Jesus Twofold Teaching About The Kingdom Of God

Recent research on Jesus' teaching about the Kingdom of God has in common the assumption that it remains the same throughout the time of his proclamation of it. The data that cannot be harmonized are usually judged to be inauthentic, originating from Christian prophets in the early church. Smith shows in closely argued detail how essential it is to differentiate two historical contexts for Jesus' teaching about the Kingdom of God. The nature of the Kingdom of God is conditional upon its acceptance and the acceptance of its messenger-which is to say, Jesus' teaching about the Kingdom of God is hypothetical. This is the non-rejection context of Jesus' teaching about the Kingdom of God. But some of Jesus' teaching about the Kingdom of God presupposes a context of the rejection of his message by the majority of Jews and especially the Jewish authorities. In this new context, Jesus teaches that the Kingdom will still come but not in the way first delineated, in the non-rejection context. This can be called the rejection context of Jesus' teaching about the Kingdom of God. No attempt should be made to assimilate all the data into one historical context. Distinguishing two contexts for Jesus' teaching about the Kingdom of God allows us to appreciate how Jesus modifies his teaching in the light of the rejection of the Kingdom. Without this differentiation of two historical contexts, it is impossible to make sense of Jesus' teaching about the Kingdom of God.

We live in a world full of challenges. The three graces can almost be seen as motors for Christian life in today's world, but the words faith, hope, and love have so many everyday uses that their technical, theological meanings are, for many, difficult to appreciate. Modern life also leaves many yearning for authenticity and meaning. Many religions have answered that need by calling to mind the image of a path. Always profound progressions, religious paths tend to be motivated either by practices (the act of walking the path) or focal points. Christianity has a focal point, an object, and it sees the three graces as distinctively content filled. The heart of this book is about helping people find the Christian path and their intellectual, emotional, and spiritual balance--an equilibrium that is sustained by a strong personal faith, an enduring hope for the future, and genuine love that will withstand the worst of times. It contributes to the category of Christian literature that provides a pattern for Christian living without surrendering the intellect to the more popular side of this genre.

Tucker S. Ferda examines the theory of the Galilean crisis: the notion that the historical Jesus himself had grappled with the failure of his mission to Israel. While this theory has been neglected since the 19th century, due to research moving to consider the response of the early church to the rejection of the gospel, Ferda now provides fresh insight on Jesus' own potential crisis of faith. Ferda begins by reconstructing the origin of the crisis theory, expanding upon histories of New Testament research and considering the contributions made before Hermann Samuel Reimarus. He shows how the crisis theory was shaped by earlier and so-called “pre-critical” gospel interpretation and examines how, despite the claims of modern scholarship, the logic of the crisis theory is still a part of current debate. Finally, Ferda argues that while the crisis theory is a failed hypothesis, its suggestions on early success and growing opposition in the ministry, as well as its claim that Jesus met and responded to disappointing cases of rejection, should be revisited. This book resurrects key historical aspects of the crisis theory for contemporary scholarship.

In the last decade or so, scholarship on the miracles of Jesus has shifted from reconstructions of the historical Jesus to the questions of why and to what end early Jesus-followers told stories about miracles. Myrick Shinall contends that Mark and Q contain two distinct ways of remembering Jesus’s miracles in relation to his proclamation of the kingdom of God. He compares three cases of Mark-Q overlaps which feature miracles: the Beelzebul controversy, the commissioning of the disciples, and the testing or “temptation” narratives, and finds that in Mark, the miracles and the kingdom of God both point to Jesus’ identity as a divine figure, whereas in Q, Jesus and the miracles point instead to the coming kingdom of God. Shinall further argues that these different views represent different strategies for creating group identities for Jesus’ followers, strategies that came into conflict as the movement’s identity coalesced. At length, he shows that the mix of “high” and “low” Christology in the Synoptic tradition requires reframing of the current debate over how early a “high” Christology developed in the nascent Jesus movement.

In this historical study, Jonathon D. Beeke considers the various sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Reformed expressions regarding the duplex regnum Christi, or, as especially denominated in the Lutheran context, the “doctrine of the two kingdoms.”

The Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels is unique among reference books on the Bible, the first volume of its kind since James Hastings published his Dictionary of Christ and the Gospels in 1909. In the more than eight decades since Hastings, our understanding of Jesus, the Evangelists and their world has grown remarkably. New interpretive methods illumined the text, the ever-changing profile of modern culture has put new questions to the Gospels, and our understanding of the Judaism of Jesus's day has advanced in ways that could not have been predicted in Hastings's day. But for many readers of the Gospels the new outlook on the Gospels remains hidden within technical journals and academic monographs. The Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels bridges the gap between scholars and those pastors, teachers, students and lay people desiring in-depth treatment of select topics in an accessible and summary format. The topics range from cross-sectional themes (such as faith, law, Sabbath) to methods of interpretation (such as form criticism, redaction criticism, sociological approaches), from key events (such as the birth, temptation and death of Jesus) to each of the four Gospels as a whole. Some articles - such as the Dead Sea Scrolls, rabbinic traditions and revolutionary movements at the time of Jesus - provide significant background information to the Gospels. Others reflect recent and less familiar issues in Jesus and Gospel studies, such as divine man, ancient rhetoric and the chreiai. Contemporary concerns of general interest are discusses in articles covering such topics as healing, the demonic and the historical reliability of the Gospels. And for those entrusted with communicating the message of the Gospels, there is an extensive article on preaching from the Gospels. The Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels presents the fruit of evangelical New Testament scholarship at the end of the twentieth century - committed to the authority of Scripture, utilising the best of critical methods, and maintaining dialog with contemporary scholarship and challenges facing the church.

In recent years the theme of the kingdom of God has come to the forefront in the preaching, teaching, and popular writing of Christians of all theological persuasions. Any attempt to gain clarity on the biblical meaning of the phrase the "kingdom of God" must take the teaching of Jesus as its major point of reference; for the prominence of kingdom terminology today is directly attributable to the great frequency with which he appealed in his teaching to the notion of God's kingdom. In this little book, the author sets Jesus' proclamation of the kingdom of God against its Jewish background and discusses some of the characteristic emphases that appear in Jesus' message. He then identifies three broad ways in which God's kingdom operated in Jesus' ministry, which he suggests provide, at least in broad outline, an agenda for the Church today as it strives to bear witness to the "gospel of the kingdom" entrusted to it by its Lord.

A landmark work, Mark Saucy's The Kingdom of God in the Teaching of Jesus presents and critiques all significant scholarship done in the last 30 years in both New Testament and systematic theology studies on Jesus and the kingdom.