Shailer Mathews

“ What then is this consummation, this end of the age? Certainly not death. Jesus seldom considers the death of the individual. The transition between "this age" and "the coming" is between eras and societies. The glorious kingdom is to come after the period of growth and conflict is past. The catastrophic completion of the slow process is after the possibilities of that process are exhausted, and with it will begin a new and better age. ”

“ There is constant danger that, in the attempt to restate the teachings of Jesus in the terms of today's thought, exposition shall wait too subserviently upon desire. The first century, albeit surprisingly like the nineteenth, was nevertheless not the nineteenth, and Jesus the Jew was not a product of Greek syllogisms and German hypotheses. Nevertheless, were one to come to the words of Jesus unbiased by traditional interpretations, the impression would be inevitable that the goal of his efforts was the establishment of an ideal society quite as much as the production of an ideal individual. ”

“ That which is true of the divine paternity in the sense of Jesus, is not true of the divine paternity in the larger sense. Promises made to those who in this deeper sense pray to their father are not to be transferred to those who will not so pray, but prefer hatred to love, wickedness to purity. A bad man cannot honestly desire that the father's kingdom should come and that his will should be done on earth as in heaven. A man full of selfishness and licentiousness cannot seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness in firm trust that a heavenly father will provide for his necessities. ”

“ Upon this ideal sonship is based the ideal brotherhood. Men are brothers through the possession of a life derived from the same parent. So in the new social order of Jesus, these men who have satisfied the deepest possibilities of their nature and are living in union with God—that is, are righteous—are brothers. Here again we meet with an accurate use of terms. The members of the kingdom alone are called brothers by Jesus. ”

“ Jesus, then, thinks that an ideal society is not beyond human attainment, but is the natural possibility for man's social capacities and powers. The new social order, as a spiritual fellowship between men and between God and men expressing itself in social relations, may at once be established potentially in the midst of that other social order, which is based upon a disregard of the normal religious and social capacities of men, and which becomes of necessity self-destructive, and in tendency anarchistic. ”

“ But in this connection Jesus ignores death. He never for a moment thinks that men cease to be men simply because they are dead. No more does human society. But whether before or after death, the realization of this ideal to which the age has slowly been leading the race is certain. The time of conflict will pass. The power of the new order will be so great that all opposition will have past or have been crushed. That for which men have prayed will appear. The kingdom will then in truth have come, and the will of God will be done as in heaven. ”

“ In a word, Jesus concentrates his attention upon the period of development. And this is the same thing as saying that the nearest approach to a realization of a Christian society is to be found where the principles of his ideal society are most nearly expressed in the institutions and life of a people, where this divine sonship and the consequent human fraternity become facts, not the premises of a doctrinaire sociology. ”

“ Jesus gives no clear answer, but his position, to judge from the few uncertain expressions of the gospel, [93] seems to imply that the church is one form of the attempt to realize the principles embodied in the kingdom of God. But there is not a trace of any belief on his part that the two would ever be coextensive. The new social order was to be religious; historically, it has made much progress through the aid of religious organizations. But it is as much grander than the church as an ideal is grander than the actual; as much wider as social life is wider than any one institution ”

“ It is enough to point out the fact that the kingdom is thought of by Jesus as present as well as future, and that its history is an evolution. Each stage of the growth will be to a considerable degree determined by the character of the men—or groups of men—with whom the new order has to deal. [91] Naturally the rates of progress will vary at different developing points. The influence of the old social environment will always be felt, and its elements will yield themselves with unequal readiness to the new ideal. ”

“ In the thought of Jesus it is a kingdom, not a congeries of kingdoms as numerous as there are God-fearing men. If Paul in one instance [15] seems to speak as if it were a discipline,—"not eating and drinking, but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Ghost"—it is because his readers can be trusted to recognize the boldness of the metonymy. Jesus never so speaks. With him ethical teachings are expressed explicity and literally by such terms as "perfect," [16] " righteousness," [17] and the like. In one case he is reported as making righteousness and the kingdom as coordinate goods. ”

“ It is one thing to appreciate the exact position of Jesus, and it is quite another to translate it into the terms of one's own philosophy. The first step is one of interpretation, and must always condition the second. The chief criticism of this appropriation of the kingdom as the capstone of a philosophy is the same that must be passed upon so much of the work of the theologian—it is attractive, it is doubtless in the main true, but it is not the thought of Jesus. ”

