Jesus of Nazareth

by Gerhard Lohfink

  that shall never be destroyed. (Dan 7:2-14)

  This symbolic text was written in Israel during a period of great crisis. Daniel is the pseudonym of a theologian and prophet whose real name is no longer known. He lived in the second century before Christ under Antiochus III and then Antiochus IV, the Syrian rulers notorious in Jewish history. Antiochus IV ruled from 175–164 BCE. His plan was to Hellenize Israel. He plundered the Jerusalem temple and entered the holy of holies—a sacrilege to Jews who followed the Law. He established a cult of Zeus Olympios in the temple precincts. Jews were forbidden to practice their own worship or to celebrate the Sabbath. That is the immediate historical background for the book of Daniel and its hopes for the end time.

  Because this was a time when faith was in crisis and persecution was rampant, the text says it is night. The four winds are the four compass directions and are an image representing the fact that this text is about the whole world, not only Israel. This is about world history. And the great sea spoken of in the night visions is not a body of water that can be geographically located. It is the world ocean, the primeval sea, and thus an image of chaos. For ancient people the sea was chaotic and perilous.

  Thus the four beasts emerge from the chaos, and they themselves represent social chaos. They stand for four world empires, or we could say four societies, each more bestial and evil than the one before it. The lion, for the author of the book of Daniel, was the great power Babylon. The bear was the empire of the Medes, the leopard that of the Persians.

  Then the prophet sees the fourth beast, and here the imagery almost gets away from him, so horrible is it. This is the beast itself. It is the world power that was most dangerous to Israel’s faith: the Hellenistic empire of the Seleucids, a successor to Alexander’s. The ten horns are ten Hellenistic rulers. The last horn, the “little one,” is Antiochus IV. As the arrogance of the last horn reaches its climax, an ancient one appears: this is God himself. He alone, and not the bestial world empires, is master of the world and of history. They have only been assigned the right to rule in a limited and transferred fashion (Dan 7:6, 12). That God is the true Lord of history is evident in what follows.

  A heavenly court is assembled to judge all the world empires, but especially the beasts. The sentence is carried out immediately. Then a fifth empire appears before the world court, a fifth society. As previously the symbols were lion, bear, leopard, beast, now the corresponding symbol is the human being. For “son of man” simply means “human being.” The whole series—lion, bear, leopard, beast, human being—thus represents successive societies. The fifth society is, of course, very carefully dissociated from those that precede it. It is no longer brutal, no longer bestial, but finally a human society. Therefore it is symbolized not by beasts but by a human being.

  We must see what a sharp distinction the text makes at this point: the fifth society does not arise out of the sea of chaos but comes from heaven. It comes “with the clouds of heaven” (Dan 7:13). Thus the new, eschatological society comes from above. It cannot be made by human beings. It is God’s gift to the world. It is the end of all violent rule.

  And yet, even though this ultimate and final empire, this rule without end, comes from above, it does not float above the world. Despite its heavenly origin it is altogether earthly and worldly. It is the longed-for true, eschatological Israel, for in the subsequent interpretation of the vision it is identified absolutely with the “holy ones of the Most High.” An interpreting angel says to Daniel:

  “As for these four great beasts, four kings shall arise out of the earth. But the holy ones of the Most High shall receive the kingdom and possess the kingdom forever—forever and ever.… The kingship and dominion and the greatness of the kingdoms under the whole heaven shall be given to the people of the holy ones of the Most High; their kingdom shall be an everlasting kingdom, and all dominions shall serve and obey them.” (Dan 7:17-18, 27)

  Thus not only the vision itself but its context makes clear that this is about empires, societies—and the one society represented by the “human being” is Israel. But it is not simply the Israel of the present. It is the hoped-for eschatological Israel. It is a counter-reality over against all social constructions of history thus far, which either relied on brutal violence or could not survive without it.

  The human being/son of man is thus a symbol for the ultimate and final royal rule of God, but at the same time a figure for the true Israel that serves God the Father alone. The two cannot be separated, for the royal rule is “given” (Dan 7:14) forever to this true, eschatological Israel. And that royal rule comes from God; it is God’s own rule, now revealed in all its purity and without blemish—in a finite human society.

  Daniel 7 only shows in a carefully developed form what appears in many other late Old Testament texts: the reign of God and the people of God belong together. The “field” within which the reign of God appears is first of all and primarily Israel. It is true that God reigns as king over the whole world, but that royal rule is revealed in Israel. It never manifests itself to the nations independently of Israel but always in connection with Israel and through Israel.

  The Abraham Principle

  Why is that? Why is there this unending fixation on Israel in the Old Testament? Is this the inferiority complex of a little nation that had to fear for its existence all the time and therefore almost of necessity developed a theological megalomania? Most certainly not. If we read the Old Testament from beginning to end—from Abraham to Daniel, so to speak—then looking back, considering the whole of it and at the same time incorporating the great revolutions in world history, we could say:4 The God of the Bible, like all revolutionaries, desires a complete overturning, the radical alteration of the whole of the world’s society. For in this the revolutionaries are right: what is at stake is the whole world, and the change must be radical, simply because the misery of the world cries to heaven and because it begins deep within the human heart. But how can God change society at its roots without taking away its freedom and its humanity?

