| 3. Universalism and Individualism? Dualism and Pessimism? | ||||
This does not mean, however, that Jesus thinks in universalistic terms. Man as such has as little claim as the Jew. Jesus is far from seeing man in the light of humanism, as if by a natural endowment or by his destiny to realize an ideal, he possessed in himself divinity or kinship to God. Thus the humanistic concept of universality is wholly foreign to him. If the Kingdom of God were conceived universalistically, a claim of man upon God would be established. And it is exactly this claim which does not exist. It may indeed be said that there is a contradiction between the implication of the call to repentance addressed to the people, which does away with the claims of the nation as such, and the postulated limitation of the preaching to the Jews. This very contradiction shows clearly that man and the Kingdom of God are not seen by Jesus in the light of a humanistic ideal of mankind, that man as such is not predestined for the Kingdom. The Kingdom is an eschatological miracle, and those destined for it are not thus destined because of their humanity but because they are called of God. To begin with, the Jewish people are called, and the connection of the Kingdom with the Jewish people demonstrates most clearly how far from universalistic is the thought of the Kingdom, how utterly every human claim on God disappears; for the calling of the nation depends wholly on God's choosing. On the other hand, a nationalistic misinterpretation is avoided, since the call to repentance is directed to the chosen people, and this call rejects every claim of the individual based on the fact that he belongs to this people. | ||||
Thus all humanistic individualism is rejected. Not the individual but the "church" is called, to it belongs the promise. It is not the individual who attains, in the Kingdom of God, to the realization of his latent capacities, to the cultivation of his personality, or to perfect happiness. That God should cause His sovereignty to appear, that His will should be done, that the promise to the community should be fulfilled, this is what the realization of the Kingdom of God means. Thus the individual indeed finds deliverance, but only because he belongs to the eschatological community, not because of his personality. Further, the call to repentance guards against the misunderstanding that a man either could depend upon his calling or ought ever to despair of his calling. Through the call to repentance he is forced to decision, and his decision will show whether he belongs to the chosen or to the rejected. | ||||
Finally all individualistic cultivation of the spirit, all mysticism, is excluded. Jesus calls to decision, not to the inner life. He promises neither ecstasy nor spiritual peace; the Kingdom of God is not the object of occult vision and mystical raptures. The very na�vet� of the heavenly banquet with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is significant. Jesus does not think of man in terms of the anthropological dualism of Hellenistic mysticism; that is, he does not speak of the tragedy of man, of the entangling of the divine soul in the earthly body, of its purification and liberation, either through cultic means or through contemplation, devotion, and absorption of self into the Infinite. The Kingdom of God is not a spiritual power or sphere, to which the highest in man is essentially akin, into which in certain spiritual experiences the soul enters. All pietistic religious experience is wholly alien to him. By any such means a claim of man on God would again be established, and man's attitude toward God would be that of raising himself to deity. Jesus knows only one attitude toward God�obedience. Since he sees man standing at the point of decision, the essential part of man is for him the will, the free act, and in this connection the dualistic anthropology which sees two natures, flesh and spirit, active in man, has no meaning. For on will, on free act, depends man's existence as a unit, as a whole; reflection on the antithesis of spirit and flesh has no place here. It is not the physical in man which is evil in him�the whole man is evil if his will is evil. | ||||
The Kingdom of God, then, is not to be understood in terms of a metaphysical or cosmological dualism. The present world is not deprived of value because of a dualistic pessimism. To what extent the well-known sayings on the lilies of the field, the birds of heaven, and similar words were really spoken by Jesus can no longer be determined; they express the childlike faith in providence found in Jewish proverbial wisdom and that of the Orient in general. In any case the statement that in contrast to John the ascetic he was called a glutton and wine-drinker belongs to old tradition. (Matt. 11 :16-19) No word of complaint over the evil of the world, that it would be better never to have been born, that the beast is better off than man, such as the Jewish apocalypses contain, dominates the preaching of Jesus. | ||||
(One such saying is indeed inserted in the gospel record: "The foxes have holes and the birds of heaven their nests, but a son of man has nowhere to lay his head." ( Matt. 8 :20) But this owes its inclusion among the words of Jesus to a misinterpretation. "A son of man" (human being) was understood as "the Son of man," and thus the saying was believed to embody a statement of Jesus about himself.) | ||||
To Jesus the world is not evil, but men are evil; and not in the sense that the human race as such is evil because of its lower nature. No, just as there are good and bad trees, so there are good and bad men; as the seed falls on good and bad ground, so the word of the gospel falls on good and bad hearts. There are healthy and sick, just and unjust. No theory of dualism, but the urgency of the demand leads to the insight that the will of men as a rule is bad, that before God at least none can be called good. (Matt. 7 :11, Mark 10 :8) But the bad will is what makes the evil man evil, the greedy hard-hearted, the religious self-complacent. The call to repentance includes all, and no one has any advantage over another or can look down on him. When he was told about the Galileans whom Pilate had slain, he said, | ||||
"Do you think that these Galileans were especially wicked, because this death came upon them? No, I tell you, but if you do not repent, you also will perish. Or do you think that those eighteen whom the Tower of Siloam fell on and slew were guiltier than the others in Jerusalem? No, I tell you; if you do not repent, you also will perish." (Luke 13 :1-5) | ||||
The real evil in the world, then, is the evil will of men. Accordingly the "other world," the Kingdom of God, is not conceived as a universal metaphysical entity, as a finer, higher, more spiritual nature over against the earthly nature. The concept "Nature" has no place here. Except as the God-given world in which man receives the gift of God and must prove himself obedient to God's will, "nature" for Jesus does not exist. Thus the question of how far the present earthly nature is to be changed or replaced through the coming of the Kingdom is not relevant. Just as the present world exists only as God's creation, so the world to come also will be His creation. Therefore the Kingdom of God cannot be for Jesus a colorful realm of fancy to which the individual can flee for refreshment and escape from responsibility. | ||||