23. 
 
 While thus recognizing that the king- 
 dom of God has an importance in our 
 Lord's teaching second to that of no other 
 subject, we should not go to the extreme 
 into which some writers have fallen, of 
 finding in it the only theme on which 
 Jesus actually taught, which would imply 
 that all other topics dealt with in his dis- 
 courses were to his mind but so many 
 corollaries or subdivisions of this one great 
 truth. The modern attempts to make 
 the kingdom of God the organizing cen- 
 
6 The Kingdom and the Church 
 
 ter of a theological system have here 
 exerted a misleading influence upon the 
 interpretation of Jesus' teaching. From 
 the fact that the proximate object of his 
 saving work was the realization of the 
 kingdom, the wrong inference has been 
 drawn, that this must have been also the 
 highest category under which he viewed 
 the truth. It is plain that the one does 
 not follow from the other. Salvation 
 with all it contains flows from the nature 
 and subserves the glory of God, and we 
 can clearly perceive that Jesus was ac- 
 customed consciously to refer it to this 
 divine source and to subordinate it to this 
 God-centered purpose, cf. Jno. xvii. 4. 
 He usually spoke not of ** the kingdom " 
 absolutely, but of *' the kingdom of God " 
 and ** the kingdom of heaven,"and these 
 names themselves indicate that the place 
 ^\ of God in the order of things which they 
 ^ describe is the all-important thing to his 
 mind. 
 
 It is only with great artificiality that 
 
Introductory 7 
 
 the various component elements of our 
 Lord's teaching can be subsumed under 
 the one head of the kingdom. If any 
 deduction and systematizing are to be at- 
 tempted, logic and the indications which 
 we have of our Lord 's habit of thought 
 on this point alike require, that not his 
 teaching on the kingdom but that on 
 God shall be given the highest place. 
 The relation observable in the discourses 
 of the Fourth Gospel between the per- 
 son of Christ and salvation, is also 
 the relation which we may conceive 
 to exist between God and the kingdom. 
 Because God is what he is, the kingdom 
 bears the character and embodies the 
 principles which as a matter of fact belong 
 to it. Even so, however, we should avoid 
 the modern mistake of endeavoring to 
 derive the idea of the kingdom from the 
 conception of the divine fatherhood alone. 
 This derivation expresses an important 
 truth recognized by Jesus himself, when 
 he calls the kingdom a fatherly gift to the 
 
8 The Kingdom and tJie Church 
 
 disciples, Lk. xii. 32. But it represents 
 only one side of the truth, for in the king- 
 dom other attributes of God besides his 
 fatherhood find expression. The doc- 
 trine of God in its entire fulness alone 
 is capable of furnishing that broader basis 
 on which the structure of his teaching 
 on the kingdom can be built in agree- 
 ment with Jesus' own mind. 
 
 On the other hand, it cannot be denied 
 that in many respects the idea of the 
 ^, , , kingdom acted in our Lord's thought and 
 \ r*^ 'Teaching as a crystallizing point around 
 which several other elements of truth nat- 
 ' urally gathered and grouped themselves 
 in harmonious combination. That the 
 idea of the church, where it emerges in 
 his teaching, is a direct outgrowth of the 
 development of his doctrine of the king- 
 dom, will appear in the sequel. But not 
 only this, also the consummation of the 
 world and the final state of glory were 
 evidently viewed by him in no other 
 light than as the crowning fulfilment of 
 
Introductory 9 
 
 the kingdom-idea. Still further what 
 he taught about righteousness was most 
 closely interlinked in his mind with the 
 truth about the nature of the kingdom. 
 The same may safely be affirmed with 
 reference to the love and grace of God. 
 The great categories of subjective reli- 
 gion, faith and repentance and regenera- 
 tion, obviously had their place in his 
 thought as answering to certain aspects 
 of the kingdom. Even a subject appar- 
 ently so remote from the kingdom-idea, 
 in our usual understanding of it, as that 
 of miracles in reality derived for Jesus 
 from the latter the larger part of its 
 meaning. Finally, the kingdom stood in 
 our Lord's mind for a very definite con- 
 ception concerning the historical relation 
 of his own work and the new order of 
 things introduced by it to the Old Testa- 
 ment. All this can here be stated in 
 general only ; our task in the sequel will 
 be to work it out in detail. But what 
 has been said is sufficient to show that 
 
lo The Kingdom and the Church 
 
 there is scarcely an important subject in 
 the rich repertoire of our Lord's teaching 
 with which our study of his disclosures 
 concerning the kingdom of God will not 
 bring us into contact. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 The Kingdom and the Old Testa- 
 ment 
 
 ^ W HE first thing to be noticed in 
 I Jesus' utterances on our theme is 
 that they clearly presuppose a con- 
 sciousness on his part of standing with 
 his work on the basis of the revelation 
 of God in the Old Testament. Our 
 Lord occupies historic ground from the 
 outset. From first to last he refers to 
 **the kingdom of God " as a fixed con- 
 ception with which he takes for granted, 
 his hearers are familiar. In affirming 
 that it is **at hand" he moreover as- 
 cribes to it the character of something 
 
 II 
 
12 The Kingdom and the Church 
 
 forming part of that world of prophecy, 
 which moves onward through the ages 
 to its divinely appointed goal of fulfil- 
 ment. It were utterly out of harmony 
 with this fundamental principle of our 
 Lord's kingdom-gospel to represent him 
 as the founder of a new religion. His 
 work was the realization of what in 
 the ideal form of prophecy had been 
 known and expected ages before. We 
 simply here observe at a peculiarly vital 
 point what underlies as a broad uniform 
 basis his official consciousness every- 
 where. No array of explicit statements 
 in which he acknowledges his accept- 
 ance of the Old Testament Scriptures as 
 the word of God can equal in force this 
 implied subordination of himself and of 
 his work to the one great scheme of 
 which the ancient revelation given to 
 Israel formed the preparatory stage. 
 Indeed in appropriating for himself the 
 function of bringing the kingdom, in 
 laying claim to the Messianic dignity. 
 
The Old Testament 13 
 
 Jesus seized upon that in the Old Testa- 
 ment which enabled him at one stroke 
 to make its whole historic movement 
 converge upon and terminate in himself. 
 There is in this a unique combination of 
 the most subHme self-consciousness and 
 the most humble submission to the rev- 
 elation of God in former ages. Jesus 
 knew himself as at once the goal of his- 
 tory and the servant of history. 
 
 The Old Testament knows of a king- 
 dom of God as already existing at that 
 time. Apart from the universal reign 
 exercised by God as Creator of all things, 
 Jehovah has his special kingdom in Israel. 
 The classical passage relating to the latter 
 is Exodus xix. 4-6, from which it appears, 
 that the making of the covenant at Sinai 
 established this relationship. In virtue 
 of it, Jehovah, besides being Israel's God, 
 also acted as Israel's national King. By 
 direct revelation he gave them laws and 
 by his subsequent guidance of their his- 
 tory he made his rule a living reality. 
 
14 The Kingdom and the Church 
 
 Even later, when human kings arose, 
 these had no other rights from the point 
 of view of the legitimate religion than 
 those of the vicegerents of Jehovah. The 
 meaning of this order of things was that 
 in Israel's life all other interests, both 
 public and private, were subordinated to 
 and made a part of religion. Whilst else- 
 where religion was a function of the 
 state, here the state became a function of 
 religion. In itself this idea of a kingship 
 exercised by the deity over the entire 
 range of life was not confined to the 
 sphere of special revelation. Melekhy 
 king, was a common name for the god- 
 head among the Semitic tribes, so that to 
 some extent, the principle of what we 
 call ** the theocracy "was known to them. 
 But the relation which they imagined to 
 exist between themselves and their gods 
 was in Israel alone a matter of actual 
 experience. A most vivid consciousness 
 of this fact pervades the entire Old Tes- 
 tament. 
 
The Old Testament 15 
 
 In view of this it creates some surprised 
 at first sight, that Jesus never speaks of 
 the kingdom of God as previously exist- 
 ing. To him the kingdom is through- 
 out something new, now first to be real- 
 ized. Even of John the Baptist he speaks 
 as not being in the kingdom, because his 
 whole manner of work identified him 
 with the preceding dispensation. The 
 law and the prophets are until John : 
 from that time the gospel of the king- 
 dom of God is preached, Lk. xvi. 16 ; 
 Matt. xi. 13. There are only two pas- 
 sages in which the old theocratic order 
 of things might seem to be referred to 
 under the name of the kingdom. In 
 Matt. viii. 12, Jesus calls the Jews ** the 
 sons of the kingdom." But this is prob- 
 ably meant in the sense, that in virtue of 
 the promises they are heirs of the king- 
 dom, not in the sense of their having had 
 the kingdom in actual possession before 
 the coming of Christ. On the same prin- 
 ciple we must probably interpret Matt. 
 
1 6 The Kingdom and the Church 
 
 xxi. 43, where Jesus predicts that the 
 kingdom of God shall be taken away 
 from the Jews and given to a nation 
 bringing forth the fruits thereof, the king- 
 dom being used for the title to the 
 kingdom. Or, if the literal meaning of 
 the words be pressed, it should be remem- 
 bered, that our Lord spoke them during 
 the later stage of his ministry, at a time 
 when through his labors the kingdom of 
 God in its new and highest sense had been 
 Lat least incipiently realized. 
 
 The only indirect recognition of God's 
 kingship under the Old Testament is 
 found in Matt. v. 35, where Jerusalem 
 Js called "the city of the great King." 
 ' When the question is put, how must 
 we explain this restriction of the term 
 by Jesus to the new order of things, 
 the answer cannot of course be sought 
 in any lack of appreciation on his part 
 of the reasons which underlie the op- 
 posite usage prevailing in the Old Tes- 
 tament. Nor can the reason have lain 
 
The Old Testament 17 
 
 in a desire to accommodate himself to the 
 contemporary Jewish conception, for, 
 although the Jews at that time ex- 
 pected the kingdom from the future, 
 they also knew it in another sense as 
 already present with them through the 
 reign of God in the law. The true 
 explanation is undoubtedly to be found 
 in the absolute, ideal character our Lord 
 ascribed to the order of things associated 
 with the name of the kingdom. To his 
 mind it involved such altogether new 
 forces and such unparalleled blessings, that 
 all relative and provisional forms pre- 
 viously assumed by the work of God on 
 earth seemed by comparison unworthy 
 of the name. Thus, while he would not 
 have denied that the Old Testament 
 institutions represented a real kingdom 
 of God, the high sense with which he 
 had invested the term made it unnatural 
 for him to apply it to these. ^ 
 
 And after all the Old Testament itsel?! 
 had pointed the way to this restricted 
 
1 8 The Kingdom and the Church 
 
 usage followed by our Lord. Side by 
 side with the kingdom that is we meet 
 in the Old Testament a kingdom yet to 
 come. This is due to three causes. In 
 the first place, among the Semitic tribes 
 the kingship very often originated by 
 some powerful personality performing 
 great acts of deliverance and obtaining in 
 result of this a position of preeminence, as 
 we see it happen in the case of Saul. Thus, 
 though Jehovah was King, he never- 
 theless could perform acts in the future, 
 work deliverances for his people, such 
 as would render him King in a new sense, 
 cf. Is. xxiv. 21 ; xliii. 15 ; Hi. 7 ; Mic. ii. 
 12 ; iv. 6 ; Obad. 21 ; Ps. xcvii. 1 ; xcix. 
 1. Secondly, the suspension of the visi- 
 bly exercised rule of Jehovah during the 
 exile naturally led to the representation, 
 that he would in the future become King 
 by resuming his reign. It is especially 
 in the Book of Daniel that the idea of the 
 future kingdom of Jehovah is developed 
 in contrast with the world-monarchies 
 
The Old Testament 19 
 
 through which his kingdom appeared in 
 abeyance for the present. Thirdly, the 
 rise of Messianic prophecy had the natural 
 result of projecting the true kingdom of 
 God into the future. If not the present 
 king was the ideal representative of 
 Jehovah, but the future ruler as the 
 prophets depict him, then, as a correlate 
 of this, the thought would suggest itself 
 that with this new ideal instrument the 
 rule of God in its full ideal sense will first 
 be realized. The expectation of the 
 kingdom of God became equivalent to - 
 the Messianic hope of Israel. Now, inas- / 
 much as our Lord knew himself to be 
 the promised Messiah and knew that the 
 Messianic King had had his typical pred- 
 ecessors under the Old Testament, we 
 can indirectly show that the conception 
 of the theocracy as a typical kingdom ofj 
 God cannot have been unfamiliar to him. 
 In the Gospels both the thing and the 
 name of the kingdom appear familiar 
 to the people among whom Jesus taught. 
 
20 The Kingdom and the Church 
 
 cf. Matt. iii. 2 ; Mk. xv. 43 ; Lk. xiv. 
 15 ; xvii. 20. It would be rash, however, 
 to infer from this, that Jesus simply 
 accommodated himiself in his mode of 
 speech about the kingdom to the pre- 
 vailing usage of his time. The way in 
 which he handled the conception in gen- 
 eral not only, but the very prominence 
 to which he raised it, bore the marks 
 of great originality and were productive 
 of the most momentous changes from a 
 religious point of view. This can be 
 best apprehended if we place our Lord's 
 usage by the side of that found in the 
 contemporary Jewish literature. Here, 
 as in the Old Testament, besides the divine 
 kingship over the world both the present 
 reign of Jehovah over Israel and his fu- 
 ture kingdom are referred to. In these 
 references we notice two peculiarities. 
 The first is that the kingdom itself is 
 not strictly speaking represented as fu- 
 ture, but only the enforcement or man- 
 ifestation of the kingdom. God's rule 
 
The Old Testament 2i 
 
 is ever existing, only at present it is not 
 recognized. In the future the world 
 will be made to submit to it, thus the 
 kingdom is manifested. This peculiarity 
 is the result of the one-sided manner in 
 which the relation of God to his people 
 and the world appeared to be bound up 
 in the law. Hence the Jewish phrase, 
 ** to take up the yoke of the kingdom of 
 heaven," meaning to vow obedience to the 
 law. The second peculiarity consists in 
 the rareness with which even in this qual- 
 ified sense the Jewish sources speak of 
 God's kingdom as a future thing. In 
 comparatively few cases, where the new 
 order of things expected in the Messianic 
 age is referred to, does the name king- 
 dom of God appear in connection with it. 
 This cannot be accidental. Probably the 
 reason is as follows : the conception 
 which the average Jewish mind had 
 framed of the new order of things and 
 the interest which in its view attached to 
 it, were not sufficiently God-centered to 
 
22 The Kingdom and the Church 
 
 favor the use of the phrase *' kingdom of 
 God." The emphasis was placed largely 
 on what the expected state would bring 
 for Israel in a national and temporal sense. 
 Hence it was preferably thought of as 
 the kingdom of Israel over the other 
 nations. Or the place of the kingdom- 
 idea was taken by different conceptions, 
 such as that of '* the coming age," which 
 were indefinite enough to leave room for 
 the cherishing of the same self-centered 
 hope. 
 
 Now it is from a comparison with these 
 two peculiarities that our Lord's prefer- 
 ence for the name "' kingdom of God" re- 
 ceives its proper light. While to the mind 
 of Judaism the divine rule is equivalent to 
 the sovereignty of the law, Jesus, though 
 not excluding this, knew of a much 
 larger sphere in which God would 
 through saving acts exercise his glorious 
 prerogatives of kingship on a scale and 
 in a manner unknown before. In his 
 teaching the kingdom once more be- 
 
TJic Old Testament 23 
 
 comes a kingdom of grace as well as of 
 law, and thus the balance so beautifully 
 preserved in the Old Testament is re- 
 stored. 
 
 The consequence of this was, of course, 
 that great emphasis had to be thrown 
 upon the newness of the kingdom, upon 
 the fact of its being and bringing some- 
 thing more than the reign of law in which 
 the Jews found their ideal. Thus the 
 Lord's method of not calling even the Old 
 Testament legal organization the king- 
 dom may have been partly due to a revolt 
 in his mind from the Jewish perversion of 
 the same. Further, by making the idea 
 as prominent as he did in his teaching and 
 at the same time speaking of it exclusively 
 as the kingdom of God, our Lord pro- 
 tested against the popular misconception of 
 it as a national kingdom intended to bring 
 Israel supremacy and glory. Finally, 
 through the enlargement which the idea 
 of God's reign had undergone, so that it 
 stood for a reign of saving grace as well 
 
24 The Kingdom and the Church 
 
 as of law, it became possible for our Lord 
 to subsume under the notion of the king- 
 dom the entire complex of blessing and 
 glory which the coming order of things 
 would involve for the people of God, 
 and yet to keep before men's minds the 
 thought that this new world of enjoy- 
 ment was to be enjoyed as a world of 
 God. Thus by bringing the name of 
 ** God's kingdom" and the whole content 
 of the Messianic hopes of Israel together, 
 he imparted to the latter the highest ideal 
 character, a supreme religious consecra- 
 ftion. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 Kingdom and Kingship. The 
 Kingdom of God and the King- 
 dom of Heaven 
 
 ^ J 'he Greek word Basileia used in 
 / the Gospels for *' kingdom " and 
 the corresponding Hebrew and 
 Aramaic words, suchasAf^/^z//^and Mem- 
 lakhah, can, like many words in the Eng- 
 lish language, designate the same concep- 
 tion from two distinct points of view. 
 They may stand for the kingdom as some- 
 thing abstract, the kingship or rule exer- 
 cised by the king. Or they may describe 
 the kingdom as something concrete, the 
 territory, the sum total of the subjects and 
 
 25 
 
26 The Kingdom and the Church 
 
 possessions ruled over, including what- 
 ever of rights, privileges and advantages 
 are enjoyed in this sphere. Now the 
 question arises, in which sense did our 
 Lord mean the phrase when he spoke of 
 the "kingdom of God." In the Old 
 Testament where a kingdom is ascribed 
 either to Jehovah or to some human 
 power, the abstract sense is usually the 
 one intended, although in some of the 
 latest writings of the Old Testament ex- 
 amples of the concrete usage occur, with 
 reference always, however, to human 
 kingdoms. God's kingdom is here al- 
 ways his reign, his rule, never his do- 
 main. When Obadiah predicts '' the 
 kingdom shall be the Lord's," his mean- 
 ing is that in the future to Jehovah will 
 belong the supremacy. That such was 
 also the common Jewish usage in our 
 Lord's time appears from the manner in 
 which the supremacy of Israel over the 
 nations is associated with the idea of the 
 kingdom. 
 
Kingdom and Kingship 27 
 
 We have already seen that the 
 relative absence of the phrase ** the 
 kingdom of God" from the Jewish 
 sources points to the same conclusion, 
 for it was a lack of interest in the truth 
 that Jehovah would be supreme that 
 prevented this phrase from becoming 
 popular. On the other hand, to Jesus 
 the thought that God would rule was a 
 glorious thought which filled his soul 
 with the most sacred joy. In so far it 
 is undoubtedly correct when modern 
 writers insist that in interpreting our 
 Lord's sayings the meaning "reign," 
 ** kingship," shall be our point of depart- 
 ure, and warn against the misleading as- 
 sociations of the English word *' king- 
 dom," which in modern usage practically 
 always means the territory or realm. Still 
 it is advisable to proceed slowly here. 
 Attention has already been called to the 
 significant enlargement which Jesus in- 
 troduced into the current use of the 
 phrase. If to him it covered all the priv- 
 
 y 
 
28 The Kingdom a7id the Church 
 
 ileges and blessings which flow from the 
 coming reign of God, then it is plain how 
 inevitably it would tend in his mouth 
 to become a concrete designation. From 
 meaning at first ** a rule " it would begin 
 to mean, if not a territory or body of 
 subjects, at least a realm, a sphere of life, 
 a state of things, all of these more or less 
 locally conceived. To be sure, even 
 so the connotation would always remain, 
 that the kingdom thus understood is pos- 
 sessed and therefore pervaded by God, 
 but after all the rendering ** reign of 
 God " would no longer apply. In point 
 of fact a single glance at the Gospel-dis- 
 courses shows how utterly impossible it 
 is to carry through the abstract rendering 
 in each single instance where our Lord 
 speaks of the kingdom of God. 
 
 Briefly stated the matter stands as fol- 
 lows : In a few instances the translation 
 *' reign " is required by the connection, as 
 when it is said *' the Son of man shall come 
 in his kingdom." In some other cases, 
 
Kingdom and Kingship 29 
 
 less rare than the foregoing, it is possible, 
 perhaps slightly more plausible, to adopt 
 the abstract rendering, as when we read 
 of the kingdom ** coming," ** appear- 
 ing," *' being at hand," *' being seen," al- 
 though in these and other instances no 
 one can maintain that the substitution of 
 the concrete would make the sense un- 
 natural. While neither meaning is un- 
 suitable, one may in such cases for general 
 reasons be inclined to believe, that the 
 thought of a revelation of God's royal 
 power lay uppermost in our Lord's mind. 
 Then there are a great number, perhaps 
 the majority, of passages in which the 
 note of the concrete plainly predominates. 
 When the figure is that of ** calling" to 
 the kingdom of God, of ** entering " into 
 it, of its being '* shut " or of people being 
 ** cast out " from it, of its being '' sought," 
 *' given," '* possessed," ** received," ** in- 
 herited," everybody feels, that in such 
 modes of speech not the exercise of the 
 divine rule itself, but the resulting order 
 
30 TJie Kingdom and the Church 
 
 of things, the complex of blessings pro- 
 duced by it, the sphere in which it works, 
 stand before the speaker's mind. Taking 
 this into consideration we may say that, 
 if hasileia is everywhere to be rendered 
 by the same word, that word ought to 
 be ** kingdom." To introduce a distinc- 
 tion and translate in some cases *' reign," 
 in other cases *' kingdom," is obviously 
 impracticable, because, as above stated, 
 in a number of cases we have no data for 
 choosing between the two. 
 