“ These distinctions are evidently those of terminology rather than of thought. The man who especially emphasizes universal, racial divine sonship will be sure to admit different degrees of filial obedience and love; while, as already intimated, he who does not prefer to use thus indiscriminately the only words capable of supreme religious content, nevertheless is most eager to urge at the same time God's love for the race and the possibilities of reformation on the part of the evil man. ”

“ Only on one or the other of two alternatives can the opposite opinion be supported: Either Jesus saw the impossibility of early plans for social or political revolution and looked to a heavenly Messianic kingdom, or such passages as are not clearly eschatological are to be rejected as the mistaken reports and interpretations of the gospel history. So far as the last possibility is concerned the contrary is quite as likely; while in regard to the first suggestion, it may be urged that an unbiased chronology and exegesis fail to disclose any such change on the part of Jesus. ”

“ And the fact of a real spiritual union with God, the outcome of man's natural and normal powers, is called by Jesus and the earlier Christian writers a sonship and fatherhood.
It may be urged that the point at issue is trivial. If Jesus recognizes and enforces that universal love of God for men which is today denoted by the expression fatherhood of God, and if, indeed, his application of the term is simply a question of terminology, why attempt any sharp discrimination? ”

“ The Johannine conception is even more explicit. Entrance to it is dependent wholly upon a spiritual renewal, [85] and in the sonship thus obtained are the forces [86] that are to make for the complete realization of the specific ideals Jesus presents as the features of the perfect social life. In this spiritual character of the kingdom lies its energy and its practicability. Membership within it is possible for all since all are spiritual. [87] It can move not merely in organized but in unorganized ways. It can remake public opinion and social conceptions. ”

“ Those who wilfully refuse to join in the society will grieve most miserably, their suffering being the result of their inability to share in the blessings of the new humanity.
7. Although this triumphant establishment of the ideal society is the goal of human evolution under the impulse of the newly revealed religious forces, Jesus does not allow himself to weaken the practical operation of an attempted realization of its laws by any over description of its joys. ”

“ In fact, no one in Israel, which was from the first to be a kingdom whose supreme Lord and King was Jehovah, could thereby understand anything else than a kingdom in which the will of God is fulfilled as perfectly upon earth as by the angels in heaven. ”

“ Distance is therefore not an element adverse to a progressive social unity. Jesus himself in his own estimation is the visible expression of this center in which all these relations converge and unite. In his death he drew all men to himself. [75] Wherever a little group of brethren is, there is also the Son of Man. ”

“ While there is in these words a gratifying recognition of the supreme position accorded by Jesus to the kingdom, and while such a view emphasizes what is certainly a dominant teaching of his, namely, that the highest good consists in entering the kingdom, that is gaining salvation, it is as certainly doing violence to some of the analogies that furnish much of the content of its definition when the kingdom is made altogether supra-mundane. ”

“ It is not to be a mere coercive aggregation of men; its essential element is not its form but the coordinating and unifying spiritual life that is common to all. Membership is psychical, not external, and its blessings are also spiritual. The poor in spirit [79] are to be its members; within it the mourner is to be comforted; [80] those hungry for righteousness are to be fed ”

“ It is not merely an old Jewish form of thought, which it is useful to study for the elucidation of the biblical literature it is regarded by many as the most natural and adequate conception that we can take to guide us in forming a system of Christian theology. Further this notion of the kingdom of God has not merely a speculative but a practical bearing ”

“ He has, for instance, much more to say about marriage and wealth than about heaven and hell. As may appear later, his descriptions of what should be special social relationships are never temporizing but absolute, yet the consummation of the age's progress is chiefly advanced as an incentive to approximate its ideal conditions in the present. ”

“ Stead (Kingdom of God, p. 69) regards it as the fellowship of souls, divine and human, of which the law and life are love, wherein the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of man as both are embodied in Jesus the Christ, are recognized and realized." Weiss (Biblical Theology of the New Testament, I, 63) does not accurately define the term as used by Jesus, but gives an approximate definition as follows: "What this kingdom of God is, is nowhere expressly said; the idea is regarded as one quite familiar to the people. ”

“ A term thus frequently used of necessity will express at various times and in different connections different shades of thought. To discover the substance that lies behind this varying usage and is common to it all is no small task. ”

“ In its turn this points to the possibility of a beginning and progressive social order here and now. Jesus in his double revelation of God to man and humanity to man inaugurated its historical life. If consciousness of sonship is possible for men, and moral development along both individual and social lines is made possible by man's very constitution; if Jesus could speak of his immediate disciples as enjoying the blessings of the kingdom [88] and as brethren with God as their father ”