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Koch on Apocalyptic
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 October 2024
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‘(Jesus’ audience) thought that the Kingdom would be a place like the old kingdom of David, with armies and a king’s throne. Jesus knew that it was not a place, but the action of God ruling over our hearts.’ So John Hargreaves, though it is perhaps unfair to pick on him, for similar pronouncements can be found in hundreds of popular, and indeed scholarly, theological writings. It is the way most of us were brought up to think. Perhaps it is the right way of thinking, but there are, I think, increasingly good reasons for feeling unsure about that. When the Jews talked about ‘the kingdom’ (without further qualification) they certainly were not thinking of some invisible operation: they meant the Roman Empire. The ‘Kingdom of God’ on the lips of Jesus may well have referred to something equally tangible—to a world order, not a concept. He may well have been speaking not of the invisible activity of ‘grace’ in the ‘soul’, but of a kingdom, however spiritual, with visible, material attributes. A recent writer on the Fourth Gospel, for instance, has interpreted the scene before Pilate in these terms:
Jesus’ kingship is not ‘unworldly’. Instead one of the characteristics of the Johannine treatment of the trial and of the events that lead up to it is that the political implications are emphasized. In 11, 48 a specifically political motivation is injected into the plotting of the Jewish authorities. John alone mentions the presence of the Roman soldiers the spaira kai ho chiliarchos) at the arrest of Jesus. In the trial itself, the political-realistic element is introduced by the Jews at 19, 12: ‘If you release this man you are not Caesar’s friend; anyone who makes himself a king opposes Caesar’.
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- Copyright © 1941 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
page 423 note 1 John Hargreaves: A Guide to St Mark's Gospel (T.E.F. Study Guide, 2), London, S.P.C.K., 1969, p. 18.
page 423 note 2 See, for instance, Rudolph Schnackenburg, God's Rule and Kingdom, 1963, p. 95: God's sovereignty is ‘purely religious in character’, without political connotations. Such a spiritualizing tendency may stem, Klaus Koch suggests, form the ‘disappointment’ of German scholars with the German Reich.
page 424 note 1 Wayne A. Meeks: The Prophet‐king, Moses traditions and the Johannine Christology (Novum Testamentum suppl. XIV). Leiden, 1967, p. 64. Of cours, even if Meeks' interpretation is correct, it is by no means self‐evident, far from it, that the view of the fourth evangelist on the Kingdom faithfully represents the view of Jesus. I can only say, speaking for myself, that I am becoming ever more convinced of the truth of Dodd's remark, ‘It is in the Fourth Gospel which in form and expression. as probably in date, stands farthest from the original tradition of the teaching [of Jesus] that we have the most penetrating exposition of its central meaning’ (The Apostolic Preaching, lecture III).
page 424 note 2 Klaus Koch: The Rediscovery of Apocalyptic (Studies in biblical theology, 2nd ser. 22) London, S.C.M., 1972 (Translated by Margaret Kohl), 157 pp. £2.25.
page 425 note 1 Koch, p. 91.
page 425 note 2 Koch, p. 80.
page 426 note 1 See Bertil Alberktson, History and the Gods, Lund, 1967, for an interesting discussion of this question of a divine plan in history. The view is frequently encountered that history as a meaningful process is a biblical commonplace. Thus Johannes Lindblom can speak of ‘the prophetic idea of the history of Israel as the realization of a fixed divine plan from its beginning to its end’. That God acts in history is certainly good Israelite theology (also good Mesopotamian, Moabite and Hittite theology, as Albrektson shows), bit this is not, Albrektson argues, the same thing as ‘a divine plan in history’: ‘there is a great difference between a plan in a limited sequence of occurrences and a plan in History with a capital H: the view that Yhwh acts purposefully in what happens is not necessarily identical with the view that history as a whole is heading for a definite goal along a road laid out according to a fixed plan’. An examination of the relevand Old Testament texts leads him to the conclusion that Daniel alone proclaims a divine plan in history (‘the books’ of Daniel 7, 10 are reminiscent of the ‘tables of destiny’ in Mesopotamian texts, which do seem to know of some notion of a divine governance of world history). The doctrine would seem in Israel, on this showing. to be a peculiarity of apocalyptic thinking.
page 426 note 2 ‘The members of non‐Israelite nations’, Koch adds (p.30), ‘will also partake of the coming salvation … a tendency to universalism is … unmistakeable’. I note that he quotes no text in support of this from Daniel, a book from which universalism would seem to be completely absent. ‘The apocalypses’, C. K. Barrett remarks New Testament Background, 1957, p. 238), ‘differ widely regarding the fate of the Gentiles’. (Cf. 2 Baruch 72, 4–6 and 1 Enoch 90, 28–42 with, e.g. 4 Ezra 13, 37, 38, 49).
page 427 note 1 It is not clear whether the Kingdom would be established by God single‐handed, so to say, or whether he would employ men to manage the technicalities of the revolution for him. Harvey Cox favours the former position: ‘Apocalypticism and politics are inherently incompatible … (For apocalypticism) rational action is useless because powers outside history and beyond human control will quickly bring the whole thing to a blazing end. … Apocalypticism is at work wherever people simply decide to opt out of a political process and seek personal salvation or wait for the deluge’ (On Not Leaving it to the Snake, 1968, p. 38f; quoted, Koch p. 153). For the opposite view it may be urged that favourable references to the Maccabees in Daniel (e.g. 11, 34) suggest that the author of that apocalypse at least was either a political activist or, at any rate, a sympathizer. If the author of Daniel believed that the Kingdom would be established through the divine initiative prompting men to political and military resistance to existing power structures, other apocalyptists may have thought likewise, though given the uncertainty mentioned above as to whether all the apocalyptists came from the same background, it would be rash to make any assumptions on this score. Perhaps some apocalyptists believed in human intervention in the revolution and others not. There is no presumption that if someone (e.g. perhaps Jesus) was sympathetic to apocalyptic thinking, he was therefore a political activist. Again, even if Jesus, say, were well disposed to political activism, that does not mean he was well disposed to a particular form of activism such as Zealotism (one could still be a political activist and believe the Zealots were fighting with the Wrong Manifesto, or at an inpportune time).
page 427 note 2 Koch (p. 136) quotes a passage from the Syriac Apocalypse of Daniel which suggests that one apocalptist at least was in no doubt that the Kingdom would be a real, earthly paradise (of a sort that William Morris would perhaps have been pleased to hail as the fulfilment of his docialist aspirations) rather than an insubstantial never‐never land: ‘The son shall speak to his father and say “Thou art not my father”. And the servant shall make himself equal to his lord. The maid shall be seated and the mistress shall serve. The youth shall lie down at table before him that is old,’
page 428 note 1 Earlier, on page 77, he quotes with implied approval the words of Ernst Kämann: ‘According to the New Testament, God's aim is not the salvation of the individual; it is the justification of the world.’
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