 Even less satisfactory is the recent pro- 
 posal to translate everywhere ** the sover- 
 eignty of God," for not only is this 
 unsuitable for all sayings in which the con- 
 crete usage of the term is undoubtedly fol- 
 lowed, it also fails to express with fulness 
 and accuracy the abstract sense where 
 this may be recognized. Sovereignty 
 denotes a relation existing by right, even 
 where it is not actually enforced. In the 
 case of God, therefore, it can be scarcely 
 said to come. The divine hasileia in- 
 
Kingdom and Kingship 31 
 
 eludes, as we have seen, besides a right 
 to rule, the actual energetic forth-putting 
 of God's royal power in acts of salvation. 
 Besides '*the kingdom of God" we 
 find *'the kingdom of heaven." The 
 Evangelist Matthew uses this well-nigh 
 exclusively ; only in vi. 33 ; xii. 28 ; 
 xiii. 43 ; xxi. 31, 43 ; xxvi. 29, does he 
 write ** the kingdom of God " or ** the 
 kingdom of my" or *' their Father," 
 whereas '* the kingdom of heaven " oc- 
 curs more than thirty times in his Gos- 
 pel. In Chap. xii. 28 the use of 
 ** God " instead of *' heaven " is explained 
 by the preceding '* Spirit of God ;" in the 
 two other instances in Chap, xxi, no 
 reason for the substitution is apparent. 
 In Mark and Luke ** the kingdom of 
 heaven " is not found. This raises the 
 question, which of these two versions 
 more literally reproduces the usage of 
 Jesus himself. In all probability Mat- 
 thew's does, since no good reason can be y 
 assigned, why he should have substituted 
 
32 TJie Kingdom and the Church 
 
 **the kingdom of heaven," whilst a suf- 
 ficiently plausible reason for the opposite 
 procedure on the part of Mark and Luke 
 can be found, in the fact, that, writing 
 for Gentile readers, they might think 
 such a typically Jewish phrase, as " the 
 kingdom of heaven " less intelligible than 
 the plain " kingdom of God. " Of course, 
 in holding this, we need not imply that 
 in each individual case, where the first 
 Evangelist has '' kingdom of heaven," this 
 phrase was actually employed by Jesus. 
 All we mean to afiirm is the general prop- 
 osition that Jesus used both phrases, and 
 that in so far Matthew has preserved for 
 us an item of information no longer ob- 
 tainable from the other two Synoptical 
 Gospels. 
 
 But what were the origin and mean- 
 ing of this phrase "the kingdom of 
 heaven," and what light does it throw on 
 our Lord's conception of the kingdom ? 
 Among the later Jews a tendency existed 
 to forego employing the name of God. 
 
Kingdom and Kingship 33 
 
 Various substitutes were current and 
 ** heaven " was one of these. Apart from 
 the phrase under discussion, traces of this 
 mode of speech are found in Matt. xvi. 
 19; Mk. xi.30; Lk. xv. 18, 21. It was a 
 mode of speech which had arisen from 
 the Jewish habit of emphasizing in the 
 nature of God more than anything else 
 his exaltation above the world and un- 
 approachable majesty, to such an extent 
 even as to endanger what must ever be 
 the essence of religion, a true communion 
 between God and man. But this custom, 
 though exponential of a characteristic 
 fault of Judaism, had also its good side, 
 else our Lord would not have adopted it. 
 In his human nature Jesus had a profound 
 sense of the infinite distance between 
 God and the creature. Whatever there 
 was of genuine religious fear and rever- 
 ence of God in the Jewish consciousness 
 awakened an echo in his heart and found 
 in him its ideal expression, from which 
 all the one-sidedness that belonged to it 
 
34 TJie Kingdom and the Church 
 
 in Judaism had disappeared. If, there- 
 fore, Jesus spoke of God as heaven, this 
 did not spring from a superstitious fear 
 of naming God, but rather from a desire 
 to name him in such a way as to call up 
 at once the most exalted conception of 
 his being and character. To do this the 
 word ** heaven" was eminently fitted 
 since it draws man's thought upwards 
 to the place where God reveals his glory 
 in perfection. 
 
 This can best be felt in another 
 phrase which likewise among the Evan- 
 gelists Matthew alone has preserved for 
 us, and which likewise our Lord had in 
 common with the Jewish teachers of that 
 age, the phrase **the Father in heaven" 
 or ** the heavenly Father." If in this the 
 name ** Father " expresses the conde- 
 scending love and grace of God, his infinite 
 nearness to us, the qualification **in 
 heaven " adds the reminder of his infinite 
 majesty above us, by which the former 
 ought always to be held in balance lest 
 
Kingdom and Kingship 35 
 
 we injure the true spirit of religion. I? 
 may be affirmed, therefore, that, when 
 Jesus referred to ''the kingdom of 
 heaven," he meant this in no other sense 
 than ''the kingdom of God," except in 
 so far as there was an added note of 
 emphasis on the exalted nature of him 
 whose kingdom this is. -J 
 
 The word "heaven," however, al- 
 though it primarily qualifies God and 
 describes his greatness, not that of the 
 kingdom, must also have been intended 
 by our Lord to color the conception 
 of the latter. If the king be one who 
 concentrates in himself all the glory of 
 heaven, what must his kingdom be ? 
 We shall not go far amiss in saying 
 that J esus desired to awaken in his disciples 
 a sense of the mysterious supernatural 
 character, of the absolute perfection and 
 grandeur, of the supreme value pertaining 
 to this new order of things, and desired 
 them to view and approach it in a spirit 
 appreciative of these holy qualities. Al- 
 
36 The Kingdom and the Church 
 
 though the phrase " kingdom of heaven ' ' 
 is not found in the Old Testament, the 
 word ** heaven " appears there already in 
 significant association with the idea of the 
 future kingdom. In Daniel it is said 
 that ** the God of heaven " will set up a 
 kingdom, and this means that the new 
 reign will take its origin in a supernatural 
 manner from the higher world. To 
 Jesus also ** heaven " and the supernatural 
 were cognate ideas, cf. Matt. xvi. 17 ; 
 Mk. xi. 30. That the thought of the 
 absolute perfection of the heavenly 
 world as determinative of the character 
 of the kingdom may well have been 
 associated with the name *' kingdom 
 of heaven " in Jesus' mind, appears from 
 the close connection between the second 
 and third petitions in the Lord's prayer : 
 ** Thy kingdom come — Thy will be done, 
 as in heaven, so on earth," cf. also 
 Matt. V. 48. For heaven as the sphere 
 of supreme unchangeable values and the 
 goal of aspiration we may refer to such 
 
Kingdom and Kingship 37 
 
 words as Matt. v. 12 ; vi. 20. In view 
 of the profound significance which Jesus 
 throughout ascribed to the contrast be- 
 tween the heavenly and the earthly world, 
 it is hardly likely that heaven was to him 
 a mere formal circumlocution for God. 
 It meant not God in general, but God as 
 known and revealed in those celestial 
 regions which had been our Lord's eter- 
 nal home. Only with this in mind can 
 we hope to understand something of the 
 profound sense in which he called the 
 kingdom **a kingdom of heaven." 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 The Present mid the Futttre King- 
 dom 
 
 T T 7^^ have already seen that our 
 1^^ Lord makes a sharp distinction 
 between the Old Testament or- 
 der of things and the kingdom of God, 
 and in doing this conforms to that side 
 of the Old Testament representation 
 which itself looks upon the kingdom as 
 future. Now the very important ques- 
 tion arises : how did he conceive of the 
 coming of this kingdom both as to time 
 and manner ? Until not long ago the 
 view quite generally prevailed and was 
 38 
 
Present mid Future Kingdom 39 
 
 thought to be in harmony with Jesus' own 
 teaching, that the coming referred to 
 might be conceived of as a lengthy proc- 
 ess covering ages and reaching its consum- 
 mation by a sudden crisis at the end coin- 
 ciding with the second coming of Christ 
 and the end of the present world. And 
 this prolonged process, in distinction from 
 the final crisis, was supposed to consist in 
 our Lord's view of essentially inward, 
 spiritual, invisible changes. The king- 
 dom, it was believed, comes when the gos- 
 pel is spread, hearts are changed, sin and 
 error overcome, righteousness cultivated, 
 a living communion with God established. 
 In this sense the kingdom began its com- 
 ing when Jesus entered upon his public 
 ministry, his work upon earth, including 
 his death, was part of its realization, the 
 disciples were in it, the whole subsequent 
 history of the church is the history of its 
 gradual extension, we ourselves can act 
 our part in its onward movement and are 
 members of it as a present organization. 
 
40 The Kingdom mid the Church 
 
 In recent years, however, this view has 
 been subjected to severe criticism by a 
 certain group of writers and rejected as 
 unhistorical. It is claimed, that Jesus 
 took an entirely different view of the 
 matter than that outlined above. Jesus 
 did not for a moment think that by his 
 prophetic activity or by any spiritual 
 changes thus wrought among Israel, the 
 kingdom would come. All that he 
 meant to accomplish by his labors was 
 merely preparatory to its coming : the 
 people had to be made ready for its ap- 
 pearance. To introduce the kingdom 
 was God's work, not his. No man could 
 do anything towards either hastening 
 or delaying it. And when it came it 
 would come at one single stroke, by a 
 sudden supernatural interposition of God, 
 in a great world-crisis, consequently not 
 for a part but with its whole content all 
 at once, fulfilling all the promises, giving 
 the signal by its arrival for the end of 
 the present world. And this stupendous 
 
Present and Future Kingdom 41 
 
 event Jesus expected to happen in his 
 lifetime, or, after he had attained to the 
 certainty of his intervening death, at least 
 within the time of the then living genera- 
 tion. 
 
 Before endeavoring to test which of 
 these two opposing views is in accord 
 with our Lord's teaching, we must care- 
 fully note the real point of divergence 
 between them and must also make clear 
 to ourselves what issues are at stake in our 
 decision in favor of the one or the other. 
 The two views have this in common that 
 they both recognize the coming of the 
 kingdom in its final absolute sense to 
 have been associated by Jesus with the end 
 of the world. The older view therefore 
 is inclusive of the more recent one, and 
 the difference arises from the fact that the 
 former affirms something more which 
 the latter denies. The sole point in. dis- 
 pute concerns our right to ascribe to 
 Jesus such a conception of the kingdom 
 that he could also find the beginning of 
 
42 The Kingdom and the Chitrch 
 
 its arrival in the purely spiritual results of 
 his labors and accordingly extend this 
 gradual coming of it over an indefinite 
 period of time. 
 
 But this sole point at issue is fraught 
 with the gravest consequences as it is 
 decided one way or the other. For, 
 first of all, it involves the question of 
 the infallibility of our Lord as a relig- 
 ious teacher. If he expected and an- 
 nounced only one coming of the king- 
 dom and that to happen shortly within 
 his lifetime or the lifetime of that 
 generation — then there is no escape from 
 the conclusion that the outcome has 
 proved him mistaken. Secondly, the 
 distribution of emphasis in our Lord's 
 teaching becomes essentially different if 
 we adopt the most modern view on this 
 matter. By common consent the center 
 of gravity in his preaching, that to which 
 he attaches supreme importance, is the 
 kingdom. Now, if we may believe that 
 this kingdom was to him in part identical 
 
Present and Future Kingdom 43 
 
 with the existence of certain spiritual 
 states, such as righteousness and com- 
 munion with God, then these receive 
 with the kingdom the highest place in 
 our Lord's estimation of values. If, on 
 the other hand, these He outside of the 
 kingdom and are mere preparatory states, 
 then they lose their central position and 
 become means to an ulterior end consist- 
 ing in the kingdom. In the third place, 
 the controversy affects the character of 
 our Lord's ethics. The advocates of the 
 recent view believe that Jesus' conviction 
 with reference to the rapidly approach- 
 ing end of the world largely colored his 
 ethical views, in that it prevented him 
 from developing a positive interest for 
 the duties which pertain to this present 
 life. Finally, the conception of our Lord's 
 character itself may be said to be involved. 
 Some at least who ascribe to him such 
 high-strung expectations seek to explain 
 this on the theory, that he was an ecstatic 
 visionary person, rather than a man of 
 
 ^ 
 
44 The Kingdom and the Church 
 
 calm, equable spiritual temper. It thus 
 appears that the aspect of our Lord's 
 kingdom-doctrine now under discussion 
 is interlinked with the gravest problems 
 touching the value and authority of his 
 [character and work in general. 
 
 It must be admitted that the Old Tes- 
 tament does not distinguish between sev- 
 eral stages or phases in the fulfilment of 
 the promises regarding the kingdom, but 
 looks upon its coming as an undivided 
 whole. John the Baptist also seems to 
 have still occupied this Old Testament 
 standpoint. This, however, was due to 
 the peculiar character of prophecy in 
 general, in which there is a certain lack 
 of perspective, a vision of things sep- 
 arated in time on one plane. We may 
 not argue from this, that Jesus, who was 
 more than a prophet and stood face to 
 face with the reality, must have been 
 subject to the same limitations. Nor are 
 we justified in saying, that, because con- 
 temporary Judaism took such a view of 
 
Present and Future Kingdom 45 
 
 the matter, Jesus likewise must have 
 held this. For, on the one hand, Juda- 
 ism was no norm for him ; on the other 
 hand, within Judaism itself a distinction 
 between successive stages in the fulfil- 
 ment of the Messianic promises had al- 
 ready arisen. 
 
 We have seen that the Jews were 
 accustomed to look forward not so 
 much to an entirely new and first 
 arrival of the kingdom, but rather to a 
 manifestation of God's rule in a higher 
 form. And even within the limits of 
 this future manifestation of the kingdom 
 stages had begun to be distinguished. 
 The idea of a preliminary Messianic 
 kingdom on earth lasting for a definite 
 number of years, to be followed by the 
 consummation of the world and an eter- 
 nal kingdom under totally new con- 
 ditions may possibly have been developed 
 as early as our Lord's day. In the later 
 teaching of the New Testament a some- 
 what similar distinction certainly exists, 
 
46 The Kingdom and the Church 
 
 as when Paul distinguishes between the 
 present reign of Christ, dating from the 
 resurrection, and the final state after he 
 shall have delivered the kingdom to the 
 Father, 1 Cor. xv. 23-28. 
 
 The view, therefore, that the kingdom 
 might be present in one sense, and yet have 
 to come in another, did not lie beyond the 
 doctrinal horizon of Judaism even, and 
 we must a priori reckon with the possi- 
 bility that in some form or other this view 
 may appear also in the teaching of Jesus. 
 In point of fact certain statements of 
 Jesus concerning the kingdom as an in- 
 ward spiritual state strongly resemble the 
 Jewish representation, e. g. the words 
 in Mk. X. 15 about "receiving the king- 
 dom of God " sound like an adaptation 
 of the Jewish figure which speaks of 
 " taking up the yoke of the kingdom of 
 heaven," cf. also Matt. xiii. 52. 
 ' The difference between this Jewish rep- 
 resentation and Jesus' idea of the prelimi- 
 nary kingdom lies in this, that according 
 
Present and Future Kingdom 47 
 
 to the Jewish view the kingdom is always 
 there, it being only a question whether 
 man will take it upon himself, whereas 
 according to Jesus, who thought less of 
 human efforts, but had a deeper insight 
 into the sinfulness of man and a higher 
 conception of what the true reign of God 
 involves, even this partial kingdom must 
 first come through an act of God before 
 man can be invited to receive it. As to 
 the other point of contact in the Jewish 
 expectation, it should be remembered 
 that the intermediate kingdom was to 
 begin with the appearance of the Mes- 
 siah. If then Jesus regarded himself 
 even while on earth as the Messiah and 
 as engaged in Messianic work, which we 
 have no reason to doubt, he must also 
 have looked upon the stage of this earthly 
 Messianic labor as a provisional stage of 
 realization of the kingdom. Of course 
 here again he transformed the Jewish 
 conception by his spiritualizing touch 
 into something entirely different and 
 
48 The Kingdom and the Church 
 
 infinitely higher than what it was be- 
 [fore. 
 
 Coming to the facts themselves we ob- 
 serve that no one denies the presence of 
 Q\ the idea of a spiritual provisional king- 
 ^dom in the gospel record of Jesus' 
 teaching as it lies before us. The view 
 that Jesus did not entertain this idea, of 
 necessity involves ascribing to the Evan- 
 gelists an unhistorical representation of 
 what our Lord actually taught. It is al- 
 leged that the gospel-tradition on this 
 point was colored by the later develop- 
 ment of things, which showed that a 
 long time had to intervene between the 
 first and second coming of the Lord and 
 therefore compelled the assuming of a 
 provisional kingdom of protracted dura- 
 tion. Upon this critical phase of the 
 question our present limits and purposes 
 forbid us to enter. We only note it to 
 remark that for those who hold to the 
 historical trustworthiness of the Gospels 
 !^no doubt can here exist. The present 
 
Present and Future Kingdom 49 
 
 spiritual kingdom is by common consent 
 plainly recognized in such sayings as 
 Matt. xi. 11 ; xiii. 41 ; xvi. 19. J 
 
 Apart, however, from critical attempts 
 to eliminate this element from Jesus' 
 teaching efforts have been made to attain 
 the same object by means of exegesis, 
 and into these we must briefly look 
 while examining the available evidence. 
 Clearest of all seem the words spoken by 
 our Lord in answer to the Pharisees who 
 had accused him of being in league with 
 Beelzebub : '* If I by the Spirit (Lk. 
 finger) of God cast out demons, then the 
 kingdom of God has come upon you. " 
 The underlying supposition of this ar- 
 gument is, that, where the kingdom of 
 Satan is destroyed, there of necessity the 
 kingdom of God begins. If the former 
 already took place at that time, then the 
 latter also had become a present reality. 
 Now it has been urged, that this saying 
 proves nothing in favor of the usual con- 
 ception of a spiritual kingdom to be 
 
50 The Kingdom and the Church 
 
 gradually realized, because our Lord 
 might look upon the casting out of de- 
 mons and other miracles as signals of the 
 rapidly approaching final coming of the 
 kingdom, the beginning as it were of the 
 end. 
 
 In answer to this we observe that, 
 even if this were a correct interpretation, 
 the presence of a certain element of grad- 
 ualness in our Lord's conception of the 
 matter would thereby be in principle ad- 
 mitted. The coming would not be en- 
 tirely abrupt, there would be not only 
 premonitions but actual anticipations. 
 But it is impossible to interpret the words 
 in the above sense, because at an early 
 point of his career our Lord looked for- 
 ward to his death as something that had 
 to intervene before all things could be ful- 
 filled, so that he could not have regarded 
 his conquest over the demons as imme- 
 diately preceding and heralding the end. 
 His meaning must be, that when Satan's 
 power ceases, a new order of things be- 
 
Present and Future Kingdom 51 
 
 gins, which in itself is equivalent to the 
 rule of God. In one respect only it will 
 have to be conceded that the saying un- 
 der discussion does not embody the full 
 idea of the spiritual kingdom of God. 
 It proves the actual presence of the king- 
 dom at the time of our Lord's ministry, 
 but does not directly affirm that this 
 kingdom has its reality in inward, invisible 
 states. The casting out of demons like 
 other miracles belongs rather to the out- 
 ward, visible sphere. 
 
 The same qualification will have to 
 apply to another passage at least in one 
 of the two renderings of which it is cap- 
 able. According to Lk. xvii. 21 Jesus 
 answered the question of the Pharisees 
 as to the time of the appearance of the 
 kingdom of God by declaring ** behold 
 the kingdom of God is lvTo<i vjxcov.'- 
 This may mean: ''within you," or it 
 may mean *'in your midst." In the 
 former case both the spiritual nature and 
 the present reality are affirmed, in the 
 
52 The Kingdom and the Chnrch 
 
 latter case only the presence of the king- 
 dom in some form at the time of speak- 
 ing is implied. Recently it has been as- 
 serted that on the rendering ''in your 
 midst" even the last-mentioned inference 
 is not warranted, because our Lord 
 speaks of the future, and means to say : 
 at its final appearance the kingdom of 
 God does not come so as to be subject 
 to observation or calculation ; people 
 will not be able to say, "Here or there," 
 lo, all at once it will be in your midst. 
 But this is untenable because from other 
 sayings we know, that the final com- 
 ing of the kingdom is preceded by 
 certain signs and in so far is actually 
 subject to observation and calculation. 
 We must choose between the two ren- 
 derings given above, and of these the 
 second, "in your midst," deserves the 
 preference for two reasons : first, because 
 it suits best the purpose of the question 
 of the Pharisees, which was as to the 
 time of the coming of the kingdom, not 
 
Present and Fnture Kingdom 53 
 
 as to its sphere, and because of the 
 unbeHeving Pharisees it could scarcely be 
 said that the kingdom was " within " them. 
 Our Lord means to teach the enquirers 
 that, instead of a future thing to be fixed 
 by apocalyptic speculation, the coming of 
 the kingdom is a present thing, present 
 in the very midst of those who are cu- 
 rious about the day and the hour of its 
 sometime appearance. Now this does 
 not directly explain how the kingdom is 
 present. The view remains possible that 
 Jesus referred to miraculous works as 
 one form of the manifestation of God's 
 royal power, in which case this saying 
 would not carry us beyond the foregoing 
 about the casting out of demons. But 
 the view is equally plausible, that he re- 
 ferred to the establishment of God's 
 rule in the midst of Israel through the 
 spiritual results of his labors. 
 
 Another statement which clearly 
 teaches both the actual presence of the 
 kingdom and its spiritual form of exist- 
 
54 The Kingdofn and the Church 
 
 ence is Matt. xi. 12 ; Lk. xvi. 16. Here 
 "the law and the prophets " are said to 
 extend until John, that is to say, the 
 prophetic looking-forward dispensation 
 of the old covenant reaches its close in 
 John : from there onward begins a dis- 
 pensation in which the kingdom of God 
 is the theme no longer of prophecy, but 
 of gospel-preaching, therefore is no 
 longer future but present. John him- 
 self is not in this kingdom while others 
 are. This, of course, cannot apply to 
 the final kingdom, for from this Jesus 
 certainly could not have excluded the 
 Baptist. It can only mean, that John 
 does not share in the privileges made 
 available in the new order of things in- 
 troduced by Jesus' work, because he 
 virtually continued to stand on the basis 
 of the law and the prophets, on the basis 
 of the old covenant. And these priv- 
 ileges to which John had no access cer- 
 tainly consisted not in the mere oppor- 
 tunity to witness the miracles of Jesus 
 
Present and Future Kingdom 55 
 
 as external acts ; a participation of in- 
 ward spiritual blessings must be referred 
 to, for on account of this our Lord pro- 
 nounces the smallest or smaller in the 
 kingdom greater than John, and we know 
 from other sayings that Jesus measured 
 true greatness in a different way than by 
 contact with his miracles. 
 
 The well known saying from the Ser- 
 mon on the Mount : '* Seek ye first his 
 kingdom and his righteousness and all 
 these things ( i. e. food and raiment ) shall 
 be added unto you," Matt. vi. 33, may 
 also be quoted in this connection. Even 
 though the view that righteousness is 
 here present righteousness and as such 
 a closer specification of the kingdom, 
 should be subject to dispute, the fact re- 
 mains that the kingdom itself appears as 
 a possession obtainable in this life. For 
 food and clothing are here represented 
 as something to be added not to the seek- 
 ing of the kingdom but to the kingdom 
 itself, and it goes without saying, that this 
 

 56 The Kingdom and the Church 
 
 is applicable only to the kingdom in its 
 present state of existence. 
 
