stress upon these early guesses at the thought of Jesus, is it altogether without significance that he so uniformly speaks of himself as the Son of Man?
But we are not left to conjecture or a priori argument. Jesus himself has chosen as his term for the highest good[1]—or at least for one of the prerequisites of its attainment—one that in itself suggests social relations—the kingdom of God.[2] No other term—unless it be Son of Man—is so characteristic of Jesus; none is more certainly his. Early Christianity, it is true, soon displaced it with the more concrete term church, and later Christianity has not hesitated to confound the two; but with Jesus there was neither the substitution nor the confusion. Throughout the gospel sources whether of the synoptic or the Johannine cycle, the usage is constant. The kingdom is the goal of effort, the reward of persecution, and the abode of blessedness.
If any weight is to be given to the teachings of Jesus, it is imperative that the meaning of this term as he used it should be accurately gauged, and it is characteristic of the new school of biblico-theological writers like Weiss, Wendt, Beyschlag, and Bruce, that, with its mastering desire for the purely objective presentation of New Testament teachings, it should especially seek to discover and expound the "mysteries of the kingdom" as the center of all essentially Christian doctrine. The effect of such exposition has been felt almost as much in the realm of dogmatics and apologetics as in that of biblical theology, but as much as in either within the circle of earnest searchers for a philanthropy and politics that shall be at once scientific and Christian.[3]
- ↑ For a justification of this term see Matt. 13:44, 45. See also Issel, Die Lehre vom Reiche Gottes im Neuen Testament, p. 52 sq.
- ↑ Or kingdom of Heaven. For present purposes the distinction between the two terms is unessential. The content of each is the same, although there are doubtless subjective if not critical grounds for the use of each in different accounts. See Wendt, Teaching of Jesus, I., 370 n.
- ↑ "No one can read attentively many modern theological works without observing that the kingdom of God occupies a much more prominent place in them than it has in the writings of former times. This is partly due to the fact that scholars of the present day are more careful to preserve the genuine historical ideas of other ages and peoples instead of casting them into the forms or moulds of later thought. . . . It is not
