1. Two different types of teaching seem to be contained in the Gospels about the Coming of the Kingdom of God.
(1) On the one hand words are frequent which imply or expressly state that Christ taught that that present “generation should not pass away till all things were accomplished” (Mat_24:34), that the disciples would not have time even to “go through the cities of Israel before the Son of Man be come” (Mat_10:23), and that the final consummation of the Kingdom would come “like a thief in the night” (Mat_24:43), in sudden and catastrophic form. Such sayings are so numerous, and in many cases so intimately bound up with the context and with other sayings, that they cannot be explained away without grave risk of explaining away along with them the historical character of the Gospels altogether. Moreover, even if such language could be eliminated from the Gospels, the universal belief of the primitive Church—testified to in practically every one of the Epistles—could hardly be accounted for, except as based on something in our Lord’s teaching.
(2) On the other hand, it is equally unscientific to explain away the collective force of certain passages of a different tenor. Such are the parables of the Mustard Seed and Leaven, the Seed growing secretly, the Hidden Treasure, and the Pearl of great Price; also certain shorter sayings like, “If I by the finger of God cast out devils, then is the Kingdom of God come upon you” (Mat_12:28; Luk_11:20), “the Kingdom of God is within you” (Luk_17:21); or again, the mention of the fact that “the blind see, the lame walk . . . the poor have the Gospel preached unto them” (Luk_7:22), as a token to John the Baptist that our Lord was the Expected One. And there are other less striking utterances, all of which seem to imply that there is a sense in which the Kingdom is already present. Many of them, indeed, also imply, and all are consistent with, the view that in another sense it is still future, and that only in the light of the richness of that future will the real importance of the present be seen. The future, indeed, is the harvest, but the present is the seed.
2. How could our Lord speak at one time of the immediacy of the end of the world, and at another of its long delay? He was a prophet. Now the function of the Hebrew prophets was not primarily to forecast future events, but to interpret the ways of God to man. Their claim was not in its essence that of the soothsayer or the clairvoyant. They were, first and foremost, men uniquely sensitive to spiritual issues, who saw God at work in the world, but who saw also His purposes thwarted and defeated for the time being by the sin and waywardness of man; and their mission was to declare to their contemporaries Jehovah’s mind and will, to utter a message from on high. In speaking of the present, they spoke also of the future; but their anticipations in this regard were not, as a rule, of the nature of exact predictions, nor was their fulfilment in detail of moment to their essential truth.
The Book of Jeremiah, for example, still includes among the prophet’s utterances an early foreboding of the coming of judgment against Jerusalem out of the North, in spite of the fact that the invading Soythians, to whose coming in the year 626 B.C. the passage probably refers, did not actually reach Judaea, but advanced upon Egypt by the coast road through Philistia, and were eventually bought off by the Egyptians. It is likely enough that the prophet’s failure on this occasion to forecast accurately the course of events went far to discredit his message in the eyes of his countrymen at the time, and may partly explain why his subsequent preaching fell so largely upon deaf ears. But the fact of the oracle in question having been literally unfulfilled did not lead the prophet, or those who collected and edited his writings, to suppress it. Judgment did fall upon Jerusalem, though the agents of her destruction were not Soythians from the North but Babylonians from the East; and the vision of the seething cauldron, whose face was from the North, is retained in the sacred text as a true word of the Lord, justified not in the letter, but in the spirit.
So also Ezekiel, in a group of prophecies referring to Tyre, announces the immediate downfall and annihilation of the city, utters a dirge over its former splendour, and proclaims the dire punishment of its king for his arrogance; though as a matter of fact Nebuchadnezzar, after besieging Tyre for thirteen years (585-573 B.c.), failed to take it, and was obliged to raise the siege without any decisive result in favour of the Babylonians, as Ezekiel himself later on admitted.
If what the prophets expected was not realized as they expected, if God’s plans for the world were other than they thought and hoped, is that to say that these thoughts and hopes of theirs are valueless to us? Not the form of the apocalyptic vision, not the description of the future according to sensuous and imaginative conceptions, not the mystical dates and numbers, not the symbolism now so terrific, now so peaceful, is that essence of apocalyptic which we find still to be an inspiration, an inspiration of a kind and worth not elsewhere to be found. It is the spirit which lies behind apocalyptic, the presuppositions of apocalyptic, the power which makes apocalyptic a possibility, that we have to take count of, and on which we can stay ourselves. For all Apocalypse is, as has been said, a “Tract for Bad Times,” and it is in such times that man is tested, whether he can rise to any vision of God’s ways and purposes, whether the spirit of man can become the candle of the Lord.
Some years ago a book was published entitled, The Decisive Hour of Christian Missions. Its main argument was that the peoples of Asia and Africa are at the present time passing through a renaissance more remarkable and far-reaching than the movement which changed mediaeval into modern Europe; that their entire political, economic, social, intellectual, and religious life is in process of reconstruction; that their ancient faiths, standards, and social systems are proving insufficient to meet the demands of the new time; and that the question of all questions for the Christian Church is whether in the present hour of crisis and of destiny it can give to these peoples a spiritual faith, to be the strength and inspiration of the new world which they are setting out to build.
The same view as to the decisive nature of the present opportunity was taken by the World Missionary Conference that met at Edinburgh in. 1910. In words which in the light of recent events seem prophetic, it affirmed the critical importance of the next few years in determining the spiritual evolution of mankind “If those years are wasted,” it declared, “havoc may be wrought that centuries are not able to repair. On the other hand, if they are rightly used, they may be among the most glorious in Christian history.”
