The Kingdom of Heaven

170:5.1Hav­ing sum­ma­rized the teach­ings of Je­sus about the king­dom of heaven, we are per­mit­ted to nar­rate cer­tain later ideas which be­came at­tached to the con­cept of the king­dom and to en­gage in a pro­phetic fore­cast of the king­dom as it may evolve in the age to come.

170:5.2Through­out the first cen­turies of the Chris­tian pro­pa­ganda, the idea of the king­dom of heaven was tremen­dously in­flu­enced by the then rapidly spread­ing no­tions of Greek ide­al­ism, the idea of the nat­u­ral as the shadow of the spir­i­tual—the tem­po­ral as the time shadow of the eter­nal.

170:5.3But the great step which marked the trans­plan­ta­tion of the teach­ings of Je­sus from a Jew­ish to a gen­tile soil was taken when the Mes­siah of the king­dom be­came the Re­deemer of the church, a re­li­gious and so­cial or­ga­ni­za­tion grow­ing out of the ac­tiv­i­ties of Paul and his suc­ces­sors and based on the teach­ings of Je­sus as they were sup­ple­mented by the ideas of Philo and the Per­sian doc­trines of good and evil.

170:5.4The ideas and ide­als of Je­sus, em­bod­ied in the teach­ing of the gospel of the king­dom, nearly failed of re­al­iza­tion as his fol­low­ers pro­gres­sively dis­torted his pro­nounce­ments. The Mas­ter’s con­cept of the king­dom was no­tably mod­i­fied by two great ten­den­cies:

170:5.51. The Jew­ish be­liev­ers per­sisted in re­gard­ing him as the Mes­siah. They be­lieved that Je­sus would very soon re­turn ac­tu­ally to es­tab­lish the world-wide and more or less ma­te­rial king­dom.

170:5.62. The gen­tile Chris­tians be­gan very early to ac­cept the doc­trines of Paul, which led in­creas­ingly to the gen­eral be­lief that Je­sus was the Re­deemer of the chil­dren of the church, the new and in­sti­tu­tional suc­ces­sor of the ear­lier con­cept of the purely spir­i­tual broth­er­hood of the king­dom.

170:5.7The church, as a so­cial out­growth of the king­dom, would have been wholly nat­u­ral and even de­sir­able. The evil of the church was not its ex­is­tence, but rather that it al­most com­pletely sup­planted the Je­sus con­cept of the king­dom. Paul’s in­sti­tu­tion­al­ized church be­came a vir­tual sub­sti­tute for the king­dom of heaven which Je­sus had pro­claimed.

170:5.8But doubt not, this same king­dom of heaven which the Mas­ter taught ex­ists within the heart of the be­liever, will yet be pro­claimed to this Chris­tian church, even as to all other re­li­gions, races, and na­tions on earth—even to ev­ery in­di­vid­ual.

170:5.9The king­dom of Je­sus’ teach­ing, the spir­i­tual ideal of in­di­vid­ual righ­teous­ness and the con­cept of man’s di­vine fel­low­ship with God, be­came grad­u­ally sub­merged into the mys­tic con­cep­tion of the per­son of Je­sus as the Re­deemer-Cre­ator and spir­i­tual head of a so­cial­ized re­li­gious com­mu­nity. In this way a for­mal and in­sti­tu­tional church be­came the sub­sti­tute for the in­di­vid­u­ally spirit-led broth­er­hood of the king­dom.

170:5.10The church was an in­ev­i­ta­ble and use­ful so­cial re­sult of Je­sus’ life and teach­ings; the tragedy con­sisted in the fact that this so­cial re­ac­tion to the teach­ings of the king­dom so fully dis­placed the spir­i­tual con­cept of the real king­dom as Je­sus taught and lived it.

170:5.11The king­dom, to the Jews, was the Is­raelite com­mu­nity; to the gen­tiles it be­came the Chris­tian church. To Je­sus the king­dom was the sum of those in­di­vid­u­als who had con­fessed their faith in the fa­ther­hood of God, thereby declar­ing their whole­hearted ded­i­ca­tion to the do­ing of the will of God, thus be­com­ing mem­bers of the spir­i­tual broth­er­hood of man.

