"1

God come upon you," "the Kingdom of God is within you," or again the mention of the fact that "the blind see, the lame walk . . . the poor have the Gospel preached unto them," as a token to John the Baptist that our Lord was the Expected One. And there are other less striking utterances, all of which seem to imply that there is a sense in which the Kingdom is already present. Many of them, indeed, also imply, and all are consistent with, the view that in another sense it is still future, and that only in the light of the richness of that future will the real importance of the present be seen. The future, indeed, is the harvest, but the present is the seed.

"

The conviction that the salvation of God is in one sense here and now, yet in another and larger sense still awaiting consummation, that in the present life man can enjoy a foretaste or "earnest of that which shall be, is fundamental as much in the religious experience of the world's great mystics as in that of the ordinary man. It is perhaps especially characteristic of that age-long strain in Hebrew religion represented in the Psalms. Hence the attempt to eliminate this double element from the central theme of our Lord's teaching by explaining away the sayings last enumerated is not merely a tour de force of exegesis but is to run counter to the analogies of the religious consciousness.

But there is not really even a verbal inconsistency between the two classes of sayings. Kingdom of God" is on the whole a misleading translation of the original. "Reign or rule of God" would usually be the better rendering; cf. especially the paraphrase in the Lord's Prayer "Thy kingdom come," that is, "Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven." Wherever the forces of the evil one are put to flight, whenever the sick are healed, whenever men hearken to the

1 I must needs think that "within you," and not "among you," is the natural rendering of vròs vμŵr. This, of course, does not rule out speculation as to whether the Greek correctly represents the Aramaic phrase used by our Lord, but the burden of proof lies with those who maintain that it is a mistranslation.

call to repent, these things are no mere sign that the Kingdom is near; they are, so far as they go, an actual instalment of the realised reign of God on earth. They are not the flash-light from a distant coast, the mouth of the harbour is already reached.

Here again our Lord reverts back to an earlier conception. The latest stage of Apocalyptic, as Dr. Charles points out, differs from the earlier Apocalyptic, and still more from the old prophetic view, in despairing of the regeneration of this world by any means however supernatural, and in hoping only for a new Jerusalem coming straight down from heaven on to a new earth. But the Kingdom of God as preached by our Lord entailed also a regeneration of this earth, of which it had been written, "The earth is the Lord's, and the fulness thereof." Thus His conception, combining the earlier Prophetic with the later Apocalyptic, includes two ideas which modern thought must needs hold apart -the idea of a corporate national regeneration on this earth, and the idea of individual immortality in supersensuous sphere.

We see here that same reinterpretation of contemporary religious beliefs in the light of their underlying principles, which we have already seen in His treatment of the Law. The essential idea of the Kingdom is the realisation of the rule of God; wherever then evil is being rebuffed and good is triumphing, the Kingdom is, just so far, in the act of being realised. In St. Paul we find that "the Kingdom of God is not eating and drinking, but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Ghost" (Rom. xiv. 17), and that the present indwelling of the Spirit is "an instalment of our inheritance" (Eph. i. 14). In this, as well as in his more definitely eschatological hopes, his teaching is essentially implicit in his Master's.

1 Cf. also 2 Cor. i. 22, v. 5.

THE SON OF MAN

So much for the Kingdom-what of the King? The importance of His deliberate choice of the title, Son of Man, has been already indicated (p. 102), but it is not easy to be sure of the exact meaning He attached to it.

A word must be said as to the actual phrase itself. In the Old Testament, Son of Man is a poetical equivalent for man. "Lord, what is man that Thou art mindful of him, or the son of man that Thou regardest him?”1 The equivalent phrase in later Aramaic simply means ; whether this was already so in the dialect used in Galilee in our Lord's time is a disputed point among Aramaic scholars. In any case the title may be fairly represented in English as "the Man."

"man

We have seen, however, that the Book of Enoch shows that, at any rate in some circles, it had acquired also a technical sense as a Messianic title. A confusion between the ordinary and the technical use of the words was thus possible, both in the minds of the original hearers of our Lord and in the tradition of His sayings. For instance, the saying, "The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath, therefore the Son of Man is Lord also of the Sabbath," seems more pointed if the latter half means, not that the Messiah, but that man as such is master of the Sabbath. Again, the difficulty that the saying (Mark ii. 10), "The Son of Man hath power to forgive sins," does not seem to have been interpreted as an open claim to Messiahship, would be met if the Pharisees had understood, possibly misunderstood, Him to mean by the words no more than "man."

