2. The God of the Future (Chapter 4. Jesus' Teaching: God the Remote and the Near) (Jesus and the Word) (Bultmann, Rudolf)

These observations have already set forth certain fundamental aspects of Jesus conception of God, and points at which his view of God differs from the Jewish, in spite of all they have in common. Like strict Judaism his thinking is far removed from the Greek. God is for him in the Jewish sense the remote God, who in no way belongs to the world nor is part of the world. In certain peculiarities of expression, in the habit of sometimes speaking of God in circumlocutions, Jesus resembles the pious Jews, if our record is to be trusted on this point. (Luke 15:7, 10, 18; 6:38; 12:20; 16:9) Likewise he speaks freely of the angels, who are God s servants. (E.g. Matt. 18 :10, Mark 8:38, Luke 12:8, 9) But just here his own attitude is plainly shown, for he does not make angels and heavenly things objects of speculation, nor impart secret information about them, as Jewish apocalyptists speculate about the names and duties of the angels, about the stars and the winds.

For him God is not an object of thought, of speculation; he does not press into service the concept of God in order to understand the world and comprehend it as a unity. Therefore God is to him neither a metaphysical entity nor a cosmic power nor a law of the universe, but personal Will, holy and gracious Will. Jesus speaks of God only to affirm that man is claimed by the will of God and determined in his present existence through God s demand, His judgment, His grace. The distant God is at the same time the God near at hand, Whose reality is not to be grasped when a man seeks to escape from his own concrete existence, but precisely when he holds it fast. Jesus speaks of God not in terms of general truths, in dogmas, but only in terms of what God is for man, how He deals with man. He does not speak objectively of the attributes of God, of His eternity, unchangeableness, and the like, by which Greek thought strove to describe the transcendent nature of God. He says incidentally that God is merciful and kind (Luke 6 :36, Mark 10 :18); but in this he expresses only man s experience of God in his own life, he speaks only of God s dealing with man.

It is not that Jesus distinguishes between a remote, mysterious, metaphysical nature of God, and God s dealing with us as the expression of this nature; rather the remote and the near God are one. It is impossible to speak of God in Jesus sense without speaking of His activity. As with man, in Jesus sense, there can be no distinction between his nature and his actions which are the result of his nature, but the actual essence of man is present in action, likewise God is present where He is active. Jesus then does not make known a new conception of God, or revelations of the nature of God; instead, he brings the message of the coming Kingdom and of the will of God. He speaks of God in speaking of man and showing him that he stands in the last hour of decision, that his will is claimed by God.

Hence any conception of God as a higher nature is foreign to Jesus. A man cannot through cultic, sacramental means bring himself into closer relation to the remote God, nor obtain for himself a divine nature. As little as Jesus thinks of cult as a good work, does he think of it as a mysterious means of freeing man from his lower nature. The concept of nature in general is unknown to him, and nothing is for him low or evil except the evil will of man. It is not sacramental washings that make a man pure, but only a pure heart, that is, a good will. (Mark 7:I5) What significance Jesus saw in John s baptism we cannot now tell. Perhaps he took it for granted that his followers, like himself, had been baptized. The later tradition that he himself baptized (John 3 :22) is not reliable. Probably the baptism of John was an eschatological sacrament, and may have had in the circle of the Baptizer some peculiar sacramental meaning, but Jesus can scarcely have seen more in it than the acknowledgment of penitence before the coming of the Kingdom. Certainly he did not himself institute baptism as a sacramental means of salvation, as the legendary account in Matt. 28:19 says, and as the practice of baptism in the Hellenistic Christian churches suggests.

The Hellenistic Christians saw Jesus also as the founder of a sacramental meal, the Lord s Supper, and under the influence of this later view the account of the last supper of Jesus with his disciples was modified. (Mark 14: 22-25, etc. ) But this is certainly an intrusion of the sacramental viewpoint of Hellenistic Christianity into the original tradition. The teaching of Jesus and that of the oldest group of his followers contained no trace of any such sacramental conception. All the presuppositions for this are lacking, that is, all ideas of an intrinsic worthlessness of human nature compared with the intrinsic worth of divine holiness.

Jesus no more teaches a mystic relation to God than he conceives of access to God as mediated through cult and sacrament. "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength" (Mark 12:30) does not mean man s loss of himself as an independent personality, a submersion of self in the stream of divine life. Instead, this highest commandment is clearly defined, addressed to the will of man, by the second, "Love your neighbor as yourself." (Mark 12:31) The individual life of man is not annihilated in his relationship to God, but on the contrary is awakened to its own reality, because the man is constrained to decision. God Himself must vanish for the man who does not know that the essence of his own life consists in the full freedom of his decision, that through the decision of his will, through obedience, he can win fellowship with God. Otherwise God would be a universal natural substance, something non-rational; psychological experiences, excitement and ecstasy, devotion and joy, would be interpreted as communion with God. As little as Jesus describes the nature of God in these terms does he speak of spiritual states and experiences. All mystical designations of God are lacking in his teaching, and all talk of the soul and its emotional states. A mystical conception of God can be dualistic or pantheistic, or even both in some peculiar combination.

Just as none of these tendencies are to be found with Jesus, because for him God is visible in His will and activity, so there is no trace of a corresponding conception of man. For Jesus man is not a cosmic being, in whose body and spirit the forces of the divine nature flow and are active, a microcosm and mirror of the divine in miniature. Jesus neither distinguishes sense and spirit, lower and higher, in man, nor does he speak of the divine which is confined in the prison of the body and must be released so that it can free itself from the material and be united with God. The man is wholly evil if his eye is not single, if his heart is not pure, if his will is not obedient. Always a man is conceived only as standing before God, constrained to a decision of will; God is the Will which demands obedience from men.

