of the Jews. It took its form from those ideas. Scherer also represents
Jesus' idea of the kingdom as wholly Apocalyptic. The _first_ criticism
to be made upon this hypothesis is, that a Theocratic idea arising out
of the Jewish expectations and conformed to them could not dispense with
all thought of earthly conflict. The struggle could not have been
altogether upon a supermundane theatre, nor the triumph of the Messiah
achieved without common warlike agencies. The common Jewish idea was
founded on the language of some Hebrew prophets, and appears in the
Apocalyptic writings of Christ's age; and his own mind in cherishing the
hope attributed to him must have quite surrendered itself to the popular
expectation. This expectation supposed some outward conflict as the
occasion of supernatural interference. Nor do I know any ground for
thinking that in Christ's time the Jews expected the Messiah to prevail
with angelic aid without a conflict of arms. Whoever will read Ezekiel
and Daniel will see that those prophets expected a contest on earth with
earthly weapons, as the occasion for the intervention of Jehovah. And
whoever will read the wars of the Maccabees will see how Jewish courage,
fired with the expectation of celestial assistance, never stopped to
compare the apparent strength of the respective forces. Nor did the
Apocalyptic seers dismiss this thought of earthly battle. The book of
Enoch speaks of the unconverted as delivered at the judgment into the
hands of the righteous, whose horses shall wade in the blood of sinners,
and whom the angels shall come to help.[36] The Apocalypse of the New
Testament presents the picture of the Messiah as mounted on a white
horse, and riding forth to judge and make war; and the comment of Dr.
Noyes on this and similar passages is that, in the mind of the writer,
there was to be war in heaven and upon earth, before Christ should reign
in final triumph.[37] This theory has no distinctive character without
supposing the angels acting on the stage of sense and time, and giving
the Hebrews the victory. With this expectation is probably connected the
"sign from heaven" demanded of Jesus by the Pharisees, a sign which
should stimulate Hebrew faith to irresistible warlike ardor. The
unconverted were to be vanquished by some mysterious exercise of
Messianic power. Hence many were not satisfied with Christ's miracles;
not that they disputed their reality, but as being not decisive of his
Messianic character. Now, if this had been the thought of Jesus, he
would have been disposed to seek an occasion for such interference from
on high. It is true, in saying this, we say he must have given himself
up to the enthusiasm which so often fanatically manifested itself in his
age, and was always ready to break forth. But the idea supposed, when
one's whole being was yielded to it,--as Jesus did yield his whole being
to the ideas which possessed him,--could not have stopped short of
practical action. He must have been prepared in his thought to act with
fanaticism. Strauss says, "He did not try to bring about all this by his
own will; but awaited a signal from his heavenly Father." The actual
Jesus did undoubtedly as Strauss says; but the supposed Jesus would have
at some time believed the signal to be given. The idea, and the sort of
faith in supernatural aid which accompanied it, would lead him to think
the moment had come for this demonstration. "If such were the ideal of
Jesus in fact, why did he not seek to realize it at once? Why did he
prefer the way of renunciation and self-sacrifice to the possession of
the kingdoms of the world? Why, in the place of the Son of Man, have we
not a Mahomet six hundred years in advance." The logical and necessary
result of belief in his Messiahship, and of faith in this sort of
supernatural aid in realizing it, was that he should bring about an
occasion for this demonstration. It was an encounter with the Romans, in
the hope that Jehovah and the angels would fight for God's people, and
be more than strong enough against all odds. "The Messianic Theocracy
could not exist as a Roman province."[38] But Jesus studiously avoids
conflict with Rome. Besides, the second part of the temptation of Christ
sets aside at once this ideal. His early consciousness of wonderful
power had not the effect of disposing his mind favorably toward such
Jewish Messianic ideas. That consciousness tended rather to spiritualize
his thought: we may say, it subdued him. It made his whole feeling
moderate, and his whole thought wise and temperate. This is a very
remarkable part of the representation of him by the evangelists.
[Footnote 36: Book of Enoch, Dillman, ch. 100.]
[Footnote 37: Rev. xix. 11; comp. Christian Examiner, May, 1860, p.
382.]
[Footnote 38: Hase's Life of Jesus.]
