Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

THE MISSION OF JESUS §12.3
If there is something of historical as well as contemporary hermeneutical
value here, we should be open to the possibility that Jesus' kingdom talk had a
metaphorical character. That is, in speaking of the kingdom of God as he did he
may have been 'turning' it from its conventional sense; God's kingship is not to
be understood in the terms which 'kingship' normally evoked. Or again, it may
have been ' reality [-]depicting without pretending to be directly descriptive', depicting
that which could not be depicted otherwise. This is not quite the same as
Perrin's understanding of the kingdom as a 'tensive symbol', one whose set of
meanings can be neither exhausted nor adequately expressed by any one referent.
But the point is similar, for the historian asking how the term would have been
understood by Jesus' hearers as much as for the modern interpreter. If there is
something in this, then we should beware of evaluating Jesus' kingdom talk by
the extent to which it can be translated into something more literal. And fulfilment
of esehatological hope is presumably not to be measured by the degree of
correlation between language and event, even when a closer correspondence is in
the event claimed. The suggestion here is that the language of vision (apocalypse)
is not to be pressed for a literal cash value, that the correlation between
such language and actual (literal) events is of less consequence than has usually
been assumed, and that hope expressed in such language might well find satisfaction
(fulfilment) in events quite different from those depicted.
Here again the vicissitudes of Christian hope may provide a helpful parallel.
Christian hope is typically composed of images, principally drawn from the
Apocalypse of John (Revelation), which include an immense walled city built of
precious stones, a river and tree of life, and 'the marriage supper of the Lamb'.
To take such symbolism literally is to misinterpret it. The metaphorical images
are an attempt to indicate what cannot be described in literal terms. But for centuries
Christians have been content to hope for heaven, without any real idea of
what 'heaven' is and what 'actually' happens 'there', though some have indeed
wanted to press the metaphors for some literal content. The question is whether it
was any different for Second Temple Jewish expectation and hope.
d. How Then to Proceed?
It would be a mistake to think of these three key questions (§ 12.3a-c) as somehow
secondary to the task of understanding the impact made by Jesus' kingdom
preaching, as though we could first expound the kingdom texts and then go on to
ask what his preaching evoked in the minds of his hearers. On the contrary, these
questions go to the heart of the hermeneutical problem of perceiving how these
texts were heard in the first century and of how we rehear that hearing today. So
the typical way of tackling the problem — by focusing on one or two crucial
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