 Most clearly, however, both the pres- 
 ent reality and the internal nature of the 
 kingdom are taught in some of the great 
 parables. Matt, xiii, Mk. iv. Lk. viii. 
 In the parable of the wheat and the tares 
 the kingdom appears as a state of things 
 in which the good and the bad still inter- 
 mingle. The same is true of the parable 
 of the fish-net. Here, then, obviously 
 our Lord speaks of the kingdom in a 
 form different from its final form, which 
 is represented as beginning with the sepa- 
 ration between the two kinds. Now these 
 two parables, and the interpretation of 
 the second, especially in Matt. xiii. 36-43, 
 are said to betray the influence of later 
 conceptions. But what shall we say about 
 the one of the mustard seed and the 
 leaven ? It cannot be denied that Jesus 
 here conceives of the kingdom as a grow- 
 ing organism, a leavening power, concep- 
 tions which will scarcely apply to anything 
 
Present and Future Kingdom 57 
 
 else than to a spiritual order of things. To 
 interpret these as describing the immense 
 contrast between the small beginning of 
 things in Jesus' miracles and the great 
 world-renewing conclusion of his work 
 soon to be witnessed is, it seems to us, a 
 forced exegesis, which unnecessarily 
 charges Jesus with an artificial use of 
 these figures so exquisitely chosen and so 
 strikingly applied on the common view. 
 Finally, it should be noted that in con- 
 nection with these parables Jesus spoke 
 significantly of " the mysteries " or " the 
 mystery" (Mk.) of the kingdom of 
 heaven. The most plausible explanation 
 of this statement is, that it refers not so 
 much to the parabolic form of teaching 
 as to the principal idea embodied in some 
 of these parables. What else could so 
 suitably have been designated by Jesus 
 "a mystery" in comparison with the 
 Jewish expectations than the truth that 
 the kingdom comes gradually, impercep- 
 tibly, spiritually ? 
 
58 The Kingdom mtd the Church 
 
 It appears from the foregoing that it 
 is impossible to deny to our Lord the con- 
 Q", ception of an internal kingdom which 
 i^ as such comes not at once but in a 
 lengthy process. Some writers, recog- 
 nizing the necessity of this, are yet un- 
 willing to admit that it was a conception 
 held by Jesus from the beginning of his 
 ministry. In their opinion his mind un- 
 derwent a development on the subject ; 
 beginning with the expectation of a 
 kingdom to appear suddenly by an imme- 
 diate act of God, he afterwards became 
 convinced that the opposition offered to 
 his person and work rendered this im- 
 possible, that the kingdom of glory could 
 not immediately be realized, and thus 
 was led to beheve, that only on its inter- 
 nal, invisible side the rule of God could 
 even now be established. The opposi- 
 tion encountered would lead to his death, 
 but death would be a transition to an 
 exalted state, which would in turn be fol- 
 lowed by his coming with the clouds of 
 
Present and Future Kingdom 59 
 
 heaven and the establishment of the king- 
 dom in its full final form. 
 
 A single glance at the Gospels, how- 
 ever, will show how impossible it is to 
 distribute the sayings relating to the pres- 
 ent and final form of the kingdom in 
 such a way as to make out a period at the 
 beginning of which Jesus knew only the 
 latter. Some of the clearest utterances 
 regarding the spiritual coming of the 
 kingdom belong to a comparatively early 
 stage of his teaching, cf. Matt. xi. 11 ; 
 Mk. ii. 18-22. Nor do the general argu- 
 ments adduced in favor of this hypothesis 
 have sufficient force to commend it. It 
 is true Jesus began with representing the 
 kingdom as future, but this applied at 
 the beginning equally to its spiritual, and 
 to its visible, final realization. He urged 
 the disciples continually to seek after 
 the kingdom, but this only implies that 
 within them it has to come ever increas- 
 ingly. He speaks of the eschatological 
 kingdom as ** the kingdom " absolutely. 
 
6o The Kingdom and the Church 
 
 but this mode of speech is not confined 
 to the early period of his teaching : it 
 occurs also later at a time when he is ad- 
 mitted to have been familiar with the 
 idea of an immanent kingdom. He 
 could thus speak because only at the end 
 of time will the kingdom in its ideal com- 
 pleteness appear. This does not ex- 
 clude that he recognized less complete 
 embodiments of the kingdom-idea as 
 present long before. Again it is true 
 that he does not at first announce himself 
 as Messiah, and from this the inference 
 might be drawn that with his Messiah- 
 ship he put also the coming of the 
 kingdom into the future. This in- 
 ference would be correct, if restraint in 
 the announcement of himself as Messiah 
 had proceeded from the conviction that 
 he was not as yet the Messiah, nor his 
 present work Messianic work in the strict 
 sense of the term. In point of fact Jesus 
 kept his Messianic claims in the back- 
 ground for pedagogical reasons, while 
 
Present and Future Kingdom 6i 
 
 perfectly conscious that he was exercis- 
 ing Messianic functions. The correct 
 view on this point is that he distinguished 
 two forms of Messianic activity, one on 
 earth in humility, one from the throne 
 of glory, and corresponding to this two 
 forms of the kingdom, one invisible now, 
 one visible at the end, and, thus under- 
 stood, the two-sidedness of his Messianic 
 consciousness affords a striking parallel 
 to the two-sidedness of his kingdom-con- 
 ception. On the whole, therefore, we 
 have no reason to believe that in our 
 Lord's subjective apprehension of the 
 truth there was any appreciable progress 
 on this important subject within the limits 
 of his public ministry. 
 
 In Jesus' objective teaching, on the 
 other hand, as distinguished from his 
 subjective consciousness, a certain devel- 
 opment in the presentation of truth con- 
 cerning the kingdom cannot be denied. 
 We are able to affirm this, not so much 
 from a comparison of the utterances be- 
 
62 The Kingdom and the Church 
 
 longing to the earlier or later periods. 
 This would be difficult since the material 
 in our Gospels is not all arranged on the 
 chronological plan. The fact appears 
 rather in this way, that at two points in 
 our Lord's ministry a certain phase of 
 the doctrine of the kingdom is introduced 
 with such emphasis as to mark it rel- 
 atively new. These two points are the 
 occasion on which our Lord uttered the 
 great kingdom-parables and the an- 
 nouncement of his passion near Ca^sarea 
 Philippi. 
 
 From the manner in which the 
 great parables draw the distinction be- 
 tween the immanent and eschatologi- 
 cal coming of the kingdom, and from the 
 elaborateness with which Jesus here de- 
 scribes the gradual, invisible character of 
 the former as resembling the process 
 of organic growth, we are led to infer 
 that previously this principle had not 
 been accentuated in his teaching. This 
 does not mean that he had hitherto ab- 
 
Present and Future Kingdom 63 
 
 stained from referring to the spiritual side 
 of the subject. We have seen above that 
 the opposite is true. It simply means, that 
 up to this point, while sometimes predicat- 
 ing of the kingdom things true of it in its 
 purely spiritual stage, sometimes predicat- 
 ing of it things of eschatological charac- 
 ter, he did not on purpose formulate the 
 difference and the relation between the 
 two, but treated the kingdom as a unit 
 of which both classes of statements could 
 be equally affirmed. The historical ex- 
 planation of this peculiarity is probably 
 to be sought in our Lord's desire to keep 
 in close touch during the first period of 
 his ministry with the Old Testament type 
 of teaching, which, as we have seen, did 
 not as yet distinguish between periods 
 and stages in the realization of the king- 
 dom. Thus in condescension to Israel 
 he took up the thread of revelation where 
 the Old Testament had left it, to give a 
 new and richer development to it soon 
 after in his epoch-making parabolic de- 
 
64 The Kingdom and the Church 
 
 liverances. The new element introduced 
 at the second critical juncture, in the re- 
 gion of Cssarea Philippi, concerns the re- 
 lation of the church to the kingdom and 
 will be discussed afterwards in a separate 
 chapter. 
 
 It should be observed that our Lord's 
 ' teaching relates to two aspects of the 
 same kingdom, not to two separate king- 
 doms. The ancient theological distinc- 
 tion between a kingdom of grace and a 
 kingdom of glory is infelicitous for this 
 reason. In the parable the growing of 
 the grain and the harvest belong together 
 as connected parts of the same process. 
 There is one continuous kingdom-form- 
 ing movement which first lays hold upon 
 the inward spiritual center of life by it- 
 self, and then once more seizes the same 
 in connection with its external visible 
 embodiment. In the second stage the 
 essence of the first is re-included and re- 
 mains of supreme importance. The im- 
 manent kingdom as at first realized con- 
 
Present and Future Kingdom 65 
 
 tinues to partake of imperfections. Hence 
 the eschatological crisis will not merely 
 supply this soul of the kingdom with its 
 fitting body, but will also bring the ideal 
 perfection of the inner spirit itself. Our 
 Lord's doctrine of the two-sided kingdom 
 thus understood is an eloquent witness 
 to the unique energy with which he sub- 
 ordinated the physical to the spiritual, as 
 well as to the sobriety with which he 
 upheld the principle, that the physical is 
 not to be despised, but appreciated in 
 its regenerated form, as the natural and 
 necessary instrument of revelation for the 
 spiritual. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 Current Misconceptions regarding 
 the Present and Future Kingdom 
 
 Y J^AVING found that both the im- 
 
 I I manent and the eschatological 
 conceptions of the coming of the 
 kingdom are clearly represented in Jesus' 
 teaching and having in general defined 
 the relation of the one to the other, we 
 may now proceed to look at each sepa- 
 rately in order to guard against certain 
 misconceptions to which both may easily 
 become subject. A tendency exists with 
 some writers, especially of the class who 
 insist that Jesus had no other than the 
 66 
 
Current Misconceptions 67 
 
 eschatological conception of the king- 
 dom, to identify the view ascribed to him 
 with the current Jewish expectations. 
 This would involve, that he was not only 
 mistaken in regard to the time of the 
 kingdom's appearance, but also held an 
 inherently false idea regarding its nature, 
 not having entirely outgrown the limita- 
 tions of his age and environment on this 
 point. It has in all seriousness been as- 
 serted by a recent writer of this class, that 
 the notion of the kingdom in the historic 
 form in which our Lord embraced it, is 
 that element of his teaching to which we 
 cannot ascribe abiding value, that in the 
 experience of Jesus himself it proved a 
 delusion, that to his teaching on the 
 fatherhood of God rather than to it is 
 due the enrichment which our Lord 
 wrought in the religious consciousness 
 of humanity. 
 
 This error results from the failure to 
 recognize the immanent, spiritual aspect 
 of the kingdom-idea as actually present 
 
68 The Kingdom and the Church 
 
 in Jesus' teaching and the thorough re- 
 construction which in result of it the idea 
 as a whole underwent. It was little more 
 than the name that Jesus borrowed from 
 the kingdom-expectation of Judaism ; 
 whatever of the content of his own king- 
 dom-teaching he had in common with 
 the eschatological belief of his time be- 
 longed to the purer and nobler type of 
 Jewish eschatology, that built up around 
 the idea of "the coming age." And 
 even the latter he lifted to an infinitely 
 higher plane by subsuming it under the 
 principle of the supremacy of God. So 
 far as connected with the kingdom the 
 Jewish hope was intensely political and 
 national, considerably tainted also by sen- 
 suality. From all political bearings our 
 Lord's teaching on the kingdom was 
 wholly dissociated, cf. Mk. xii. 13 ; Jno. 
 xviii. 36. There is no trace in the Gos- 
 pels of the so-called chiliastic expectation 
 of a provisional political kingdom, that 
 strange compromise whereby Judaism 
 
Current Misconceptions 69 
 
 endeavored to reconcile the two hetero- 
 geneous elements that struggled for the 
 supremacy in its eschatological conscious- 
 ness. What formally corresponds in our 
 Lord's teaching to this notion is the idea 
 of the invisible, spiritual kingdom, and 
 how totally different it is ! 
 
 Equally broad and free is Jesus' king^ 
 dom-doctrine in its attitude towards the 
 problem of Israel's national prerogative. 
 Sayings like Matt. viii. 11 ; xxi. 43 ; xxviii. 
 19 ; Mk. xiii. 10 ; xiv. 9 ; Lk. iv. 26, 27, 
 prove that he distinctly anticipated the 
 rejection of many in Israel and the ex- 
 tension of the gospel to the Gentiles on 
 a large scale. It is true these are all 
 prophetic words. In his own pastoral 
 activity he confined himself deliberately 
 to the lost sheep of the house of Israel 
 and kept his helpers within the same 
 limits. But even so there is in his whole 
 attitude as a teacher of Israel that which 
 has been strikingly characterized as ** in- 
 tensive universalism." In the Jew it is 
 
yo The Kingdom and the Church 
 
 the man he seeks and endeavors to save. 
 The problems raised, the duties required, 
 the blessings conferred are such as to be 
 applicable to all without distinction of 
 
 I race, caste, or sex. 
 
 I— Lk. xxii. 30 is sometimes quoted to 
 prove that Jesus had not freed himself 
 from the Jewish particularism. Though 
 possibly the ** judging " may have to be 
 understood in the sense of ** reigning," 
 yet the words by no means imply the 
 salvation of all Israel, nor do they exclude 
 the calling of the Gentiles. They were 
 spoken at a time when Jesus could no 
 longer doubt that the masses of Israel 
 would reject him. Besides the words are 
 figurative, to judge from the context with 
 its reference to " eating " and ** drinking." 
 All we can legitimately infer from them 
 is that the apostles will have a position 
 of preeminence in the kingdom. 
 
 The third feature in which our Lord's 
 kingdom-message differs from the Jew- 
 ish expectation consists in the absence of 
 
Currejit Misconceptions ']i 
 
 the sensualistic element so prominent in 
 the latter. True he speaks in connection 
 with the kingdom of eating, drinking, 
 reclining at table, inheriting the earth, 
 etc., and it is said we have no right to 
 spiritualize all this. But the Old Testa- 
 ment already used such forms of speech 
 with the clear consciousness of their 
 metaphorical character. Even in the 
 apocalyptic literature this sense is not en- 
 tirely wanting, as the statement of Enoch 
 XV. 11, **They will not partake of any 
 food, nor will they thirst," shows. With 
 reference to one point at least, Jesus pos- 
 itively affirmed that the sensual enjoy- 
 ments of the present life will cease in 
 the world to come, Mk. xii. 25. On the 
 other hand, we must remember that it 
 is possible to go too far in the spiritualiz- 
 ing interpretation of this class of utter- 
 ances. We may not dissolve everything 
 into purely inward processes and mental 
 states, as modern theologians do when 
 they say that heaven and hell are in the 
 
72 The Kingdom and the Church 
 
 hearts of men. The eschatological king- 
 dom has certainly in our Lord's concep- 
 tion its own outward forms of life. These 
 figures stand for objective, external real- 
 ities in which the body will have its own 
 part and function. When our Lord 
 speaks of earthly enjoyments, he means 
 something that will be truly analogous to 
 these and yet move on an altogether 
 higher plane. Our difficulty lies in this, 
 that we cannot frame a concrete con- 
 ception of outward forms of life without 
 having recourse to the senses. But our 
 difficulty does not prove the impossibility, 
 nor does it prove that the same difficulty 
 existed for Jesus, who was familiar with 
 the heavenly world by experience, 
 r We believe, however, that there is 
 greater need at the present day to guard 
 against a misunderstanding of the other 
 side of our Lord's kingdom-teaching, 
 that which relates to the spiritual, in- 
 visible form of the kingdom. Modern 
 writers do not always sufficiently em- 
 
Current Misconceptions 73 
 
 phasize that, notwithstanding its internal 
 character, the kingdom remains to all 
 intents a supernatural kingdom. It is 
 easy to speak disparagingly of the gross 
 realistic expectations of the Jews, but 
 those who do so often attack under the 
 pretense of a refined spiritualism the very 
 essence of Biblical supernaturalism. After 
 all deductions are made, it must be main- 
 tained that the Jews could not have cher- 
 ished this vigorous realism, had they not 
 been supernaturalists at heart, trained in 
 that great school of supernaturalism, the, 
 Old Testament. In this matter Jesus 
 was in full agreement with their posi- 
 tion. 
 
 The circumstance that some of the 
 parables which deal with this aspect of 
 the kingdom have been taken from the 
 sphere of organic life has sometimes led 
 to misconceptions here. The point of 
 comparison in these parables is not the 
 naturalness of the process but only its 
 gradualness and invisible character. In 
 
74 The Kmgdotn and the Church 
 
 the parable of the imperceptibly grow- 
 ing seed, Mk. iv. 26-29, rather the 
 opposite is implied, viz., that God gives 
 the increase without human intervention. 
 Jesus performs all his work, even that 
 pertaining to the immanent kingdom, in 
 the Spirit, and the Spirit stands for the 
 supernatural. That we must not identify 
 the processes whereby this side of the 
 kingdom is realized with purely natural 
 processes can be best seen from the 
 Fourth Gospel. Here the present hfe is 
 equivalent to the immanent kingdom. 
 But this present life appears to be 
 thoroughly supernatural in its origin and 
 character. Regeneration introduces into 
 it. 
 
 At a subsequent point of our enquiry, 
 when discussing the relation of the 
 church to the kingdom, it will appear 
 still more clearly, that by its translation 
 into the sphere of the internal and in- 
 visible the kingdom-idea has lost noth- 
 ing of the supernaturalistic associations 
 
Current Misconceptions 75 
 
 which belonged to it from its very or- 
 igin. The difference between the two 
 stages of its coming does not lie in 
 that the one is brought about by forces 
 already present in the human world, 
 whereas the other has to be accom- 
 plished by the introduction of new 
 miraculous forces from above. It is a 
 difference merely in the mode of opera- 
 tion and revelation of the supernatural 
 common to both stages. The same 
 omnipotent power at work through the 
 ages will also effect the consummation 
 at the end. But it will assume a new 
 form when the end has come, so as to 
 work instantaneously, and will draw 
 within the sphere of its operation the en- 
 tire physical universe. It would not be in 
 harmony with Jesus' view so to conceive 
 of it, as if by the gradual extension of 
 the divine power operating internally, by 
 the growth of the church, by the ever- 
 widening influence of the truth, the king- 
 dom which now is will become all-com- 
 
76 The Kingdom and the Church 
 
 prehensive and universal and so of itself 
 pass over into the final kingdom. This 
 would eliminate all true eschatology and 
 obliterate the distinction between the two 
 aspects of Jesus' teaching on the subject. 
 The parables of the wheat and the 
 tares and of the fish-net, while on the 
 one hand they do imply, as we have seen, 
 the higher unity of the entire movement, 
 also imply on the other hand that its 
 consummation does not spontaneously 
 result from the preceding process, super- 
 natural though this be. The harvest is 
 conditioned by the ripeness of the grain, 
 and yet the ripeness of the grain can 
 never of itself set in operation the 
 harvest. The harvest comes when the 
 man puts forth the sickle, because the 
 fruit is ripe. So when the immanent 
 kingdom has run its course to maturity, 
 God will intervene in the miracle of all 
 miracles. It would also plainly be im- 
 possible for the final kingdom to come 
 in any other way than this. For this 
 
Current Misconceptions 77 
 
 final state of the kingdom presupposes 
 great physical, cosmical changes, which 
 no force working in the spiritual sphere 
 can produce. It would be difficult to 
 overestimate the vividness with which 
 our Lord realized and the emphasis with 
 which he describes the new and mar- 
 velous conditions under which the life 
 of the blessed in the future kingdom 
 will be lived. It is an order of things 
 lying altogether above this earthly life, 
 in which the righteous shall shine as the 
 sun, in which all the prophets will be 
 seen, in which the pure in heart shall 
 enjoy the beatific vision of God, in which 
 those who hunger and thirst after right- 
 eousness shall be completely filled. 
 Surely to effect this there must take place 
 a great crisis, a great catastrophe at the 
 end which will be the very opposite of 
 all evolution. Our Lord himself has 
 marked its unique character by calling it 
 the palingenesis, the regeneration. Matt. 
 xix. 28. 
 
% 
 
 jS The Kingdom and the Church 
 
 Still further we must guard against con- 
 fining the internal, spiritual kingdom to 
 the sphere of the ethical. This is an er- 
 ror which has had considerable vogue in 
 recent times, owing to the fact that cer- 
 tain systems of theology constructed from 
 a one-sided ethical point of view have 
 adopted the kingdom-idea as their or- 
 ganizing center. The kingdom has been 
 defined as an ethical community realized 
 by the interaction of men on the prin- 
 ciple of love. This is erroneous in two 
 respects. In the first place, according to 
 our Lord the whole content of religion 
 is to be subsumed under the kingdom. 
 While it is true that the kingdom con- 
 sists in righteousness, it is by no means 
 coextensive with the same, but consists 
 in many other things besides. Such 
 blessings as life, forgiveness of sin, com- 
 munion with God, belong to it just as 
 much and have just as vital a connection 
 with the kingdom-idea, as the cultivation 
 of love, as will subsequently appear. And 
 
Current Misconceptions 79 
 
 secondly, all that belongs to the kingdom, 
 the ethical and religious alike, is repre- 
 sented in Jesus' kingdom-teaching, not 
 as the product of human activity, but as 
 the work of God. He nowhere says 
 that men make the kingdom. In our 
 Lord's Prayer the words : ** Thy will be 
 done " explain the preceding words 
 *'Thy Kingdom come," but both are 
 petitions, in uttering which we are taught 
 to look to God that he may set up in us 
 his reign even in that form which will be 
 revealed through our actions. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 The Essence of the Kingdom : The 
 Kingdom as the Supremacy 
 of God in the Sphere of Saving 
 Power 
 
 /T has been shown in the foregoing 
 how our Lord designates the new 
 order of things he came to introduce 
 *'the kingdom of God," and that not 
 merely in its final outcome but in its en- 
 tire course of development. The ques- 
 ftion must next be raised. Why did he 
 adopt this name, what is the appropriate- 
 ness of the designation to his own mind ? 
 It certainly would be wrong to assume 
 80 
 
The Sphere of Saving Power 8i 
 
 that he used it from mere accommoda- 
 tion to a popular parlance, that it was in 
 no wise suggestive to him of important 
 principles and ideas. This is excluded 
 by the fact pointed out above, that it was 
 not by any means the most familiar of 
 the names current among the Jews for 
 the Messianic age. If Jesus nevertheless 
 favored it above all others, he must have 
 had a positive reason for this. Nor can 
 we explain his choice from mere depend- 
 ence on the Old Testament. Jesus' de- 
 pendence on the Old Testament was 
 never a mere matter of form. He always 
 sought in the form the substance, in the 
 terms appropriated the great ideal prin- 
 ciples they were intended to express. 
 We must therefore look for these. In] 
 looking for them we must not expect to 
 find anywhere in his teaching a definition 
 of the kingdom. Jesus' method of teach- 
 ing was not the philosophical one of de- 
 fining a thing, but the popular, parabolic 
 one of describing and illustrating it. 
 
