Understanding the Kingdom of God by Georgia Harkness
Chapter 4: The Kingdom Before and After Jesus
3. The kingdom of God in the early church
title of the Christ, the Anointed One, we are fully justified in using it.
and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God" (John 3:3, 5). This suggests that by the end of the first century, when John’s Gospel was written, both baptism as the external sign of
regeneration and the Holy Spirit as its inner agency had become linked to the concept of the kingdom. But of the kingdom itself we hear no more in the fourth Gospel. John, like the other three evangelists, accents the importance of the crucifixion and resurrection by giving these events a major place in the narrative; but unlike them he makes the divinity of Jesus so predominant over his humanity that the teachings presented take quite a different turn.
In John there is no agony in Gethsemane, no cry of dereliction from the Cross, but Jesus is in complete command of every situation. This brings about in the trial scene an indirect reference to the kingdom in a different context from that in the Synoptics. When asked by Pilate, "Are you the King of the Jews?" Jesus answers, "My kingship is not of this world; . . . For this I was born, and for this I have come into the world, to bear witness to the truth. Every one who is of the truth hears my voice" (18:36-37). The kingship of Jesus, not a kingdom to be entered, is here the central note.
In Acts we are told that Jesus continued to speak of the kingdom in his post-resurrection appearances (1:3). Yet the difficulty encountered by even his closest disciples to grasp his message is evidenced by the fact that when they came together they asked him, "Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?" The Davidic Messiah was still their dream! Jesus apparently thought that it was useless to argue with them, for he told them it was not for them to know the times or seasons fixed by the Father’s authority. Instead, they should be witnesses to him by the power of the Holy Spirit "in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the end of the earth’’ (1:6-8).
In Luke’s account of the birth and spread of the church in Acts, we find a few references to the kingdom of God, first in connection with Philip’s and then with Paul’s preaching and teaching about the kingdom (8:12; 14:22; 19:8; 28:23, 31). What they indicate is that the kingdom
message was not forgotten, but was not taken nearly so seriously as the impulse to preach Christ crucified and the good news of salvation through Christ. The references are very general, the most concrete being the statement that in Lystra, Iconium, and Antioch Paul and Barnabas were
"strengthening the souls of the disciples, exhorting them to continue in the faith, and saying that through many tribulations we must enter the kingdom of God" (Acts 14:22).
In Paul’s letters there are more references to the kingdom of God than in Acts, but considering the volume of the letters the proportion is no greater. Paul clearly believed in an imminent end of the present world. Yet it is noteworthy that he does not associate it with any such dramatic panoply as the Synoptic Gospels were later to present. While the term "second coming," in so many words, is found nowhere in the New Testament, there are brief references to the Lord’s coming in I Corinthians 4:5 and 15:23; I Thessalonians 2:19, 4:15, and 5:23; and a day of judgment through Christ in Romans 2:16. These are similar to somewhat incidental references in John 21:22, James 5:7, and Revelation 2:25. It would appear that these writers, in common
with the prevalent idea in the early church, believed that Christ would return, but they stopped short of making this a spectacular event.
Paul seems to have thought of the kingdom as both present and future, and what is dominant in his mention of it is a strong emphasis on its moral requirements. We are told in Romans 14:17,
"For the kingdom of God is not food and drink but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit." Again in I Corinthians 4:20 in a protest against too much arrogant talk we find Paul saying, "For the kingdom of God does not consist in talk but in power." The futuristic element blends with the moral as he says in I Corinthians 6:9, "Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God?" Then he proceeds to give a list of offenses which mark the unrighteous. There is a similar approach in Galatians 5:19-21 with a long list of offenses.
Yet the passage leads into his priceless statement, "But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such there is no law"
(5:22-23). Apparently these are the qualities most basic for membership in the kingdom of God.
In a few passages Paul speaks of the kingdom of Christ. In Ephesians 5:5, if he wrote this letter, Paul has it that no immoral or impure man "has any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God." In a more authentic but also more obscure passage in I Corinthians 15:23-28 he speaks of the coming of Christ and says, "Then comes the end, when he delivers the kingdom to God the Father after destroying every rule and every authority and power. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet’’ (15:24-25). There seems here to be a blend of the present reign of Christ before the final consummation with an ultimate surrender to God of the authority delegated to him as the Christ.
What shall we make of all this? What I make of it has already been indicated along the way, but a summary may be in order. This is that Jesus was heavily indebted to his past, but was no
copyist of it; that he spoke as an apocalyptist, but that his apocalypticism was probably distorted and exaggerated in the records of the Synoptics; more important, that he had a prophetic sense of mission as God’s suffering servant and agent of redemption; that he deeply respected the law of his fathers, but gave it a new depth of meaning in self-giving love. I believe with his
followers in the early church that Jesus was the Christ, the Son of the living God, and our Savior; and that he believed himself to have a unique calling and God-given mission. To Jesus the kingdom of God was the universal, eternal, righteous reign of God, only partially accepted amid the world’s evil yet a present fact, a sphere of human existence to be entered and furthered by moral obedience in love to the will of God. He believed also in a final consummation with God’s victory over evil, and believed himself to be God’s agent in bringing this to pass.
Whether this is equivalent to saying that he believed himself to be the Messiah depends on the connotation given to this term.
The reader is invited to agree or to disagree with these conclusions to the degree that the evidence that has been presented seems persuasive. However, they will be presupposed in the remainder of the book.
Notes:
1. The doctrine of the remnant, having passed through the crucible and reinterpretations of New Testament thought, still persists in the belief of Jehovah’s Witnesses and other Pentecostals that on the day of the second coming, they alone will be taken to dwell with Jesus in heaven.
2. Quoted by O. E. Evans in The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, K-Q (Nashville:
Abingdon Press, 1962), p. 19.
3. John Bright, The Kingdom of God (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1953). Chapter 6 uses the suggestive term "the holy commonwealth" to designate this aspect of the outlook of Judaism.
4. It is the contention of S. G. F. Brandon in Jesus and the Zealots: A Study of the Political Factor in Primitive Christianity (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1968) that Jesus was a Zealot and a violent exponent of nationalism. This position has been effectively answered by George R. Edwards in Jesus and the Politics of Violence (New York: Harper and Row, 1972).
5. John Knox in Christ the Lord, pp. 30 38, points out Jesus probably used the terms "Son of man" in both senses, but that the early church, convinced that he was the Messiah, gave an eschatological interpretation to some sayings not so intended. He gives a more extended list of such passages.
6. John Bright, The Kingdom of God, pp. 208-14, regards Jesus as definitely believing himself to be the Messiah, but in the pattern and concept of the Suffering Servant.
7. The affirmation in Mark 14:61 in answer to Pilate’s question is less likely to have been spoken by Jesus than the replies given in Matthew 27:11 and Luke 22:70, for if he had said that he was the Son of God, the Jews could have put him to death for blasphemy.
8. There is no single word in English by which to translate the full meaning of the Paraclete. It has been variously rendered as comforter, counselor, advocate, and simply helper.
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Understanding the Kingdom of God by Georgia Harkness
Georgia Harkness was educated at Cornell University, Boston University School of Theology, studied at Harvard & Yale theological seminaries and at Union Theological Seminary of New York. She has taught at Elmira College, Mount Holyoke, and for twelve years was professor of applied theology at Garrett Biblical Institute. In 1950 she became professor of applied theology at the Pacific School of Religion, in Berkeley, California. Published by Abingdon Press, New York & Nashville, 1974. This material was edited for Religion Online by Ted & Winnie Brock.