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Library of the
H?ale Divinity Scbool

The Books of
Ifrank Cbamberlain porter
Winkley Professor of
Biblical Theology

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THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS

JH&ftfe-

THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF
JESUS
An Essay in Christian Sociology

BY

SHAILER MATHEWS, A.M.
PROFESSOR OF NEW TESTAMENT HISTORY AND INTERPRETATION
IN THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

Wefa gorfe
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd.
1897

FXI9

Copyright, 1897,
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

Nortoooti i^reBB
J. S. dishing & Co. — Berwick & Smith
Norwood Muse. U.S.A.

o  ,

cv
>'

r: CONTENTS

CHAPTER I
PAGE
Introduction  i

The term Christian Sociology — Obstacles in believing
that Jesus gave any social teachings — The one way
for gaining such teachings — Their sources — General
character of Jesus' social teaching.

I-

CHAPTER II

P-

Man . . . . . . . . 18
The general character of Christian anthropology — Man's
nature both physical and psychical — Social life a neces
sity — Fellowship with God — Human fellowship neces-

J

sary — Conclusion. CHAPTER III

Society ....  40
ir The Kingdom of God not political or subjective or escha-
tological — The real content of the term as used by
& Jesus, that of an ideal social order — " The Fatherhood
of God and the Brotherhood of Man" — Chief ele
ments in Jesus' conception of the Kingdom — Con-
 elusion. CHAPTER IV
The Family . .... -79
Marriage a primal fact in human life and not a creature
of law — Divorce — Exceptions to the general position
of Jesus — ¦ Woman — Children — Conclusion.

vi CONTENTS
CHAPTER V PAGE
The State  107
Christianity as a political teaching — The silence of Jesus
in regard to politics — Jesus not an anarchist — His
teachings not political. CHAPTER VI
Wealth . . ... 132
The interest of Jesus in economic life — His apparent
hostility to wealth — The underlying principle of his
economic teaching — Wealth and the Kingdom —
Jesus not a Socialist — Wealth a trust.
CHAPTER VII
Social Life ... .... 158
Jesus not an ascetic — His attitude towards convention
alities and friendships — His doctrine of equality — Ob
jections thereto — Conclusion.
CHAPTER VIII
The Forces of Human Progress . 175
The forces upon which Jesus did not count — His recog
nition of wants as motives — The dynamics of divine
sonship — The love of brothers — The love of those
not brothers and the doctrine of non-resistance —
Conclusion. CHAPTER IX
The Process of Social Regeneration . . . .198
The kingdom to become universal — The transformation
of society in general — The process primarily individual
and not institutional — The means to be employed —
The completion of the new social order.

INDEX OF TEXTS

231

NOTE
The following chapters appeared originally as a series of
essays in the American Journal of Sociology. They have,
however, been to a considerable extent rewritten, and are
published in their present form with the consent of the editor
of that journal.

THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS

CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
The term Christian Sociology may be used both
incorrectly and unfortunately. The names of many
sciences are used in two ways : they may indicate
the method by which results are obtained, and
they may indicate the formulation of such results.
Thus history may be a method science or it may
be a descriptive science. In the former case it
would be absurd to unite with it any word having
a moral content. , A method of investigation may
be ill or well fitted to produce the best results, but
ethically it can be neither good nor bad. The
same is perhaps even clearer of such objective
sciences as chemistry and geology. To speak of
a Christian method of sociological investigation is
quite as impossible. The process of investigating
social forces and results, the discovery of the true
nature of society, can no more have an ethical —

2 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
still less religious — character than the study of
a crystal or a chemical compound.
In the other sense in which the name of a
science is used such criticism is less appropriate.
The moment an investigator attempts to formu
late his results in propositions, that moment he
injects into them his own predilections. While
the method of investigation may be morally neu
tral, the statement and the application of its re
sults may be largely tinged with ethics. This
is less obvious in the case of physical sciences,
but admittedly true of the social. Thus in a
true sense there may be a Christian view of
history, and, so to speak, a Christian science of
history. This is even more evident in the case
of philosophy. In the sense, therefore, of the
formulation and application of results derived by
Christian students, a sociology may be said to be
Christian. It is, however, not altogether clear that such
a terminology though permissible is advisable.
Historically, at any rate, the term is at a dis
advantage. The champions of some so-called
Christian sociology are dangerously open to criti
cism similar to that which Voltaire passed upon
the Holy Roman Empire — it is neither scientific
nor Christian. It certainly is desirable that an

