SECTION IV

the theocracy, especially the christian church

In viewing the theocracy as the historical development of the kingdom of God, it may be regarded under three principal forms. First, it appears in the growth of its peculiar life, as this advances towards full maturity. This maturity is manifested by the circumstance of the ripened fruit of the sacred organism bursting its decaying shell, and wholly freeing itself from it. The sacred plant is the Old Testament Church; the shell, Talmudism; the fruit, the Christian Church. The Messiah being then indisputably the central point of the theocracy, these three forms of religious life must of necessity all point, by decided christological indications, to the history of Christ’s life. In fact, the preliminaries of this history appear even in such particulars as the Old Testament assumes. The first fundamental law of Old Testament history is this, that the kingdom of God is founded by distinguished and chosen individuals. It is to such individuals that the Lord says, ‘I give people for thy life’ (Isa 43:4). The theocracy does not reckon the greatness of humanity by heaping numbers upon numbers, nor by the combination of ‘millions of perukes or socks.’ It is not the ant-hill in which undistinguished equality prevails, but the beehive in which all is done with reference to a mystically governing queen, which is the type of the theocratic ideal of human nature. The second characteristic of the theocracy is, that it regards history from the point of view afforded by its unity, whether that unity is considered with respect to its extension in the contemporary history of various nations, or its duration during periods. Much has been said concerning the isolation of Israel in the Old Testament; but it must not be ignored, that this isolation is the struggle of the morbid monotheistic spirit of Israel with the polytheistic nations—a struggle decidedly demanding and announcing the union of other nations with Israel, while the heathen nations, in spite of all their intermingling, pursued their several courses side by side, without any feeling that they were destined for union. This theocratic view of the unity of history points towards the point of union. Thirdly, the theocracy had a deep conviction of being an organism, the purpose of whose development it was to exhibit the formation of true religion and its progress towards perfection. The prophets are full of distinctions between the various gradations of religious life under the Old Testament, and their special vocation is the announcement of its consummation, the manifestation of the kingdom of God in and through the God-man. Finally, the theocracy also lays great stress upon the ironical contrast in which the arrangements of the divine economy stand to the assumptions of ordinary worldly understanding. God, for example, chooses the little to represent the eternal; the mean, despised nation of the Jews becomes the instrument of revelation; the obscure country of Palestine, and of this country the poor province of Galilee, and of this province the despised town of Nazareth, is the theatre of its highest miracles. A worldling would certainly not have chosen ‘a corner in Galilee’ for the manifestation of such things, but rather the great Mongolian steppe, where the ‘specimens of the genus’ manage their horses in countless troops. This fundamental principle of the theocracy, the manifestation of the great in the little, leads the religious sense upon the track of the Nazarene, the Crucified. Even Talmudism, that decayed husk of the theocratic life, the obverse of the history of the New Testament kingdom of God, is forced to bear testimony, by distinct allusions, to the history of Christ. The still prevailing expectation of a personal Messiah is the soul which holds together, keeps on its feet, and drives through the world, the dry skeleton of the wandering Jew. The power of the stumbling-stone may be inferred from the force with which it has hurled the unhappy nation through all the world, and crushed and scattered its members. The fate of the Jewish people bears the impress of the tremendous conflict they have waged against their destiny, their guilty resistance of their vocation, and the glory of this vocation. Thus their fate also leads us to infer the fulness and holiness of that manifestation of God in actual history, at which they stumbled, and against which they fell. Finally, the dead formalism of Talmudism finds its counterpart in the Christian festival of Whitsuntide, and in the Christian Church. The Church is, moreover, the expanded Gospel, because it bears the life of Christ within itself. All its vital powers are in their nature one, and point, in this oneness, to the oneness of their source, the one perfect personality of the God-man. They are also all ideally real, whenever their nature as matured powers is fully manifested; and as such they cannot be the product of an idealistic imaginative school, but must be the result of a perfect, potent, ideally real life, perpetuated in the establishment of a Church. These vital powers have, moreover, been overgrown by certain particulars of merely ecclesiastical remembrance; yet even under this form they point to as many particulars of Gospel history. In the glorification of the blessed Virgin, e.g., is contained a perpetual announcement of the miraculous birth of Christ. The great incidents of the life of Christ, everywhere appear in the festivals, dogmas, and vital powers of the Church. How decidedly does the Church’s joy in the midst of affliction, her glorying in the cross, point to the death of Christ, its influence and glorious results! Can the perpetual testimony of the Christian Church to the resurrection and ascension of Christ, by its assurance of victory over death, by its hope of the glory of the future life, be mistaken? When we consider, further, the divine vital forces of the Church, in their opposition to the fashion and notions of the world, we are constrained to wonder at the might of that spiritual irruption, with which they burst forth from their fountain to conquer the resistance of the ancient world, and are consequently led to the conclusion, that they could only have become matters of history through a series of miracles; just as a lofty mountain stream can only fight its appointed course through a country by means of a series of waterfalls. Thus do even our institutions for the blind, our hospitals, and asylums point to that glorious chaplet of miracles by which Christ was surrounded in the energizing effect of His miraculous life. Finally, all may be summed up in the one remark, that the life of the Church of Christ is a manifestation of the presence of the Holy Ghost. This presence of the Spirit of God, however, as the Holy Spirit, assumes the perfection of the Gospel life in its fulness, its totality, its infinite depth, and pure reality. An idealistic immature religious life, a life terminating in the bud and never advancing beyond its first beginnings, might announce the presence of the Spirit of God, but the Spirit is not manifested as the Holy Spirit, till the manifestation of the Son is perfected. How could the return of the Son to the Father take place, before His coming from the Father into the world was perfected? Not till the manifestation of the Son was completed, could that free life, with which all the incidents of His life are identified, flow forth to sanctify the Church, that is, to lead her back with the Son out of the world into union with God. Thus the Church, as the stream of divine life, testifies to its sublime source, the life of Jesus (Joh 7:39).

