104 The Kingdom Is Too Jewish (Kingdom of God 13)

This is part three of a series of three lectures on why some Christians ended up rejecting the kingdom message in the first few centuries of Christianity.  In this part, I work through the major differences between how Jews and Greeks read scripture.  What we find is that the Christians who didn’t like the kingdom idea lumped in those who did believe in it with the unbelieving Jews who rejected Jesus as the Messiah.  In other words, kingdom advocates got labeled “Judaizers” for supporting biblical (literal) interpretations that the Jews were using to show that Jesus could not be the Messiah because he did not literally fulfill the kingdom prophecies.

This is lecture 13 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:

Christians Who Spoke Against the Kingdom as Too Jewish

Origen of Alexandria (3rd c.)

Now some men, who reject the labour of thinking and seek after the outward and literal meaning of the law…picture to themselves the earthly city of Jerusalem rebuilt with precious stones laid down for its foundations and its walls erected of jasper and its battlements adorned with crystal…Then, too, they suppose that ‘aliens’ are to be given them to minister to their pleasures, and that they will have these for ‘plowmen’ or ‘vinedressers’ or ‘wall-builders’…and they consider that they are to receive the ‘wealth of nations’ to live on and that they will have control over their riches, so that even camels of Midian and Ephah will come and bring ‘gold, incense and precious stones’.  All this they try to prove on prophetic authority from those passages of scripture which describe the promises made to Jerusalem…and they quote from the scriptures many other illustrations, the force of which they do not perceive must be figurative and spiritual. Then, too, after the fashion of what happens in this life, and of this world’s positions of dignity or rank or supreme power, they consider that they will be kings and princes…And, to speak briefly, they desire that all things which they look for in the promises should correspond in every detail with the course of this life, that is, that what exists now should exist again. Such are the thoughts of men who believe indeed in Christ, but because they understand the divine scriptures in a Judaistic sense, extract from them nothing that is worthy of the divine promises.  (De Principiis 2.11.2)

Eusebius of Caesarea (4th c.)

In addition to all these letters, he [Dionysius of Alexandria] composed two treastises, On Promises, occasioned by Nepos, a bishop of Egypt, who taught that the promises made to the saints in the divine Scriptures should be interpreted in a more Jewish fashion and that there would be a sort of millennium of bodily indulgence on this earth.  (Ecclesiastical History 7.24)

Like the Jewish people who read the Scriptures literally, one could assume that it is the land of Palestine. But according to the deeper meaning, according to the final word, the high and heavenly and angelic word of God and the divine apostle of the “heavenly” Zion teaches that it is “the Jerusalem above, which is the mother of us all.” (Commentary on Isaiah 2.1-4)

And though the lion is carnivorous by nature, he shall be nourished with husks as a herbivorous animal. So too there are savage and coarse people who understand only the literal interpretation of the graces of the divine Scripture. The divine Scripture is the nourishing word of souls, but its secrets escape the notice of our minds, for the meaning is surrounded by a husk.  (C