  It can only be that God “starts out small,” beginning at a single place in the world. There must be a place—visible, comprehensible, subject to examination—where liberation and healing begin, that is, where the world can become what it is meant to be according to God’s plan. Starting from this place, then, the new thing can spread abroad. But it most certainly cannot happen through indoctrination or violence. Human beings must have the opportunity to view the new thing and test it. Then if they want to they can allow themselves to be drawn into the history of salvation and the story of peace that God is bringing into being. Only in this way can the freedom of the individual and of the nations be preserved. What drives one toward the new thing cannot be compulsion, not even moral pressure, but only the fascination of a world transformed.

  So God has to start small, with a small nation. More precisely, God cannot even begin with a nation. God must start with an individual, because only the individual is the point where God can build on change undertaken freely.

  That is precisely what the stories of the patriarchs in Genesis tell about. The first pages of the Bible had told of the creation of the world, the development of the story of humankind, and—in a few hints—the growth of human civilization and culture. But along with all that the Bible also spoke immediately of disobedience to God and thus of the growth of destructive rivalries and brutal violence.

  But then Genesis 12 starts over with something new. It suddenly ceases to look at humanity as a whole and begins to talk about an individual: Abraham. God begins to transform the world by starting anew, at a particular place in the world, with a single individual:

  Now the LORD said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of
the earth shall be blessed.” (Gen 12:1-3)

  So God makes a new beginning with an individual. However, he will not remain a lone individual. He will become a great nation. That is unavoidable, since an individual could not show what God wants: a new society. So the individual has to be there at the beginning, but in the end the result must be a new society because redemption, salvation, peace, blessing always have also—and indeed, primarily—a social dimension. At the very end of the Bible we will find the image of the “holy city,” the “new Jerusalem” (Rev 21)—and the city, the polis, was in antiquity the proper image of society.

  Nevertheless, the indispensable role of the individual remains integral to the people God wants to create. The people of God can never be a pure collectivity, never simply a mass; it must always also be “Abraham,” that is, a people in which every individual is constantly called by God to perform her or his duty. We may call the whole thing the “Abraham principle.”

  For the Sake of the Nations

  From all this we can already see that the people God chooses and creates cannot rest within itself. It is not self-enclosed, existing for its own sake. It is chosen out of the mass of the nations for the sake of those nations. Abraham was, after all, dragged out of his family and his homeland so that he could be a blessing for many others. In the people that came from him was to be made visible and tangible what God wants for the whole world: nonviolence, freedom, peace, salvation.

  Because God desires the salvation of the world, that salvation has to be tangibly present in the experimental field of a small nation, precisely so that the other nations can see that there really can be justice and peace in the world, so they can see that justice and peace are not utopia, not “nowhere,” and so they can freely take on this new social order. Of course that puts a shocking burden on this nation: the burden of election. Because if the people of God does not do justice to its task, if instead of peace in its midst there is conflict, instead of nonviolence it works violence, instead of showing forth salvation it spreads disaster, it cannot be a blessing for the nations. Then it falls short of the meaning of its existence; then it will not only be a laughingstock for the nations but will do great harm.

  A Basic Biblical Constant

  That, or something like it, is the description one must give of the meaning of Israel’s election, looking back especially at the stories of the patriarchs in Genesis but also at any number of other key biblical texts such as Exodus 19:5-6 or Isaiah 2:1-5. At any rate, this election and its function for the world form a basic constant in the Old Testament. According to the Old Testament, salvation and the reign of God cannot otherwise exist in the world.

  But then the question arises: is this basic constant of the Old Testament abandoned in the New Testament? Is it no longer valid there? Has it given way to a vague and placeless universalism? Anyone who says or even hints at such a thing will have to prove it. He or she will have to prove that for Jesus, Israel was indeed no longer the sign of blessing (or of judgment) for all nations but that he had separated himself internally from Israel and preached an absolute salvation, that is, one divorced from Israel—with “people in general” as the immediate audience for his message.

  It would then have to be proved explicitly and in detail that Jesus only appeared in Israel because that was his place of origin, because he was naturally shaped in some way, like every human being, by the history of his people, but that otherwise he had set himself apart from Israel’s history of election. And yet there is not the faintest evidence of such a thing. It simply cannot be produced. Precisely where Jesus (like John the Baptizer before him) calls into question the participation of Israel, or part of Israel, in ultimate and definitive salvation (cf. Matt 8:11-12) he presumes Israel’s salvation-historical function. But above all there is an overabundance of texts to show that Jesus did not abandon the fundamental constant we have described. I will speak of those texts at length in the following chapters. Most important of these is the choice of the Twelve—a demonstrative sign-action showing that Jesus cared about the twelve tribes of Israel. The Twelve are a visible sign and, of course, also an “instrument” of his will to gather all Israel. And why? for the sake of Israel? No, for the sake of the world!