170:5.12The Mas­ter fully re­al­ized that cer­tain so­cial re­sults would ap­pear in the world as a con­se­quence of the spread of the gospel of the king­dom; but he in­tended that all such de­sir­able so­cial man­i­fes­ta­tions should ap­pear as un­con­scious and in­ev­i­ta­ble out­growths, or nat­u­ral fruits, of this in­ner per­sonal ex­pe­ri­ence of in­di­vid­ual be­liev­ers, this purely spir­i­tual fel­low­ship and com­mu­nion with the di­vine spirit which in­dwells and ac­ti­vates all such be­liev­ers.

170:5.13Je­sus fore­saw that a so­cial or­ga­ni­za­tion, or church, would fol­low the prog­ress of the true spir­i­tual king­dom, and that is why he never op­posed the apos­tles’ prac­tic­ing the rite of John’s bap­tism. He taught that the truth-lov­ing soul, the one who hungers and thirsts for righ­teous­ness, for God, is ad­mit­ted by faith to the spir­i­tual king­dom; at the same time the apos­tles taught that such a be­liever is ad­mit­ted to the so­cial or­ga­ni­za­tion of dis­ci­ples by the out­ward rite of bap­tism.

170:5.14When Je­sus’ im­me­di­ate fol­low­ers rec­og­nized their par­tial fail­ure to re­al­ize his ideal of the es­tab­lish­ment of the king­dom in the hearts of men by the spirit’s dom­i­na­tion and guid­ance of the in­di­vid­ual be­liever, they set about to save his teach­ing from be­ing wholly lost by sub­sti­tut­ing for the Mas­ter’s ideal of the king­dom the grad­ual cre­ation of a vis­i­ble so­cial or­ga­ni­za­tion, the Chris­tian church. And when they had ac­com­plished this pro­gram of sub­sti­tu­tion, in or­der to main­tain con­sis­tency and to pro­vide for the rec­og­ni­tion of the Mas­ter’s teach­ing re­gard­ing the fact of the king­dom, they pro­ceeded to set the king­dom off into the fu­ture. The church, just as soon as it was well es­tab­lished, be­gan to teach that the king­dom was in re­al­ity to ap­pear at the cul­mi­na­tion of the Chris­tian age, at the sec­ond com­ing of Christ.

170:5.15In this man­ner the king­dom be­came the con­cept of an age, the idea of a fu­ture vis­i­ta­tion, and the ideal of the fi­nal re­demp­tion of the saints of the Most High. The early Chris­tians (and all too many of the later ones) gen­er­ally lost sight of the Fa­ther-and-son idea em­bod­ied in Je­sus’ teach­ing of the king­dom, while they sub­sti­tuted there­for the well-or­ga­nized so­cial fel­low­ship of the church. The church thus be­came in the main a so­cial broth­er­hood which ef­fec­tively dis­placed Je­sus’ con­cept and ideal of a spir­i­tual broth­er­hood.

170:5.16Je­sus’ ideal con­cept largely failed, but upon the foun­da­tion of the Mas­ter’s per­sonal life and teach­ings, sup­ple­mented by the Greek and Per­sian con­cepts of eter­nal life and aug­mented by Philo’s doc­trine of the tem­po­ral con­trasted with the spir­i­tual, Paul went forth to build up one of the most pro­gres­sive hu­man so­ci­eties which has ever ex­isted on Uran­tia.

170:5.17The con­cept of Je­sus is still alive in the ad­vanced re­li­gions of the world. Paul’s Chris­tian church is the so­cial­ized and hu­man­ized shadow of what Je­sus in­tended the king­dom of heaven to be—and what it most cer­tainly will yet be­come. Paul and his suc­ces­sors partly trans­ferred the is­sues of eter­nal life from the in­di­vid­ual to the church. Christ thus be­came the head of the church rather than the el­der brother of each in­di­vid­ual be­liever in the Fa­ther’s fam­ily of the king­dom. Paul and his con­tem­po­raries ap­plied all of Je­sus’ spir­i­tual im­pli­ca­tions re­gard­ing him­self and the in­di­vid­ual be­liever to the church as a group of be­liev­ers; and in do­ing this, they struck a death­blow to Je­sus’ con­cept of the di­vine king­dom in the heart of the in­di­vid­ual be­liever.

