Читать книгу The Kingdom of God - John Bright - Страница 5

THIS BOOK, AS ITS TITLE INDICATES, IS CONCERNED WITH AN IDEA OF CENTRAL IMPORTANCE IN THE THEOLOGY OF THE BIBLE. IT SEEKS TO TRACE for the benefit of the general Bible reader the history of that idea and to suggest its contemporary relevance. By this means, it is hoped, a contribution may be made to the understanding of the Scriptures. For the concept of the Kingdom of God involves, in a real sense, the total message of the Bible. Not only does it loom large in the teachings of Jesus; it is to be found, in one form or another, through the length and breadth of the Bible—at least if we may view it through the eyes of the New Testament faith—from Abraham, who set out to seek “the city . . . whose builder and maker is God” (Heb. 11:10; cf. Gen. 12:1 ff.), until the New Testament closes with “the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God” (Rev. 21:2). To grasp what is meant by the Kingdom of God is to come very close to the heart of the Bible’s gospel of salvation.

But the book has a broader aim: to come to grips, if possible, with one of the fundamental reasons for the current neglect of the Bible. It is unnecessary to furnish proof that there exists even among Christians a widespread biblical illiteracy, and gratuitous to deplore that fact as disastrous. Indeed, one might go so far as to say that Protestantism will not forever survive if steps cannot be taken to remedy it. We may not forget that the Protestant churches all began in a very biblical protest, have always claimed the Bible as the final source of authority, and have never allowed that any hierarchy may stand between the believer and that Bible to bar his way to it or to mediate its interpretation. Uprooted from the Bible we have no proper place to stand; we cannot, in fact, be Protestant. It is therefore no light thing that the Bible should have become so strange a book to the average churchgoer and (tell it not in Gath!) to many a minister as well.

Now the reasons for this are no doubt manifold, and we cannot pause here to analyze them. But surely many a reader will complain that the Bible is a most confusing book of very unequal interest, so varied in content that he is unable to follow a line through it. Much of it is scarcely comprehensible, much is perplexing, and much plainly dull. (How many a person has set out manfully to read it through only to come a cropper somewhere in the middle of Leviticus!) Even its thrillingly told narrative has a most ancient flavor. The reader feels that much of it says nothing to him, and he is tempted to skip. In the end, if he persists in reading his Bible at all, he confines himself to favorite snippets here and there.

In any case there has grown up in the Church, alongside a total neglect of the Bible, a dangerous partial use of it. As a Church we declare that the Bible is the Word of God, and we draw no distinctions between its parts. But in practice we confine our use almost entirely to selected sections—the Gospels and the Psalms, portions of Paul and the prophets—and ignore the rest as completely as if it had never been written. The result is that we not only neglect much that is valuable but, what is worse, miss the deepest meaning of the very parts we use because we lift them from their larger context.

This is nowhere more acutely evident than where the relationship of Old Testament to New is concerned. The two testaments are sharply separated both in our printed Bibles and in the minds of most readers. And, because the New Testament has Christ, it is quite natural and right that the Christian should turn first and most frequently to it, and should find there the ultimate source of his faith. But that raises a question: In what sense does the Old Testament have authority over the Christian at all? Its ceremonial law has been set aside in Christ and is no longer binding. Its prophetic hope, it is affirmed, was fulfilled in him. Has not the Old Testament, then, in some way been superseded? In what relationship does it stand to the New in the canon of Holy Scripture? If that is a question which puzzles the layman, he may comfort himself that it has exercised scholars no less. At present it appears that the Church is not sure of her answer. We continue to affirm that the scriptures of the Old and New Testaments are the Word of God, and vaguely we believe this to be so; but it is to be feared that we have no clear idea of what we mean by the statement. In practice we tend to relegate the Old Testament to a position of little importance and to regard it, one might say, as scripture of the second rank. An ambiguous and unofficial sort of neo-Marcionism has arisen.

The question of the unity of Scripture must be taken seriously if the Bible is to be saved from disuse and misuse. But it is not a question that can be brushed aside with an easy answer. In one sense the Bible exhibits more diversity than unity. It is a very variegated book; rather, it is not a book at all, but a whole literature. It was written over a period of well above a thousand years by men of the most diverse character and circumstance; its parts are addressed to all sorts of situations; it contains every conceivable type of literature. To level the Bible off, as it were, and to impose upon it an artificial unity, or equality of value, which ignores this amazing diversity would be to manufacture a strait jacket. It would also be to leave unanswered the question, In what sense is Christ the crown and norm of revelation?

But is there in the Bible some unifying theme which might serve to draw its diverse parts together into a complete whole? Is there, amid its admitted discontinuity, any essential continuity?

