The degree to which such idiotic notions are complicit in the calamitous history of the twentieth century need not be discussed here. In any case, it is highly dangerous to separate Christianity from Israel and commit oneself to theological individualism.
Harnack was by no means alone in his narrowing of the message of Jesus to the individual. He was, in fact, representative of a broad current of liberal theology at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. The idea that the reign of God has to do only with individuals and is something profoundly internal was widely accepted at the time, especially in segments of Protestant theology. There were corresponding phenomena in Catholic theology and piety. The motto of countless parish missions, “save your soul!” is very familiar.
The Reign of God Within
There is a saying of Jesus in the gospels that appears to support the internal nature of the reign of God invoked by Harnack and many others. Harnack quotes it several times in his lectures. It is in Luke’s gospel, at the end of a short narrative that prepares us for the saying itself:
Once he was asked by the Pharisees when the reign of God was coming, and he answered, “The reign of God is not coming with things that can be observed; nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There it is!’ For, in fact, the reign of God is [already] among you [
entos hymōn
].” (Luke 17:20-21)
Most translations today render entos hymōn as “among you” or “in your midst.” The question is whether this does justice to the Greek text. But first a brief word on the form of the whole pericope: in terms of narrative technique the two verses constitute a “chreia,” that is, a genre that creates the necessary narrative framework for an important and decisive saying. The saying, which is the heart of the matter, is placed at the end. Here the saying itself is: “the reign of God is [already] entos hymn.”
But there is no point in pursuing the structure preceding the saying too intensively here. In Luke’s sense of things the Pharisees are apparently asking for signs (portents) of the reign of God, as the disciples in Mark 13:4 ask about signs foretelling the end of the world. Jesus answers that there are no such (visible) signs ahead of time. Why? Simply because the reign of God is already present. Because it already exists there is no point in looking for it “here” or “there” (cf. Mark 13:21).
Of course, the crucial question is how the reign of God is present. The precise meaning of Luke’s Greek phrase in 17:21, entos hymn, is disputed. It could mean “with you” or “between you” or (in view of the textual context) “among you,” “in your midst.” But it can also mean “within your sphere of influence,” “within your power,” “available to you,” “at your disposal.” These latter meanings of entos are found, at any rate, in several passages of the Greek classics, but particularly in a number of ancient papyri.18 This has a superb application here. Besides, elsewhere Luke always writes “in the midst of” or “among” as en meso. But however we decide this, the point is that Luke wants to say that the reign of God is already here. It has already come. That is why searching for portents is pointless.
But Martin Luther—and this is what makes Luke 17:21 so explosive—translated entos hymn as “The reign of God is within you.” That is also a possible meaning of the words. In that case the text would say: “From outside there is nothing to be seen. But within, in the soul, in human hearts, the reign of God is already present.”
As I have said: that is a possible translation of the Greek. But it fits badly in the context, because then the passage would say that the Pharisees already have the reign of God within them. Above all, that kind of invisibility and internal character in no way matches the manner in which Jesus speaks about the reign of God elsewhere. The realm of which he speaks is precisely not a purely internal, altogether spiritual sphere that is hidden and inaccessible, for “the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them” (Matt 11:5). All that is happening before everyone’s eyes. The reign of God is breaking forth in the midst of the world and not only within people. Every dimension of reality is to be placed within the realm of God: soul and body, health and sickness, wealth and poverty, adults and children, family and society. That makes Luther’s translation altogether improbable. It neither matches the close context of the text nor fits in the broader context of Jesus’ message and practice. For that reason Luther’s translation is generally rejected today.
But it created, or at least accelerated, a fateful and continuing impact. Harnack and many others used this translation as support for assigning the reign of God to the invisible realm of the soul. This apparently solved a whole list of problems, almost as if incidentally. For example, there was the so-called imminent expectation of the end of things. If the place for the reign of God is only in the soul it can certainly be present already. The reign of God within the soul is not disturbing to anybody and can be asserted at any time. The problem of “the reign of God and society” was also resolved. If the reign of God is only within, a clean and simple separation can be made between external conditions and the hidden realm.
In reality, of course, the separation cannot be maintained. It is not only individuals and their inner lives that need redeeming but also the situations within which they live—for example, the lack of freedom, the structures of injustice, and the mechanisms of manipulation that have eaten their way into society.
Jesus was not just concerned with souls. He wanted a changed society. That is precisely why he begins the new thing within a community of disciples whom he orders to quit acting as if they are superior, to forgive one another seventy-seven times a day, and to turn the other cheek when someone strikes them.
Even Origen
Of course, it was not Adolf von Harnack who first located the reign of God “within.” We have seen that Martin Luther had already understood it as an “inner kingdom.” But Luther was not the first to interpret the text in that way either. Throughout the history of theology, but especially in the history of mysticism, we find a long line of related interpretations that go back as far as Origen, the great theologian of Alexandria (185–ca. 255). Origen wrote a work “On Prayer” in about the year 233, and within it he gives an interpretation of the Our Father. Speaking of the third petition, he says:
[Whoever] prays for the coming of the kingdom of God prays with good reason for rising and fruit bearing and perfecting of God’s kingdom within him.… The Father is present with him, and Christ rules together with the Father in the perfected Soul, according to the saying… We will come unto him and make abode with him. By God’s kingdom I understand the blessed condition of the mind and the settled order of wise reflection.
19
For Origen, then, the “coming” of the reign is the “coming” of the Father and Son into the soul of the one who truly prays. They take up their dwelling in the inmost being of that person. That is a very beautiful and also an altogether biblical thought (cf. John 14:23). But does it really cover what Jesus meant by the coming of the reign of God?