170:5.18And so, for cen­turies, the Chris­tian church has la­bored un­der great em­bar­rass­ment be­cause it dared to lay claim to those mys­te­ri­ous pow­ers and priv­i­leges of the king­dom, pow­ers and priv­i­leges which can be ex­er­cised and ex­pe­ri­enced only be­tween Je­sus and his spir­i­tual be­liever broth­ers. And thus it be­comes ap­par­ent that mem­ber­ship in the church does not nec­es­sar­ily mean fel­low­ship in the king­dom; one is spir­i­tual, the other mainly so­cial.

170:5.19Sooner or later an­other and greater John the Bap­tist is due to arise pro­claim­ing “the king­dom of God is at hand”—mean­ing a re­turn to the high spir­i­tual con­cept of Je­sus, who pro­claimed that the king­dom is the will of his heav­enly Fa­ther dom­i­nant and tran­scen­dent in the heart of the be­liever—and do­ing all this with­out in any way re­fer­ring ei­ther to the vis­i­ble church on earth or to the an­tic­i­pated sec­ond com­ing of Christ. There must come a re­vival of the ac­tual teach­ings of Je­sus, such a re­state­ment as will undo the work of his early fol­low­ers who went about to cre­ate a so­cio­philo­soph­i­cal sys­tem of be­lief re­gard­ing the fact of Mi­chael’s so­journ on earth. In a short time the teach­ing of this story about Je­sus nearly sup­planted the preach­ing of Je­sus’ gospel of the king­dom. In this way a his­tor­i­cal re­li­gion dis­placed that teach­ing in which Je­sus had blended man’s high­est moral ideas and spir­i­tual ide­als with man’s most sub­lime hope for the fu­ture—eter­nal life. And that was the gospel of the king­dom.

170:5.20It is just be­cause the gospel of Je­sus was so many-sided that within a few cen­turies stu­dents of the rec­ords of his teach­ings be­came di­vided up into so many cults and sects. This piti­ful sub­di­vi­sion of Chris­tian be­liev­ers re­sults from fail­ure to dis­cern in the Mas­ter’s man­i­fold teach­ings the di­vine one­ness of his match­less life. But some­day the true be­liev­ers in Je­sus will not be thus spir­i­tu­ally di­vided in their at­ti­tude be­fore un­be­liev­ers. Al­ways we may have di­ver­sity of in­tel­lec­tual com­pre­hen­sion and in­ter­pre­ta­tion, even vary­ing de­grees of so­cial­iza­tion, but lack of spir­i­tual broth­er­hood is both in­ex­cus­able and rep­re­hen­si­ble.

170:5.21Mis­take not! there is in the teach­ings of Je­sus an eter­nal na­ture which will not per­mit them for­ever to re­main un­fruit­ful in the hearts of think­ing men. The king­dom as Je­sus con­ceived it has to a large ex­tent failed on earth; for the time be­ing, an out­ward church has taken its place; but you should com­pre­hend that this church is only the lar­val stage of the thwarted spir­i­tual king­dom, which will carry it through this ma­te­rial age and over into a more spir­i­tual dis­pen­sa­tion where the Mas­ter’s teach­ings may en­joy a fuller op­por­tu­nity for de­vel­op­ment. Thus does the so-called Chris­tian church be­come the co­coon in which the king­dom of Je­sus’ con­cept now slum­bers. The king­dom of the di­vine broth­er­hood is still alive and will even­tu­ally and cer­tainly come forth from this long sub­mer­gence, just as surely as the but­ter­fly even­tu­ally emerges as the beau­ti­ful un­fold­ing of its less at­trac­tive crea­ture of meta­mor­phic de­vel­op­ment.