Such statements have been criticized as extravagant and feverish. Every generation, it is said, is apt to have an exaggerated notion of the particular tasks which it is called to undertake. And yet history supplies abundant evidence that there are tides in the affairs of men; that real crises occur in the life of nations and of the Church as well as of individual men; and that when they arise, life or death may depend on the capacity of the individual or the nation or the Church to recognize and to meet them. The belief that the present time is of critical importance in the spiritual history of the non-Christian peoples rests upon a solid basis of facts; and if the Church is too preoccupied, or has not sufficient insight, to grasp the meaning of these facts, the spiritual loss to the world will be great and inevitable. [Note: J. H. Oldham, in Papers for War Time, v. 3.]
3. It may be said that in His words regarding the end of the world Christ is rather an apocalyptic than a prophetic speaker. But the difference is here of no account. Apocalyptic writers or speakers, both Jewish and Christian, lacked nothing in moral strength and insight. Righteousness is as dear to them as to the prophets. There is no idea that the time to come, the supernatural age, the revelation of God and of Messiah, can be anything except a final vindication of good over evil, the doing of right by the Judge of the whole earth, a manifestation of what in a modern term we may call the survival-value of all goodness (while the corruption of wickedness is for destruction only), the sealing of those who have gone after the way of the Lord and kept His commandments. Where apocalyptic generally differs from prophecy is in its sense that a whole new era—the future as opposed to the present—must dawn, a different and outwardly supernatural set of conditions arise, before God’s purposes can be made clear and His ways be justified. The prophet speaks to his contemporaries and bids them see God’s hand in the working out of the history in which they play their part, and rouse themselves to help His counsels to prevail. The apocalyptist, speaking in the name of some worthy of past time, no longer with the “Thus saith the Lord” of the prophet, bids Israel endure in patience the present discontent and wait for the end. Both prophet and apocalyptist demand righteousness in God’s people, but for the one it is the righteousness which is ready to be up and doing, with the other it approaches what we call quietism: everything is determined; the saint is not so much a fellow-worker with God as a pious observer of God’s works.
Clough’s poem gives something of the spirit which a writer of Apocalypse would try to breathe into those who cared to listen to him:
December days were bleak and chill,
The winds of March were wild and drear,
And, nearing and receding still,
Spring never would, we thought, be here.
The leaves that burst, the suns that shine,
Had, not the less, their certain date:—
And thou, O human heart of mine,
Be still, refrain thyself and wait.
4. It is therefore no surprise that the earliest disciples looked upon the end of the world as at hand. The dominant note in the religious life of this earliest band of Christian disciples was that of expectancy. They were looking for the visible return of their Lord in triumph on the clouds of heaven, and the great event was daily and hourly awaited. What was necessary in the meanwhile was that men should repent and be baptized and believe the Good News that the Messiah was at hand, and that He was none other than Jesus.
Their first instinct was to have all things common. The religion taught by St. Paul and St. John is a religion of poverty, with little or no interest in the present life; which submits to violence and ill-usage as a matter of course; which accepts the loosening of family ties; which preaches indulgence without limits, even to seventy times seven, “as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven” (Eph_4:32); in which devotion to the unseen, a sense of the citizenship in heaven, fills the thoughts, and throws into the background, into utter insignificance, things visible and temporal. It discourages wealth, and says hard things of the love of money; it is shocked at appeals to law, and holds it far “more blessed to give than to receive” (Act_20:35); it regards industry as a moral remedy against idleness, and riches only as what may be turned into “the treasure in heaven” (Mat_6:20); it contemplates a state of mind in which war between Christians is inconceivable and impossible; it brands ambition and the “minding of earthly things” (Php_3:19).
But after the first generation of Christians this was no longer possible. The end of the world did not come. Then it was seen that Christian society was meant to take in, as avowedly legitimate, other forms of life than those insisted on and recognized at first. It was not always to have all things common. It was not always to live by the literal rule, “Take no thought for the morrow” (Mat_6:34). It was not always to set the least esteemed to judge, or to turn the other cheek. It was not always to decline the sword. It was not always to hold itself bound by the command, “Sell all that thou hast” (Mat_19:21; Mar_10:21; Luk_18:22). Probably it is not too much to say that Christianity helped largely in that break-up of ancient society out of which modern society has grown. But society, broken up, was reorganized; and as, while time lasts, society must last, the common, inevitable laws of social action resumed their course when society entered on its new path with the Christian spirit working in it, sometimes more, sometimes less; ebbing or advancing, but manifestly, in the long run, influencing, improving, elevating it.
The history of Christendom has fallen far short of the ideal of the New Testament. Yet I do not think we can doubt that true Christian living has had at least as fair chance, in the shape which the Church has taken, as it could have had if the Church had always been like one of those religious bodies which shrink from society. It has had its corruptions: we may be quite sure that it would have had theirs, if it had been like them. In its types of goodness it has had what is impossible to them—greatness and variety. And its largeness and freedom have not been unfruitful. I am not thinking of exceptional lives of apostolic saintliness, like Bishop Ken’s. But in all ages there have been rich men furnished with ability, busy men occupied in the deepest way with the things of this life, to whom Christ’s words have been no unmeaning message—students, lawyers, merchants, consumed with the desire of doing good; soldiers filled with the love of their neighbour; “men,” as we call them, “of the world” following all that is pure and just and noble in the fear and love of God; of whom if we cannot say that they are men in earnest to follow in the steps of Jesus Christ, it is difficult to know of whom we can say so. [Note: R. W. Church, The Gifts of Civilization, 61.]