But, secondly, I will now suppose the expectation of Jesus to have been
purified from every notion of warlike action. The regeneration
(palingenesia) was to be not a political revolution, but a renovation of
the earth and the heavens, attended by a resurrection of the dead, of
whom the accepted were to dwell with Christ in the renovated world,--not
the present earth, but the earth restored,--and that his presence and
return were to be visible. This is his coming with the angels to set up
his kingdom and to reign.
I. The very language which this hypothesis is adopted to explain, taken
in its proper sense, proves too much. Jesus was to be a king on the
renewed earth, yet his kingdom was to be different from those of this
world. "It is not," he says, "of this world." It is a real kingdom as
much as that of David; but it is not to be a worldly rule on the one
hand, nor a purely spiritual rule on the other. It is political, and not
political. According to the writer of the Apocalypse, whose views are
supposed to have been sanctioned by Jesus, this king must reign until he
has put all enemies under his feet. When the kingdom is consummated, he
is to surrender it to his Father. The hypothesis under consideration
represents the kingdom as to be consummated at the time of the
world-catastrophe which, with the second or real coming of Jesus as
Messiah, will occur, according to the alleged words of Christ himself,
immediately after the destruction of the city. Why shall not the kingdom
be given up immediately to the Father? This king in "the proper sense,"
and in no purely spiritual sense, who comes visibly, will have no
occasion for a reign in the proper sense of the word. Strauss says,
"Jesus expected to restore the throne of David, and with his disciples
to govern a liberated people. But in no degree did he rest his hopes on
the sword of his adherents, but on the legions of angels which the
Father would send him. He was not disconcerted when his end approached
without the kingdom having come. It would come with his return." But how
when he returned was the throne of David to be restored, and a proper,
literal reign to exist, and not a mere spiritual reign? This king has no
business to perform: his work is all accomplished immediately by a
stupendous miracle. And he and his apostles have nothing to do but to
sit on idle thrones, or to feast at tables loaded with luxuries which
are at the same time mundane and supermundane; to enjoy a sensual
paradise, which differs from a Mohammedan paradise only in that it does
not consist of the coarsest forms of sensual life. They are to partake
of an actual wine, a fruit of the vine,--a new kind of wine; to observe
the passover with supermundane food, but food pleasurable to the taste.
This Jesus is thought to have expected and promised.[39] I sometimes
think this attempt to find a half-way doctrine of Jesus' expectation
concerning the future ascribes to him an apocalypticism more inept and
fatuous than that of the Jews themselves. It attempts to unite the
contradictory. It cannot be stated by Strauss in any thing like the
literal sense of the passages on which it is founded, without supposing
something of that political element which it is designed to exclude; or
else entirely dropping that relation to Jewish hopes to which it is
believed to owe its origin, and thus leaving it unexplained. For, if
Jesus gave up all expectation whatever of a kingdom of this world, we
have no occasion for a visible return.
[Footnote 39: See Renan's Life of Jesus, first edition.]
II. The second objection to this view is that it is incompatible with
the most important expressions and opinions of Jesus.
1. The kingdom is to come with the world-catastrophe; and the King is
then to come in some mysterious manner on the clouds of heaven. How,
then, could Jesus say the kingdom of God cometh not with _observation_?
Could any political kingdom arise in a more outwardly striking manner?
How does that saying of Christ comport with his promising a literal
miraculous light in the heaven (Matt. xxiv. 30) which shall betoken his
own coming and the great world-change? That form of coming with a
precursive sign in the heaven is just what he contradicted. Such a
kingdom would come with a sign which could be watched for,--a sign very
different from those signs of the time, the moral indications, which a
spiritual insight might discern. How could he say the kingdom of God was
among them _already_, if it were yet to come at the time of the great
world-change? How could he say to Caiaphas: "Yes, I am the Messiah; and
moreover _from this moment_ you shall see the Son of Man sitting on the
right hand of power and coming on the clouds of heaven"? It was
equivalent to saying, "You have arrested me, you have already doomed me
to death. But I am the Anointed of God to introduce the new spiritual
kingdom of Humanity; and, from this moment in which you decree my death,
my cause takes a Divine impulse, and my purpose strides on to the
triumph God has destined for it."