There are those who would find little. One thinks of those scholars, fewer today than formerly, who would trace through the Bible the course of man’s development in the realm of religion (or, theistically conceived, the progress of divine revelation), which began with the tribal god and primitive faith of early Israel, moved upward through the prophets into ethical monotheism, and finally reached its culmination in the teachings of Jesus.¹ That such an approach had an atomizing effect on the Bible cannot be doubted. To be sure, a certain continuity was observed, but it lay in the evolutionary pattern itself, not the Bible. The biblical religion was set apart into its various stages of development, the later of which had little or nothing in common with the earlier. It was impossible even to speak of a biblical theology. Now it would be dishonest to sneer at this critical scholarship, for it produced much for which we must be grateful. In particular it reminded us that revelation is not a picture gallery but a process in history. Of course there was progress! But the scheme of straight-line evolution was a framework imposed on the Bible from without, and it has proved far too rigid to accommodate the data. It can bring no solution to the problem of Scripture.

But one nurtured in the mainstream of Reformation theology may find the answer very simple: the unity of Scripture is in Christ. That this is in a real sense true I trust will be made clear as we proceed. To the mind of the New Testament faith not only all Scripture, but all history, centers in Christ. Yet this fact, true as it is, must be asserted with considerable care lest, in our zeal to make Christ all in all, we be guilty of imposing him arbitrarily on the Old Testament. It was once quite customary to do this, and there are those today who, it is to be feared, go too far in this direction.² If this is done consistently, the Old Testament becomes simply a Christian book, and biblical theology assumes a static quality which violates its very nature. In careless hands Old Testament studies tend to degenerate into a game of which the object is to find types of Christ and the prefigurement of Christian truth in unlikely places. This is, of course, to discard sound exegetical method. As Christians we read our Old Testament in the light of Christ, and from it we preach Christ. But we are not permitted to attribute to the Bible writers ideas which they did not have in mind, only to discover as best we can what they actually intended to say. To save the Old Testament by reading into it ideas which are not there is to save it at too high a price.

This book arises out of a concern for the problems just raised. It is submitted in the belief that while the complexity of the Bible is by no means to be minimized, there nevertheless runs through it a unifying theme which is not artificially imposed. It is a theme of redemption, of salvation; and it is caught up particularly in those concepts which revolve about the idea of a people of God, called to live under his rule, and the concomitant hope of the coming Kingdom of God.³ This is a note which is present in Israel’s faith from earliest times onward, and which is to be found, in one way or another, in virtually every part of the Old Testament. It also unbreakably links Old Testament to New. For both have to do with the Kingdom of God, and the same God speaks in both.

It is, of course, impossible to subsume all that the Bible has to say under a single catchword, and no attempt to do so has been made here. The title does not imply that the New Testament concept of the Kingdom of God may be imposed on the Old, nor does it seek to disguise the fact that the idea of the rule of God underwent considerable development within the Old Testament itself. But ideas are ever larger than the words that carry them. The roots of this idea lie in the very earliest period of Israel’s history. Development is undeniable, but it must be viewed less as an evolution upward from lower forms to higher, than as a development outward from a concept which was normative in Israel’s faith from the beginning onward. It was a concept which by its very nature pointed beyond itself and demanded its fulfillment.

As was said in the beginning, this book is addressed primarily to the general reader of the Bible. For this reason, although it is hoped that no indefensible position has been taken, every effort has been made to keep the text of the book free of technical discussion lest the reader, called upon to follow the thread of the argument through piles of scholarly baggage, should lose it altogether. The aim throughout has been clarity. It has not, of course, been possible to avoid footnotes. The reader who does not wish to go into them may well pass them by. It is because of the hope that the book may also be of use to teachers and more advanced students, and because candor demands that indebtedness be acknowledged and important areas of disagreement be indicated, that they have been included. Wherever it has been possible to do so, the effort has been made to refer to such works as may be expected to assist the student in further reading. Because of the limitations of space no attempt has been made to give full bibliography.

The historical approach has been chosen because, in the last analysis, biblical theology can be treated in no other way. Abstract it, discuss it as a system of ideas divorced from history, and it is no longer biblical theology. It is hoped, however, that the historical approach, far from dismaying the reader, will assist him to fit the various parts of the Bible—particularly the Old Testament prophets—into their proper historical perspective.

If this book should make the Bible in any way clearer, or should stimulate in any the desire to study it, I shall be deeply gratified. But if it should be the means of causing some to hear again from the Bible page the summons to citizenship in the Kingdom of God, it will have more than succeeded.

JOHN BRIGHT

¹ So most critical scholars of the past generation. An excellent example of this approach in popular language is Harry Emerson Fosdick, A Guide to Understanding the Bible, the Development of Ideas Within the Old and New Testaments (New York: Harper & Bros., 1938).

² Wilhelm Vischer is perhaps an example: cf. Das Christuszeugnis des Alten Testaments (7th ed., Vol. I; 2nd ed., Vol II; Zürich: Evangelische Verlag, 1946); Eng. trans. Vol. I, from 3rd Ger. ed., A. B. Crabtree, The Witness of the Old Testament to Christ (London: Lutterworth Press, 1949).

³ This insight is of course not original. I must acknowledge indebtedness to W. Eichrodt, whose Theologie des Alten Testaments (1st ed., Vol. I, Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1933; 3rd ed., Vol. I, Berlin: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 1948; cf. p. 1) first brought the importance of it home to me.