 F 
 
82 The Kingdom and the Church 
 
 Paul, though speaking much less of the 
 kingdom, has come much nearer to de- 
 fining it than our Lord, cf . Rom. xiv. 17. 
 The absence of definition, however, does 
 not involve a lack of order or correlation 
 in the aspects and features described. In 
 the great variety of statements made con- 
 cerning the kingdom the careful observer 
 will not fail to discover certain general 
 lines along which the description or com- 
 parison moves, certain outstanding prin- 
 ciples to whose elucidation it constantly 
 returns. If we can ascertain these, we 
 shall also have found the key to our Lord's 
 own view about the deeper meaning of 
 the name "kingdom of God." 
 r At the outset we must reject as inade- 
 quate the favorite modern explanation 
 that in the figure of the kingdom the 
 point of comparison lies primarily in the 
 mutual association of men so as to form 
 a moral or religious organism. The king- 
 dom is indeed a community in which 
 men are knit together by the closest of 
 
The Sphere of Saving Power '^'^y 
 
 bonds, and especially in connection with 
 our Lord's teaching on the church this 
 is brought out. Taking, however, the 
 kingdom-teaching as a whole this point 
 is but little emphasized, Matt. xiii. 24-30, 
 47-50. Besides, this conception is not 
 nearly wide enough to cover all the things 
 predicated of the kingdom in the Gos- 
 pels, according to which it appears to con- 
 sist as much in gifts and powers from 
 above as in inter-human relations and ac- 
 tivities. Its resemblance to a community 
 offers at least only a partial explanation of 
 its kingdom-character, and so far as this 
 explanation is correct it is not ultimate, 
 because not the union of men as such, 
 but that in God which produces and 
 underlies it, is the true kingdom-forming 
 principle. J 
 
 The main reason for the use of the 
 name by Jesus lies undoubtedly in this, 
 that in the new order of things God is in 
 some such sense the supreme and con- 
 trolling factor as the ruler in a human 
 
84 The Kingdom mid the Church 
 
 kingdom. The conception is a God- 
 centered conception to the very core. In 
 order to appreciate its significance, we 
 must endeavor to do w^hat Jesus did, look 
 at the whole of the world and of life from 
 the point of view of their subserviency 
 to the glory of God. The difficulty for 
 us in achieving this lies not merely in that 
 we are apt to take a lower man-centered 
 view of religion, but equally much in that 
 by our modern idea of the state we are 
 not naturally led to associate such an order 
 of things with the name of a kingdom. 
 According to our modern conception, 
 especially in its republican form, the in- 
 stitution of the state with its magistrate 
 exists for the sake of the subjects, even 
 the king, at least in a constitutional mon- 
 archy, may be considered as a means to 
 an end. In the ancient state this is dif- 
 ferent. Here the individual exists for 
 the state, and in the Oriental monarchy 
 the state is centralized and summed up 
 in the person of the ruler. 
 
TJie Sphere of Saving Power 85 
 
 Now whatever may be the merits or de- 
 merits of such a principle as the construc- 
 tive principle for our human political 
 life, it affords obviously the only point of 
 view from which we can properly con- 
 strue the fundamental relation between 
 God and man. It was on the basis of 
 such a conception of kingship, that from 
 early times the relation of God to Israel 
 had been expressed in the form of a royal 
 rule. The primary purpose of Israel's) 
 theocratic constitution was not to teach 
 the world the principles of civil govern- 
 ment, though undoubtedly in this respect 
 also valuable lessons can be learned from 
 it, but to reflect the eternal laws of re- 
 ligious intercourse between God and man 
 as they will exist in the consummate life 
 at the end. Judaism had lost the sense 
 for this, had shifted the center of gravity 
 from God to man ; in Jesus' teaching the 
 proper relation was restored. To him 
 the kingdom exists there, where not 
 merely God is supreme, for that is true 
 
86 The Kmgdo7n and the Church 
 
 at all times and under all circumstances, 
 but where God supernaturally carries 
 through his supremacy against all oppos- 
 ing powers and brings man to the willing 
 recognition of the same. It is a state of 
 things in which everything converges 
 and tends towards God as the highest 
 
 ^good. 
 
 The closing words of the Lord's 
 
 ' Prayer, according to the version in 
 Matthew, are the purest expression of 
 this kingdom-consciousness which Jesus 
 desired to cultivate in the minds of his 
 disciples : ' * Thine is the kingdom, and the 
 power, and the glory, for ever." Even 
 if these words should not be authentic, 
 since they are wanting in the text of Luke, 
 and in the text of Matthew in some im- 
 portant authorities, whence the Revised 
 Version places them in the margin, still 
 they retain their weight as a very ancient 
 witness to the conception of the kingdom 
 in the early church. It will be observed 
 that Paul in 1 Cor. xv, where he speaks 
 
The Sphere of Saving Power 87 
 
 of the delivering up of the kingdom by 
 Christ to the Father, describes the con- 
 tent of the final kingdom of God in pre- 
 cisely the same way as consisting in this 
 that ^^ God will be all in all,'' vs. 28, cf. 
 also Rev. xi. 15. Because the kingdom 
 is thus centered in God himself, it can be 
 represented by our Lord as the supreme 
 object of human pursuit This would 
 plainly be impossible if the idea of the 
 kingdom was conceived on any lower 
 plane, for in that case some other object 
 would be interposed between God and 
 man as the absolute end of man's reli- 
 gious aspiration. Because the kingdom 
 of God means the ideal of religion in 
 this highest sense realized, Jesus de- 
 clared the scribe to be not far from the 
 kingdom, because the latter recognized 
 the commandment to love God with all 
 the heart, all the soul, all the strength, 
 and all the mind as the supreme com- 
 mandment, Mk. xiv. 34. In Matt. vi. 
 33 the seeking after the kingdom is op- 
 
SS The Kingdom and the CJntrch 
 
 posed to the seeking after earthly things, 
 because it is at the bottom the seeking 
 after God himself. And the same God- 
 centered view, which thus finds expres- 
 sion in the thought of the kingdom, is 
 also the highest aspect under which Jesus 
 views his entire work in the discourses 
 of the Fourth Gospel. Here Christ at 
 the close of his ministry speaks to the 
 Father: ** I glorified thee on the earth, 
 having accomplished the work which 
 thou hast given me to do," xvii. 4. We 
 find, therefore, that though the name 
 kingdom is absent, the main idea em- 
 bodied in it is found in John as well as 
 in the Synoptists. The principle thus 
 disclosed is of the greatest conceivable 
 practical significance. It teaches that 
 in the very order of things provided for 
 the salvation of mankind, everything is 
 in its ultimate analysis designed to glorify 
 God. The kingdom is a conception 
 which must of necessity remain unintel- 
 ligible and unacceptable to every view of 
 
The Sphere of Saving Power 89 
 
 the world and of religion which magni- 
 fies man at the expense of God. J 
 The supremacy of God in the king"^ 
 dom reveals itself in various ways. It 
 comes to light in the acts by which the 
 kingdom is established, in the moral 
 order under which it exists, in the spirit- 
 ual blessings, privileges and delights that 
 are enjoyed in it. The first constitute 
 the kingdom a sphere of divine power, 
 the second a sphere of divine righteous- 
 ness, the third a sphere of divinely be- 
 stowed blessedness. These rubrics are 
 not, of course, so many sections into 
 which the content of the kingdom can 
 be divided, but rather so many aspects 
 under which it may be considered. 
 What is kingdom-power from one point 
 of view is kingdom-righteousness from 
 another and kingdom-blessedness from 
 still a third. The exercise of powder is 
 needed to render possible the realization 
 of righteousness, the realization of right- 
 eousness to render possible the bestowal 
 
90 The Kingdom and the Church 
 
 of blessedness. Remembering the de- 
 scriptive character and the practical pur- 
 pose of our Lord's teaching we should 
 not endeavor to draw any hard and fast 
 lines, but make allowance for the easy 
 passing over of one aspect into the other. 
 The element of power is one of the 
 earliest and most constant elements in 
 the Biblical disclosure of the divine king- 
 ship. The Song of Moses celebrates 
 Jehovah as King because he has glori- 
 ously overcome his enemies, Ex. xv. 
 And from these ancient times onward 
 the note of conquest is never absent from 
 the Old Testament utterances regarding 
 the kingdom. Especially in Daniel the 
 kingdom is presented from this side, 
 when it appears as a stone breaking to 
 pieces the image of the world-kingdoms 
 ii. 45. How familiar this idea was to 
 the Apostle Paul we may gather from 
 his words in 1 Cor. xv. 25, "' For he 
 (Christ) must reign, till he (God) hath 
 put all his enemies under his feet." 
 
The Sphere of Saving Power 91 
 
 Here the kingship of Christ is equivalent 
 to the process of subjecting one enemy 
 after another. After the last enemy, 
 death, has been conquered, there is no 
 further need for the kingdom of Christ : 
 hence it is delivered up to God the 
 Father. Christ's kingdom as a process of 
 conquest precedes the final kingdom of 
 God as a settled permanent state. 
 
 To the Jewish conception of the coming 
 kingdom also this feature was essential. 
 What our Lord did was to give to this 
 Jewish mode of representation an in- 
 finitely higher content, while formally 
 retaining it. He lifted it out of the po- 
 litical sphere into the spiritual. The con- 
 quests to which he refers are those over 
 Satan and the demons, over sin and evil. 
 It is kingdom against kingdom, but both 
 of these opposing kingdoms belong to a 
 higher world than that to which Rome 
 and her empire belong. In the words, 
 " If I by the Spirit of God cast out de- 
 mons, then the kingdom of God has 
 
92 The Kingdom and the Church 
 
 come upon you," already commented 
 upon in another connection, our Lord 
 refers to the forth-putting of this divine 
 conquering power as a sure sign of the 
 coming of the kingdom. 
 
 But we must broaden this idea : not 
 merely the casting out of demons, all 
 the miracles of Jesus find their interpre- 
 tation at least in part from this, that they 
 are manifestations of the kingdom-power. 
 It is a mistake to think that Jesus looked 
 upon them exclusively as signs authen- 
 ticating his mission. Undoubtedly this 
 was one of the purposes for which the 
 miracles were intended, and it is brought 
 out prominently in the Fourth Gospel. 
 But in the Synoptists, where the teach- 
 ing of Jesus is centered in the kingdom- 
 idea, the miracles do not appear primarily 
 in this light. Here they are signs in a 
 different sense, viz., signs of the actual 
 arrival of the kingdom, because they 
 show that the royal power of God is al- 
 ready in motion. He rebukes the people 
 
The Sphere of Saving Powey 93 
 
 because they can interpret the signs of 
 the weather, but cannot interpret the 
 signs of the times. These signs of the 
 times are nothing else than the miracu- 
 lous works which prove the kingdom to ! 
 be there. The forces which will rev- 
 olutionize heaven and earth are already 
 at work. 
 
 On the same principle Jesus answered I 
 the inquiry of John the Baptist, as to 
 whether he were the one that was to 
 come, or they should expect another, 
 with a reference to his Messianic works : 
 " The blind receive their sight, and the 
 lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and 
 the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up, 
 and the poor have good tidings preached 
 unto them," Matt. xi. 5. The Messianic 
 works are the works which inaugurate 
 the kingdom. Still more clearly this 
 appears from the discourse in the syna- 
 gogue at Nazareth recorded by Luke, 
 which had for its text the prophecy of 
 Isaiah : ** The Spirit of the Lord is upon 
 
94 The Kingdom and the Church 
 
 me, because he anointed me to preach 
 good tidings to the poor: he hath sent 
 me to proclaim release to the captives, 
 and recovering of sight to the blind, to 
 set at liberty them that are bruised, to 
 proclaim the acceptable year of the 
 Lord," Lk. iv. 18, 19. Here the accept- 
 able year of Jehovah, the year of jubilee, 
 in v^hich all things return to their normal, 
 wholesome condition, is none other than 
 the era of the kingdom, and by the be- 
 stowal of the blessings enumerated it 
 comes. 
 
 It will be observed that the miracles 
 which Jesus wrought were with one ex- 
 ception beneficent miracles. To give a 
 sign from heaven, a sign not possessing 
 this beneficent character, he persistently 
 refused. The true signs had to be king- 
 dom-signs, exhibitions of God's royal 
 power. This power, therefore, has two 
 sides : so far as the enemies of God are 
 concerned, it is a conquering, destructive, 
 judging power ; so far as man is con- 
 
The Sphere of Saving Power 95 
 
 cerned, it is a liberating, healing, saving 
 power. In the casting out of demons 
 both sides are revealed. In the other mir- 
 acles it is chiefly the beneficent side which 
 finds expression. Jesus brings release to 
 the captives and sets at liberty those that 
 are bruised, for the satanic power not 
 only renders man miserable but also re- 
 duces him to bondage, as is even exter- 
 nally indicated by the fact that the de- 
 mons control the physical organism of 
 those possessed. 
 
 The question naturally arises, how can 
 this identification of the kingdom with 
 the efl?ects of a power working largely 
 in the physical sphere be reconciled with 
 the emphasis placed by Jesus upon the 
 spiritual nature of the kingdom. The 
 answer is that the physical evils which 
 the kingdom-power removes have a 
 moral and spiritual background. Satan 
 reigns not merely in the body, nor merely 
 in the mind pathologically considered, 
 but also in the heart and will of man as 
 
96 The Kingdom and the Church 
 
 the instigator of sin and the source of 
 moral evil. Hence Jesus made his mir- 
 acles the occasion for suggesting and 
 working the profounder change by which 
 the bonds of sin were loosed and the 
 rule of God set up anew in the entire in- 
 ner life of men. Because this real con- 
 nection exists, the physical process can 
 become symbolical of the spiritual. In 
 the Synoptical Gospels, it is true, this is 
 nowhere directly stated, although the 
 external and the internal are sometimes 
 significantly placed side by side as coordi- 
 nated parts of one identical work, Mk. 
 ii. 9. In the Fourth Gospel, however, 
 Jesus gives clearly to understand that the 
 physical acts are intended to point to cor- 
 responding spiritual acts. The healing 
 of the blind, the raising of the dead find 
 their counterpart in what he does for the 
 souls of sinners. 
 
 On the other hand, it should not be 
 overlooked that these physical signs have 
 also a connection with the kingdom in the 
 
The Sphere of Saving Power 97 
 
 external sphere itself. The miraculous 
 power is prophetic of that great kingdom- 
 power which will be exerted at the end. 
 It is especially in eschatological connec- 
 tions that a revelation of power is referred 
 to, Matt. xxiv. 30; Mk. xii. 24. All the 
 supernatural phenomena that accompa- 
 nied not merely the ministry of Jesus, but 
 characterized also the history of the apos- 
 tolic church, must be interpreted in this 
 light. It had to be shown immediately, 
 that the work inaugurated by Jesus airri«| 
 at nothing less than a supernatural reA 
 newal of the world, whereby all evil will\ 
 be overcome, a renewal of the physical! 
 as well of the spiritual world, Matt. xix. \ 
 28. Because the Old Testament had 
 treated these two as belonging inseparably 
 together, and because in reality it would 
 now appear that the two lay far apart in 
 point of time, it was all the more neces- 
 sary that some solid anticipations of the 
 eschatological change should be given. 
 Verbal prophecy was not sufficient : a 
 
98 The Kingdom and the Church 
 
 prophecy in acts was required, and this 
 the miracles furnished. In so far there is 
 an element of truth in the modern view 
 which represents Jesus as looking upon 
 the miracles as the beginning of the final 
 arrival of the kingdom. Here, as on 
 other points, our Lord's teaching warns 
 us against that excessive spiritualizing 
 tendency, to which the external world 
 becomes altogether worthless and indif- 
 ferent or even withdrawn from the direct 
 control of God. 
 
 The source of this kingdom-power is 
 according to our Lord's teaching the 
 Spirit. In the saying Matt. xii. 28 the 
 point evidently is, that where the Spirit of 
 God operates, there the kingdom of God 
 comes. To his being anointed with the 
 Spirit Jesus ascribes all his power to do 
 miracles, Lk. iv. 18. To accuse him of 
 casting out demons in league with Beel- 
 zebub is to blaspheme the Spirit, cf. for 
 the interchangeableness of the concep- 
 tions of "Spirit" and ** power," such pas- 
 
The Sphere of Saving Power 99 
 
 sages as Lk. i. 17, 35; xxiv. 19, 49; Acts 
 i. 8 ; X. 38. Indeed our Lord's references 
 to the Spirit as the author of saving acts 
 are almost entirely connected with his 
 miracles. Still it would be inaccurate, as 
 is sometimes done, to deny to Jesus the 
 idea, so beautifully worked out by Paul, 
 that the Spirit is the source of the moral 
 and religious renewal of man, the author 
 and bearer of the entire Christian life 
 with all its graces and virtues. In the 
 Fourth Gospel the presence of this idea 
 is acknowledged by all. Here our Lord 
 teaches that man must be born of water 
 and the Spirit in order to see and to enter 
 the kingdom of God. In the closing 
 discourses of this Gospel the work of the 
 Spirit as guiding all the disciples into the 
 knowledge of the truth is made very 
 prominent, and the knowledge of the 
 truth in our Lord's Johannine teaching 
 distinctly includes its moral and spiritual 
 saving apprehension and appropriation by 
 the disciples, so that the Spirit is here 
 
loo The Kingdom and the Church 
 
 brought into direct connection with the 
 ethical and religious life of man. 
 
 Even from the Synoptical sayings the 
 same idea is not entirely absent. Though 
 the Spirit may work in the sphere of the 
 miracles, yet these miracles are wrought 
 for the moral purpose of overthrowing 
 the kingdom of evil. The Spirit leads 
 Jesus into the wilderness to be tempted 
 of Satan and thus appears as pursuing the 
 end of the Messiah's moral victory over 
 the Prince of Evil. Satan exerts an evil 
 influence over man in the moral and re- 
 ligious sphere, consequently on the prin- 
 ciple of opposition the Spirit of God must 
 have been believed to exert a good in- 
 fluence. Probably also the saying of 
 Jesus, that the heavenly Father out of 
 his goodness is ready to give the Spirit 
 to his children, Lk. xi. 13, does not have 
 exclusive reference to the Spirit as the 
 source of miracles. Thus we see that 
 the first outlines of the doctrine of the 
 Spirit, as afterwards developed in apostolic 
 
The Sphere of Saving Power loi 
 
 revelation, are already drawn by Jesus. 
 The full disclosure of this doctrine could 
 not be expected then, because the full 
 bestowal of the Spirit could not come until 
 after the Saviour's death, Jno. vii. 39. 
 But in his Messianic works Jesus exhib- 
 ited in a revelation of facts the funda- 
 mental part taken by the Spirit in the sal- 
 vation of man. Thus Jesus stands at the 
 transition point between the Old Testa- 
 ment doctrine of the Spirit on the one 
 side and the full apostolic unfolding of 
 the doctrine on the other side. In the 
 Old Testament the emphasis still rests on 
 the charismatic character of the Spirit's 
 work as qualifying the office-bearers of the 
 theocracy for their task. Jesus began to 
 show how the official Spirit, which be- 
 longs to him as Messiah, becomes a 
 source of communication of the Spirit to 
 others, and that not merely for the per- 
 formance of supernatural works but also 
 for conferring the religious and moral 
 blessings of the kingdom. The part. 
 
I02 The Kingdom and the Church 
 
 however, of our Lord's teaching in which 
 the connection between the Spirit and 
 the internal aspect of the kingdom finds 
 clearest expression, and which approaches 
 most closely to the apostohc type of 
 doctrine, is that relating to the church. 
 With this we shall deal in a later chapter. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 The Essence of the Kingdom con- 
 tinued : The Kingdom in the 
 Sphere of Righteousness 
 
 /N regard to the relation between the 
 kingdom and righteousness three 
 lines of thought can be distinguished 
 in the teaching of Jesus. According to 
 the one the ideal fulfilment of the will 
 of God in man's moral life is in itself 
 a revelation of the divine supremacy, and 
 the act of declaring man righteous in it- 
 self a prerogative of the divine kingship. 
 According to the other the righteousness 
 needed by man appears as one of the 
 
 103 
 
I04 The Kijigdoni mid the Church 
 
 blessings which God in his kingdom be- 
 stows. According to still a third repre- 
 sentation the kingdom is given as a reward 
 for the practice of righteousness in this 
 life. Each of these we shall consider 
 separately. 
 
 According to the Old Testament and 
 the Semitic conception generally, the 
 kingship and the exercise of legislative 
 and judicial authority are inseparably 
 united. The modern distribution of 
 these several functions of government 
 over distinct institutions is entirely un- 
 known. The king gives laws and exe- 
 cutes laws. "To judge" and "to 
 reign" are synonymous expressions. 
 This should be kept in mind in order to 
 apprehend correctly the first aspect of 
 our Lord's teaching on righteousness as 
 related to the kingdom. Righteousness 
 is always taken by Jesus in a specific 
 sense which it obtains from the refer- 
 ence to God as Lawgiver and Judge. 
 Our modern usage of the word is often 
 
The Sphere of Right eottsitess 105 
 
 a looser one, since we are apt to associ- 
 ate with it no further thought than 
 that of what is fair and equitable, in- 
 herently just. To Jesus righteousness 
 meant all this and much more than this. 
 It meant such moral conduct and such a 
 moral state as are right when measured 
 by the supreme norm of the nature and 
 will of God, so that they form a repro- 
 duction of the latter, a revelation, as it 
 were, of the moral glory of God. 
 
 When the disciples are exhorted to let 
 their light shine before men that these 
 may see their good works and glorify 
 the Father in heaven, this thought is ex- 
 pressed in terms of fatherhood, but the 
 conception of glory involved is closely 
 allied to that of kingship. In the Lord's 
 Prayer the petition ** Thy kingdom 
 come " naturally leads on to the petition 
 "Thy will be done, as in heaven, so on 
 earth," so that the fulfilment of the will 
 of God is obviously regarded as one of 
 the principal forms in which his king- 
 
io6 The Kingdo7n and the Chitrch 
 
 ship is realized. Its consummate expres- 
 sion this principle finds in the command- 
 ment : ** Ye therefore shall be perfect, 
 as your heavenly Father is perfect," 
 Matt. V. 48. The sayings just quoted 
 affirm not merely that the norm of right- 
 eousness is to be found in God, they like- 
 wise imply that the aim of righteousness, 
 the final cause of obedience, lies in God. 
 Righteousness is to be sought from the 
 pure desire of satisfying him, who is the 
 supreme end of all moral existence. 
 
 In both these points our Lord's teach- 
 ing on righteousness was no less vitally 
 connected with his conception of the di- 
 vine kingship than with that of the divine 
 fatherhood. And in both respects we 
 must place his teaching over against the 
 principles and tendencies which were at 
 work in the Jewish ethics of the time, 
 in order fully to appreciate its profound 
 significance. The characteristic faults of 
 the Jewish ethics were formalism, casu- 
 istry, an inclination to emphasize the pro- 
 
The Sphere of Righteousness 107 
 
 hibition rather than the commandment, 
 and, worst of all, self-righteousness and 
 hypocrisy. These faults proceeded from 
 a twofold source. On the one hand, 
 Judaism had virtually become a worship 
 of the law as such. The dead letter of 
 the law had taken the place of the living 
 God. The majesty and authority of the 
 holy nature and perfect will of God were 
 no longer felt in the commandments. 
 On the other hand, the Jewish law-ob- 
 servance was self-centered, because it was 
 chiefly intended to be the instrument for 
 securing the blessedness of the coming 
 age. 
 