2. This expectation is incompatible with what he says on other topics
related to the kingdom, the resurrection, and the future life. This
expectation implies the Apocalyptic view of the resurrection. The
Messiah was to come to raise the dead. (The Christian world has
generally entertained the same view.) The visible return and the
resurrection coexisted, probably, in Jesus' mind. If he held the one, he
held the other. The two opinions were Siamese twins, connected by a
vital bond; separate them and you would kill them both. But Jesus gave a
view of the resurrection and the future life totally different from the
Apocalyptic one. He taught the _continuance_ of life. His argument with
the Sadducees proves that doctrine, or it amounts to nothing. God is the
God not of the dead, but of the living. The Rich Man and Lazarus, of the
parable, are already in a future state of retribution. He who believes
on him has "already passed from death unto life." Jesus could not
suppose that one who had received from him the quickening of spiritual
life could pass into the under-world, and grope as a shade in the
intermediate state. "Whosoever liveth and believeth in him shall never
die." Now, to one who is satisfied that Jesus was emancipated from the
doctrine of an intermediate state, it must be evident that he could not
have held the Apocalyptic notion resting on it of a raising of the dead
at the coming of the Messiah, and could not have held to the visible
coming of the Messiah who was to come to do that very thing.
The same observation is to be made of the judgment. Jesus shows himself
emancipated from the common notion of the judgment, and of a future
simultaneous judgment-day. He that believeth on him is not judged. He
that believeth not is judged already, in that he has not believed in the
only-begotten Son of God. God sent him not to judge or to punish the
world, but to save it. The judgment of the world is not to be
exclusively at a remote day. It has begun. It is _now_. Christ says, Now
is the judgment of this world; now is the Prince of this world to be
cast out; now, when Jesus is about to consummate by dying the moral
means of that result. Jesus is not to be a personal Judge of men at a
remote time. His principles are for ever to judge men, to judge them
finally. Not himself as the personal Logos, or as the reappearing
Messiah, is to judge men, but "the word he has spoken." These thoughts
in the fourth Gospel must have come from Jesus, not from the writer, who
shows himself in places not emancipated from the view of his time.
3. The doctrine of Christ's expectation which I am considering is not
congruous with the means which he contemplates for accomplishing his
work, and with the view he took of the progress of his kingdom, and of
the moral duties and retributions of Humanity. Nothing is clearer than
that his kingdom of God was to be a communion of men on earth bound
together by the same consciousness of the heavenly Father. It was to
extend into another life. But it was to spread more and more widely, and
subdue the world to his spiritual dominion. By moral influence he is to
be King. This communion is to be the salt of the earth, the light of the
world. It is to extend its influence by holy example, by good works. He
will be in spirit with the apostles and with his church. He trains them
to carry on his work, and tells them to preach the good news to all
nations. He does this as if founding a work which shall go on
indefinitely. He declares early, in a discourse designed to explain his
kingdom, that the law shall not pass away; that it shall in its moral
requirements be all realized. Heaven and earth shall not pass away until
all shall _be_. And he directs his disciples to pray as much as for
daily bread that God's kingdom may come, and that God's will may be done
_on earth_ as it is done in heaven. Is it possible that this teacher
expects all this to be closed in thirty or forty years, by a violent
catastrophe, and by the substituting of a universal miracle for this
moral instrumentality? He says it is not the Father's will that one of
the lowliest shall perish. Did he mean to limit the opportunity of
salvation for the race to forty years, and to consign to the torment of
Gehenna all who did not accept the new truth in that time? And all this
impossibility is heightened by the nature of some of those parables in
which he treated of his kingdom. "If the kingdom of God were to be
established by an irresistible miracle, on a fixed day, in a manner so
splendid, what signify those admirable parables of the mustard-seed, of
the leaven, of the net, of the grain growing from itself, which suppose
a development, slow, regular, organic, proceeding from an imperceptible
point, but endowed with a Divine vitality, and displaying successively
its latent energies?"[40] Besides, no one ever more strictly enjoined
the duties of life, the everlasting obligations. He contemplates such
duties as are to be done in such a world as ours was then and is now, as
the essential sphere in which the heavenly spirit must be formed in man.
His principle of final judgment is, "Inasmuch as ye have done the duties
of Humanity unto your fellow-men, ye have done them unto me. Come, ye
blessed of my Father." Could that teacher suppose that the opportunity
for performing such duties would cease for ever before the last of his
apostles should have died? Could he think that within that time the
destinies of Humanity as he knew it would be closed?
[Footnote 40: Réville, Review of Renan's Life of Jesus.]
