102 The Kingdom Is Too Crude (Kingdom of God 11)

Now that you’ve seen the historical defenders of the kingdom faith, it’s time to turn our attention to those who fought against it.  Over the next three lectures you’ll learn the main reasons why Christianity rejected the kingdom message of the bible and replaced it with going to heaven or hell at death.  First up, we’ll take a tour of how the ancients thought about creation and the universe, giving special attention to how Plato and Philo influenced Christian thinking.

This is lecture 11 of the Kingdom of God class, originally taught at the Atlanta Bible College.  To take this class for credit, please contact ABC so you can do the work necessary for a grade.

Notes:

Kingdom Called Crude

Dionysius of Alexandria (d. 265)

“But since they bring forward a certain work of Nepos, on which they especially rely as irrefutably proving that the kingdom of Christ will be on earth…we should…examine and correct whatever appears to be unsoundly composed…But when a book is published which seems most convincing to some and do[es] not allow our simpler brethren to have high and noble thoughts, either regarding the glorious and truly divine coming of our Lord or our resurrection from the dead or our gathering together unto Him and being like to Him, but persuade them to hope for the small and mortal and such as are of the present in the Kingdom of God…then it is necessary that we, too, argue with our brother Nepos as if he were present.”  (Eusebius, History of the Church 7.24)

Origen of Alexandria (d. 253)

“Because of this it happens that certain of the simpler Christians, since they do not know how to distinguish and to keep separate what in the divine Scriptures must be allotted to the inner man and what to the outer man, misled by the similarities in the designations, have turned themselves to certain foolish stories and vain fictions, so that even after resurrection they believe that corporeal foods must be used and drink taken not only from that true Vine which lives forever, but also from vines and fruits of wood.” (Comm. of the Song of Songs, Prologue)

Eusebius of Caesarea (d. 339)

“Among these he [Papias] says that there will be a period of about a thousand years after the resurrection of the dead, when the kingdom of Christ will be established on this earth in material form. I suppose that he got these ideas through a perverse reading of the accounts of the Apostles, not realizing that these were expressed by them mystically in figures. For he appears to be a man of very little intelligence, to speak judging from his books, but he was responsible for the great number of Church writers after him holding the same opinion as himself, who proposed in their support the antiquity of the man, as, for instance, Irenaeus and whoever else appeared to hold similar views.” (Church History 3.39)

Augustine of Hippo (d. 430)

“The same Evangelist John has spoken of these two resurrection in his book which is called the Apocalypse, but in such a way that some of us have not understood the first of the two, and thereby have turned it into some ridiculous fancies….Those who, because of this passage in this book, have suspected that the first resurrection is future and bodily…This opinion would be somewhat tolerable, if the delights of that Sabbath to be enjoyed by the saints were, through the presence of the Lord, of a spiritual kind. For we too were at one time of this opinion.” (City of God 20.7.1)

“If we were to tell those pagan philosophers that our bodies are going to be victorious on a new earth and not in heaven, we would be speaking boldly and rashly, yes, even against the faith. For we ought to believe