 Where the norm of righteousness is a 
 deified law rather than a personal law- 
 giver, and where the supreme motive for 
 obedience is a self-interested one, there 
 inevitably the faults above enumerated 
 must make their appearance. God being 
 kept at a distance, no strong need will 
 be felt for yielding more than compli- 
 ance with the law in the outward act. 
 
io8 The Kingdom and the Church 
 
 Because the ultimate root in which all 
 the commandments are one in the nature 
 and will of God is lost sight of, the law 
 will become a mere aggregate of unre- 
 lated precepts, a collection of statutory- 
 ordinances, for adjusting which to the 
 compass of the entire outward life a com- 
 plicated system of the most refined casu- 
 istry will be required. Because the con- 
 trolling motive is self-centered, the 
 escape from transgression will form a 
 more serious concern than the positive 
 fulfilment of what the spirit of the law 
 demands. Finally, where the moral life 
 is thus concentrated on the outward con- 
 duct, where the conscience does not 
 search and judge itself in the presence 
 of the personal God, who knows the 
 heart, there the sins of self-righteous- 
 ness and hypocrisy find a fertile soil for 
 development. 
 
 Such was the moral consciousness in 
 which our Lord wrought a revolution 
 by enunciating the twofold principle 
 
The Sphere of Righteousness 109 
 
 above stated. He once more made 
 the voice of the law the voice of the 
 living God, who is present in every com- 
 mandment, so absolute in his demands, 
 so personally interested in man's conduct, 
 so all-observant, that the thought of 
 yielding to him less than the whole inner 
 life, the heart, the soul, the mind, the 
 strength, can no longer be tolerated. 
 Thus quickened by the spirit of God's 
 personality, the law becomes in our 
 Lord's hands a living organism, in which 
 soul and body, spirit and letter, the 
 greater and smaller commandments are 
 to be distinguished, and which admits of 
 being reduced to great comprehensive 
 principles in whose light the weight and 
 purport of all single precepts are to be 
 intelligently appreciated. 
 
 The two great commandments are to 
 love God supremely and one's neighbor 
 as one's self, Mk. xii. 30, 31. The prac- 
 tical test of conduct is to do unto men 
 all things whatsoever one desires to have 
 
I lo The Kingdom and the Church 
 
 done to one's self, for this is the sum- 
 mary of the law and the prophets, Matt, 
 vii. 12. In case of conflict the mere 
 ceremonial must give way before the 
 ethical. Matt. v. 23, 24. There are com- 
 mandments in reference to which it is 
 sufficient to say that they should not be 
 left undone, such as the tithing of mint, 
 anise and cummin, and there are com- 
 mandments of such supreme and intrinsic 
 importance as to demand in men a posi- 
 tive and energetic determination to do 
 them, viz., the weightier matters of the 
 law, justice, mercy and faith. Matt, xxiii. 
 23. Because righteousness is a matter 
 of immediate, personal concern between 
 the soul and God, it can rest on nothing 
 else than the divinely revealed command- 
 ments, and no human tradition can bind 
 the conscience : '' Every plant which the 
 heavenly Father planted not, shall be 
 rooted up," Matt. xv. 13. Finally, 
 what alone can impart value in the sight 
 of God to any act of obedience is the 
 
The Sphere of Righteousness 1 1 1 
 
 sincerity of the heart from which it pro- 
 ceeds. Righteousness must be fruit, the 
 organic product of the life and character, 
 exponential of what is within, Matt. vii. 
 16, 20 ; xxi. 43. 
 
 All this was the result of bringing men 
 face to face with God as the righteous 
 Lawgiver and King, personally cognizant 
 of every man's conduct. In view of it, 
 it is hardly necessary to observe that our 
 Lord also represents God as the supreme 
 Judge of the moral life. To be right- 
 eous is strictly speaking equivalent to 
 being justified of God. And this ref- 
 erence to the judgment of God is to 
 Jesus not a subordinate matter, it is an 
 essential ingredient of his conception of 
 righteousness. The process of moral 
 action does not appear complete to him 
 until it receives in the divine justifying 
 sentence its crown and consummation. 
 The right to hold accountable and judge 
 ranked clearly in his mind among the 
 highest of God's royal prerogatives. On 
 
112 The Kingdom a7id the Church 
 
 this point he carefully preserved the 
 valuable kernel of truth contained in 
 the exaggerated Jewish ideas about the 
 forensic relation betw^een God and man. 
 While making much of the divine love, 
 our Lord did not suffer his emphasis on 
 this to obscure the important principle 
 of the divine justice. In correcting the 
 one-sidedness of Judaism, which had no 
 eye for the grace of God, he did not fall 
 into the opposite extreme of reducing 
 everything to the love of God. On the 
 contrary, in his teaching the two divine 
 attributes of love and justice are perfectly 
 balanced. In the well-known saying of 
 Matt. vi. 33 we can observe the close con- 
 nection he assumed between the king- 
 ship of God and his forensic righteous- 
 ness. The disciples are here urged, first 
 to make God's kingdom the object of 
 their pursuit, and then, as a closer speci- 
 fication, to seek God's righteousness. 
 By the latter is meant either the exercise 
 of God's justifying righteousness on 
 
The Sphere of RigJiteoitsness 1 1 3 
 
 man's behalf, or that righteousness as a 
 human state, which is counted before 
 God. On either view, the kingship of 
 God and the exercise of forensic right- 
 eousness are intimately associated. 
 
 The supreme importance w^hich Jesus 
 in virtue of this God-centered concep- 
 tion attached to righteousness may be in- 
 ferred from the fact that its pursuit is 
 spoken of in equally absolute terms as the 
 seeking of the kingdom. It is the high- 
 est concern of the disciple. He must 
 hunger and thirst after it, treat it as the 
 very sustenance of his life, the only thing 
 that will satisfy his most instinctive desires. 
 He must submit to persecution for its 
 sake. Matt v. 6, 10. All this becomes 
 intelligible only on the assumption that 
 to Jesus the question of right and wrong 
 was not a purely moral, but in the 
 deepest sense a religious question. His 
 teaching on righteousness means the 
 subsumption of ethics under religion. 
 
 We need not wonder that with such a 
 
1 1 4 The Kingdom and the Church 
 
 sublime conception of what righteous- 
 ness impUed, even this aspect of the 
 kingdom, in which formally at least, it 
 closely resembled the Jewish idea of the 
 already existing reign of God through 
 the law, appeared nevertheless to Jesus 
 as something future. The kingdom had 
 yet to come, because it consisted in an 
 observance of the law conformed to an 
 altogether new ideal, practised in an al- 
 together new spirit. Something far 
 greater and higher stood before his mind 
 than had ever been contemplated by the 
 mind of Judaism. Thus the God-cen- 
 tered ideal of righteousness itself prepared 
 the way for the second line of thought 
 traceable in our Lord's teaching on the 
 subject, viz., that righteousness is one of 
 the blessings to be bestowed in the king- 
 dom. For this there was an Old Testa- 
 ment basis. The prophets had predicted 
 that the lawgiving function of Jehovah's 
 kingship would enter upon a new stage 
 in the Messianic age. According to 
 
The Sphere of Righteousness 1 1 5 
 
 Jeremiah God will then write his law 
 upon the hearts of the people, xxxi. 33. 
 According to Ezekiel he will make Israel 
 to walk in his statutes, xxxvi. 27. The 
 prophecies in the second part of Isaiah's 
 book promise an impartation of righteous- 
 ness to the people of God as a result of 
 a new marvelous disclosure of Jehovah's 
 own righteousness in the future. Jesus, 
 who derived so many evangelical ideas 
 from the last-mentioned source, may 
 have had these prophecies in mind, when 
 in the Sermon on the Mount he spoke of 
 such as hunger and thirst after righteous- 
 ness. Is. Iv. 1. At any rate the other 
 beatitudes show that the state of mind 
 here described is a receptive rather than 
 a productive one. The hungering and 
 thirsting stand on a line with the poor 
 and the meek, they are conscious of 
 not possessing the desired good in them- 
 selves and look to God for supplying it. 
 When they are satisfied, this is due not 
 to their own effort but to an act of God. 
 
1 1 6 The Kingdom and the Church 
 
 The same thought is indirectly expressed 
 in the *' seeking " of righteousness com- 
 manded in Matt. vi. 33. In the parable 
 of the Pharisee and publican the term 
 ** justification " is applied to an acceptance 
 of man by God not based on self-right- 
 eous works, but on penitence and trust in 
 the divine mercy. 
 
 It would be historically unwarranted 
 to read into these utterances the whole 
 doctrine of the imputed righteousness of 
 Christ. It was impossible for Jesus to 
 develop this doctrine with any degree of 
 explicitness, because it was to be based on 
 his own atoning death, which still lay in 
 the future. Our Lord speaks of a state 
 of righteousness before God to be con- 
 ferred as a part of the coming kingdom. 
 How far this will be done by imputation, 
 how far it will also be done by changing 
 the heart and life of men so as to pro- 
 duce works which God will be able in 
 principle to approve in his judgment, 
 which of these two will be the basis of 
 
The Sphere of Righteousness 1 1 7 
 
 the other is not clearly explained. Our 
 Lord's doctrine is the bud in which the 
 two conceptions of a righteousness im- 
 puted and a righteousness embodied in 
 the sanctified life of the believer still lie 
 enclosed together. Still it should not be 
 overlooked, that in more than one re- 
 spect Jesus prepared the way for Paul 
 by enunciating principles to which the 
 latter's teaching could attach itself. He 
 emphasized that in the pursuit of right- 
 eousness the satisfaction of God should 
 be man's supreme concern. This, car- 
 ried out to its ultimate consequences with 
 reference to sinful man, could not but 
 lead to the conception of a righteousness 
 provided by God himself in the perfect 
 life and atoning death of Christ. He 
 also affirmed that the righteousness re- 
 quired of the disciples was of an infinitely 
 higher kind than that possessed by the 
 Scribes and Pharisees, something as new 
 and unprecedented as the kingdom itself, 
 and thus raised the problem as to how this 
 
1 1 8 The Kingdom and the Church 
 
 unique standing before God was to be 
 acquired. Still further, he gave to un- 
 derstand that this righteousness was at- 
 tainable by the disciples only, so that it 
 must be held to rest on a previous state 
 of acceptance by God, determined by his 
 fatherhood and grace. 
 
 The third representation connects the 
 kingdom with righteousness practised in 
 this life as a reward. Here obviously the 
 kingdom denotes not the kingship of 
 God, but the entire complex of resulting 
 blessings, and that as they will be be- 
 stowed in the last day. Thus in Matt, 
 v. 20, the possession of a righteousness 
 exceeding that of the Scribes and Phari- 
 sees appears as a prerequisite for enter- 
 ing the kingdom. The same idea un- 
 derlies the numerous passages that speak 
 of a future reward. It has been asserted 
 that Jesus retained this whole line of 
 thought, because he had not fully eman- 
 cipated himself from the fundamental 
 error of Judaism, according to which 
 
The Sphere of Righteousness 119 
 
 everything in religion revolved around 
 the ideas of merit and rew^ard. The 
 charge, if well-founded, would be a se- 
 rious one, for the principle in question, 
 far from appearing in isolated sayings 
 only, prevades the entire teaching of 
 Jesus. The disciple's life is depicted 
 throughout as a labor in the vineyard, at 
 the plow, in the harvest-field, in the 
 household. Treasures can be laid up in 
 heaven. 
 
 In order to solve this difficulty it is 
 necessary sharply to distinguish. The 
 first thing to remember is that we have 
 no right to declare the desire for re- 
 ward as a motive in ethical conduct 
 unworthy of a high standard of morality 
 and therefore unworthy of the better 
 element in our Lord's own teaching. 
 This would be the case only, if it figured 
 as the only or the supreme motive, and 
 if other motives of a disinterested God- 
 centered kind did not exist side by side 
 with or above it. If our Lord appealed 
 
1 20 The Kingdom and the Church 
 
 to the fear of punishment as a deterrent 
 from evil, why should he not have ap- 
 pealed to the desire for blessedness and 
 reward as an incentive to the good? 
 May we not believe that Jesus himself 
 was strengthened in enduring his suffer- 
 ing by the prospect of the promised 
 glory ? cf. Heb. xii. 2. Does anybody 
 think that in his case this interfered in 
 the least with his making it his meat and 
 his drink to do the Father's will ? 
 
 Secondly, it should be emphasized that 
 the stimulus afforded by the promise of 
 reward need not appeal to the lower, 
 sensual instincts, as but too often it did 
 in the Jewish mind, but may equally well 
 address itself to the highest, spiritual de- 
 sires. In this respect our Lord's teach- 
 ing moves on the highest conceivable 
 plane. The pure in heart shall see God, 
 those that hunger and thirst after right- 
 eousness shall be completely satisfied with 
 the same, the peacemakers shall be called 
 sons of God. These second clauses 
 
The Sphere of Righteousness 121 
 
 in the beatitudes describe the essence of 
 the final kingdom in which the reward 
 will consist. They show, therefore, that 
 the reward towards which Jesus points 
 his followers is not something morally 
 or spiritually indifferent, but the highest 
 enjoyment of what here already consti- 
 tutes the natural blessedness pertaining 
 to the internal kingdom. Thus the re- 
 ward bears an organic relation to the 
 conduct it is intended to crown. 
 
 Still further, we must observe that 
 there is a fundamental difference between 
 the manner in which Judaism conceived 
 of the principle of reward and Jesus' 
 conception of the same as regards the 
 necessity with which this principle was 
 believed to operate. According to the 
 Jews this was a legal necessity ; the ful- 
 filment of the law being inherently 
 worthy of and entitled to the reward 
 following it. Hence also there existed 
 between the two a ratio of strict equiva- 
 lence, so much being given for so much. 
 
122 The Kingdom and the Church 
 
 Jesus plainly taught that between God 
 and man no such commercial relation 
 can exist, not merely because this is im- 
 possible on account of man's sin, but for 
 the deeper reason, that God's absolute 
 sovereignty precludes it even under the 
 conditions of human rectitude, because 
 God as God is entitled, apart from every 
 contract or stipulation of reward, to all 
 the service or obedience man can render. 
 The disciples are ** unprofitable serv- 
 ants," even after they have done every- 
 thing required of them, Lk. xvii. 10. 
 They are *' unprofitable " not in the 
 sense that their labors are useless, but in 
 the sense that they can do no more for 
 God their owner, than he can naturally ex- 
 pect of them. In the parable, the talents, 
 for the increase of which the servants are 
 rewarded, are not originally their own 
 but entrusted to them by their Lord. 
 As a result the relation of pure equiva- 
 lence between what is done and what 
 is received is entirely abolished. The 
 
The Sphere of Righteousness 123 
 
 reward will far exceed the righteousness 
 which precedes it. He that is faithful 
 over a few things will be set over many 
 things, nay over all things, Matt. xxiv. 
 47 ; XXV. 21, 23. He who receives a 
 prophet or a righteous man obtains a re- 
 ward as great as that of the prophet and 
 the righteous men, Matt. x. 41, 42. 
 Restitution will be a hundredfold for 
 things given up, Mk. x. 30. And the 
 parable of the laborers in the vineyard 
 teaches that in its ultimate analysis the re- 
 ward is a free gift, whence also the one 
 who has labored but a little while can 
 receive the full wages, Matt. xx. 1-16 ; 
 cf. Lk. xvii. 10. 
 
 We see, therefore, that Jesus, though 
 giving a large place to the idea of reward 
 in his teaching, keeps this idea in strict 
 subordination to the two higher princi- 
 ples of the divine sovereignty and the 
 divine grace, in other words to the di- 
 vine kingship and the divine fatherhood. 
 In the latter respect as well as in the 
 
1 24 The Kingdom and the Church 
 
 former the relation between God and 
 the disciples does not admit of the giving 
 or receiving of rewards on the strictly 
 commercial basis. The Father, as Father, 
 gives to the little flock the kingdom, and 
 in general bestows good gifts upon his 
 children. What can be called wages 
 from one point of view is a gracious gift 
 from another, cf. Matt. v. 46 with Lk. 
 vi. 32, 35. The reward serves simply 
 the purpose of affording an incentive to 
 the disciples' zeal. Though the king- 
 dom itself is inherited by all, and inherited 
 by grace, there will be individual degrees 
 in the glory which it involves for each 
 disciple, because the ultimate issue can- 
 not but be determined by the progress 
 in righteousness made here below. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 The Essence of the Kingdom con- 
 tinued : The Kingdom as a State 
 of Blessedness 
 
 T TT^^ have already seen, that not 
 1^1^ the thought of man's welfare, 
 but that of the glory of God was 
 supreme in our Lord's teaching concern- 
 ing the kingdom. While emphasizing 
 this, we must not forget, however, that 
 to him this thought was inseparably con- 
 nected with the idea of the greatest 
 conceivable blessedness for man. That 
 God should reign was in his view so 
 much the only natural, normal state of 
 
 125 
 
1 26 The Kingdom and the Church 
 
 things, that he could not conceive 
 of any true happiness apart from it, nor 
 of it without a concomitant state of happi- 
 ness for those who give to God the first 
 and the highest place. This is in general 
 the connection between the kingship of 
 God as a rule over man, and the king- 
 dom of God as a possession for man, a 
 connection not obscurely indicated in 
 the saying, Matt. vi. 33. With the king- 
 ship of God all other things must come, 
 for, as Paul later expressed it : '' If God 
 be for us, who shall be against us ? " 
 That this thought is not more fre- 
 quently and more directly formulated 
 admits of easy explanation. In deriv- 
 ing the state of blessedness from the 
 character and will of God it was so 
 natural to think of the divine father- 
 hood as its source, that the reference 
 to God's kingship would scarcely sug- 
 gest itself. Accordingly we find that 
 the kingdom as a state of blessedness is 
 represented as the Father's gift to the 
 
A State of Blessedness 127 
 
 little flock rather than that of the King, 
 Lk. xii. 32; cf. also Matt. xx. 32. It 
 was quite possible, however, to reach 
 the idea of blessedness by way of direct 
 inference from that of the divine king- 
 ship. The Oriental king often bestows 
 with royal munificence all manner of 
 gifts upon his subjects. Illustrations of 
 this both from sacred and other history 
 will easily occur. Thus Jesus also speaks 
 of the kingdom under the figure of a 
 banquet prepared by the king as a mar- 
 riage feast for his son, Matt. xxii. 2. 
 Nor should it be forgotten that the 
 kingdom had been for Israel the instru- 
 ment of gracious help in times of dis- 
 tress and a source of great national pros- 
 perity. The kingship had been in its 
 ideal intent, and to some extent, at least 
 in its better days, also in effect a demo- 
 cratic institution, to which the poor and 
 the oppressed and miserable looked for 
 aid and protection. There was there- 
 fore an easy transition from the idea of 
 
1 28 The Kingdom and the Church 
 
 kingship to that of grace and salva- 
 tion. 
 
 The inestimable value of the kingdom 
 from man's point of view finds clearest 
 expression in the parable of the treasure 
 in the field and the pearl of great price. 
 In both cases it is emphasized that the 
 finder sells all his possessions in order to 
 secure this one transcendent good, cf. 
 Matt. xix. 12 ; Mk. ix. 43-47 ; Lk. xviii. 
 29. That God himself regards the king- 
 dom in this light appears from the fact of 
 his having prepared it for his own from 
 eternity, Matt. xxv. 34. The prepara- 
 tion from eternity shows, that the king- 
 dom is the supreme embodiment of the 
 divine gracious purpose. Hence also the 
 kingdom is said to be ** inherited." Be- 
 cause the kingdom thus includes all that 
 is truly valuable and precious, our Lord 
 in connection with the kingdom-parables 
 pronounces the disciples blessed who see 
 and hear the truth concerning it. In do- 
 ing this they are brought into immediate 
 
A State of Blessedness 129 
 
 contact with the fulfilment of all the Old 
 Testament promises. What many proph- 
 ets and righteous men in vain desired to 
 see and hear, is theirs in actual possession, 
 Matt. xiii. 16, 17. 
 
 Looked at concretely, the blessings 
 in which the kingdom consists are 
 partly negative, partly positive in charac- 
 ter. Negatively, the kingdom includes 
 the deliverance from all evil. Fore- 
 most among the blessings pertaining 
 to this side stands the forgiveness of sins. 
 Prophecy had already spoken of this as 
 an important element in the blessedness 
 of the Messianic age, Jer. xxxi. 34. That 
 Jesus considered this not merely as a prep- 
 aration for the kingdom, but counted it 
 of the very substance of the same may be 
 seen from Matt, xviii. 23 ff., where the 
 kingdom of heaven is likened unto a cer- 
 tain king, who graciously forgives the 
 debt of his servant and releases him. 
 Hence also the sequence in the Lord's 
 Prayer, where the petition for the com- 
 
130 The Kingdom and the Church 
 
 ing of the kingdom is followed first by 
 that for the accomplishment of the will 
 of God and next by that for the forgive- 
 ness of debts. Positively there corre- 
 sponds to this the gift of righteousness, 
 which cannot but carry with itself a sense 
 of the highest spiritual delight and satis- 
 faction for those who obtain it. The 
 mind relieved from the burden of sin and 
 assured of the divine acceptance enters 
 upon a state of profound peace and rest, 
 Matt. xi. 28, 29 ; Mk. v. 34 ; Lk. vii. 50. 
 The positive side of the blessedness re- 
 ceived in the kingdom is chiefly described 
 in the two important conceptions of son- 
 ship and of life. On these, therefore, 
 we must briefly dwell at this point. 
 While the two attributes of kingship and 
 fatherhood mark two distinct elements in 
 Jesus' conception of God, he certainly 
 did not place them wide apart, much less 
 regard them as intrinsically opposed to 
 each other. The ease with which he 
 passes over from the one to the other, 
 
A State of Blessedness 131 
 
 e. g., in the opening words of the Lord's 
 Prayer, shows that to his mind the two 
 are perfectly harmonious attributes of the 
 divine nature. There is a sense in which 
 the effects of God's fatherhood can be 
 subsumed under the kingdom-idea. As 
 on the one hand the kingship might 
 frequently originate through extension of 
 the patriarchal authority beyond the lim- 
 its of the tribe, so on the other hand the 
 king could continue to sustain the relation 
 of a father to his people. In point of 
 fact the Old Testament represents Je- 
 hovah as by one and the same act becom- 
 ing Israel's King and Israel's Father, viz., 
 by the deliverance of the exodus, Ex. iv. 
 22 ; Deut. xxxii. 6 ; Isa. xliii. 15. 
 