These are the principal reasons which determine me to believe that Jesus
did not expect to return visibly to raise the dead, judge the world, and
be the head of an external Theocratic kingdom on the renewed earth.
What, then, shall be said of the language which appears to express that
opinion? "Ye shall drink the wine new with me in my Father's kingdom."
"Ye shall sit on thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel," &c. Two
considerations are to be kept in sight in establishing the views and
expectations of Jesus: first, that he used this language--so far as he
used it--in a figurative sense, to represent spiritual and providential
facts as he conceived them; second, that the evangelists may have
sometimes given to his language a precision and a connection which did
not belong to it, as delivered. That he could not have employed this
language as it is reported to us, in its literal and proper sense, is to
my mind a necessary conviction in the premises. This would suppose that
he entertained two orders of conceptions, which were opposed to one
another, with a clear profound conviction, and gave them as revelations
of God: one his spiritual and rational beliefs; the other his
Apocalyptic beliefs. This supposition is the vice of Renan's seventeenth
chapter. The language of the Apocalyptic beliefs Jesus might use to some
extent as a vehicle for conveying the spiritual and rational to others;
and the most explicit language in which he conveyed his spiritual
beliefs, so far as it was retained in their feebler minds, might be
forced into harmony with their traditional opinions. But that in Jesus'
mind, so original, so manifestly filled with fresh thought on every
theme of Providence and man, these spiritual apprehensions of a kingdom
or communion of God which should act under and within the state,
renovating human life and society; of a Messiah who by such a kingdom
should fulfil the missionary function of Israel to the race of man; of a
resurrection which should be the uninterrupted continuance of the
blessed life, or an immediate renewal of the sense of wasted opportunity
and law violated on earth; of a judgment both immediate and continual of
every soul despising the truth revealed to it; of a retribution to civil
societies according to Divine law,--should arise as original
conceptions, be held with firm decisive grasp, be of the essence of his
instruction, and so pronounced in him that our most advanced modern
thought is but the distant echo of his profound and distinct
enunciations; and that at the same time he should hold those Apocalyptic
traditions, of a visible coming, of a Theocratic throne before whose
splendor that of Cæsar would fade away, of a simultaneous resurrection
and judgment,--hold them in unimpaired conviction, as truths to be
solemnly insisted upon as a part of his revelation,--this, it seems to
me, comes as near a psychological contradiction as we can well conceive.
And besides, if Jesus had clung to those beliefs as Divine convictions,
the language ascribed to him would have had the unity of that of the
Epistles and the Apocalypse on this subject. We should not be perplexed
with apparent contradictions. As it is, we are obliged to use those
words which inculcate his spiritual thought for explaining that part of
his language which is conformed to Jewish conceptions.
But, it is said, this language would naturally create misunderstanding,
and that it is too bold to be taken in a figurative sense. In regard to
the misunderstanding of it, let it be said, if we suppose a mind
inspired by God to see far deeper and further than its contemporaries,
it must be liable to be misunderstood in proportion to the poverty of
the vernacular language. Jesus' inspiration and insight gave his speech
a character such as the highest poetic endowment always gives, and made
it bold. It is not to be forgotten that he belonged to the east and to
the people who have given us the Old Testament prophecies. The boldest
tropes were natural to him. In moments of strong moral excitement, they
fly from him as sparks from the flint or lightning from the charged
cloud. It exposes him to the charge of mysticism. We forget that he was
not a lecturer, a systematic teacher; but a prophet, a converser in the
streets, a popular teacher, a poet sent from God to re-create humanity.
