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CHAPTER III

THE KINGDOM OF GOD

II. IN PRIMITIVE CHRISTIANITY

CHRISTIANITY, as we have seen, began as the proclamation of the near advent of the Kingdom of God. The special teaching associated The Chriswith this proclamation is stated to tian sources. have been given by Jesus of Nazareth, who is now regarded as the central figure of human history. If estimated by his achievements this position is well deserved; no master of men is comparable to Jesus in influence over the destinies of mankind. There are those who would say that this influence is due to an ideal formed by the Christian imagination rather than to an actual historical personage; such critics would maintain that we know so little about Jesus that we are not justified in asserting anything positively about His character and teaching. Still, I think the consensus of scholarly opinion to-day would be not only that Jesus really lived, but that His personality must have been one of unique greatness and power. But, apart from the doubtful testimony of ecclesiastical tradition, our only sources of information about Jesus are the writings

collected in the New Testament, and these are all of later date-some of them of much later date than the period of His ministry. So far as we know He wrote nothing Himself; so we are entirely dependent upon second-hand reports of His words. This renders the task of forming a judgment upon those words a difficult one, especially as that part of the New Testament which professes to record them is not the earliest. But for our present purpose this does not greatly matter, for we have to recognise that, great as the personality of Jesus may have been, Christianity was largely the product of the intellectual and religious environment in which it arose; it could not have been a complete breach with the past, nor is it reasonable to suppose that Jesus Himself stood altogether unrelated to the Judaism which supplied His mental and moral training. For the purpose of our present inquiry, therefore, we are less concerned with what Jesus actually said and did than with what the primitive Christian society thought about Him and His value for mankind, which is exactly what the New Testament, read in the light of contemporary history, enables us to discover. This is quite a reasonable standpoint to adopt, and one which is less open to objection than any other. The important thing to ascertain is what were the main ideas taken for granted by these first Christians, and what was the message they supposed they had to deliver to the world. The best way of getting at this will be to follow the traditional

order rather than begin with the doctrinal epistles, although probably these were the first to become literature. I omit the fourth gospel for the present, for it is not a biography at all, but a religious treatise, like the epistles, its author having adopted the literary device of employing the narrative form to set forth his ideas.

We learn, then, from the synoptical gospels that the work of Jesus was prepared for by the emergence of a remarkable preacher John the who has become known to Christian Baptist. tradition as John the Baptist. I do not mean that this preacher was a divinely appointed and longexpected forerunner of the Messiah in the sense usually understood in Christian circles to-day. I mean that a man of prophetic temper and courage, a latter-day Elijah, stood forth as the exponent of a truer and nobler view of the meaning of the Kingdom of God than that which had become popular. Any one who reads the New Testament without being possessed by the ordinary presuppositions of dogmatic Christian theology will see at once that this man was addressing himself to the mental environment of his time, and that he never got beyond it. His preaching was a protest against the materialism of prevailing ideas concerning the nature of the Kingdom, but, like so many of his contemporaries of Jewish race, he fully believed the Kingdom to be near at hand. He believed, too, in the contemporary notion of the Messiah and His work. It is evident,

from such fragments of his discourses as have come down to us, that he thought of the coming of the Messiah as a kind of universal judgment, in which all evil elements should be purged out of human society, followed by an entire reorganisation of human affairs. Neither is there any reason to doubt that he was a loyal nationalist in his conviction that the Jewish people would occupy the supreme position in the new order, and that their Messiah would be the universal monarch. It was because he believed all these things in common with the people he addressed that he obtained immediately such an extensive hearing; but, probably, it was his eloquence and moral austerity which gained him the influence he undoubtedly wielded over the popular mind for a considerable period. He was filled with indignation at the trickeries and insincerities of the religious ruling class, who talked much about the Kingdom without realising that the one indispensable requisite in the new order when it came, would be personal righteousness of a real, and not merely of a ceremonial, kind. For men of covetous and grasping spirit to talk about an ideal social order was absurd, and he told them so. The belief that real righteousness of life did not matter so long as a man was descended from Abraham, he regarded as a most mischievous perversion of the truth about the Kingdom. It seems that the main thing which drove this successor of the prophets into the open and made him a preacher was his first-hand acquaintance

with the social inequalities and unredressed wrongs of the people among whom he dwelt. We now know, as everybody knew then but submitted to it, that the aristocratic priestly order made large profits out of the disabilities of the people. It is one of the ironies of history that the ecclesiastical order should so often have done the same since in the name of the Founder of Christianity. The men who devoured widows' houses and for a pretence made long prayers were an abomination to John the Baptist; and yet these men were talking about the Kingdom of God in the same way as every one else. It is this which explains the voluntary poverty of the preacher as well as much of his fiery language. His message was social and ethical, inspired by a firm belief in the righteousness of God. When members of the orthodox religious orders came to listen to him, he did not mince matters. Let us look at what he said, but in so doing let us keep our minds free of Christian theology in any shape or form. If it were not for the fact that we are so accustomed to hearing these words read in churches, with all the atmosphere of dogma about them, we should see at once that this man was dominated by the same motive and passion as the social reformers to-day, and by very little else. Addressing himself to representatives of the orthodox religious classes, he exclaimed

"Ye offspring of vipers, who warned you

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