In this rejection of sacrament and mysticism, Jesus stands within the limits of strict Judaism, and differs from it not because he presents especially original ideas about God and the world, but because he apprehends the Jewish conception of God in its purity and consistency. With the same sureness with which he repudiates all apocalyptic or eschatological speculations, he holds fast to the idea that man stands before God under the necessity of decision. This becomes still clearer when we observe how for Jesus God is God of the future and God of the present, and when we ask whether and how Jesus combines these two ideas into a unity.

Jesus God is God of the future, and with Jesus as in Judaism this conception seems to be influenced by the dualistic view of time, which regards the present as the age of corruption. In the petition "Thy Kingdom come" (Matt. 6 :10), God s rule is evidently seen as not yet sovereign in the present; His name is not yet hallowed, His will is not yet done on earth as it is in heaven. If Jesus believed that he then saw the demons fleeing before the name of the Kingdom of God, and Satan put to flight, clearly he thought that until then the world was under the rule of Satan and his evil spirits. It would signify little to say against this interpretation that Jesus did not apparently adopt the phrasing "present and future age." (This is found only in sayings whose genuineness is very doubtful.) And also it would not be a weighty argument that Jesus does not, like other religious Jews, look in suspense and anxious longing into the uncertain future, but is convinced that even now the turning point of the times is at hand, and the powers of the imminent Kingdom can already be discerned. For the emphasis on immediacy does not show a fundamental difference from the dualistic judgment of the world. The world as it has hitherto existed would still not be seen in the light of the omnipotence of God; there would still not be clearly grasped a conception of God which excludes the thought that there can be a world or a time in which God does not rule. It would be implied that besides God there are other powers with which man under some circumstances must reckon.

It is also not sufficient to say that Jesus concept of God was no philosophical theory (true as that is), and that his belief in God as the cause of all that happens did not, in Jesus undeveloped thought, untrained in logical consistency, exclude the assumption of other active causes of world events; that the strength of Jesus faith in God is shown precisely in his holding fast, in spite of the belief in Satan, to the thought of God as the final cause of all events. This interpretation is indeed approximately true; but all depends on rightly understanding the uniqueness of Jesus belief in God.

For if this belief is a preconceived, rigid assumption, on the basis of which, against all experience, it is asserted that God is the final cause of all that happens, then it would clearly be true that the conception of God was not fully developed by Jesus. For his thought of God is not a general affirmation that God is the final cause of all occurrences, but the assertion that He is the Power which determines man in his concrete reality. If a man must say that he cannot find God in the reality of his own present life, and if he would compensate for this by the thought that God is nevertheless the final cause of all that happens, then his belief in God will be a theoretical speculation or a dogma; and however great the force with which he clings to this belief, it will not be true faith, for faith can be only the recognition of the activity of God in his own life. Such a man would then be fleeing from his own individual existence, in which alone he can find God, and would be consoling himself by the belief that God may be somewhere else; but then faith in God has become a will-o -the-wisp. The conception of the rule of Satan and the remoteness of God from the present can be unified with the idea of God only if this very remoteness of God, this abandonment to Satan, is really a determination by God Himself. But whether and how this may be thought can be shown only by further discussion.

At any rate real understanding of the problem is precluded if the futurity of the Kingdom is minimized, as by the supposition that belief in the coming Kingdom is based on the firm foundation of belief in the creation, and that the Kingdom of God is simply the consummation of the creation. For the belief in God as the Creator is thereby made a theoretical idea, a general truth, which is used as an established presupposition. But the Jewish belief in creation does not possess the character of a theory to explain the universe; instead, it is the expression of the consciousness that man in his whole existence in the world is dependent upon God. It does not therefore draw conclusions concerning the present situation of men from a theoretically reasonable idea of the cosmos, but it gains understanding of the universe from a comprehension of man s own situation.

The intrusion of the Hellenistic idea of development into the views of Jesus is especially conspicuous when the Kingdom is called the consummation of the creation, so that an ascending line is drawn from the beginning to the end. In that case the Kingdom would be already present in germ in the creation, and the Kingdom would be the unfolding of these potentialities. Then ideally the Kingdom would already exist in the present, and its purely future character would be destroyed. But there can be no doubt that according to Jesus thought the Kingdom is the marvelous, new, wholly other, the opposite of everything present. Jesus never thought of bringing the idea of the coming of the Kingdom into connection with the idea of creation.

The only connection which would be possible for his thought would be that which is here and there expressed in Jewish apocalyptic, namely, that in the blessed time of the end the first age of creation, with Paradise and its felicity, will return. This would not be a consummation of the creation, but its re-creation after it has been corrupted by the sin of men. This thought would be consistent with the view of Jesus; for here the future character of the Kingdom, its wonder and newness, would be preserved. Yet no words of such import are recorded from Jesus; and such a way of thinking is foreign to him because of its fantastic and mythological form, however congruous the underlying idea would be.

Thus if we wish to understand the message of Jesus, it is not possible to ignore the future character of the Kingdom of God nor to minimize the distance of God in the present. Instead, it is only possible to accept the paradox that the remote, future God is at the same time, precisely because He is the remote and future God, also God of the present. Or better, it is possible only to ask whether and how the recorded assertions of God s presence can be reconciled with the thought of the God of the future. In what sense did Jesus speak of the God of the present?