Necessity concurred with inspiration to make his speech tropical and
often liable to be misapprehended. He was obliged to use images and
terms which the people and the schools applied to the Messiah in order
to claim, as he meant to claim, a predetermined, providential connection
with Hebrew history and hope. When he said to Pilate, "I am a king," it
was a truth; but it was a trope. "I am the bread of life,"--a truth, but
a trope. "I am come to send a sword on the earth, not peace;" "This cup
of wine is my blood sealing the new covenant,"--truths, but compact with
the boldest tropes. When he said, "I am the Messiah," it was a truth,
but a trope. It was liable to be misunderstood; but, without it, it was
impossible that he should be understood. He saw Satan, after the seventy
returned from their mission and related their success, "falling like
lightning from heaven." If he foresaw political revolutions which would
occur within a generation, and believed they would be employed by
Providence to further the establishment of his principles or kingdom,
which would then reach a point from which it would be evident, to a
sympathizing mind quick to catch the glimpses of a new day, that they
would become dominant in humanity, would it be too bold a figure for him
to say, "The coming of the Son of Man will be as the lightning which
shoots from horizon to horizon," or too bold a figure to describe those
precursive overturns and downfalls of the old in language borrowed from
Isaiah and Joel, the prophets whom he loved and knew by heart? Might he
not believe, identifying his religion and the Divine spirit which would
spread it, that at the time of these changes, conspiring providentially
with the labors of apostles and evangelists, his voice would call the
chosen, those prepared by mental and moral affinity, to the new
life-work, to the new order of things; that his call to his own would be
like the supposed call of the last trumpet summoning them to come into a
spiritual communion of blessed work, and blessed hope? These figures
were naturally, almost inevitably, formed in these circumstances.
He used the language given him in the speech of his time in a figurative
sense, partly because of the want of proper terms suited to his purpose,
and partly because as a popular teacher, desirous to impress the common
mind, he could not sacrifice all the associations connected with that.
But we often find in proximity with it words of his own, or something in
the occasion, which he might expect to constrain the listeners to
reflect that he was speaking figuratively; as John vi., "My words, they
are spirit and they are life," and the reply Luke xxii. 38, to the
information, here are two swords, "It is enough." Were the accounts more
full, it is fair to suppose we might have more such expressions. They
would not be so likely to be remembered as the striking, figurative
words.
There are words of Christ at the Last Supper which seem to me to have
occasioned quite unnecessary perplexity. "I say unto you I will not
henceforth drink of the fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it
new with you in my Father's kingdom." They were the spontaneous outflow
of mingled sadness, affection, and hope. He might expect them to be
interpreted to his disciples by his situation, by all he had said of
leaving them, and by his habit of conveying spiritual thought under the
sensuous images suggested by the moment. They referred to the kingdom he
died to establish. They were as natural as to say, "Where two or three
are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them." But
they have been a stumbling-block to students whom we should have
expected to be able better to _orient_ themselves in the Master's genius
and style.
Colani has spent a page to ridicule it, and show that it is not fit for
its place.[41] Yet a similar figure is used by occidental preachers, who
would not expect to be reproached for coarseness. A young minister
on an occasion not unlike that on which Jesus sat with his
disciples--occurring as did that passover in the midst of sacrifice and
revolution, the Thanksgiving day celebrated after the close of our great
war, in our land at once so afflicted and so blessed--addressed his
hearers, some of whom had lost sons or brothers in camp or field, in
figurative but very appropriate and touching language, in which we may
suppose he felt the inspiration of his Master's words at the last meal.
It was to the effect that, although those who had fallen in the strife
could no more partake with us in the bounty with which the Thanksgiving
table would be spread, they would in all future festivals be with us in
spirit, and rejoice in the blessings ever more and more to be realized
which had been purchased by their sacrifices for our disinthralled
country.
[Footnote 41: Jesus Christ and the Messianic Beliefs of his Time.]
Nor do I see any better cause of the offence which is taken at the
language ascribed to Jesus in Matt. xix. 28, in the offer of thrones:
"In the regeneration, when the Son of Man shall sit on the throne of his
glory, ye also shall sit on twelve thrones judging the twelve tribes of
Israel." Let us think how Jesus must have longed to communicate his
thought and his hope to those chosen ones; how he would not be willing
to drive them away by his very greatness as he sometimes drove away the
careless and cavilling; how his mind, if he were a human being and not
an automaton, would alternate between the sternest truth-speaking and
the necessity of coming closer to them, and giving them hope, and
lifting them a little nearer to himself; how like the mother bird,
enticing her brood to their first flight, and finding he had at one
moment gone beyond them, he would come back, and alight on a point
nearer to their apprehension, that he might tempt them to use the
untried pinions of their thought,--and we need have no difficulty in
seeing that he meant thrones of moral power. I do not know how those men
received it; but I do not believe they thought then of political power.
If, after Jesus left them, they recalled this and every other such
expression as a means of nourishing the hope of an Apocalyptic return
and kingdom, the great Teacher and Comforter was not accountable for
that perversion.
Jesus' language, then, can be explained without supposing him to have
expected visibly to return after death to erect a kingdom of God of
which he should be the visible head.