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Notes

1. The separation which exists between Israel and other nations, expresses its inward relation to those nations in the same manner as the separation of the Christian Church from her excommunicated members expresses her suffering for them, and her desire for reunion with them in the communion of Christ. And as, in our days, a spirit of moral slumber makes men find more humanity in the rude, natural intercourse of the heathen nations, than in that separation between Israel and the world, so also do they find more Christianity in the moral laxity of the Church than in her exhibition of social Christian decision. The notion of discipline seems as alarming as though the very alphabet of the rights of a community were past comprehension.

2. A counterpart to the active religious penetration of Israel, by means of which it embraced Monotheism, is furnished by the passive religious penetration of the ancient Indians, which produced the nobler forms of the ancient Pantheism. And as an historical confiscation of the privileges of the Israelitish Monotheists is exhibited in the homeless Jews, so is a similar event exhibited in the case of the Indian Pantheists in the homeless gypsies. The ideal liberty of modern Pantheists was long ago realized in the wandering and forest life of the gypsies.

3. On the import of Christ’s death upon the cross, and of the founding of His Church thereupon, with respect to the fulness and peculiarity of the Gospel history, compare the striking treatise of Ullmann, What does the establishment of the Christian Church by a crucified man assume? in his collection of shorter writings, entitled Historisch oder Mythisch.

4. When, in modern philosophy, the Spirit is regarded merely as the Holy Spirit, the high significance of the successive gradations in which the Spirit manifests His life, is overlooked in the general unity of spiritual existence. The creative Spirit who forms a stone in nature, is certainly identical with the Holy Spirit who leads a Christian heart from worldliness to union with God. But it is only in the latter work that we see the sublime summit of the Spirit’s development, the whole glory of His nature as the Sanctifier. The distinctions in the biblical delineation of the Spirit rest upon depths of perception and definiteness of view which philosophy, with a somewhat ambiguous absence of presentiment, often entirely overlooks.