  The principle behind this is pointedly formulated in James’s speech in Acts 15, aided by a mixed quotation based on Amos 9:11-12:

  After this I [the LORD] will return, and I will rebuild the tent of David, which has fallen; from its ruins I will rebuild it, and I will set it [the tent] up, so that [!] all other people may seek the Lord—even all the Gentiles over whom my name has been called. Thus says the Lord, who has been making these things known from long ago. (Acts 15:16-18)

  The sense of this combined quotation is that the fallen Israel must be rebuilt precisely in order that the Gentile nations, over whom the name of the Lord has long been called out, may seek and find God. They cannot perceive him otherwise. The ultimate goal of the rebuilding of Israel is the coming of the Gentiles. Jesus thought no differently.

  Obviously this resolute will of Jesus to gather all Israel (for the sake of the nations) had everything to do with his proclamation of the reign of God. The two are inseparable. There is no text that better summarizes Jesus’ praxis and his innermost intention than the Our Father. As we will see (cf. chap. 4), the very first petition of this direction-giving prayer is about the sanctification and gathering of Israel. The background is the theology of the book of Ezekiel, especially Ezekiel 36. This “petition for gathering” is followed immediately—in the same breath, so to speak—by the petition for the coming of the reign of God. These two petitions are the most important ones Jesus entrusted to his disciples, and they belong inextricably together. The reign of God must have a people.

  How is it that such clear truths, which so obviously spring to our attention even on the basis of the Old Testament, have not been a matter of course in the history of New Testament exegesis? The reason must be a widespread framework of ideas that is deeply anchored in Christians’ heads.

  God and the Soul

  The religious subjectivism and individualism that have always threatened Christian theology left profound traces especially in the theology of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth. The depth of this can be observed in the work of Adolf von Harnack, one of the most influential theologians and scholars of his time. Harnack lived from 1851 to 1930. In the winter semester of 1899–1900 he gave sixteen lectures for students from all departments of the University of Berlin, entitled Das Wesen des Christentums [The Essence of Christianity]. More than six hundred students heard them. The book Harnack published a few months later, based on his lecture manuscripts and bearing the same title, was an even greater public event; it went through numerous editions and its ongoing influence was extraordinary.5

  In What Is Christianity, Harnack used the concepts of individualism and subjectivism without any shadow of criticism. He was convinced that those two concepts rightly and substantively described Jesus’ preaching.6 Of course, Harnack knew that Jesus worked “within his own people” and that his preaching about the coming of the reign of God was eschatological. But he separated “what is traditional and what is peculiar” in Jesus’ preaching and so distinguished the “kernel from the husk.”7 Once one peels off the Jewish husk one finds something very simple: “the Gospel in the Gospel.”8 At the end of his third lecture Harnack spoke the now-famous sentences:

  If anyone wants to know what the kingdom of God and the coming of it meant in Jesus’ message, he must read and study his parables. He will then see what it is that is meant. The kingdom of God comes by coming to the individual, by entering into his soul and laying hold of it. True, the kingdom of God is the rule of God; but it is the rule of the holy God in the hearts of individuals;

  it is God Himself in His power.

  From this point of view everything that is dramatic in the external and historical sense has vanished; and gone, too, are all the external hopes for the future.
Take whatever parable you will, the parable of the sower, of the pearl of great price, of the treasure buried in the field—the word of God, God Himself, is the kingdom. It is not a question of angels and devils, thrones and principalities, but of God and the soul, the soul and its God.

  9

  With this Harnack had produced a radical reduction of Jesus’ preaching. He says without any concern at all:

  In the combination of these ideas—God the Father, Providence, the position of men as God’s children, the infinite value of the human soul—the whole Gospel is expressed.

  10

  The individual is called upon to listen to the glad message of mercy and the Fatherhood of God, and to make up his mind whether he will be on God’s side and the Eternal’s, or on the side of the world and of time.

  11

  Here for the first time everything that is external and merely future is abandoned: it is the individual, not the nation or the state, which is redeemed.

  12

  The Gospel is above all questions of mundane development; it is concerned, not with material things but with the souls of men.

  13

  Jesus never had anyone but the individual in mind.

  14

  “The individual” and “the inner” are key words that appear repeatedly throughout the sixteen lectures. Harnack repeats the expression drawn from Augustine, “God and the soul, the soul and its God,” almost like a mantra. It is evident on its face that a message of Jesus like the one that is here—supposedly—brought out of its shell has nothing to do with the people of God and does not intend to. Harnack reveals that already, in anticipation, in the first lecture: “Jesus Christ’s teaching will at once bring us by steps which, if few, will be great, to a height where its connexion with Judaism is seen to be only a loose one.”15 Finally, in the tenth lecture, Paul will definitively “deliver” the “Christian religion from Judaism,”16 for Paul, with his knowledge, confidence, and strength, set this “new religion” “in competition with the Israelitish religion.”17