 That the place which belongs to son- 
 ship as one of the blessings of the king- 
 dom is not always recognized with suffi- 
 cient clearness finds its explanation in a 
 widely current misunderstanding of our 
 Lord's teaching on sonship. He is fre- 
 quently interpreted as teaching the in- 
 
132 The Kingdom and the Church 
 
 discriminate sonship of all men. Sonship 
 then would be something which did not 
 in any sense originate with the redemp- 
 tive relation to God or with the kingdom 
 of God. It is easy here to go to an ex- 
 treme as well in absolutely denying as in 
 indiscriminately affirming that our Lord 
 made men the sons of God by nature. 
 Some of his utterances, like the parable 
 of the prodigal son, plainly imply that 
 notwithstanding the sinner's estrange- 
 ment from God a filial relationship con- 
 tinues to exist. The whole trend of his 
 teaching is that redemption restores what 
 has been disturbed by sin. But, granting 
 this, we must not overlook two important 
 considerations which would inevitably 
 lead him to emphasize the newness of 
 the sonship which is enjoyed in the re- 
 demptive state. On the one hand, Jesus 
 had too profound a knowledge of the se- 
 riousness of sin not to recognize that it 
 must render man unworthy and incapable 
 of sonship in the full, original sense. On 
 
A State of Blessedness 133 
 
 the other hand, he had also too high a 
 conception of the transcendent perfection 
 of the kingdom not to find in it in this 
 respect as well as in others something 
 that would far surpass any religious priv- 
 ilege that man could call his own by 
 nature. The kingdom neutralizes the 
 effects of sin, but it does far more than 
 this. It carries man to the highest limit 
 of knowledge and love and service and 
 enjoyment of God of which he is capable, 
 and nothing less than the attainment of 
 this our Lord associates with the term 
 "sonship." The words recorded in Lk. 
 XX. 36, ** They are equal unto the angels ; 
 and are sons of God, being sons of the 
 resurrection," suffice to show that sonship 
 to God appeared to him as the acme 
 rather than as the common level of re- 
 ligious privilege, cf. also Matt. v. 9. 
 
 And not only the sonship of man, even 
 the fatherhood of God admits of this high 
 and exclusive application. For Jesus 
 constantly speaks to the disciples of " your 
 
134 ^^^^ Kingdom and the Church 
 
 Father," Matt. vi. 32. " The Father " in 
 the Synoptical Gospels always denotes 
 God in relation to ** the Son," i. e., Jesus 
 specifically. In the Fourth Gospel, 
 where ^^ The Father" is also used with 
 reference to the disciples generally, this 
 is not based on a conception of universal 
 fatherhood, but on the thought that the 
 relation originally existing between God 
 and Jesus is extended to the disciples 
 likewise. This, therefore, is the most 
 emphatic assertion of the unique value of 
 sonship. And this value was not confined 
 in our Lord's estimation to the moral 
 sphere, as one-sided modern representa- 
 tions sometimes make out. Sonship in- 
 volves more than moral likeness to God, 
 although this is of course one of its chief 
 elements. Its rich religious meaning 
 may be best perceived from the jubilant 
 words in which Jesus speaks of his own 
 filial relation to the Father, Matt. xi. 
 27, which, while unique in one sense, 
 must yet bear a general resemblance to 
 
A State of Blessedness 135 
 
 the sonship of the disciples. The most 
 perfect mutual knowledge, the most di- 
 rect communion of life, the most absolute 
 unity of purpose, the joint possession of 
 consummate blessedness and peace be- 
 tween God and man, all this forms part 
 of the sonship in which the kingdom 
 consists. The highest gift that can be 
 bestowed on the pure in heart is that 
 in the final kingdom they shall have 
 the beatific filial vision of God face to 
 face. 
 
 The second comprehensive term by 
 which Jesus describes the blessedness of 
 the kingdom is that of life. The Old 
 Testament idea of life has for its promi- 
 nent characteristics not so much the ele- 
 ments of growth and activity but rather 
 those of prosperity and happiness in the 
 possession of the favor of God. To this 
 our Lord in his Synoptical teaching in the 
 main adheres ; only, in harmony with the 
 prevailing Jewish usage, he projects the 
 idea into the future, life being here 
 
136 The Kingdom and the Church 
 
 equivalent to the sum total of the bless- 
 ings and enjoyments of the final kingdom. 
 Still even in the Synoptical teaching we 
 find life occasionally spoken of as a pres- 
 Vy ent religious possession, and, therefore, 
 j\ as in its very essence a spiritual state, 
 V Matt. viii. 22 ; Lk. xv. 24, 32 ; xx. 38. 
 A present kingdom necessarily carries 
 with itself a present enjoyment of life. 
 And in the same degree as this is the case 
 life also tends to become a life in the sub- 
 jective sense of the word, a name for the 
 believer's spiritual growth and activity, 
 something to be **lived" as well as 
 ''inherited." In the discourses of the 
 Fourth Gospel we can clearly observe 
 how our Lord developes the idea in these 
 two directions. His classical definition 
 of life is found in the so-called high- 
 priestly prayer : to know the only true 
 God, and him whom he did send, even 
 Jesus Christ, Jno. xvii. 3. The knowl- 
 edge of God here spoken of is, of 
 course, something which in principle 
 
A State of Blessedness 137 
 
 is already imparted in the present, 
 although its consummate possession still 
 lies in the future. It is a knowledge 
 which is far more than mere intellectual 
 cognition : it includes that practical ac- 
 quaintance, that affectionate apprehen- 
 sion, which arise from congeniality of 
 nature and the highest spiritual love. 
 Hence what introduces into it is not a 
 process of instruction, but a birth from 
 above, or a re-birth, whereby the funda- 
 mental character is changed, so that from 
 flesh, which naturally lives for this lower, 
 earthly, sensual world, it becomes spirit, 
 which naturally lives for the world of 
 heaven and for God. Because Jesus 
 is the personal representative and em- 
 bodiment of this heavenly life on 
 earth, he is the way unto God, Jno. 
 xiv. 6. 
 
 We see, therefore, how thoroughly 
 this life, which constitutes man's blessed 
 possession of the kingdom, is dominated 
 by the thought of communion with God, 
 
138 The Kitigdom and the Church 
 
 as its chief source of enjoyment. In 
 principle, however, the same thing is 
 implied in some of the Synoptical say- 
 ings cited above, which approach the 
 conception of life as something to be 
 developed in man. When the prod- 
 igal in his hunger remembers the riches 
 of his Father's house, he is said to have 
 *' come to himself." His return to the 
 Father is described as a change from 
 death into life : ** This thy brother was 
 dead, and is alive again, and was lost and 
 is found," Lk. xv. 32. Thus the re- 
 adoption to sonship and the restoration 
 to life are seen to coincide. If Jesus 
 found in both the essence of the king- 
 dom-privilege and kingdom-blessedness, 
 which can be enjoyed on earth, we 
 cannot doubt, that he also regarded 
 them as supreme among the treasures 
 and delights of the final kingdom. As 
 the point of departure for his kingdom- 
 conception lay in God, in the active ex- 
 ercise of God's royal sway, so its point 
 
A State of Blessedness 139 
 
 of arrival lies in God, in God's gift of 
 himself to man for everlasting possession. 
 It is the teaching of Jesus, as well as of 
 Paul, that from God and through God 
 and unto God are all things. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 The Kingdom and the Church 
 
 rHE conception of the kingdom is 
 common to all periods of our 
 Lord's teaching, that of the 
 I \ church emerges only at two special points 
 V^ of his ministry as recorded in Matt. xvi. 
 18 and xviii. 17. The second of these 
 two passages refers to the church quite 
 incidentally, and, even if it speaks of the 
 Christian church and not, as some have 
 thought, of the Jewish ecclesiastical or- 
 ganization, throws no further light on 
 the conception. The first on the other 
 hand deals with the church for the ex- 
 140 
 
The Church 141 
 
 press purpose of introducing it as some- 
 thing new, of describing its character 
 and defining its relation to the kingdom. 
 We are fortunate in having so explicit a 
 statement of our Lord on this important 
 matter. The subject should, of course, 
 be approached historically. We must 
 ask ourselves what there was in the 
 situation of that particular juncture of 
 our Lord's ministry that will account for 
 this solitary and significant declaration 
 about the church. Simon Peter had just 
 made his important confession, *' Thou 
 art the Christ, the Son of the living God." 
 Our Lord thereupon announces that 
 upon Peter, as the first confessor of his 
 Messiahship in the face of the unbelief 
 of the majority of the people, he w^ill 
 build his church, his ecclesia. The sup- 
 position is not that Peter has here for the 
 first time reached this conviction regard- 
 ing the Messianic dignity of Jesus, nor 
 even that here for the first time utter- 
 ance was given to such conviction. Un- 
 
142 The Kingdom and the Church 
 
 less we must disbelieve all our Gospels, 
 both had taken place on earlier occasions. 
 But the momentous significance of the 
 present confession lay in this, that it was 
 made at a juncture where many, who 
 had previously followed Jesus, had for- 
 saken him. It is the rock- character, the 
 steadfastness of Peter that is praised by 
 Jesus, that, when others wavered, he 
 had remained true to his conviction. 
 The revelation he had received from the 
 Father in heaven was not the first disclo- 
 sure of Jesus' Messiahship, but a revela- 
 tion which enabled him, in distinction 
 from the multitude, to discern in Jesus 
 the true attributes of Messiahship, not- 
 withstanding the outward appearance to 
 the contrary, 
 i Peter's confession, therefore, was dis- 
 tinctly a confession which stood in con- 
 trast with the rejection of Jesus by others. 
 From this we may gather, that the 
 church of which Jesus speaks will have 
 for its peculiarity the recognition of the 
 
The Church 143 
 
 Messiahship of Jesus in contradistinction 
 from the denial of this Messiahship by 
 those without. But this follows not 
 only from the situation in which the 
 words were spoken, we may also draw 
 the same conclusion from the tenor of 
 the words themselves. When Jesus 
 says ** I will build my church," he evi- 
 dently places this church over against 
 another, to which this designation does 
 not apply. The word Ecclesia is the 
 rendering of the Hebrew words Qahal 
 and ' Edah, which latter were the standing 
 names for the congregation of Israel. In 
 such a connection **my church" can 
 mean nothing else than ** the church 
 which by recognizing me as Messiah will 
 take the place of the present Jewish 
 church." "^ 
 
 It would be a mistake, however, to\ 
 suppose that the new church will rest 
 exclusively on a subjective belief regard- 
 ing the Messiahship of Jesus. Our Lord 
 says emphatically *' I will build," and 
 
144 ^^^^ Kingdom and the Church 
 
 thereby appropriates for himself the 
 objective task of calling this church into 
 existence by his Messianic acts. Though 
 Peter confessing be the foundation, the 
 church is not of Peter's or of any human 
 making, the Lord himself will build it. 
 And not only this, he will supremely 
 rule in it, for out of the fulness of his 
 authority he immediately proceeds to in- 
 vest Peter with the power of the keys : 
 **I will give unto thee. " Objectively con- 
 sidered, therefore, the church is that new 
 congregation taking the place of the 
 old congregation of Israel, which is 
 formed by Jesus as the Messiah and 
 stands under his Messianic rule. 
 
 Even this, however, does not fully ex- 
 haust the import of our Lord's statement. 
 It will be noticed, that he refers both 
 the building of the church and the ex- 
 ercise of his authority with regard to it 
 to the future : ** I will build " and '' I 
 will give." At the present time of 
 speaking the church is not yet ; if its 
 
The Church 145 
 
 origin and government depend on the 
 Messiahship of Jesus, then clearly this 
 Messiahship must here be taken in a 
 specific sense, the realization of which 
 also still lay in the future. Our Lord 
 can refer to nothing else than the new 
 exalted, heavenly state upon which his 
 person and work would enter through 
 his death and resurrection and seating at 
 the right hand of God. In order to 
 understand this we must remember that 
 Jesus, while in one sense conscious of 
 having Messianic authority and doing 
 Messianic work already here on earth, 
 yet in another sense regarded the exer- 
 cise of his Messianic function as begin- 
 ning with his state of glory. It was en- 
 tirely in harmony with Jesus' own point [\ 
 of view when Peter later declared that u 
 God by the resurrection had made him M 
 both Lord and Christ, Acts ii. 36. Now ^ 
 in this sense we can say that according 
 to our Lord's teaching the church could 
 not begin until after he should have en- 
 
 J 
 
146 The Kmgdoin and the Church 
 
 tered upon the exalted stage of his 
 Messiahship. That Jesus' speaking in 
 terms of the future has reference to this 
 and nothing else, may also be gathered 
 from the following fact: The Evan- 
 gelist tells us that from that announce- 
 ment concerning the church onward, 
 Jesus began to show unto his disciples 
 that he must go unto Jerusalem, and 
 suffer many things of the elders and 
 chief priests and scribes, and be killed, 
 and the third day be raised up, Matt. 
 
 ^ xvi. 21. Plainly then in his mind there 
 was a connection between the results 
 of his suffering and the origin of the 
 
 [ church. 
 
 So far we have considered our Lord's 
 words exclusively in their reference to 
 the church and not inquired into their 
 bearing upon the doctrine of the king- 
 dom. We now observe, that the church, 
 here for the first time formally intro- 
 duced, is most closely related to the king- 
 dom, which had hitherto occupied the 
 
The Church 147 
 
 foremost place in Jesus' teaching. For 
 immediately after the declaration con- 
 cerning the building of the church, our 
 Lord continues to say unto Peter : " I 
 will give unto thee the keys of the king- 
 dom of heaven ; and whatsoever thou 
 shalt bind on earth shall be bound in 
 heaven ; and whatsoever thou shalt loose 
 on earth shall be loosed in heaven," vs. 
 19. It would not be impossible, of 
 course, to give a plausible interpretation 
 of this connection on the view, that the 
 church and the kingdom are separate 
 things. Understanding the kingdom as 
 the final kingdom, and the power of the 
 keys as the power to give or deny en- 
 trance, the sense might be that to Peter, 
 as the foundation of the church, and 
 therefore to the church, had been given 
 the power in some way or other to open 
 or shut the gates of the heavenly king- 
 dom. On this view the church would 
 be distinct from the kingdom as here 
 spoken of, would indeed stand related to 
 
148 The Kingdom and the Church 
 
 it as a gate-keeper stands to a house. 
 This is, however, scarcely a possible ex- 
 egesis so far as the words of the second 
 declaration themselves are concerned. 
 The binding and loosing do not refer to 
 heaven itself, as if heaven were shut or 
 opened, but refer to certain things lying 
 within the sphere of heaven, and not of 
 heaven alone but of earth likewise. 
 
 The figure of binding and loosing will 
 have to be understood in a different 
 sense. We have the choice between in- 
 terpreting it of the binding and loosing 
 of sin, i. e. the imputation and forgive- 
 ness of sin, and interpreting it as an in- 
 stance of the common Jewish parlance 
 which employed ** to bind " in the sense 
 of ** to forbid," ** to loose " in the sense 
 of ** to allow." The former might 
 seem to be favored by Matt, xviii. 18, 
 where the same expressions occur and 
 the connection leads us to think of the 
 process of church discipline. In Matt, 
 xvi, on the other hand, there is nothing 
 
The Church 149 
 
 to indicate that the figure has this re- 
 stricted sense, on the contrary, everything 
 points to the most generalizing inter- 
 pretation that can be put upon it. The 
 keys spoken of are in all probability not 
 the keys of the outer door, but the keys 
 pertaining to the entire house, the keys 
 not of the gate-keeper, but of the house- 
 steward, and therefore symbolize the ad- 
 ministration of the affairs of the house in 
 general, cf. Isa. xxii. 22 ; Rev. iii. 7. 
 But, whichever of these two last men- 
 tioned views we may adopt, in either 
 case the kingdom of heaven appears as 
 something existing, in part at least, on 
 earth. Peter receives the keys of the 
 kingdom to bind or loose on earth. 
 What he does in the administration of 
 the kingdom here below will be recog- 
 nized in heaven. Now this promise^ 
 immediately following the declaration 
 concerning Peter as the foundation rock 
 of the church, it becomes necessary to 
 assume that in Jesus' view these two 
 
150 The Kingdom and the Church 
 
 are identified. The force of this will be 
 felt by observing that in the two state- 
 ments made the figure is essentially the 
 same, viz., that of the house. First the 
 house is represented as in process of build- 
 ing, and Peter as the foundation, then the 
 same house appears as completed and 
 Peter as invested with the keys for ad- 
 ministering its affairs. It is plainly ex- 
 cluded that the house should mean one 
 thing in the first statement and another in 
 the second. It must be possible, this 
 much we may confidently affirm, to call 
 the church the kingdom. It is another 
 question, to which we shall presently re- 
 vert, whether the kingdom can under all 
 circumstances be identified with the 
 Ichurch. 
 
 The kingdom as the church bears the 
 features of a community of men. It ap- 
 pears as a house. This character be- 
 longed to the Old Testament church for 
 which that of Jesus is substituted, it also 
 finds expression in the very name ecclesia. 
 
The Church 151 
 
 which designates the assembly of free 
 citizens called together to deliberate and 
 take action in matters pertaining to the 
 commonwealth. There are traces in 
 Jesus' earlier teaching of his having 
 viewed the kingdom under this aspect as 
 an organism of men, although the rep- 
 resentation is by no means prominent. 
 Sayings like Matt. xx. 25 ; Mk. ix. 35 ; 
 Lk. XX. 25, at least suggest the idea of 
 the kingdom as a society based on a totally 
 different principle from that governing 
 the kingdoms of this world. In point 
 of fact, Jesus gathered around himself a 
 company of disciples, and it is plausible 
 to assume that he found in their mutual 
 association the beginning of what the 
 kingdom of God was from its very na- 
 ture intended to be. The two parables 
 of the wheat and the tares and of the 
 fish-net equally imply the thought that 
 the kingdom is an aggregate of men, 
 though their point does not lie in this 
 thought as such, but in the inevitable in- 
 
152 The Kingdom and the Church 
 
 termingling of the good and bad until 
 the end. The nearest approach to the 
 later declaration about the church occurs 
 in the expression ''his kingdom" of 
 Matt. xiii. 41. This *' kingdom of the 
 Son of man" agrees with the ** church 
 of Jesus," in that both phrases make the 
 kingdom a body of men placed under the 
 Messiah as their ruler. 
 ^ From the foregoing it appears, that, if 
 the church represents an advance be- 
 yond the internal, invisible kingdom, 
 v^hich had hitherto figured so largely in 
 our Lord's teaching, the advance must 
 be sought in something else than the 
 mere fact of its being a body of disciples. 
 The advance lies in two points. In the 
 first place, the body of disciples pre- 
 viously existing must now take the place 
 of the Old Testament church and there- 
 fore receive some form of external or- 
 ganization. This the kingdom had not 
 hitherto possessed. It had been in- 
 ternal and invisible not merely in its es- 
 
The Church 153 
 
 sence, but to this essence there had 
 been lacking the outward embodiment. 
 Jesus now in speaking of the house and 
 the keys of the house, of binding and 
 loosing on earth, and of church discipline, 
 makes provision for this. In the second 
 place, our Lord gives to understand that 
 the new stage upon which his Messiah- 
 ship is now about to enter, will bring 
 to the kingdom a new influx of super- 
 natural power and thus make out of it, 
 not only externally but also internally, 
 that new thing which he calls his church. 
 It is possible to find this referred to in 
 the words about the gates of Hades, 
 which immediately follow the Lord's 
 declaration that he will build his church. 
 According to some, these words imply 
 a conflict between Hades as the realm 
 of death and the church as the sphere of 
 life. They then would mean that death 
 will not be able to conquer the church, 
 or that the church will be able to con- 
 quer death, and the ground for this 
 
154 T^^^ Kmgdorn and the Church 
 
 promise would be that Jesus will soon 
 win a victory over death and fill his 
 church with unconquerable life, Rev. i. 
 18. Probably, however, the correct ren- 
 dering is ** the gates of Hades shall not 
 surpass it." The gates of Hades seem 
 to have been a figure for the highest 
 conceivable strength, because no one can 
 break through them. On this rendering 
 our Lord simply means to say that the 
 church will not be excelled in strength 
 by the strongest that is known ; the fig- 
 ure is a further elaboration of the idea 
 that the church is built upon a rock. 
 There are, however, other sayings be- 
 longing to the same closing period of 
 our Lord's ministry, in which he predicts 
 the coming of the kingdom with a new, 
 previously unknown power. In Matt, 
 xvi. 28 ; Mk. ix. 1 ; Lk. ix. 27 ; Matt, 
 xxvi. 64 ; Mk. xiv. 62 ; Lk. xxii. 69, 
 Jesus speaks of a coming of the Son of 
 man in his kingdom, of a coming of the 
 kingdom of God with power, which 
 
The Church 155 
 
 will take place in the near future, so that 
 some of the people then living will wit- 
 ness it. A common way of interpreting ^-^ 
 these sayings is to refer them to the final \ 
 coming of the kingdom at the end of the 
 world. Those, however, who adopt this 
 view, must assume that our Lord was 
 mistaken as to the nearness of the event in 
 question and hence give up the infalli- 
 bility of his teaching. -^ 
 Another exegesis is quite possible. 
 We can interpret these sayings of the 
 coming of the kingdom in the church. 
 The strong terms in which they are 
 clothed do not absolutely forbid this. 
 It must be acknowledged that these 
 terms resemble the language in which 
 elsewhere the final coming of the king- 
 dom is spoken of. It is a coming of the 
 kingdom with power, a coming of Jesus 
 in his kingdom, even a coming of Jesus 
 with the clouds of heaven. But these 
 expressions become more easily explain- 
 able, if we endeavor to realize what the 
 
156 The Kmgdom and the Church 
 
 church in her first appearance was to be, 
 and how the humediate future presented 
 itself to Jesus from his own personal 
 point of view. In the early church 
 there were to be many extraordinary 
 manifestations of the Spirit's power, so 
 extraordinary indeed as to anticipate in 
 some respects the phenomena that will 
 be observed at the end of the world. 
 And, even apart from this, the presence 
 of the Spirit in the church in its more 
 ordinary form of operation is something 
 sufficiently marvelous and stupendous to 
 justify the strong terms employed. The 
 church actually has within herself the 
 powers of the world to come. She is 
 more than the immanent kingdom as it 
 existed before Jesus' exaltation. She 
 forms an intermediate link between the 
 present life and the life of eternity. 
 Here we can best observe how thoroughly 
 supernaturalistic our Lord's conception 
 of the church-form of the kingdom is. 
 And our Lord looked upon the appear- 
 
The Church 157 
 
 ance of this church from a point of view- 
 that was pecuHarly his own. He was to 
 be its Lord and King. Now to him 
 there was not that sharp division be- 
 tween the church-kingdom and the final 
 kingdom which there is for us who live on , 
 earth. For him the consummation of the' 
 kingdom in which all is fulfilled began 
 with his resurrection and ascension. It 
 is therefore not unnatural that he should 
 speak of this approaching state in terms, . 
 which, in themselves considered, might 
 make us think of the final coming of the 
 kingdom. 
 
