Jesus of Nazareth: What He Wanted, Who He Was

1. In twentieth-century exegetical literature we repeatedly encounter, even among serious exegetes, the assertion that the reign of God announced by Jesus, and the salvation he promised, were “a purely religious matter.”²⁰ We can understand this formulation if we know what it was supposed to mean. Mainly it was a matter of distinguishing Jesus’ reign of God from Jewish expectations of the reestablishment of the nation and political action against the Roman occupying power. But more than that: the expression “purely religious” was meant to separate it from the expectation of a glorious messianic kingdom.

All these distinctions were justified. The question is only whether the label “purely religious” did not open the gates to new misunderstandings. What do we mean by “purely religious”? If the words are meant to exclude the world and society, they are meaningless and have nothing to do with the Bible.

2. A further reason why today’s exegesis has such a hard time considering the reign of God and the people of God together is that in the twentieth century people no longer spoke only of the “purely religious” character of the reign of God; they also said that it is “supernatural,” “otherworldly,” a “simply unworldly thing.” That, at any rate, is how Rudolf Bultmann formulated it in his book on Jesus that appeared in 1926:

[The reign of God] is not a good toward which the will and action of men is directed, not an ideal which is in any sense realized through human conduct, which in any sense requires

men

to bring it into existence. Being eschatological, it is wholly supernatural.

²¹

Whoever seeks it must realize that he cuts himself off from the world, otherwise he belongs to those who are not fit, who put their hand to the plow and look back.

²²

[“Entering into” the reign of God] does not imply any possibility of conceiving the Kingdom as something which either is or can be realized in any organization of world fellowship.

²³

We can also have some understanding for this eloquent language, with its measured formulations. It is typical of the “dialectical theology” emerging out of the critical experiences of World War I. These theologians rightly wanted to separate themselves from a broad current in nineteenth-century Protestantism that was convinced that the reign of God was developing in the growth of culture and intellect. Dialectical theology was right to oppose that.

But this opposition was in part presented in a dangerously one-sided language, as can be seen very clearly in the quotations from Bultmann. Does the reign of God really have nothing to do with human activity? A whole series of Jesus’ parables flagrantly contradicts that thesis. I will have more to say about that in chapter 7. And does the reign of God really have nothing to do with “world fellowship”? Then the reign of God would truly be a kind of cosmic cloud somewhere in the universe. It would have nothing to do with this world. And can we say that the reign of God is “supernatural” or somehow “cut off from the world”? Then there would be no chance for a bridge to the Old Testament and Judaism. The Jewish religious historian Gershom Scholem (1897–1982), a great scholar of Judaism and Christianity, wrote in one of his essays:

Judaism, in all its forms and shapes, has always held fast to a concept of redemption, which it has seen as a process taking place in public, on the stage of history and in the medium of community, in short, decisively occurring in the visible world and impossible to be conceived without such a visible appearance. In contrast, Christianity has an idea that redemption takes place in the “spiritual” realm and is invisible, playing itself out in the soul, in the world of each individual, and effecting a secret transformation that need not correspond to anything in the world outside.

²⁴

Scholem is right in many respects. In these sentences he formulates one of the most dangerous constrictions in Christianity, and especially in Christian theology. But he is also wrong. From the beginning the church concerned itself with the world and society. Even those Christians who have lived the monastic life have transformed and cultivated the world to an extraordinary degree. But when Bultmann calls the reign of God “wholly supernatural,” something that cannot be realized within secular society, he affirms Gershom Scholem’s verdict against Christianity.