This is an extraordinarily interesting commentary on the fundamental problem of modern systems of Bible interpretation making the claim to be following Jesus.
Professor Hiers was trained at Yale University and taught there after receiving his doctorate. He has been since 1960 professor of religion at the University of Florida. His point of view is that the Jewish aspects of Jesus’ gospel have been constantly suppressed by theologians and churches and thus often hidden from the public. Jesus was in fact a Jewish preacher of the coming Kingdom of God. The Kingdom of God is positively not in Scripture the “rule of God in our hearts now.” The Bible has other language to describe that feature of the faith. The Kingdom of God is a kind of code word to describe the hoped-for national liberation of the land of Israel and the beginning of a brand new era of history, including worldwide peace. This is to occur, according to Jesus’ Good News (Gospel) about the Kingdom, when Jesus comes back.
When he returns it will not be the “end of the world” but, as the New Testament says, the end of this age. A new age or era will follow, and this will be the Kingdom of God reestablished on earth. Jesus will be the first successful world president and the saints will be co-heirs with him of the throne of David (Dan. 2:44; 7:27; Luke 22:28-30; I Cor. 6:2, II Tim. 2:12; Rev. 3:21; 2:26). This will be the fulfillment of the covenant God promised from the beginning, that His people would eventually be in power in the land of Israel with benefits extending to the whole world. It is for this great reversal of human affairs which we pray when we say “May your Kingdom come,” and “Come, Lord Jesus.”
The following observations of Professor Hiers from his Jesus and the Future (John Knox Press, 1981) underline the way in which this fundamental truth about the Gospel of the Kingdom has been distorted, eclipsed or suppressed by established religion:
“Interpreters of Christian persuasion have ordinarily not been especially interested in what Jesus intended and did in his own time” (1).
“Christian interpreters tend to suppose that Jesus set out to establish the kind of Christianity they experience as familiar and meaningful” (1).
“It has been less than a century since a few biblical scholars first began to realize that the historical Jesus proclaimed as of first importance something quite unfamiliar either to modern Christianity or to modern thought: the Kingdom of God.” “The Kingdom Jesus proclaimed was entirely future. By responding to his message, his hearers were not building the Kingdom on earth but preparing themselves for admission to it when it comes.” “When it came all would be transformed into a new and splendid promised land, indeed a new heaven and new earth in place of the old” (2).
“Weiss’s little book completely undermined the prevailing liberal conception of Jesus as founder and teacher of the Kingdom as God’s rule in the hearts of men or the structures of society” (2).
“These authors [said Schweitzer in his Quest for the Historical Jesus] persistently ignored or interpreted away the main features of Jesus’s eschatological orientation evidenced in the gospels. Most of the writers wished to claim Jesus’s support for their particular conceptions of Christianity” (vii). “Modern portrayals of Jesus have been influenced to a great extent by the interest or perspective of the writer” (vii).
“The eschatological Jesus depicted in the historical tradition is not the Jesus of any modern church or school of theology” (ix).
“Interpreters ignore or reinterpret the eschatological traditions and they leave the way clear to ‘discover’ in Jesus whatever figure is most congenial to their particular doctrine, ideologies or programs” (x). “The result is a Jesus who is intelligible neither in his own time nor to modern understanding” (x). “Interpreters have already decided what Jesus should have believed” (xi). “Our studies confirm the central place of Jesus’s futuristic and apocalyptic orientation in the synoptic representation of his beliefs and message” (xii). “The eschatological aspects of Jesus’s preaching and teaching are not merely incidental or peripheral, but form the substance or core of his message” (xii). “We are particularly disinclined to credit the common wisdom which insists that Jesus's perspective was necessarily distinct from that of either the early Christian community or apocalyptic Judaism.”
“In every case these authors [argues Schweitzer in Quest] finally reveal a desire to de-emphasize Jesus’s futuristic beliefs. The writers then seize upon any texts that might possibly be read to show that somehow Jesus understood the Kingdom as a present reality, and assure their readers that this present Kingdom was what mattered most to him and should matter most to ‘us’ today” (9).
“Nearly all schools agreed that Jesus’s futuristic expectations, if permitted to stand, would be an embarrassment, if not a disaster, for contemporary faith. Consequently, critics evidently are willing to read into Jesus’s mind all sorts of modernizing reinterpretations” (10).
“Another procedure frequently used by interpreters who wish to disentangle Jesus from the complications of his eschatological perspective is to redefine ‘apocalypticism’” (10).
“Interpreters in the ‘mainstream’ of Christianity and academe are disposed, therefore, to believe a priori that Jesus could not have shared such a bizarre worldview, and to discount all evidence to the contrary” (11).
“It is a fact that the Jesus depicted in the sources is and remains the Jewish, eschatological, apocalyptic Jesus. As Schweitzer observed some eighty years ago, the historical Jesus is a stranger and an enigma to modern thought. Despite the best efforts of ‘the new Quest,’ ‘the new historiography' and ‘the new hermeneutic,’ the historical, eschatological Jesus was not the founder of any school of modern theology” (113).
“Writers candidly acknowledge and review synoptic traditions indicating Jesus’s futuristic eschatological beliefs, but then turn to the few passages that can be construed to mean that he thought the Kingdom somehow present and finally conclude by suggesting that only this latter belief is important for modern faith” (15).
“They ‘disengage’ the meaning of Jesus and his message from the unfortunate concepts which — it would otherwise appear — he shared with apocalyptic Judaism” (17).
“Many interpreters evidently assume that in order to salvage Jesus’s ethics they must deny his eschatology” (59). “Jesus’s entire ministry or public activity was directed to the preparation of his people to the coming Kingdom” (77).
“As Christianity became more at home in the world of Greek thought, the hope for reunion at table in the Kingdom of God became less intelligible, for the fulfilled life of salvation was conceptualized primarily as a nonmaterial realm or mode of existence. Understandably, the NT passages that gave promise to the hope for eating and drinking in the Kingdom of God were increasingly passed over in silence, or else subjected to allegorical or ‘spiritual’ reinterpretations” (88).
“Since Jesus — in the view of traditional theology — was a Christian, not a Jew, it seems natural to suppose that he would have discarded such Jewish ideas as a physical or worldly kingdom in favor of spiritual or otherworldly meanings” (16).
“Both schools have proceeded as if it were necessary to dispense with the eschatological Jesus in order to preserve the Christianity each knows. Yet both schools wished to enjoy the sense of security inherent in the assumption that their respective theological positions corresponded more or less precisely to what Jesus had in mind. Understandably, neither school has been quick to recognize that the only Jesus portrayed in the synoptic gospels is the strange, eschatological Jesus” (99).
“Jesus expected that in the coming Kingdom of God he and his followers, together with other righteous persons, would sit at table eating and drinking. This expectation is not shared by many Christians in the 20th century. It has not been a significant part of the Christian world-view for several centuries. On the whole, NT scholars obligingly have restrained from emphasizing this aspect of Jesus’s message and outlook. In general the synoptic passages where this expectation is in evidence are simply ignored. Occasionally an interpreter acknowledges the existence of certain passages, but then suggests that such ideas should be treated as vestiges of Jewish belief or as later glosses by transmitters or editors of the tradition. That such ideas might actually have been part of Jesus’s understanding and proclamation to his contemporaries is seldom considered. Interpreters sometimes concede that Jesus may have made such statements, but then go on to explain that he did so intending to symbolize something other than the literal and materialistic ideas seemingly represented” (72).
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