 Besides these passages we have the 
 statement of Matt, xviii. 20, in which 
 our Lord promises to be present in the 
 midst of his disciples in a peculiar man- 
 ner, and which throws light upon the 
 idea of a coming of his which shall pre- 
 cede the final coming. But especially 
 do the Saviour's last discourses preserved 
 for us in the Gospel according to John 
 afford us help in apprehending his 
 
O-x 
 
 ^ 
 
 158 The Kingdom and the Church 
 
 meaning on this point. Here he plainly 
 represents himself as coming to the dis- 
 ciples in the Spirit, and that in a way 
 quite distinct from the manner in which 
 he will come at the end of the world. 
 It is a coming which the disciples will 
 witness, whilst to others he will not re- 
 veal himself. It cannot be said to refer 
 to the bodily appearances of Jesus after 
 the resurrection, for it is intended to re- 
 sult in an abiding presence. Here, there- 
 fore, we have something quite analogous 
 to the Synoptical statements previously 
 quoted, the only difference being that 
 the conception of the kingdom itself is 
 wanting here as elsewhere in John, 
 r From what has been said it appears 
 that every view which would keep the 
 kingdom and the church separate as two 
 entirely distinct spheres is not in harmony 
 with the trend of our Lord's teaching. 
 The church is a form which the kingdom 
 assumes in result of the new stage upon 
 which the Messiahship of Jesus enters 
 
The Church 159 
 
 with his death and resurrection. So far 
 as extent of membership is concerned, 
 Jesus plainly leads us to identify the in- 
 visible church and the kingdom. It is 
 impossible to be in the one without being 
 in the other. We have our Lord's ex- 
 plicit declaration in Jno. iii. 3, 5, to the 
 effect that nothing less than the new 
 birth can enable man to see the kingdom 
 or enter into it. The kingdom, there- 
 fore, as truly as the invisible church is 
 constituted by the regenerate ; the re- 
 generate alone experience in themselves 
 its power, cultivate its righteousness, 
 enjoy its blessings. It is, of course, quite 
 possible, while recognizing this identity 
 of extent, to make distinctions as to the 
 point of view from which the regenerate 
 are called the kingdom and the church. 
 Various attempts in this direction have 
 been made. It may be said that the 
 kingdom designates believers in their re- 
 lation to God as ruler, the church be- 
 lievers in their separateness from the 
 
1 60 The Kingdom and the Church 
 
 world and their organic union with one 
 another. Or, that the church designates 
 beHevers in their attitude of worship to- 
 wards God, the kingdom, beHevers in 
 their ethical activities towards one an- 
 other. Or again, that the church desig- 
 nates the people of God from the point 
 of view of their calling to be God's in- 
 strument in preparing the way for and 
 introducing the ideal order of things, the 
 kingdom, the same people of God so far 
 as they possess the ideal order in princi- 
 ple realized among themselves. These 
 and similar distinctions have their doc- 
 trinal usefulness and are unobjectionable, 
 so long as they do not obscure the fact 
 that the kingdom, as well as the church, is 
 circumscribed by the line of regenera- 
 tion, and that the invisible church itself 
 is that which determines its inner es- 
 sence, its relation to God and Christ, a 
 true kingdom, since it consists of those 
 over whom the Messiah rules as the rep- 
 . resentative of God. 
 
Tlie CJittrch i6i 
 
 But what about the relation of the 
 visible church to the kingdom ? Here 
 again we must first of all insist upon it, 
 that our Lord looked upon the visible 
 church as a veritable embodiment of his 
 kingdom. Precisely because the invisible 
 church realizes the kingship of God, the 
 visible church must likewise partake of 
 this character. We have seen that the 
 power of binding and loosing given to 
 the church is described under the figure 
 of the keys of the kingdom of heaven. 
 Our Lord in conferring this power acts 
 in the capacity of King over the visible 
 church. In Matt. xiii. 41 the kingdom 
 of the Son of man, out of which the an- 
 gels in the last day will remove all things 
 that cause stumbling and them that do 
 iniquity, is nothing else but the visible 
 church. The visible church is con- 
 stituted by the enthronement of Christ 
 as the King of glory. Out of the fulness 
 of his royal authority he gave immediately 
 before ascending the great commission 
 
 K 
 
1 62 The Kingdom and the Church 
 
 to preach the gospel and disciple the 
 nations and instituted the sacrament of 
 baptism. We must say, therefore, that 
 the kingdom-forces which are at work, 
 the kingdom-Ufe which exists in the in- 
 visible sphere, find expression in the 
 kingdom-organism of the visible church. 
 That Christ is King in this church and 
 all authority exercised within any church- 
 body derives from him is an important 
 principle of church government, which 
 those who endeavor to distinguish be- 
 tween the kingdom of God and the visible 
 church do not always sufficiently keep in 
 Imind. 
 
 From this, however, it does not neces- 
 sarily follow, that the visible church is 
 the only outward expression of the in- 
 visible kingdom. Undoubtedly the 
 kingship of God, as his recognized and 
 applied supremacy, is intended to pervade 
 and control the whole of human life in 
 all its forms of existence. This the par- 
 able of the leaven plainly teaches. These 
 
The Church 163 
 
 various forms of human life have each 
 their own sphere in which they work 
 and embody themselves. There is a" 
 sphere of science, a sphere of art, a sphere 
 of the family and of the state, a sphere 
 of commerce and industry. Whenever , 
 one of these spheres comes under the 
 controlling influence of the principle of 
 the divine supremacy and glory, and this 
 outwardly reveals itself, there we can 
 truly say that the kingdom of God hasl 
 become manifest. Now our Lord in his 
 teaching seldom makes explicit reference 
 to these things. He contented himself 
 with laying down the great religious and 
 moral principles which ought to govern 
 the life of man in every sphere. Their 
 detailed application it was not his work 
 to show. But we may safely affirm two 
 things. On the one hand, his doctrinei 
 of the kingdom was founded on such a <- 
 profound and broad conviction of the 
 absolute supremacy of God in all things, 
 that he could not but look upon every 
 
164 The Kingdom and the Church 
 
 normal and legitimate province of human 
 life as intended to form part of God's 
 kingdom. On the other hand, it was 
 not his intention that this result should 
 be reached by making human life in all 
 its spheres subject to the visible church. 
 It is true that under the Old Covenant 
 something of this nature had existed. In 
 the theocracy the church had domi- 
 nated the life of the people of God in all 
 its extent. State and church were in it 
 most intimately united. Jesus on more 
 than one occasion gave to understand 
 that in this respect at least the conditions 
 of the Old Covenant were not to be per- 
 petuated, cf. Matt. xxii. 21 ; Jno. xviii. 
 36 ; xix. 11. And what is true of the 
 relation between church and state, may 
 also be applied to the relation be- 
 tween the visible church and the various 
 other branches into which the organic 
 life of humanity divides itself. It is en- 
 tirely in accordance with the spirit of 
 Jesus' teaching to subsume these under 
 
The Church 165 
 
 the kingdom of God and to co-ordinate 
 them with the visible church as true 
 manifestations of this kingdom, in so far 
 as the divine sovereignty and glory have 
 become in them the controlling prin- 
 ciple. But it must always be remenv 
 bered, that the latter can only happen, 
 when all these, no less than the visible 
 church, stand in living contact with the 
 forces of regeneration supernaturally in- 
 troduced into the world by the Spirit of 
 God. While it is proper to separate be- 
 tween the visible church and such things 
 as the Christian state, Christian art. Chris- 
 tian science, etc., these things, if they 
 truly belong to the kingdom of God, 
 grow up out of the regenerated life of 
 the invisible church. J 
 
 As already stated, this is a subject on 
 which our Lord's teaching does not bring 
 any explicit disclosures and which can 
 only be treated by way of inference. It 
 has sometimes been thought that the 
 parables of the wheat and the tares and 
 
1 66 The Kmgdoni and the Church 
 
 of the fish-net contain an explicit declara- 
 tion concerning the kingdom as a wider 
 sphere than the church. This is assumed, 
 because these parables imply that in the 
 kingdom the good and the evil are to be 
 allowed to intermingle, which cannot be 
 the rule in the church, as the obligation 
 to exercise church discipline plainly 
 shows. Historically interpreted, how- 
 ever, these parables do not warrant such 
 an inference. The current doctrine of 
 the kingdom, shared up to that point by 
 the disciples, assumed that the very first 
 act of God at the coming of the kingdom 
 would consist in an absolute and eternal 
 separation between the good and the 
 evil. This assumption was natural so 
 long as no distinction between the two 
 stages of the history of the kingdom had 
 been made. When Jesus introduced 
 this distinction, it became necessary to 
 emphasize that not everything which was 
 true of the final appearance of the king- 
 dom could therefore also be predicated 
 
The Church 167 
 
 of its present, invisible mode of coming. 
 As a warning to this effect these two 
 parables must be interpreted. 
 
 Our Lord desires to make plain that, 
 while the kingdom is now actually com- 
 ing, a complete separation between the 
 evil and the good cannot be effected until 
 the end of the world. During the pres-^ 
 ent age the kingdom must partake of the 
 limitations and imperfections to which a 
 sinful environment exposes it. Of the 
 church, as the externally organized king- 
 dom, this is eminently true. It exists 
 upon the field of the world. At no time 
 until the very last will it be entirely puri- 
 fied of all evil elements. This truth, 
 however, in no wise interferes with the 
 possibility nor absolves from the duty of 
 church discipline. The process to which 
 our Lord refers in Matt, xviii. 17 is not 
 intended for effecting an absolute sepa- 
 ration between the good and the evil, and 
 thus rendering the church as ideally pure 
 as she will be in the final state of the 
 
1 68 The Kingdom and the Church 
 
 kingdom. Its proximate end is the self- 
 preservation of the church in that state 
 of holiness which befits her profession, 
 and would be destroyed by the exercise 
 of religious fellowship with such as re- 
 main unrepentant in the face of open sin. 
 Its ulterior end is remedial, consisting in 
 the salvation of the sinner thus left to 
 himself. Both ends can be pursued 
 without forgetting or denying the lesson 
 taught in the parables, that it is not given 
 to men to judge the heart, and that God 
 alone in the day of judgment will infal- 
 libly remove from the church all elements 
 which, while simulating its outward ap- 
 pearance, do not belong to it in the inner 
 [spiritual reality. 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 TJie Entrance into t/ie Kingdom 
 
 <b 
 
 Repentance and Faith 
 
 2 
 
 ¥~^ROM the beginning our Lord's 
 t^ announcement of the nearness of 
 the kingdom was linked with the 
 demand for repentance and faith, Matt. 
 iv. 17 ; Mk. i. 15. This was not acci- 
 dental, but an inevitable result from the 
 nature of the kingdom. Repentance 
 and faith are simply the two main aspects 
 of the kingdom, righteousness and the 
 saving grace of God, translated into terms 
 of subjective human experience. Be- 
 cause the kingdom is in its very essence a 
 
 169 
 
 ic, 
 
lyo The Kingdom and the Church 
 
 kingdom of righteousness, therefore it is 
 impossible for any one to be truly in it 
 without having previously repented. 
 Because the kingdom intrinsically con- 
 sists in the exercise of the divine saving 
 grace and power, therefore it requires in 
 every one who is to share its benefits 
 that responsive and receptive attitude 
 towards these divine attributes which is 
 
 [called faith. 
 
 p The relation of repentance to the king- 
 dom is strikingly defined in Matthew's 
 version of the parable of the marriage 
 feast, xxii. 1-14. Comparing this with 
 the form in which our Lord uttered the 
 same parable on a previous occasion, ac- 
 cording to Lk. xiv. 16-24, we find 
 among other changes the significant 
 touch added of the man without a wed- 
 ding garment. It is plain from the na- 
 ture of the invitation, that what this 
 wedding garment stands for is not to be 
 regarded as in any way entitling the 
 bearer to a place at the feast. Those 
 
Repentance and Faith 171 
 
 who come are taken from the highways 
 and hedges, from the streets and lanes of 
 the city and compelled to enter. They 
 are received, therefore, without merit on 
 their part, on the principle of free grace. 
 Nevertheless, when once within, it is in- 
 dispensable that they should wear the 
 garment appropriate to the occasion. 
 Thus repentance and righteousness, 
 while they do not in any meritorious 
 sense earn the benefits of the kingdom, 
 are yet indispensable concomitants of the 
 state in which alone these benefits can 
 be received. J 
 
 Our Lord's idea of repentance is as^ 
 profound and comprehensive as his con- 
 ception of righteousness. Of the three 
 words that are used in the Greek Gos- 
 pels to describe the process, one em- 
 phasizes the emotional element of re- 
 gret, sorrow over the past evil course of '' 
 life, /xera/ieXo/xat, Matt. xxi. 29-32 ; a 
 second expresses reversal of the entire ' 
 mental attitude, fieTavoew, Matt. xii. 41, 
 
172 The Kingdom and the Church 
 
 Lk. xi. 32 ; xv. 7, 10 ; the third denotes 
 a change in the direction of life, one 
 goal being substituted for another, 
 eVto-T/ae^o/xat, Matt. xiii. 15 (and par- 
 allels) ; Lk. xvii. 4 ; xxii. 32. Repent- 
 ance is not limited to any single faculty 
 of the mind : it engages the entire man, 
 intellect, will and affections. Nor is it 
 confined to the moral sphere of life in the 
 narrower sense : it covers man's entire 
 religious as well as his moral relation to 
 God. Repentance in the conception of 
 Jesus is wide enough to include faith. 
 Matt. xi. 20, 21. Here as elsewhere, 
 what strikes us most is the God-centered 
 character of our Lord's teaching on the 
 subject. The state from which a re- 
 pentance must take place is condemned, 
 because it is radically wrong with refer- 
 ence to God. The sin of the prodigal 
 has for its central feature the abandon- 
 ment of the Father's house. The sinful 
 are like wandering sheep, like lost coins, 
 representations which imply a detach- 
 
Repentance and Faith 173 
 
 ment of the spiritual consciousness from 
 its center in God. J 
 
 The strongest way of expressing this* 
 is to designate the state of man without 
 repentance a state of death, Matt. viii. 22 ; 
 Lk. XV. 24, 32. And Jesus does not look 
 upon this state as a godless state in the 
 purely negative sense of the word. 
 Where the love of God is absent, there 
 an idolatrous love of the world and of 
 self enters, and a positively offensive and 
 hostile attitude towards God results. It 
 is very significant that Jesus, in speaking 
 of the two masters, does not say that to 
 love the one is to neglect the other, or 
 to hold to the one is to renounce the 
 other, but employs positive terms in both 
 clauses, " Either he will hate the one and 
 love the other, or else he will hold to the 
 one and despise the other," Matt. vi. 24. 
 Man is so necessarily bound to God in 
 his inmost consciousness, that absolute ' 
 indifference or neutrality are excluded^ 
 
 In the crisis of repentance the offense 
 
174 The Kingdom and the Chttrch 
 
 against God and the need of God are that 
 upon which the repenting consciousness 
 is focused. The sorrow of true repent- 
 ance is one which arises from conviction 
 of sin. It is also a sorrow after God, such 
 as proceeds from a sense of spiritual desti- 
 tution. Both principles are well brought 
 out in the parable of the prodigal son, the 
 discourse in which Jesus has so marvel- 
 ously described the psychological process 
 of repentance. The prodigal *' comes 
 to himself." Previously he had been 
 out of himself, had not known and felt 
 himself in the simple truth of his funda- 
 mental relation to God. He realizes 
 that he perishes with hunger, whilst in 
 his Father's house there is bread enough 
 and to spare. In his confession the of- 
 fense against God is significantly placed 
 before that against the human father. 
 
 Again, in the new life which follows re- 
 pentance the absolute supremacy of God 
 is the controlling principle. He who 
 repents turns away from the service of 
 
Repentance and Faith 175 
 
 mammon and self to the service of God. 
 Our Lord is emphatic in insisting upon 
 this absokite, undivided surrender of the 
 soul to God as the goal of all true re- 
 pentance. Because this and nothing less 
 is the goal, he urges the necessity of a 
 constant repetition of the process. Even 
 to his followers he said at a compara- 
 tively late stage of his ministry, *' Ex- 
 cept ye turn and become as little chil- 
 dren, ye shall in no wise enter into the 
 kingdom of heaven," Matt, xviii. 3. 
 From this necessity we must also explain 
 the uncompromising manner in which 
 Jesus requires of his disciples the renun- 
 ciation of all earthly bonds and posses- 
 sions which would dispute God his su- 
 preme sway over their life. Matt. x. 39 ; 
 xvi. 25 ; Lk. xiv. 25-35. The state- 
 ments to this effect are not meant in the 
 sense that external abandonment of these 
 things is sufficient or even required. 
 The idea is that the inward attachment 
 of the soul to them as the highest good 
 
176 The Kingdom and the Church 
 
 must be in principle destroyed, that God 
 may take the place hitherto claimed by 
 them. Within the kingdom they are 
 entitled to affection on the disciple's part 
 in so far only as they can be made subor- 
 dinate and subservient to the love of 
 God. The demand for sacrifice always 
 presupposes that v^hat is to be renounced 
 forms an obstacle to that absolute devo- 
 tion which the kingdom of God re- 
 quires, Mk. ix. 43. That not the external 
 possession but the internal entangle- 
 ment of the heart with temporal goods 
 is condemned, Jesus strikingly indicates 
 by the demand ** to hate" one's father 
 and mother and wife and children and 
 brethren and sisters, yea and one's own 
 life also. The energetic determination 
 of the will to forego even the pleasures of 
 natural affection, where they come in 
 conflict with the supreme duty of the 
 kingdom, is thus described and the word 
 ** hating" chosen on purpose to express 
 that in such cases an internal change of 
 
Repentance and Faith 177 
 
 mind alone, not a mere external act, can 
 make man fit for the kingdom of God. 
 Matt. X. 37 gives us Jesus' own interpre- 
 tation of such seemingly harsh sayings. 
 
 Jesus affirms the necessity of repent- 
 ance for all men, Mk. vi. 12 ; Lk. xiii. 
 3, 5 ; xxiv. 47. In an indirect way the 
 universal need of it is shown by his 
 utterances on the universality and per- 
 vasiveness of sin. Even to the disciples 
 it can be said without qualification, " If 
 ye then, being evil, etc.," Matt. vii. 11. 
 None is good save one, even God, Mk. 
 x. 18. It is true Jesus draws a distinc- 
 tion between ''righteous" and ''sin- 
 ners," Matt. ix. 13 ; Mk. ii. 17. But 
 the context shows that this distinction is 
 drawn from the point of view of the 
 judgment pronounced by men on them- 
 selves, not from the objective standpoint 
 of Jesus' own knowledge of them. 
 These statements were made in answer 
 to the charge of the Pharisees that Jesus 
 ate with publicans and sinners. The 
 
 L 
 
178 The Kingdom and the Church 
 
 Saviour means to say that, if their com- 
 parative estimiate concerning themselves 
 and these degraded people be correct, 
 there is all the more necessity for his 
 associating with the latter in order to 
 save them. Perhaps the reference to 
 the ninety and nine righteous persons, 
 which need no repentance, in Lk. xv. 
 7, 10, must be explained on the same 
 principle. 
 
 The connection between faith and the 
 saving grace and power of God in the 
 kingdom is just as close and vital as that 
 just traced between repentance and right- 
 eousness. It is a striking fact that in 
 the Synoptical Gospels nearly the whole 
 of our Lord's teaching on faith attaches 
 itself to the performance of miracles. 
 This implies that the miracles were emi- 
 nently adapted to bring out the inner 
 essense of faith and to reveal the true 
 reason for its necessity. They embody 
 that aspect of the kingdom to which 
 faith is the subjective counterpart. Now 
 
Repentance and Faith 179 
 
 the miracles almost without exception 
 have two features in common. In the 
 first place, they are transactions where 
 the result absolutely and exclusively de- 
 pends on the forth-putting of the di- 
 vine supernatural power, where no hu- 
 man effort could possibly contribute 
 anything towards its accomplishment. 
 And secondly, the miracles are, as we 
 have seen, healing miracles in which 
 the gracious love of God offers itself 
 to man for his salvation. Faith is 
 the spiritual attitude called for by this 
 twofold element in the saving work 
 of God. It is the recognition of the 
 divine power and grace, not, of course, 
 in a purely intellectual way, but prac- 
 tically so as to involve not only convic- 
 tion of the mind but to carry with it 
 also the movement of the will and the 
 affections. How faith stands related to 
 the saving power of God is most clearly 
 illustrated in the narrative Mk. ix. 17-24. 
 When the disciples could not heal the 
 
i8o The Kingdom and the Church 
 
 child with the dumb spirit Jesus ex- 
 claimed, '' O unbelieving generation." 
 The father says, after describing the se- 
 verity of the case, " But if thou canst do 
 anything, have compassion on us and 
 help us." To this Jesus replies, ** If 
 thou canst ! all things are possible to him 
 that belie veth." This ascribes to faith 
 something that can be affirmed of God 
 alone, viz., absolute omnipotence. Else- 
 where also this principle is emphasized 
 by our Lord, Matt. xxi. 21, 22 ; Mk. xi. 
 22, 23 ; Lk. xvii. 6. The explanation 
 lies in this that faith is nothing else than 
 that act whereby man lays hold of, ap- 
 propriates for himself the endless power 
 of God. If faith were a human endeavor, 
 something working by its own inherent 
 strength, then it would be indeed rea- 
 sonable to say with reference to the one 
 exercising it, "" If thou canst." On the 
 other hand, if the innermost meaning of 
 faith consist precisely in this, that man 
 with an utter renunciation of his own 
 
Repentance and Faith i8i 
 
 strength, casts himself upon the strength 
 of God, then plainly all further concern 
 about what is possible or impossible, 
 every '* If thou canst," is out of place. 
 Hence also faith is not a quantitative 
 matter, as it w^ould have to be, were it a 
 principle of human endeavor ; faith like 
 a grain of mustard seed will accomplish 
 the greatest conceivable results, because, 
 small though it be, it nevertheless, pro- 
 vided it be genuine faith, connects man 
 with the exhaustless reservoir of divine 
 omnipotence, Lk. xvii. 6. 
 
 This line of reasoning, however, is not 
 applicable to the miracles only. The 
 miracles illustrate the saving work of 
 God in general. All salvation partakes, 
 humanly speaking, of the nature of the 
 impossible, can be accomplished by God 
 alone. Jesus answers the question of 
 the disciples, '* Who then can be saved ?" 
 with an appeal to the almighty power of 
 God, ** With men this is impossible, but 
 with God all things are possible," Matt. 
 
1 82 The Kingdom and the Church 
 
 xix. 25, 26. All genuine saving faith is 
 as profoundly conscious of its utter de- 
 pendence on God for deliverance from 
 sin as the recipients of our Lord's mi- 
 raculous cures were convinced that God 
 alone could heal their bodies from dis- 
 ease. 
 
