1 KINGDOM and CHURCH ACCORDING to JESUS and PAUL1 Richard Bauckham St. Andrews, Scotland Introduction
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KINGDOM AND CHURCH ACCORDING TO JESUS AND PAUL1 Richard Bauckham St. Andrews, Scotland Introduction "Jesus annonrait le Royaume, et c'est 1'Eglise qui est venue" ('Jesus proclaimed the kingdom of God, but it was the church which came'): these words of Alfred Loisy2 have been frequently quoted and also quite frequently contested. They may serve to introduce the issue of the relationship between Jesus' preaching of the kingdom of God and the reality of the Christian churches of the New Testament period. To put it crudely, would Jesus have been surprised and disappointed to observe that the kingdom of God did not come, but the church did? But in order to be able to put the question in a usefully answer- able form, the issue first needs some refining. We need first to observe that, linguistically, the terms 'kingdom of God' (basileia tou theou) and 'church' (ekkfesia) are not strictly com- mensurate. The former usually refers to a state of affairs (the reign or the rule of God), the latter to a body of people (literally and origi- nally, the actual assembly of people gathered together). Of course, basileia can mean 'kingdom' in the more usual English sense of.that word, i.e. the sphere of a king's rule, and so in theory the church could be called God's kingdom in this sense, as the sphere of God's rule, the people he rules. In this sense, Israel, in a key divine declara- tion of her status as God's covenant people, was told: 'you shall be for me a kingdom (mmlkh) of priests' (Exod 19:6). Since the term ekklesia was most likely adopted by the early church from its quite frequent Old Testament use to describe Israel in the wilderness as 'the assembly (qhl LXX ekklesia) of YHWH,' one might have expected the description of Israel as a kingdom also to be applied to the church. In fact, 1 Peter 2:9 does apply the terms used in Exodus 19:6 to the church, but follows the Septuagint in rendering the Hebrew as 'a roy- al priesthood' (basileia hierateuma) rather than 'a kingdom of priests.' Revelation 5 : 10, referring to the people that Christ as the new Passover 1 2 Lamb has redeemed, says that 'you have made them for our God as a kingdom and priests' (cf. also 1:6). This relatively more literal rendering of Exodus 19:6 is perhaps the only New Testament instance where the word basileia is used directly to describe the church, and the meaning is probably more than that the church constitutes the object of God's rule, since the verse goes on to refer to the church's participation in God's rule ('they will reign on earth'). This unusual case proves the rule: the kingdom of God is not, in the New Testa- ment, a term for the church,' however closely the church may be relat- ed to it. Usually it refers not to the sphere of God's rule, but to God's rule itself. In certain cases, notably the expressions 'to enter the king- dom' and 'to inherit the kingdom,' where the meaning does seem rather more like 'sphere of rule,' the reference is to the eschatological future. , Loisy's blunt statement gains its initial plausibility from the facts of the usage of the terms. The term 'kingdom of God' (or, in Matthew, its circumlocutionary equivalent: 'kingdom of heaven') is very com- mon in the Synoptic Gospels, usually on the lips of Jesus, though it occurs only twice in John (3 :3, 5), where the terms 'life' and 'eternal life' take its place. That it was a very characteristic usage of Jesus can therefore scarcely be doubted. The word 'church,' on the other hand, is attributed to Jesus (and occurs in the four Gospels) only three times (Matt 16:18, 18:17 bis), and so it is unlikely that Jesus used it. (The authenticity of the promise to Peter in Matt 16:18, which many scho- lars have plausibly defended, need not entail the authenticity of the word ekklesia.) By contrast, 'kingdom of God' is relatively uncom- mon in the rest of the New Testament, and 'church' common (though outside Acts, Revelation and the Pauline literature, where it is com- mon, it is found only in Jas 5:14, 3 John 6, 9, 10; and the special case of Heb 2 :12). It is striking that Luke, who uses 'church' frequently in Acts, never attributes the word to Jesus, and that the author of the Fourth Gospel similarly avoids it, despite its currency in Johan- nine circles (as 3 John shows). Even extra-canonical traditions of the sayings of Jesus rarely place the word 'church' on his lips. .