Jesus of Nazareth: What He Wanted, Who He Was

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But there is no point in pursuing the structure preceding the saying too intensively here. In Luke’s sense of things the Pharisees are apparently asking for signs (portents) of the reign of God, as the disciples in Mark 13:4 ask about signs foretelling the end of the world. Jesus answers that there are no such (visible) signs ahead of time. Why? Simply because the reign of God is already present. Because it already exists there is no point in looking for it “here” or “there” (cf. Mark 13:21).

Of course, the crucial question is how the reign of God is present. The precise meaning of Luke’s Greek phrase in 17:21, entos hymn, is disputed. It could mean “with you” or “between you” or (in view of the textual context) “among you,” “in your midst.” But it can also mean “within your sphere of influence,” “within your power,” “available to you,” “at your disposal.” These latter meanings of entos are found, at any rate, in several passages of the Greek classics, but particularly in a number of ancient papyri.¹⁸ This has a superb application here. Besides, elsewhere Luke always writes “in the midst of” or “among” as en meso. But however we decide this, the point is that Luke wants to say that the reign of God is already here. It has already come. That is why searching for portents is pointless.

But Martin Luther—and this is what makes Luke 17:21 so explosive—translated entos hymn as “The reign of God is within you.” That is also a possible meaning of the words. In that case the text would say: “From outside there is nothing to be seen. But within, in the soul, in human hearts, the reign of God is already present.”

As I have said: that is a possible translation of the Greek. But it fits badly in the context, because then the passage would say that the Pharisees already have the reign of God within them. Above all, that kind of invisibility and internal character in no way matches the manner in which Jesus speaks about the reign of God elsewhere. The realm of which he speaks is precisely not a purely internal, altogether spiritual sphere that is hidden and inaccessible, for “the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them” (Matt 11:5). All that is happening before everyone’s eyes. The reign of God is breaking forth in the midst of the world and not only within people. Every dimension of reality is to be placed within the realm of God: soul and body, health and sickness, wealth and poverty, adults and children, family and society. That makes Luther’s translation altogether improbable. It neither matches the close context of the text nor fits in the broader context of Jesus’ message and practice. For that reason Luther’s translation is generally rejected today.

But it created, or at least accelerated, a fateful and continuing impact. Harnack and many others used this translation as support for assigning the reign of God to the invisible realm of the soul. This apparently solved a whole list of problems, almost as if incidentally. For example, there was the so-called imminent expectation of the end of things. If the place for the reign of God is only in the soul it can certainly be present already. The reign of God within the soul is not disturbing to anybody and can be asserted at any time. The problem of “the reign of God and society” was also resolved. If the reign of God is only within, a clean and simple separation can be made between external conditions and the hidden realm.

In reality, of course, the separation cannot be maintained. It is not only individuals and their inner lives that need redeeming but also the situations within which they live—for example, the lack of freedom, the structures of injustice, and the mechanisms of manipulation that have eaten their way into society.

Jesus was not just concerned with souls. He wanted a changed society. That is precisely why he begins the new thing within a community of disciples whom he orders to quit acting as if they are superior, to forgive one another seventy-seven times a day, and to turn the other cheek when someone strikes them.

Even Origen

Of course, it was not Adolf von Harnack who first located the reign of God “within.” We have seen that Martin Luther had already understood it as an “inner kingdom.” But Luther was not the first to interpret the text in that way either. Throughout the history of theology, but especially in the history of mysticism, we find a long line of related interpretations that go back as far as Origen, the great theologian of Alexandria (185–ca. 255). Origen wrote a work “On Prayer” in about the year 233, and within it he gives an interpretation of the Our Father. Speaking of the third petition, he says:

[Whoever] prays for the coming of the kingdom of God prays with good reason for rising and fruit bearing and perfecting of God’s kingdom within him.… The Father is present with him, and Christ rules together with the Father in the perfected Soul, according to the saying… We will come unto him and make abode with him. By God’s kingdom I understand the blessed condition of the mind and the settled order of wise reflection.

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For Origen, then, the “coming” of the reign is the “coming” of the Father and Son into the soul of the one who truly prays. They take up their dwelling in the inmost being of that person. That is a very beautiful and also an altogether biblical thought (cf. John 14:23). But does it really cover what Jesus meant by the coming of the reign of God?

Purely Religious?

We are seeking reasons why exegetes today find it so difficult to connect the reign of God and the people of God in any meaningful way. One of the most important reasons was treated at length because it played a central role in the epochal forgetfulness regarding the people of God in the last several centuries, namely, individualism or subjectivism. Adolf von Harnack was swimming with a powerful tide here. But there were many other reasons for the absence of the idea of the people of God from discussions about the reign of God: these, for example:

1. In twentieth-century exegetical literature we repeatedly encounter, even among serious exegetes, the assertion that the reign of God announced by Jesus, and the salvation he promised, were “a purely religious matter.”²⁰ We can understand this formulation if we know what it was supposed to mean. Mainly it was a matter of distinguishing Jesus’ reign of God from Jewish expectations of the reestablishment of the nation and political action against the Roman occupying power. But more than that: the expression “purely religious” was meant to separate it from the expectation of a glorious messianic kingdom.

All these distinctions were justified. The question is only whether the label “purely religious” did not open the gates to new misunderstandings. What do we mean by “purely religious”? If the words are meant to exclude the world and society, they are meaningless and have nothing to do with the Bible.

2. A further reason why today’s exegesis has such a hard time considering the reign of God and the people of God together is that in the twentieth century people no longer spoke only of the “purely religious” character of the reign of God; they also said that it is “supernatural,” “otherworldly,” a “simply unworldly thing.” That, at any rate, is how Rudolf Bultmann formulated it in his book on Jesus that appeared in 1926:

[The reign of God] is not a good toward which the will and action of men is directed, not an ideal which is in any sense realized through human conduct, which in any sense requires