>The Kingdom of God
JOHN BRIGHT
THE KINGDOM OF GOD
The Biblical Concept and Its Meaning for the Church
THE KINGDOM OF GOD
Copyright 1953 by Pierce & Washabaugh
Copyright renewal © 1981 by John Bright
All rights reserved.
No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, except as may be expressly permitted by the 1976 Copyright Act or in writing from the publisher. Requests for permission should be addressed in writing to Abingdon Press, 201 8th Avenue
South, Nashville, TN 37203.
This book is printed on recycled, acid-free paper.
ISBN 0-687-20908-0
ISBN 13: 978-0-687-20908-8
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 53-8131
Scripture quotations, except for the author’s translation, or unless otherwise noted, are from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible and are copyright 1946, 1952 by Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America.
MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
07 08 09 10 11 — 47 46 45
To my teacher
William Foxwell Albright as a token of gratitude and high esteem
Preface
THIS BOOK, AS ITS TITLE INDICATES, IS CONCERNED WITH AN IDEA OF CENTRAL IMPORTANCE IN THE THEOLOGY OF THE BIBLE. IT SEEKS TO TRACE for the benefit of the general Bible reader the history of that idea and to suggest its contemporary relevance. By this means, it is hoped, a contribution may be made to the understanding of the Scriptures. For the concept of the Kingdom of God involves, in a real sense, the total message of the Bible. Not only does it loom large in the teachings of Jesus; it is to be found, in one form or another, through the length and breadth of the Bible—at least if we may view it through the eyes of the New Testament faith—from Abraham, who set out to seek “the city . . . whose builder and maker is God” (Heb. 11:10; cf. Gen. 12:1 ff.), until the New Testament closes with “the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God” (Rev. 21:2). To grasp what is meant by the Kingdom of God is to come very close to the heart of the Bible’s gospel of salvation.
But the book has a broader aim: to come to grips, if possible, with one of the fundamental reasons for the current neglect of the Bible. It is unnecessary to furnish proof that there exists even among Christians a widespread biblical illiteracy, and gratuitous to deplore that fact as disastrous. Indeed, one might go so far as to say that Protestantism will not forever survive if steps cannot be taken to remedy it. We may not forget that the Protestant churches all began in a very biblical protest, have always claimed the Bible as the final source of authority, and have never allowed that any hierarchy may stand between the believer and that Bible to bar his way to it or to mediate its interpretation. Uprooted from the Bible we have no proper place to stand; we cannot, in fact, be Protestant. It is therefore no light thing that the Bible should have become so strange a book to the average churchgoer and (tell it not in Gath!) to many a minister as well.
Now the reasons for this are no doubt manifold, and we cannot pause here to analyze them. But surely many a reader will complain that the Bible is a most confusing book of very unequal interest, so varied in content that he is unable to follow a line through it. Much of it is scarcely comprehensible, much is perplexing, and much plainly dull. (How many a person has set out manfully to read it through only to come a cropper somewhere in the middle of Leviticus!) Even its thrillingly told narrative has a most ancient flavor. The reader feels that much of it says nothing to him, and he is tempted to skip. In the end, if he persists in reading his Bible at all, he confines himself to favorite snippets here and there.
In any case there has grown up in the Church, alongside a total neglect of the Bible, a dangerous partial use of it. As a Church we declare that the Bible is the Word of God, and we draw no distinctions between its parts. But in practice we confine our use almost entirely to selected sections—the Gospels and the Psalms, portions of Paul and the prophets—and ignore the rest as completely as if it had never been written. The result is that we not only neglect much that is valuable but, what is worse, miss the deepest meaning of the very parts we use because we lift them from their larger context.
This is nowhere more acutely evident than where the relationship of Old Testament to New is concerned. The two testaments are sharply separated both in our printed Bibles and in the minds of most readers. And, because the New Testament has Christ, it is quite natural and right that the Christian should turn first and most frequently to it, and should find there the ultimate source of his faith. But that raises a question: In what sense does the Old Testament have authority over the Christian at all? Its ceremonial law has been set aside in Christ and is no longer binding. Its prophetic hope, it is affirmed, was fulfilled in him. Has not the Old Testament, then, in some way been superseded? In what relationship does it stand to the New in the canon of Holy Scripture? If that is a question which puzzles the layman, he may comfort himself that it has exercised scholars no less. At present it appears that the Church is not sure of her answer. We continue to affirm that the scriptures of the Old and New Testaments are the Word of God, and vaguely we believe this to be so; but it is to be feared that we have no clear idea of what we mean by the statement. In practice we tend to relegate the Old Testament to a position of little importance and to regard it, one might say, as scripture of the second rank. An ambiguous and unofficial sort of neo-Marcionism has arisen.
The question of the unity of Scripture must be taken seriously if the Bible is to be saved from disuse and misuse. But it is not a question that can be brushed aside with an easy answer. In one sense the Bible exhibits more diversity than unity. It is a very variegated book; rather, it is not a book at all, but a whole literature. It was written over a period of well above a thousand years by men of the most diverse character and circumstance; its parts are addressed to all sorts of situations; it contains every conceivable type of literature. To level the Bible off, as it were, and to impose upon it an artificial unity, or equality of value, which ignores this amazing diversity would be to manufacture a strait jacket. It would also be to leave unanswered the question, In what sense is Christ the crown and norm of revelation?
But is there in the Bible some unifying theme which might serve to draw its diverse parts together into a complete whole? Is there, amid its admitted discontinuity, any essential continuity?
There are those who would find little. One thinks of those scholars, fewer today than formerly, who would trace through the Bible the course of man’s development in the realm of religion (or, theistically conceived, the progress of divine revelation), which began with the tribal god and primitive faith of early Israel, moved upward through the prophets into ethical monotheism, and finally reached its culmination in the teachings of Jesus.1 That such an approach had an atomizing effect
