§ 10. CONCLUDING REMARKS

If, on the basis of all this, we bring together the ideas of salvation which Jesus connects with His offering of Himself, we find that He ascribes saving significance now to His death in itself and now to His dying as a necessary passage to a glorified life. The two are not only not contradictory, but together they give a full, living, and satisfactory view, which again is in harmony with all the former testimonies to His idea of salvation. His death in itself will, according to Mark x. 45, Matt. xx. 28, certainly burst the bands which still hold captive in worldliness even the best, but it will only do so for those in whom His life has already taken root, and only after the completed break with the world will it freely unfold itself. His death, according to Matt. xxvi. 28, will be the seal of a divine forgiveness of sin which finally quiets all doubt of the divine grace, arising from a consciousness of guilt. But it will only be this to those who-as the whole institution of the Supper expresses-allow Him who died for them to live in them by their hearty acceptance of His life which was given for them. Thus conceived His declarations about His death harmonise with His whole preceding doctrine of salvation, and are a supplement and completion with which it cannot dispense. For, that the kingdom of heaven, that is, communion with God, has come near, is already guaranteed by the testimony of Jesus, much more so is it by His person, from the inner life of which this testimony springs. And yet this guarantee is incomplete until He has shown and perfected by His obedience to death His unity with God from which He derives that testimony. Again, the redeeming power which is at once a transforming and a justifying power lies in the gospel and its bearer; that power exists and is operative from the beginning. But it can only become effective and master the world when He who bears it has proved Himself to be absolute victor, even against the full muster of the powers of darkness, and has, at the same time, in this perfecting of victory, laid aside the limitations of space and time, and been transfigured into a universal principle of victory, a spiritual nature which can be communicated to men (1 Cor. xv. 45). If, on the other hand, we were forced to explain the obscure

utterances of Jesus in the traditional sense instead of this, that is, if we said heaven was first opened by the abstract fact of His death and forgiveness rendered possible, and the angry God transformed into a heavenly Father, it would be as great a contradiction of His whole preceding doctrine of salvation as could possibly be conceived. By that doctrine of His death everything would be given up of what He had before taught, -that the kingdom of heaven had come near, that there is a Father in heaven who forgives all the debts of His children, that there is a new birth from the seed of His word and a peace of soul under an easy yoke in following Him,—and that they are not future possibilities, but present realities. Nay, it would make His whole preceding active life worthless-and at bottom also the succeeding glorified life, which would have nothing further to contribute to salvation. There would then remain to biblical theology no other course than to regard those individual utterances of Jesus about His death as not genuine, and only put in the mouth of Jesus at a later period in opposition to the abundance of the contrary testimony. In doing so, however, we would transform into an inscrutable riddle the institution of the Supper, this most certain of all certain things that have been transmitted to us, and likewise the whole subsequent apostolic teaching about the Saviour's death.1

1 Weiss, even in the last edition of his New Testament Theology, vol. i. p. 99, has sought to reconcile the fact that Jesus during His lifetime imparted to His disciples the forgiveness of sins as a present possession, with the doctrine that the redeeming death first procured it. Certainly he says, p. 102: "The members of the kingdom, from the very fact that they are in the kingdom of God, are sure of the forgiving grace of God. But if the life-work of Jesus was the founding of the kingdom of God, and reached its climax in the surrender of His life, then this surrender was a necessary though extreme means for bringing those who had proved unsusceptible to the highest revelation of God's grace into that new relation to Himself which was to be set up in His kingdom." I confess that this solution of the riddle has remained obscure to me. Does it mean that the death of Jesus was necessary, not for those who already believed on Him in His lifetime, and therewith had already got forgiveness of sin (Mark ii. 5), but for the unbelieving multitude? But then Jesus must have said in the institution of the Supper that He would let His body be broken and His blood be shed for the unbelieving multitude, and not ὑπὲρ ὑμῶν!