 But faith is more than a conviction 
 regarding the necessity and sufficiency 
 of the divine power. It also involves 
 the recognition of God's willingness 
 and readiness to save, is a practical ap- 
 propriation of the divine grace. Thus 
 there enters into it an element of trust. 
 Jesus never encouraged the exercise of 
 faith as a mere external belief in super- 
 natural power. The performance of a 
 sign from heaven, which men might 
 have witnessed without such trust in 
 God or himself, he persistently refused. 
 Where there existed an antecedent hin- 
 drance to the exercise of this trust, he 
 would not even perform any healing mir- 
 acles. He, who truly believes, vividly 
 
Repentance and Faith 183 
 
 realizes that God is loving, merciful, for- 
 giving, glad to receive sinners. Faith 
 transfers to God what human parents ex- 
 perience in themselves with reference to 
 their own children, the desire to help 
 and supply. Matt. vii. 7-11. Not to 
 trust would be to ascribe to him the evil 
 disposition of sinful men towards one an- 
 other. This reliance of faith is not con- 
 fined to the critical moments of life, it 
 is to be the abiding, characteristic inner 
 disposition of the disciple with reference 
 to every concern. To trust God for 
 food and raiment is as truly the mark 
 of the disciple in the kingdom as to de- 
 pend on him for eternal salvation. Matt. 
 vi. 30. Faith in those on whom the 
 wonderful cures were wrought may have 
 manifested itself at first as a momentary 
 act, but Jesus frequently called the atten- 
 tion of such people to what faith had 
 done for them, thus suggesting that this 
 faith could be made fruitful also on fu- 
 ture occasions. Of the disciples he ex- 
 
1 84 The Kingdom mid the Church 
 
 plicitly required faith as an abiding dis- 
 position of trust. When in the storm 
 they came to him saying, '' Save Lord, 
 we perish," he rebuked them because 
 they were without confidence in his 
 presence with them as a source of ab- 
 sokite safety. 
 
 Being in its very essence trust, faith nec- 
 essarily rests in a person. It is not con- 
 fidence about any abstract proposition, 
 but reliance upon a personal character 
 and disposition. The disciples are urged 
 to have "faith in God," Mk. xi. 22. 
 But, inasmuch as Jesus is the revelation 
 and representative of God, nay, one 
 with God, he also is the personal object 
 of faith. It is true, in the Synoptical 
 Gospels this is explicitly stated in one 
 passage only, viz.. Matt, xviii. 6, ** These 
 little ones that believe on me." But 
 this almost entire absence of the formula 
 is easily explained. It was the result of 
 Jesus' method of not directly proclaiming 
 at first his own position in the kingdom, 
 
Repentance and Faith 185 
 
 but rather of allowing it to be gradually 
 inferred from practical experience. It 
 does not prove the assertion of some 
 modern writers, that in the gospel, as 
 Jesus preached it, there was no place for 
 his own person, that it was merely a gos- 
 pel about God. Though not frequently 
 in so many words, yet in acts we find 
 our Lord seeking to elicit and cultivate a 
 personal relationship of faith between 
 the disciple and himself and in himself 
 with God. Conscious of being the Mes- 
 siah, he could not help assigning to him- 
 self a place in the gospel, and viewing 
 himself as in a real sense the object of 
 religious trust. This appears from his 
 saying to Peter shortly before the passion, 
 " Simon, Simon, behold Satan asked 
 to have you, that he might sift you (no- 
 tice the plural pronoun) as wheat : but I 
 made supplication for thee, that thy 
 faith fail not." Here the crisis of our 
 Lord's suffering is represented as the 
 great testing crisis of true discipleship. 
 
1 86 The Kingdom and the Church 
 
 Satan will in it sift the true disciples 
 from the false. The true will approve 
 themselves in this, that, when everything 
 goes against Jesus, their faith fails not. 
 And, on the other hand, when Peter's 
 faith begins to fail, this is described as a de- 
 nial of Jesus ; faith, therefore, must in- 
 volve the opposite of denial, an avowal, a 
 personal bond of identification between 
 the master and the disciple, Lk. xxii. 31- 
 34. And it is psychologically inconceiv- 
 able that in those who were helped by the 
 miracles of Jesus, faith should not have 
 assumed the form of personal trust in him 
 as the instrument of the saving grace and 
 power of God. Faith in God and faith 
 in Jesus here inevitably coalesced. 
 
 Faith is not represented by our Lord 
 as an arbitrary movement of the mind, 
 which would be independent of the 
 deeper-lying dispositions and tendencies 
 of life. Jesus knows of antecedent states 
 of heart by which faith and unbelief 
 are determined. The unbelief of the 
 
Repentance and Faith 187 
 
 Jews he explains from the fact of their 
 being ** offended " in him. What Jesus 
 was and did and taught stood at ahnost 
 every point in direct antithesis to what 
 they expected their Messiah to be, to do 
 and to teach. But these expectations 
 and beliefs of the Jews were deeply 
 rooted in their general religious state 
 and character : their unbelief, therefore, 
 resulted from the fundamental disposition 
 of their hearts. They that refuse faith 
 do so, because they are an evil and adul- 
 terous generation. If they were what 
 they ought to be and had not broken 
 the pledges of their covenant mar- 
 riage to God, if their attitude towards 
 God were normal, they would believe 
 on him whom God had sent. And all 
 this is true likewise of faith. In its ul- 
 timate analysis faith is, according to Jesus, 
 a divine gift. Faith must be the work 
 of God in man, because only so can it 
 be in harmony with itself as the recog- 
 nition that we owe everything to God's 
 
1 88 The Kingdom and the Church 
 
 working for us and in us. It is the Fa- 
 ther who reveals to the babes what he 
 hides from the wise and understanding, 
 Matt. xi. 25. Jesus prays for Peter, that 
 his faith fail not : that which we pray for 
 we affirm to be dependent on the opera- 
 tion of God. When Peter makes his 
 confession, ** Thou art the Christ, the 
 Son of the living God," Jesus declares 
 that not flesh and blood has revealed this 
 unto him, but the Father in heaven. 
 
 In the discourses of the Gospel accord- 
 ing to John, several important points of 
 our Lord's doctrine of faith are brought 
 out with greater clearness and explicitness 
 than in the Synoptical statements. Faith 
 here is from beginning to end faith in 
 Jesus, and not merely in Jesus as the in- 
 strument of God, but as the image and 
 incarnation of God, so that to believe in 
 him is to believe in God. Consequently 
 this faith in Jesus is also more clearly 
 represented as a comprehensive faith in 
 him as a Saviour for life and death, for 
 
Repentance mid Faith 189 
 
 time and eternity, and not merely faith 
 in Jesus as helper in a concrete case of dis- 
 tress. Still further our Lord here by 
 anticipation describes how faith will stand 
 related to his atonement and resurrection, 
 how it will become faith in the heavenly, 
 glorified Christ, J no. iii. 14 ; vi. 51 ; vii. 
 29, 38; xi. 25; xv. 7, 16; xvi. 23, 24. 
 Because the testimony of Jesus concern- 
 ing himself in this Gospel is so much 
 fuller and richer, faith is more closely 
 identified with knowledge, Jno. vi. 69 ; 
 viii. 24, 28 ; xiv. 9, 10, 20 ; xvi. 30. We 
 have already seen above, however, that 
 knowledge here means far more than 
 intellectual cognition. It implies prac- 
 tical acquaintance, confidence and love, 
 Jno. X. 4, 14, 15 ; xvii. 25, 26. Finally, 
 our Lord is here much more explicit on 
 the causes of faith and unbelief than in 
 the more popular Synoptical teaching. 
 Faith and unbelief are experimental states 
 and acts in which the whole spiritual 
 condition of the individual comes to 
 
190 The Kingdom mid the Church 
 
 light. Not to believe is the great sin, 
 because the deep inherent sinfulness of 
 the heart displays in this sin its true 
 character of hostility towards God, Jno. 
 ix. 41 ; XV. 22, 24 ; xvi. 8, 9. In the 
 , same manner faith is the outcome of an 
 inward condition of the heart. This our 
 Lord describes as a doing of the truth, a 
 working in God, a being of the truth, a 
 having of the love of God in one's self, 
 a hearing from the Father, a learning 
 from him, a being drawn by the Father, a 
 having been given by the Father to the Son, 
 in virtue of which believers are Jesus' 
 own sheep even before he manifests him- 
 self to them, Jno. iii. 21 ; v. 42 ; vi. 44, 45 ; 
 xvii. 11 ; xviii. 37. In all these respects 
 the teaching of Jesus here recorded is not 
 in contradiction with, but simply the 
 legitimate expansion of that delivered to 
 us in the three other Gospels. 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 
 Recapitulation 
 
 TT 'T AVING reached the end of our 
 / / discussion we may now endeavor 
 briefly to formulate the impor- 
 tant principles embodied in our Lord's 
 teaching on the Kingdom of God and 
 the Church. They are the following: 
 In the first place, the kingdom-con- 
 ception involves the historic unity of Jesus* 
 work with the Old Testament work of 
 God. These two constitute one body 
 of supernatural revelation and redemp- 
 tion. 
 
 Secondly, the doctrine of the kingdom 
 stands for the principle that the Chris- 
 
 191 
 
192 TJie Kingdom and the CJutrch 
 
 tian religion is not a mere matter of sub- 
 jective ideas or experiences, but is related 
 to a great system of objective, supernatural 
 facts and transactions. The kingdom 
 means the renewal of the world through 
 the introduction of supernatural forces. 
 
 Thirdly, the kingdom-idea is the 
 clearest expression of the principle that 
 in the sphere of objective reality, as well 
 as in the sphere of human consciousness, 
 everything is subservient to the glory of God. 
 In this respect the kingdom is the most 
 profoundly religious of all biblical con- 
 ceptions. 
 
 Fourthly, the message of the kingdom 
 imparts to Christianity, as Jesus proclaims 
 it, the professed character of a religion of 
 salvation, and of salvation not primarily 
 by man's own efforts but by the power 
 and grace of God. The kingdom rep- 
 resents the specifically evangelical ele- 
 ment in our Lord's teaching. The same 
 principle finds subjective expression in 
 his teaching on faith. 
 
Recapitulation 193 
 
 Fifthly, Jesus' doctrine of the king- 
 dom as both inward and outward, com- 
 ing first in the heart of man and after- 
 wards in the external world, upholds 
 the primacy of the spiritual and ethical 
 over the physical. The invisible world 
 of the inner religious life, the righteous- 
 ness of the disposition, the sonship of 
 God are in it made supreme, the essence 
 of the kingdom, the ultimate realities to 
 which everything else is subordinate. 
 The inherently ethical character of the 
 kingdom finds subjective expression in 
 the demand for repentance. 
 
 Sixthly, that form which the kingdom 
 assumes in the church shows it to be in- 
 separably associated with the person and 
 work of Jesus himself. The religion 
 of the kingdom is a religion in which 
 there is not only a place but in which the 
 central place is for the Saviour. The 
 church form of the kingdom rightly 
 bears the name of Christianity, because 
 in it on Christ everything depends. 
 
 M 
 
194 The Kingdom and the Church 
 
 Finally, the thought of the kingdom 
 of God implies the subjection of the 
 entire range of human life in all its forms 
 and spheres to the ends of religion. The 
 kingdom reminds us of the absoluteness^ 
 the pervasiveness, the unrestricted dominion, 
 which of right belong to all true religion. 
 It proclaims that religion, and religion 
 alone, can act as the supreme unifying, cen- 
 tralizing factor in the life of man, as that 
 which binds all together and perfects all 
 by leading it to its final goal in the serv- 
 1 ice of God. 
 
 THE END. 
 
INDEX OF SUBJECTS 
 
 A 
 Age, the coming, 22, 68. 
 
 B 
 
 Basileia, 25, 
 Beatitudes, 2, 121. 
 Blessedness, 89, 125-139. 
 
 C 
 
 Chiliasm, 45, 68, 
 Church, 8, 102, 140-168. 
 Community, the Kingdom as a, 82. 
 
 D 
 
 Death, of Jesus, 50, 146. 
 Demons, 49, 50. 
 
 Development in Jesus' conception of the Kingdom, 
 58-64. 
 
 E 
 
 Ethics of Jesus, 43, 103-124. 
 of Judaism, 106— 108. 
 
1 96 Index of Subjects 
 
 F 
 
 Faith, 9, 178-190, 
 Fatherhood, 7, 34, 130-135. 
 Final kingdom, 8, 17-19, 21, 40. 
 Forgiveness of sin, 129—130. 
 
 G 
 
 Grace, 4, 9, 23, 123. 
 
 J 
 
 John the Baptist, 15, 44, 54. 
 
 Judaism, its conception of the Kingdom, 19—22, 
 26, 27, 45, 67-72, 85. 
 its ethics, 106-108. 
 
 K 
 
 Kingdom and kingship, 25—31. 
 
 of God and of heaven, 31—37. 
 
 parables, 2, 56-57, 62-63, 73-74. 
 
 the preliminary, 45. 
 
 the present and the future, 38-41, 64, 65. 
 Knowledge, 99, 136-137. 
 
 L 
 
 Law, 13, 17, 21, 22, 107-111. 
 
 Life, 4, 5, 74. 135-139- 
 Love, 9. 
 
Index of Subjects 197 
 
 M 
 
 Malkuth, 25. 
 
 Memlakhah, 25. 
 
 Messiahship, 12, 47, 60-61, 141-145. 
 
 Miracles, 9, 92-95, 1 78-1 81. 
 
 O 
 
 Old Testament, 9, 11-19, 44, 54, 81. 
 
 P 
 Paul, his conception of the Kingdom, 46—82. 
 Power, of the Kingdom, 90-102. 
 Prophecy, Messianic, 19. 
 
 R 
 
 Regeneration, 4, 74, 77, 137, 159. 
 
 Repentance, 9, 169-178. 
 
 Resurrection of Jesus, 146. 
 
 Reward, 11 8-1 24. 
 
 Righteousness of the Kingdom, 9, 89, 103— 124. 
 
 S 
 
 Sermon on the Mount, 2. 
 
 Sonship in the Kingdom, 130— 135. 
 
 Spirit of God, 98-102, 156. 
 
 Spiritual nature of the Kingdom, 39,49-57, 71-72. 
 
 Supernatural character of the Kingdom, 36, 73-77. 
 
 Supremacy of God in the Kingdom, 83-89. 
 
198 Index of Subjects 
 
 T 
 
 Theocracy, 14. 
 Truth, 4, 5, 99. 
 
 U 
 
 Universalism, 69—70. 
 
INDEX OF TEXTS 
 
 Matthew ii. 44 36 
 
 45 90 
 iii. 2 20 
 iv. 17 I, 169 
 
 V. 6 1 13, 1 15, 120 
 
 8 120 
 
 9 120, 133 
 10 113 
 12 37 
 17 105 
 20 118 
 23,24 no 
 35 16 
 
 46 124 
 48 36, 106 
 
 vi. 9, 10 131 
 
 10 105 
 
 12 130 
 
 20 37 
 
 24 173 
 
 Matthew vi. 30 183 
 
 33 31. 85, 87, 
 
 112,113,116, 
 
 126 
 
 vii. 7-1 1 183 
 
 11 69,177 
 
 12 1 10 
 16 III 
 20 III 
 
 viii. 12 15 
 
 22 136, 173 
 
 26 184 
 
 ix. 13 177 
 
 X- 39 175 
 
 41,42 123 
 
 X'- 5 93 
 
 11 49,59 
 
 12 54 
 
 13 15 
 
 20, 21 172 
 
 199 
 
200 
 
 Index of Texts 
 
 /latthew xi. 25 188 
 
 27 
 
 134 
 
 28-29 
 
 130 
 
 xii. 28 31,49, 91, 98 
 
 41 
 
 171 
 
 xiii. 1 1 
 
 57 
 
 15 
 
 122 
 
 16,17 
 
 129 
 
 24-30 
 
 83, 151, 
 
 
 165-168 
 
 36-43 
 
 56 
 
 41 49, 
 
 152, 161 
 
 43 
 
 31 
 
 44-46 
 
 128 
 
 47-50 
 
 83, 151, 
 
 
 165-168 
 
 52 
 
 3, 46 
 
 XV. 13 
 
 no 
 
 xvi. 17 
 
 36, 188 
 
 18 140, 
 
 153, 154 
 
 19 33, 
 
 49, 147- 
 
 15 
 
 
 
 25 
 
 175 
 
 28 
 
 154 
 
 viii. 3 
 
 175 
 
 6 
 
 184 
 
 Matthew xviii. 
 
 17 
 
 140, 
 167 
 
 18 
 
 
 148 
 
 20 
 
 
 157 
 
 23 
 
 
 129 
 
 xix. 25, 26 
 
 
 182 
 
 28 
 
 77,97 
 
 XX. 1-16 
 
 
 123 
 
 25 
 
 
 151 
 
 32 
 
 
 127 
 
 xxi. 21, 22 
 
 
 180 
 
 29-32 
 
 
 171 
 
 31 
 
 
 31 
 
 43 15,3 
 
 1,69 
 
 ,111 
 
 xxii. 1-14 
 
 
 170 
 
 2 
 
 
 127 
 
 21 
 
 
 164 
 
 xxiii. 23 
 
 
 no 
 
 xxiv. 30 
 
 
 97 
 
 47 
 
 
 123 
 
 XXV. 15 
 
 
 122 
 
 21-23 
 
 
 123 
 
 34 
 
 
 128 
 
 xxvi. 29 
 
 
 31 
 
 64 
 
 
 154 
 
 xxviii. 19 
 
 
 69 
 
Index of Texts 
 
 201 
 
 Mark i. 15 
 
 I 
 
 169 
 
 ii. 9 
 
 
 96 
 
 17 
 
 
 177 
 
 18-22 
 
 
 59 
 
 iv. 10 
 
 
 57 
 
 26-29 
 
 
 74 
 
 V. 34 
 
 
 130 
 
 vi. 12 
 
 
 177 
 
 ix. I 
 
 
 154 
 
 17-24 
 
 179- 
 
 -181 
 
 35 
 
 
 151 
 
 43 
 
 
 176 
 
 X. 15 
 
 
 46 
 
 17 
 
 
 5 
 
 18 
 
 
 177 
 
 30 
 
 
 123 
 
 Xi. 22, 23 
 
 
 180, 
 184 
 
 30 
 
 33 
 
 1 36 
 
 xii. 13 
 
 
 68 
 
 24 
 
 
 97 
 
 30, 31 
 
 
 109 
 
 xiii. 10 
 
 
 69 
 
 xiv. 9 
 
 
 69 
 
 34 
 
 
 87 
 
 XV. 43 
 
 
 20 
 
 Luke i. 17 
 
 99 
 
 35 
 
 99 
 
 iv. 18, 19 
 
 94,98 
 
 26, 27 
 
 69 
 
 43 
 
 I 
 
 vi. 32, 35 
 
 124 
 
 vii. 50 
 
 130 
 
 ix. 27 
 
 154 
 
 xi. 13 
 
 100 
 
 20 
 
 49 
 
 32 
 
 172 
 
 xii. 32 8, 
 
 124, 127 
 
 xiii. 3, 5 
 
 177 
 
 xiv. 15 
 
 20 
 
 16-24 
 
 170 
 
 25-35 
 
 175 
 
 XV. 7, 10 
 
 172, 178 
 
 11-32 
 
 174 
 
 17 
 
 138 
 
 18, 21 
 
 33 
 
 24 
 
 136, 173 
 
 32 136, 
 
 138, 173 
 
 xvi. 16 
 
 15,54 
 
 xvii. 4 
 
 172 
 
 6 
 
 180, 181 
 
 10 
 
 122, 123 
 
202 
 
 Index of Texts 
 
 Luke xvi 
 
 i. 20 
 
 20,51 
 
 John xiv. 
 
 9. 
 
 10, 
 
 20 
 
 189 
 
 xviii. 14 
 
 
 116 
 
 XV. 7, 16 
 
 
 
 
 189 
 
 XX. 25 
 
 
 151 
 
 22, : 
 
 -3. 
 
 24 
 
 
 
 36 
 
 
 133 
 
 
 
 
 189, 
 
 190 
 
 38 
 
 
 136 
 
 xvi. 8, 9 
 
 
 
 
 190 
 
 xxii. 31- 
 
 -34 
 
 186 
 
 30 
 
 
 
 
 189 
 
 32 
 
 
 172 
 
 xvii. 3 
 
 
 
 
 136 
 
 69 
 
 
 154 
 
 4 
 
 
 
 6 
 
 ,88 
 
 xxiv. 19 
 
 
 99 
 
 II 
 
 
 
 
 190 
 
 47 
 
 
 177 
 
 25. 2 
 
 6 
 
 
 
 189 
 
 49 
 
 
 99 
 
 xviii. 36 
 
 
 3» 
 
 68, 
 
 164 
 
 190 
 
 John iii. 3, 5 
 
 3. 159 
 
 xix. II 
 
 
 
 
 164 
 
 14 
 
 
 189 
 
 Acts i. 8 
 
 
 
 
 99 
 
 21 
 
 
 190 
 
 ii. 36 
 
 
 
 
 145 
 
 V. 42 
 
 
 190 
 
 X. 38 
 
 
 
 
 99 
 
 vi. 44, 
 
 45 
 
 190 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 51 
 
 
 189 
 
 I Cor. XV. 
 
 23 
 
 -2 
 
 8 
 
 46 
 
 69 
 
 
 189 
 
 25 
 
 
 
 
 90 
 
 vii, 29, 
 
 38 
 
 189 
 
 28 
 
 
 
 
 87 
 
 39 
 
 
 lOI 
 
 Hebrews xii. 
 
 2 
 
 
 120 
 
 viii. 24, 
 
 28 
 
 189 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 ix. 41 
 
 
 190 
 
 Revelation 
 
 iii. 
 
 7 
 
 
 149 
 
 X. 14, 
 
 15 
 
 189 
 
 xi. 15 
 
 
 
 
 87 
 
 xi. 25 
 
 
 189 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 xiv. 6 
 
 
 137 
 
 Exodus iv. 
 
 22 
 
 
 
 13^ 
 
Index of Texts 
 
 203 
 
 Exodus XV. 90 
 
 xix. 4—6 13 
 
 Deut. xxxii. 6 
 
 Psalms xcvii. i 
 xcix. I 
 
 131 
 
 Isaiah xxii. 22 149 
 
 xxiv. 21 18 
 
 xliii. 15 18, 131 
 
 lii. 7 18 
 
 Iv. I 1 15 
 
 Jeremiah xxxi. 33 115 
 
 34 129 
 
 Ezekiel xxxvi. 27 115 
 
 Daniel 18 
 
 ii. 44 36 
 
 45 90 
 
 Obadiah 21 
 Micah ii. 12 
 
 18,26 
 
 18 
 
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