Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

§12.2 The Kingdom of God
At the beginning of the third quarter of the twentieth century, as harbinger
of a forthright postmodern hermeneutic, Norman Perrin asked whether the term
was not a good deal more flexible still. Scholars have been mistaken in regarding
the kingdom of God as a conception, whereas it should rather be understood
as a symbol intended to evoke the myth of God acting as king. To elucidate his
point Perrin drew on a distinction proposed by Philip Wheelwright between a
'steno-symbol', a symbol with a one-to-one relationship to what it represents,
and a 'tensive symbol', whose set of meanings can be neither exhausted nor adequately
expressed by any one referent. 32 His conclusion was that 'Jesus used
Kingdom of God as a tensive symbol, and that the literary forms and language
he used were such as to mediate the reality evoked by that symbol'. 33 The potential
of Perrin's observation has been most fully exploited by those who see
the myth or story evoked by Jesus' kingdom talk in more specific terms as the
restoration of Israel (Meyer, Sanders), 34 the 'metanarrative' of the return of Israel
from exile and God's return to Zion (Wright). 35 Or should the reality
evoked by the symbol be seen rather in terms of a radical prophetic protest
against the social inequalities and oppression within first-century Palestine
(Horsley) 36 or as a proclamation of radical egalitarianism, a 'brokerless kingdom',
on behalf of Mediterranean peasantry as a whole (Crossan)? 37 Or should
people' (Theology 1.69). Such observations also call in question Riches's attempt to distinguish
the term's 'core-meaning' from its 'conventional associations' (Jesus 18-19, 21-22, 42).
32. N. Perrin, Jesus and the Language of the Kingdom: Symbol and Metaphor in New
Testament Interpretation (Philadelphia: Fortress/London: SCM, 1976) 5-6, 22-23, 29-32.
33. Perrin, Language 56.
34. Meyer, Aims of Jesus 125, 132-34 (index, 'Restoration'); Sanders, Jesus Part One (conclusion
116-19); also 'Jesus and the Kingdom: The Restoration of Israel and the New People of
God', in E. P. Sanders, ed., Jesus, the Gospels and the Church, W. R. Farmer FS (Macon: Mercer
University, 1987) 225-39. Sanders criticises the tendency to reduce the conceptual content of the
phrase and to regard it as totally enigmatic: 'we know perfectly well what he meant in general
terms: the ruling power of God' (Jesus 125-29, here 127; the criticism is directed against
J. Breech, The Silence of Jesus: The Authentic Voice of the Historical Man [Philadelphia: Fortress,
1983], and B. B. Scott, Jesus, Symbol-Maker for the Kingdom [Philadelphia: Fortress, 1983]).
35. 'Exile and restoration: this is the central drama that Israel believed herself to be acting
out' (Jesus 127); 'Jesus is reconstituting Israel around himself. This is the return from exile;
this, in other words, is the kingdom of Israel's God' (131); Jesus' announcement of the reign of
God 'cannot but have been heard as the announcement that the exile was at last drawing to a
close, that Israel was about to be vindicated against her enemies, that her god was returning at
last to deal with evil. . . "the reign of God" ... spoke of covenant renewed, of creation restored,
of Israel liberated, of YHWH returning' (172); see also 202-209, 227. Wright is followed by
McKnight, New Vision, e.g., 70, though he also affirms that 'for Jesus the term "kingdom" was
intentionally polyvalent' (80).
36. See above §4.6b.
37. Crossan, Historical Jesus 421-22.
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