Categories we must not replace, and a kingdom used as it was not meant

The New Testament, the writer says, provides its own categories for interpreting the person of Jesus, and if we replace them with ones more familiar and more comfortable to us, we harm New Testament thought. Protestant liberals erred by replacing the kingdom of God with a traditional biographical idea; those who followed Bultmann ignored Jesus’s human and historical importance and tried to find his present meaning only through existential truth. In the liberals, God entering with Jesus, and in Jesus, disappeared; in Bultmann, the importance of that entry was taken to come through each believer rather than through Jesus. These theologians, the writer says, developed reductionist hermeneutical categories, and as a result the true importance of God’s act was largely, or almost entirely, lost.

The gospel and the kingdom of God must both be placed, and experienced, in an eschatological frame. The divine, the notes say, used the human in Jesus to conquer, on the cross, our guilt and the devil behind it. In our preaching of the scriptural word as well, the divine breaks through the human. When the word, in its effect, goes beyond a human power of eloquence, the Spirit roots it in human life. Once it dwells in our humanity and consciousness, this gospel, by the Spirit, gives a sense and a conviction that we belong to another age. Even if Christians live in this world as Jesus did, they are not a part of it, because they have been united with Christ by faith. Christian experience therefore holds, within the structure of this age, a self-attesting element of another age, an element of another reality that keeps the Christian always a sojourner in this world.

The writer cannot help stressing how important it is to see the continuity between Jesus’s proclamation of the kingdom and Paul’s proclamation of the gospel. The clear, defining expressions of the meaning of Christian faith that appear in the epistles generally, and in Paul’s especially, should be taken as consistent with what was developed under the language of the kingdom. If they are not, and the kingdom is detached from the gospel of the epistles, it usually comes to be ruled by later, extra-biblical ideologies and cultural norms. The kingdom of God is an elastic idea, and perhaps for that very reason Jesus used it during the period of his self-revelation. It was meant to reach the height of its meaning through suggestion, implication, and indirect disclosure. If this is not understood and allowed, the kingdom may be used in a sense Jesus never intended at all. That, the writer says, is without doubt what happened in Protestant liberalism.

An old idea among some evangelicals, and four titles

According to the argument the liberals advanced, the apostles, and Paul among them, fell to the temptation of Greek philosophy and turned Jesus’s simple faith into a complex ideology. With a veiled claim about themselves, the liberals asserted that they were Jesus’s true followers, and that they were the ones rescuing Christianity from a distortion by Paul. A way of thinking that at the time looked quite outstanding, even clever, however interesting it may appear, was, the writer says, altogether in error. It is therefore no small surprise to see this old idea rising again among some evangelical writers. It does not, of course, appear in the same way as before. Now it is quite readily granted that Christianity is about the kingdom of God, and what Paul wrote, and what the kingdom means, in a good many cases appears as a left-wing political ideology. Discussion of Christianity is replaced by discussion of the kingdom, biblical ethics by ethics of the kingdom, social responsibility by a transformation of the kingdom. What passes as evangelical faith is, in several of its important points, only a new protrusion of liberalism.

The titles Word and Son of God differ from each other in some respects. Word is a Johannine idiom that seems not to have been much used in the Christian church of the time; Son is widely, and quite commonly, used in the epistles. Both, however, affirm in different ways Christ’s divine status, and, as part of that, that he preexisted in eternity before time. What John intends to convey with his teaching of the Word is not completely identical with what other parts of the New Testament say with the title Son of God, but it may be said to agree almost entirely. The title Son of God describes Christ’s unique relation to God. Christ is God himself, come from the depths of God himself. But he is God come in a human form, and the human form he took both hides his being God and enables him to obey the Father.

The title Suffering Servant has a clearly biblical origin, and by the time of the epistles Jesus is quite clearly declared the central one of the gospel and of the kingdom of God. It is quite clearly held that God’s rule as king can be begun and introduced by the Servant who suffered on the cross. This title, which appears as central in Pauline theology, generates a new linguistic idiom and new theological content. The title Son of Man appears in all the Gospels. It is a term used only by Jesus, and extremely rarely used by anyone else about him. Only once did those who heard the words fail to be sure who the person indicated by this title was. That the title Son of Man is divine is, the writer says, a conclusion that comes inescapably from such sayings, and so the title becomes a synonym for the preexistent Messiah, in whom God’s character was fully revealed and by whom God’s will was fully carried out.

Orthodoxy after the apostles, and East and West on Gnosticism

In the theological work of the church in the age after the apostles, the first thing the writer attends to is how “orthodoxy” was defined. If “orthodoxy” means a right view of Christ, or of other important matters of our faith, some theologians have said that we can think of it in two quite different ways. On one side is the view that orthodoxy is what the apostles taught: the word is used to describe apostolic teaching or tradition, and orthodoxy is a fixed, static, lasting, unchanging body of truth that must be believed and obeyed. A second problem the church faced, the notes say, was one of language and concepts. In trying to explain Christ’s nature and humanity, the church used terms that were already in use and already carried philosophical implications.

The different mentality that appears in East and West, the writer says, shows itself well in their attitude to Gnosticism, which may be called the strongest of the early heresies of the church. For Eastern theologians such as Clement, Christianity is true gnosis, and the so-called Gnostics had only incomplete knowledge. Clement’s point, the notes say, is that the Gnostics were right as far as they had gone. The trouble was that they had not gone far enough to have faith. For Western theologians such as Irenaeus or Tertullian, however, Gnosticism is wrong because its premises are wrong. The notes mention, in an outline, classical Christology in the age of the fathers and from the Middle Ages to the Reformation, but they do not narrate those later histories here, and none is invented. The same Korean essay, at fuller length, is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. A student theological essay on who Christ is, arguing that the New Testament’s own categories for interpreting Jesus should not be replaced by more familiar ones.
2. The titles Word, Son of God, Suffering Servant, and Son of Man, and the continuity between Jesus’s proclamation of the kingdom and Paul’s proclamation of the gospel.
3. How, after the apostles, one view took orthodoxy as what the apostles taught, and how East and West differed in their attitude to Gnosticism.

Last updated: 14 November 2026