Jesus of Nazareth: What He Wanted, Who He Was

Obviously this resolute will of Jesus to gather all Israel (for the sake of the nations) had everything to do with his proclamation of the reign of God. The two are inseparable. There is no text that better summarizes Jesus’ praxis and his innermost intention than the Our Father. As we will see (cf. chap. 4), the very first petition of this direction-giving prayer is about the sanctification and gathering of Israel. The background is the theology of the book of Ezekiel, especially Ezekiel 36. This “petition for gathering” is followed immediately—in the same breath, so to speak—by the petition for the coming of the reign of God. These two petitions are the most important ones Jesus entrusted to his disciples, and they belong inextricably together. The reign of God must have a people.

How is it that such clear truths, which so obviously spring to our attention even on the basis of the Old Testament, have not been a matter of course in the history of New Testament exegesis? The reason must be a widespread framework of ideas that is deeply anchored in Christians’ heads.

God and the Soul

The religious subjectivism and individualism that have always threatened Christian theology left profound traces especially in the theology of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth. The depth of this can be observed in the work of Adolf von Harnack, one of the most influential theologians and scholars of his time. Harnack lived from 1851 to 1930. In the winter semester of 1899–1900 he gave sixteen lectures for students from all departments of the University of Berlin, entitled Das Wesen des Christentums [The Essence of Christianity]. More than six hundred students heard them. The book Harnack published a few months later, based on his lecture manuscripts and bearing the same title, was an even greater public event; it went through numerous editions and its ongoing influence was extraordinary.⁵

In What Is Christianity, Harnack used the concepts of individualism and subjectivism without any shadow of criticism. He was convinced that those two concepts rightly and substantively described Jesus’ preaching.⁶ Of course, Harnack knew that Jesus worked “within his own people” and that his preaching about the coming of the reign of God was eschatological. But he separated “what is traditional and what is peculiar” in Jesus’ preaching and so distinguished the “kernel from the husk.”⁷ Once one peels off the Jewish husk one finds something very simple: “the Gospel in the Gospel.”⁸ At the end of his third lecture Harnack spoke the now-famous sentences:

If anyone wants to know what the kingdom of God and the coming of it meant in Jesus’ message, he must read and study his parables. He will then see what it is that is meant. The kingdom of God comes by coming to the individual, by entering into his soul and laying hold of it. True, the kingdom of God is the rule of God; but it is the rule of the holy God in the hearts of individuals;

it is God Himself in His power.

From this point of view everything that is dramatic in the external and historical sense has vanished; and gone, too, are all the external hopes for the future. Take whatever parable you will, the parable of the sower, of the pearl of great price, of the treasure buried in the field—the word of God, God Himself, is the kingdom. It is not a question of angels and devils, thrones and principalities, but of God and the soul, the soul and its God.

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With this Harnack had produced a radical reduction of Jesus’ preaching. He says without any concern at all:

In the combination of these ideas—God the Father, Providence, the position of men as God’s children, the infinite value of the human soul—the whole Gospel is expressed.

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The individual is called upon to listen to the glad message of mercy and the Fatherhood of God, and to make up his mind whether he will be on God’s side and the Eternal’s, or on the side of the world and of time.

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Here for the first time everything that is external and merely future is abandoned: it is the individual, not the nation or the state, which is redeemed.

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The Gospel is above all questions of mundane development; it is concerned, not with material things but with the souls of men.

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Jesus never had anyone but the individual in mind.

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