Purely Religious?
We are seeking reasons why exegetes today find it so difficult to connect the reign of God and the people of God in any meaningful way. One of the most important reasons was treated at length because it played a central role in the epochal forgetfulness regarding the people of God in the last several centuries, namely, individualism or subjectivism. Adolf von Harnack was swimming with a powerful tide here. But there were many other reasons for the absence of the idea of the people of God from discussions about the reign of God: these, for example:
1. In twentieth-century exegetical literature we repeatedly encounter, even among serious exegetes, the assertion that the reign of God announced by Jesus, and the salvation he promised, were “a purely religious matter.”20 We can understand this formulation if we know what it was supposed to mean. Mainly it was a matter of distinguishing Jesus’ reign of God from
Jewish expectations of the reestablishment of the nation and political action against the Roman occupying power. But more than that: the expression “purely religious” was meant to separate it from the expectation of a glorious messianic kingdom.
All these distinctions were justified. The question is only whether the label “purely religious” did not open the gates to new misunderstandings. What do we mean by “purely religious”? If the words are meant to exclude the world and society, they are meaningless and have nothing to do with the Bible.
2. A further reason why today’s exegesis has such a hard time considering the reign of God and the people of God together is that in the twentieth century people no longer spoke only of the “purely religious” character of the reign of God; they also said that it is “supernatural,” “otherworldly,” a “simply unworldly thing.” That, at any rate, is how Rudolf Bultmann formulated it in his book on Jesus that appeared in 1926:
[The reign of God] is not a good toward which the will and action of men is directed, not an ideal which is in any sense realized through human conduct, which in any sense requires
men
to bring it into existence. Being eschatological, it is wholly supernatural.
21
Whoever seeks it must realize that he cuts himself off from the world, otherwise he belongs to those who are not fit, who put their hand to the plow and look back.
22
[“Entering into” the reign of God] does not imply any possibility of conceiving the Kingdom as something which either is or can be realized in any organization of world fellowship.
23
We can also have some understanding for this eloquent language, with its measured formulations. It is typical of the “dialectical theology” emerging out of the critical experiences of World War I. These theologians rightly wanted to separate themselves from a broad current in nineteenth-century Protestantism that was convinced that the reign of God was developing in the growth of culture and intellect. Dialectical theology was right to oppose that.
But this opposition was in part presented in a dangerously one-sided language, as can be seen very clearly in the quotations from Bultmann. Does the reign of God really have nothing to do with human activity? A whole series of Jesus’ parables flagrantly contradicts that thesis. I will have more to say about that in chapter 7. And does the reign of God really have nothing to do with “world fellowship”? Then the reign of God would truly be a kind of cosmic cloud somewhere in the universe. It would have nothing to do with this world. And can we say that the reign of God is “supernatural” or somehow “cut off from the world”? Then there would be no chance for a bridge to the Old Testament and Judaism. The Jewish religious historian Gershom Scholem (1897–1982), a great scholar of Judaism and Christianity, wrote in one of his essays:
Judaism, in all its forms and shapes, has always held fast to a concept of redemption, which it has seen as a process taking place in public, on the stage of history and in the medium of community, in short, decisively occurring in the visible world and impossible to be conceived without such a visible appearance. In contrast, Christianity has an idea that redemption takes place in the “spiritual” realm and is invisible, playing itself out in the soul, in the world of each individual, and effecting a secret transformation that need not correspond to anything in the world outside.
24
Scholem is right in many respects. In these sentences he formulates one of the most dangerous constrictions in Christianity, and especially in Christian theology. But he is also wrong. From the beginning the church concerned itself with the world and society. Even those Christians who have lived the monastic life have transformed and cultivated the world to an extraordinary degree. But when Bultmann calls the reign of God “wholly supernatural,” something that cannot be realized within secular society, he affirms Gershom Scholem’s verdict against Christianity.
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.
On the other hand, these sacramental signs are visible and perceptible. As at baptism we can see and feel the flowing water, in anointing the stroking with oil, at the ordination of a priest the imposition of hands, in the Eucharist the meal, and in every sacrament we can hear the crucial words—so also the people of God is visible and perceptible in the world. We can hear the Gospel; we can see the people of God living together. And as one can not only see and hear but also receive a sacrament, so one can participate in the life of the people of God. It is communicable.
Every sacrament is also a sign that points to something. It indicates the existence of a deeper and greater reality. The people of God is also an indicative sacrament, precisely in this sense: it points to the reign of God insofar as it is still hidden and incomplete, yet at the same time it reveals essential features of what is to come.
But a sacrament is not only a sign that points to something. It is also an effective sign. It effects participation in Christ himself and thus in his work and his destiny. In the same way the people of God is also more than a mere pointer. It makes present the reign of God as “already and not yet.” It gives a share already in the reign of God. It makes its members already companions at table in the reign of God. It allows them to experience the power of the reign of God even now, through the Holy Spirit. And as church it links its members already to the risen Christ, in whom the reign of God has already become a perfected reality.
Thus the concept of sacrament seems to be a meaningful possibility for defining the correlation between the reign of God and the people of God more precisely. It secures the visibility of the reign of God and prevents it from drifting without a location. We can, for example, with the help of this model, interpret something like Luke 11:20 without incurring the usual problems: “If it is by the finger of God that I cast out the demons, then the reign of God has come to you.” As we can see, Jesus’ exorcisms of demons liberate deeply disturbed people from diseased compulsions that bind them and deprive them of freedom. Such liberation is a tangible and perceptible reality, not only for the sick people themselves, but also for their environment. A bit of the world has been changed.
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