CHAPTER VII

THE CHURCH

§ 1. DISCIPLESHIP

The salvation brought into the world by Jesus does not act only on the individual man as such, but, as the fundamental watchword of the kingdom of God suggests, immediately calls forth a communion of men, a society which grows towards the likeness of the kingdom. For that which unites men with God as their Father, unites them also as brethren with one another, and that very thing which distinguishes them from the unredeemed world makes them also as a community "salt of the earth and light of the world." These natural laws of the kingdom of heaven were during His lifetime and in His hands realised in the simplest and freest form. In imitation of the old schools of the prophets and the schools of the scribes in His own day He gathered about Him a circle of disciples, which as His life grew more unsettled and homeless, assumed the character of a wandering family (Matt. viii. 18-22, x. 25). And He did so in order partly to confirm in their sense of citizenship those who had been won for the kingdom, and partly to make them instruments in spreading it, in order, as is said in Matt. xiii. 52, to make of them "scribes instructed in the kingdom of heaven." not impose this wandering life with Himself, and which the disciples shared, as a condition of salvation on all who desired to have part in the kingdom of heaven. Many of His friends, like the family at Bethany and some true adherents in Capernaum, He never called to follow Him, and in certain circumstances He expressly declined men's offers (Mark v. 18, 19); and in His later period of peril He advised all against following Him (Luke xiv. 25 f.; cf. Matt. viii. 18-20). But because His preaching could only take the form of instruction in daily and, as it were, domestic intercourse, supported by the whole power of personal association and example, it was certainly His desire to draw into His immediate society all whom their duties permitted (cf. Matt. viii. 21, 22; Luke ix.

He did

59, 62; Mark x. 21). And just as His experience of the unripeness of the people deepened (Matt. ix. 35, 38), and He was able to look beyond the limits of His own day, this discipleship seemed more and more important to Him for the extension and continuance of His work. In order to have a permanent basis in the ever changing company of followers, He selected twelve to be ever with Him, so that their testimony about Him might be complete; and He appointed them from the very first, as it seems to find their life's mission in preaching the kingdom of heaven (Mark i. 17, iii. 14, 15). The number twelve undoubtedly referred to the twelve tribes of the nation, which they either within His lifetime or after it-were to call into the kingdom of God (Matt. xix. 28), and accordingly the name apostles or messengers, by which the early Church from the beginning distinguished them, is traced back to Jesus Himself (Luke vi. 13). But in this choice and commission Jesus did not found an office in the sense of a legal institution with special authority. He did not even intend an exclusive or privileged missionary office, much less an office of teaching and guiding that should be authoritative for the Church in all time to come, for according to an undoubtedly trustworthy report He sent out during His lifetime seventy disciples (Luke x. 1-17), and charged all His followers with the extension of His kingdom afterwards (Matt. v. 13, 14). Without denying the distinctions of greater and less among His disciples, and specially recognising, for example, the ripened manhood and superiority and gifts of leadership in Peter (Matt. xviii. 10; Mark x. 43; Luke xii. 42; John xxi. 15 ff.), we must yet allow that He deprived them of every distinction of rank, and placed them solely in a relation of brotherly equality (Matt. xxiii. 8). He excluded any claim to rule as teacher or as patron within the community of His disciples by forbidding them to assume the name Rabbi, and saying to them, "Ye shall call no man Master, and no man father on earth: for one is your Father, who is in heaven, and one is your Master, even Christ" (Matt. xxiii. 8–10); He also interdicted all selfish ambition and all desire for power among them, and only permitted the emulation in self-denying love and service in which, as we see from His comparison with His own redeeming service of love, He saw, above all, the BEYSCHLAG.-I.

II

power of helping one another on towards eternal well-being (Matt. xx. 26, 27; Luke xxii. 25, 26).1

§ 2. THE CHURCH

This preliminary society of teachers and scholars in which the kingdom took its rise is followed by the community (or Church), éкλŋσía, which appears, from Matt. xvi. 18, still in the future. The term exkλnoía appears seldom, and at a late period in the sayings of Jesus. After the passage just quoted the word appears only in Matt. xviii. 15-20, a paragraph which is indeed important in a variety of ways, and stands out as a Magna Charta of the Church. But there is no real ground for disputing that the word is His, or for referring its origin to a later period in the Church. For not only is Ekkλnoia ( or, assembly or congregation in the original ἐκκλησία sense in which Luther has used the word (Acts xix. 39) of an assembly of citizens) an idea already found in the Old Testament, but it can easily be seen why Jesus only at a later period, but then of necessity, made it His own. So long as there was any hope of realising His work within the Old Testament national community, He could have no thought of founding a community of His own. But when this hope was at an end, when the decisive breach between His kingdom and the constituted national community of the Jews proved inevitable, and His rejection and crucifixion came clearly into view, how could Jesus think of His disciples as representing the cause of His kingdom when He was dead except in the form of a community distinct from the Jewish religious community, and worshipping God in His name as Father? But the two passages, Matt. xvi. 18, xviii. 15-20, let us all see how the idea of a community grew in the mind of Jesus. In the first" On this rock will I build My Church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it"-the idea still

1 The royalty which Jesus (Luke xxii. 28) promises to His disciples, and which Wendt applies to their future working for the setting up of the Messianic kingdom, applies rather to their position in the completed kingdom (Luke xix. 17 f.; Matt. xx. 28), and is not at all a specific promise to apostles, but a general promise to Christians; cf. 1 Cor. iv. 8; Rev. i. 6, v. 10.