As a rule, however, in the Synoptics the phrase is

1 It is notable that it is usually found in passages where the contrast of man's lowliness with God's power is implied. Thus Ezekiel is always addressed by God as "son of man." In Gen. vi. 2 the parallel phrase "daughters of men = women is also found in contrast to "sons of God."

clearly used as the title of the Apocalyptic Christ. It is used in two sets of passages, in the one with the emphasis on His glorious coming in judgment; in the other, almost in irony, to illustrate the Christian paradox, "Whoso would be greatest let him be servant of all." For instance, "The Son of Man hath not where to lay His head"; "the Son of Man shall suffer and be put to death ; "the Son of Man came not to be ministered unto but to minister, and to give His life";-passages of which half the point is lost if we forget that Son of Man was the title of a King of kings, the Vicegerent of God Himself.

Some difficulty is created by the fact, abundantly clear from St. Mark's Gospel, that His claim to be the Messiah at all was a secret, unknown even to the disciples till at Caesarea Philippi it was divined by St. Peter in a moment of inspired intuition. I believe that Schweitzer and others are correct in inferring from the form in which the cries of the multitude are given in St. Mark, the oldest version of the story, that even at the Triumphal Entry they still regarded Him, not as being Himself the supernatural Messiah of the apocalyptic hope, but as a Prophet, the forerunner of the Messiah-in fact, a second John the Baptist, as Herod had once satirically named Him (Mark vi. 16). Even if they had heard some of those sayings about the Son of Man, to us so clearly personal in their reference, they would naturally have supposed He could only mean them of some glorious being yet to come.1

Hence from the first there was an element of mystery about His use of the title. However, His

1 Cf. Burkitt, American Journal of Theology for April 1911, pp. 180-190. Schweitzer argues that John's question, “Art thou he that should come?" (Matt. xi. 3) means, not "Art thou the Christ?" but "Art thou the Elijah who is to precede the Christ?" (Mal. iv. 5; cf. Mark viii. 28, ix. 11), the "baptizer with fire" whom he himself had foretold. This may be correct. The view that John recognised our Lord as Messiah at the Baptism is implied no doubt in the Fourth Gospel, and in Matt. iii. 14-15, "I have need to be baptized of Thee," etc.—an addition to the Marcan version, which on other grounds has been regarded as inauthenticbut may be a mistaken inference of later Christian tradition.

reply to the solemn adjuration of the High Priest makes it clear that the passage in Daniel (vii. 13-14) in connection with its personal application in the Book of Enoch must be taken as normative, though not exhaustive, for any sound interpretation.

"I saw in the night visions, and, behold, there came with the clouds of heaven one like unto a son of man, and he came even to the Ancient of days, and they brought him near before him. And there was given him dominion, and glory, and a kingdom, that all the peoples, nations, and languages should serve him his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom that which shall not be destroyed" (Dan. vii. 13-14).

To this day the Oriental mind expresses itself with a luxuriance of imagery unfamiliar to the West. Especially characteristic is this of the Hebrew Prophets. Their language is the language of poetry, not of sober Saxon prose. And even beyond the norm of these the language of our Lord is rich in parable, metaphor, and paradox. If in the agony in the garden it was natural for Him to speak in conscious metaphor of the cup that He must drink, we may not press too literally a direct quotation of an ancient Scripture whose whole style was avowedly symbolic. Again, His answer to the challenge of the Sadducees with regard to the Resurrection of the Dead-another of the central ideas of contemporary eschatology-shows a clear perception of the inadequacy of the more materialistic imagery of Apocalyptic (cf. p. 137).

But while all due allowance must be made for these considerations, we may not read into ancient Galilee our own modern rationalising interpretation. Such language would be to His mind neither purely metaphorical nor absolutely literal-the word "quasi-symbolic" may be coined to represent the case.

this.

A further consideration of no small importance is

We have seen that the Kingdom was in the main