| 4. Future and Present. The Necessity of Decision | ||||
The future Kingdom of God, then, is not something which is to come in the course of time, so that to advance its coming one can do something in particular, perhaps through penitential prayers and good works, which become superfluous in the moment of its coming. Rather, the Kingdom of God is a power which, although it is entirely future, wholly determines the present. It determines the present because it now compels man to decision; he is determined thereby either in this direction or in that, as chosen or as rejected, in his entire present existence. Future and present are not related in the sense that the Kingdom begins as a historical fact in the present and achieves its fulfillment in the future; nor in the sense that an inner, spiritual possession of personal attributes or qualities of soul constitutes a present hold on the Kingdom, to which only the future consummation is lacking. Rather the Kingdom of God is genuinely future, because it is not a metaphysical entity or condition, but the future action of God, which can be in no sense something given in the present. None the less this future determines man in his present, and exactly for that reason is true future not merely something to come "somewhere, sometime," but destined for man and constraining him to decision. | ||||
The coming of the Kingdom of God is therefore not really an event in the course of time, which is due to occur sometime and toward which man can either take a definite attitude or hold himself neutral. Before he takes any attitude he is already constrained to make his choice, and therefore he must understand that just this necessity of decision constitutes the essential part of his human nature. Because Jesus sees man thus in a crisis of decision before God, it is understandable that in his thought the Jewish Messianic hope becomes the absolute certainty that in this hour the Kingdom of God is coming. If men are standing in the crisis of decision, and if precisely this crisis is the essential characteristic of their humanity, then every hour is the last hour, and we can understand that for Jesus the whole contemporary mythology is pressed into the service of this conception of human existence. Thus he understood and proclaimed his hour as the last hour. | ||||
This message of the Kingdom of God is absolutely alien to the present-day conception of humanity. We are accustomed to regard a man as an individual of the species "man," a being endowed with definite capacities, the development of which brings the human ideal in him to realization of course with variations in each individual. As "character" or as "personality," man achieves his end. Harmonious development of all human faculties, according to the individual endowment of each man, is the way to this ideal. Perhaps no man can travel this road to the end, but progress along the road, bringing the ideal nearer to realization, justifies human existence. We are accustomed to distinguish between the physical or sensuous and the mental or spiritual life. And even if at the same time the connection between them is assumed, and symmetrical development is the shining goal, still the spirit is the guiding principle, and the life of the spirit is the true meaning of human existence. | ||||
All this is completely alien to the teaching of Jesus. Jesus expresses no conception of a human ideal, no thought of a development of human capacities, no idea of something valuable in man as such, no conception of the spirit in the modern sense. Of the spirit in our sense and of its life or experience, Jesus does not speak at all. The word which in the English Biblical translations is generally rendered "soul" or "spirit" usually means simply "life," as in the well-known saying: "What shall it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his soul?" (Mark 8:36) The meaning is simply: Of what use are all the possessions of the world to a man who must die? The greed of man for property and profit is here shown to be as absurd as in the story of the rich farmer. | ||||
"There was a rich man whose land had yielded well. And he thought to himself, What shall I do? I have no place to put my grain. And he said, This is what I will do; I will pull down my barns and build greater ones, and there I will put all my grain. And then I will say to my soul [i.e., simply "to myself"], Soul, you have much wealth stored up for many years; rest, eat, drink, and be merry. But God said to him, Fool, tonight your soul [i.e., your life] will be taken, and who then will own your possessions?" (Luke 12:16-20) | ||||
The modern conception differs fundamentally from that of Jesus, because the former assumes the intrinsic worth of humanity, at least of the highest and noblest in it. The highest in man, indeed, is often designated without qualification as divine. By way of contrast, the worth of a man for Jesus is not determined by his human quality or the character of his spiritual life, but simply by the decision the man makes in the here-and-now of his present life. Jesus sees man as standing here and now under the necessity of decision, with the possibility of decision through his own free act. Only what a man now does gives him his value. And this crisis of decision arises for the man because he is face to face with the coming of the Kingdom of God. Somewhat similarly one might see the essential quality of human life defined by the fact that death awaits men and by the way they allow themselves to be determined thereby. And indeed the Kingdom of God and death are alike in this that both the Kingdom and death imply the end of earthly human existence as we know it, with its possibilities and interests. Moreover it may be said that death, like the Kingdom, is not to be considered by man as an accidental event, which sometime will bring to an end the everyday course of life, but as the true future which confronts man and limits him in the present and puts him under the necessity of decision. Thus in either case the judgment is pronounced upon man not from the human standpoint, as if man's value were somehow immanent and securely possessed by him, but from without according to Jesus, of course, God is the only Judge. | ||||
However, the coming of the Kingdom of God differs from the coming of death, because death is darkness, silence, while the Kingdom is a positive promise to man. Evidently when a man is constrained by the inevitable coming of death to make the decision, this decision can have only a negative sense, that is, to live his present life as a dying man, as an alien. On the contrary the decision which is forced upon him because of the coming of the Kingdom is positive that is, to act in his present life in accordance with the will of God. What positive meaning "to do the will of God" has for men has yet to be determined from the teaching of Jesus. | ||||
First, it must again be stressed that the eschatological message of Jesus, the preaching of the coming of the Kingdom and of the call to repentance, can be understood only when one considers the conception of man which in the last analysis underlies it, and when one remembers that it can have meaning only for him who is ready to question the habitual human self-interpretation and to measure it by this opposed interpretation of human existence. Then it becomes obvious that the attention is not to be turned to the contemporary mythology in terms of which the real meaning in Jesus teaching finds its outward expression. This mythology ends by abandoning the fundamental insight which gave it birth, the conception of man as forced to decision through a future act of God. To this mythology belongs the expectation of the end of the world as occurring in time, the expectation which in the contemporary situation of Jesus is the natural expression of his conviction that even in the present man stands in the crisis of decision, that the present is for him the last hour. To this mythology belongs also the figure of Satan who now fights against the hosts of the Lord. If it is true that to Jesus the world can be called bad only in so far as men are bad, that is, are of evil will, then it is clear how little the figure of Satan really meant to him. | ||||
Finally, it is also clear why Jesus cannot give a description of the Kingdom of God. Any such description would be possible only by projecting the demands and ideals of man or his spiritual experiences into the other world; and thereby the essential character of the beyond would be taken away. The Kingdom would be a creation of human desire and imagination; it would not be the Kingdom of God. But the Kingdom of God is not something dark, silent, and unknown, so that the idea of its relation to man is based wholly on speculation; rather the will of God is a comprehensible concept for men. What does it mean? | ||||