Jesus of Nazareth: What He Wanted, Who He Was

3. Finally, there is one more reason why today’s exegetes have a hard time thinking of the reign of God and the people of God together. In the Middle Ages (alongside some quite different positions) there was a line of theological thinking that identified the reign of God with the church. Berthold of Regensburg, one of the greatest popular preachers in the Middle Ages (ca. 1210–1272), repeatedly equated the kingdom of heaven with “holy Christendom” in his sermons. For him the two are identical. And that line of interpretation appears repeatedly throughout the medieval period. Basically, we find it already in the work of Gregory the Great (540–604). For him Jesus’ parables of the reign of God mean nothing but the church. In the background, as so often in the Middle Ages, we find Augustine, but a coarsened and simplified Augustine.

The real Augustine was much more cautious here. He worked with a twofold concept of the reign of God. While he said that the church was already the kingdom of God, he asserted that it is not yet the “kingdom of perfect peace.”²⁵ And since Augustine had an extraordinary influence on theology and preaching (and was not always read very carefully), it is no wonder that the church was repeatedly equated with the reign of God over the centuries.

But then at some point there came a time when people no longer believed in that equation. In 1892 appeared the famous book by Johannes Weiss (1863–1914), Jesus’ Proclamation of the Kingdom of God, and in it—against the trends of Enlightenment theology and rationalism, but also those of German idealism—the eschatological character of the reign of God in Jesus’ understanding was worked out in detail.²⁶ In the wake of Weiss’s insight, the identification of the reign of God with the church was increasingly rejected. Since then we hear again and again that obviously one cannot equate the two. The reign of God and the church must be clearly distinguished. The reign of God is not the same thing as the church, and the church is something different from the reign of God. This runs like a basso continuo through today’s exegetical and dogmatic literature.

And that is quite right. Obviously the church is not identical with the reign of God. But when we constantly hear this ground bass playing we are no longer in a position to ask the right questions about the relationship between the reign of God and the church, or between the reign of God and the people of God. The theme has become taboo, so to speak. And that is a shame. It is not only a shame, it is fateful. It once again affirms Gershom Scholem’s verdict.

But what really is the relationship between the reign of God and the people of God, or between the reign of God and the church? It is high time this chapter produced an answer. It should be clear by now that we have to speak of correlation, not identity. But how could such a correlation be described?

The Church and the Reign of God

There could be a great many different ways to do it, but Vatican II pointed out an especially meaningful path, namely to understand the church as a basic sacrament prior to all the individual sacraments.²⁷ This suggests the possibility of describing the relationship between the reign of God and the people of God also in terms of sacrament. So we can say that the people of God, or the church, is the sacrament of the reign of God in the process of becoming reality. Probably that is by far the best way to compare the two realities.

The classic definition of the church’s sacraments is very familiar: “The sacraments are visible signs of invisible realities.” That definition had already been used by Augustine. If we apply it to the relationship between the reign of God and the church we would say that the “invisible reality” is the reign of God, which is humanly unimaginable. It is greater and more glorious than anything we can think of. It encompasses all creation. It will encompass world society. God is making it a reality within history and will perfect and complete it in the resurrection to everlasting life.

The “visible sign” of this unimaginable reign of God, however, is the people of God, or the church. The “sign” would thus be a people—and hence a visible, tangible, graspable, definable, identifiable reality. This sign-character remains, as it does with all sacramental actions. The signs designate and indicate; they point to something greater than themselves. Thus the signs do not exist in and for themselves; in themselves they are nothing. All that they have comes from that to which they refer.