K ingdom of G od: Modern Interpretations

Abstract

Abstract “The Kingdom of God” features prominently in the Synoptics and is used as a summary for the content of Jesus' preaching. At the beginning of the 20th century, discussions over the meaning of the Kingdom of God in the Gospels were given renewed impetus by Albert Schweitzer and Johannes Weiss. Central to these renewed debates was how the Kingdom of God related to early Christians' eschatological expectations and ethics. Was the Kingdom already present or was it imminently future? Was the Kingdom of God an apocalyptic idea or was it progressively transformative in history? Nineteenth century Christian liberalism's emphasis upon the universally applicable ethical teaching of Jesus on the Kingdom of God was turned on its head by Weiss's and Schweitzer's radically consistent futurist and apocalyptic understanding of the Kingdom of God. The Kingdom in their understanding ceased to be an internalized ethical system for the individual or a blueprint for the steady moral advancement of society. Instead, the Kingdom was a radically imminent expectation of God's inbreaking into history in judgment and restoration. Thus the ethics of the Kingdom were seen as an interim ethics with only temporary relevance. Such radically world‐rejecting obedience as that for which Jesus called in the Gospels could only be demanded in the face of an imminent and cataclysmic appearance of the Kingdom of God. Consequently, Jesus' teaching on the Kingdom was restricted to the brief period of time between the preaching of Jesus and the coming of the Son of Man in judgment. Since Jesus was wrong about his imminent return as the Son of Man, the modern use of Jesus' teaching on the Kingdom was thrown into question. In response to this redefinition, C. H. Dodd proposed that the Kingdom was not future but was and has always been radically present or realized. Therefore, Jesus' teaching about the Kingdom and its ethics remain presently applicable to all followers of Jesus. Though Rudolph Bultmann rejected Dodd's “realized eschatology” for the Kingdom of God, he translated Jesus' belief in the imminence of the Kingdom into existentialist terms. For Bultmann, the imminent Kingdom calls a person to a crisis of decision that leads to authentic existence and radical obedience in the present. The result of this dialectic in the study of the Kingdom of God was the synthesis proposed by Georg Kümmel and G. E. Ladd. Both argued that in the preaching of Jesus the Kingdom of God was somehow both present and future. With the coming of Jesus, God's salvific reign had been inaugurated but its full realization still lay in the future. This synthesis represented by Kümmel and Ladd between Kingdom and eschatology has achieved a consensus among modern scholars. Subsequent discussion on the Kingdom of God was advanced by Norman Perrin who proposed that the Kingdom of God should not be viewed as a concept but as a tensive symbol. The meaning of this term, thus, is not static but dynamic and capable of being filled with varying nuances. Understanding this symbol has clearly been a major focus in Gospels scholarship in the last century. Any fresh approach to understanding the “Kingdom of God” in the Gospels and Paul will need to take into account two contexts: (1) the literary context in which the term occurs and (2) the historical context in which the term was used. Thus, while the Kingdom of God is a tensive symbol, its range of meaning is controlled by both its literary environment and its historical one.