INTRODUCTION 3
end should come to such pious christening of
scientific progeny of at best very questionable
parentage. With a recognition of its analogy
with other scientific terminology, if the term is to
be used, we bespeak for it a more definite and
positive definition.
This desired definition is to be found in the
use of the word Christian in a sense parallel
with such adjectives as Hegelian, Aristotelian,
Baconian. Just as the philosophies bearing these
names are respectively the gifts of Hegel and
Aristotle and Bacon, so Christian sociology should
mean the sociology of Christ ; that is, the social
philosophy and teachings of the historical per
son Jesus the Christ. In this positive sense
the term is both legitimate and capable of an
at least tentatively scientific content.
I
It may be objected that no such philosophy
and teachings exist — that Jesus was a teacher
of religion and morals and that beyond the realm
of these subjects his words are as few as those
concerning biology or historical criticism. Such
a view, however, is not easily tenable. While
it is evident that Jesus has given us no system
atized social teachings, he certainly was no more a

4 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
systematic theologian than he was a sociologist.
And, a priori, it would be a singular phenome
non if Christian teaching which has everywhere
effected remarkable social changes should itself be
possessed of no sociological content. It is not
altogether a reply to say that good men must
necessarily produce social improvements. Good
Brahmans in India have not greatly elevated
women, and good Greeks in Athens supported
slavery. Advance in civilization has not been
accomplished by simply producing individuals of
high religious and moral character. Since the
days when the law went forth forbidding the
branding of criminals, Christian impulses have
been quite as much social as individual, and the
yeast of the Kingdom quite as much political as
personal. Is it altogether impossible that He
whose followers have rebuilt empires and founded
new civilizations should have been quite unsus
picious of the social and political forces that lay
within his words ?
It is difficult to appreciate such a possibility for
two reasons. The first lies in the individualistic
philosophy which, since the Reformation, has
largely dominated the theological and exegetical
study of the New Testament. The chief aim of
theology has been the discovery of an explanation

INTRODUCTION 5
of the "salvation" of each individual believer.
A new man and not a new society has been the
objective point of most preaching. If sometimes
the theologian has been forced into a belief in the
solidarity of the race, it has really been that he
might have a major premise on which to base his
restricted conclusion as to the fate of the individ
ual. Such a point of view was inevitable. No
man can escape the Zeitgeist. But in thus rightly
insisting upon the need of saving faith on the part
of every man, our religious teachers have to a con
siderable degree overlooked the essential socia
bility of human nature, and unconsciously have
developed exegetical presumptions that have
biassed interpretation. Scriptural teachings have
been applied to men as if they were insulated en
tities, and to society as if it were but an aggrega
tion of easily separated wholes.
The results of such presuppositions are no less
unfortunate than inevitable. They have affected
not merely the conception of the position of the
church in the world, but they have also narrowed
Christian truth to a field in which Jesus never
meant it to remain, and to which the early Chris
tians did not limit it. Perhaps to-day's thought is
swinging to the other extreme ; but at the worst,
modern conceptions of man and society are calcu-

6 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
lated to offset the unmodified individualism of the
past. Philosophy, it is true, should never dictate
interpretation, but what conscientious exegete
would dare claim absolute immunity from its influ
ence ? Whether for weal or woe, the underlying
premises of the social sciences that isolation is
abnormality and that society is itself an object of
study, promise some day to prove as revolutionary
in biblical interpretation as was the new concep
tion of the worth of the individual in the sixteenth
century. The results of the past may thus be
supplemented by those of the present. The
future of a man is known ; the future of mankind
is now to be discovered. And this discovery will
in no small way spring from a new appreciation
of the teachings of Jesus.
A second obstacle in the way of formulating the
social teachings of Jesus is the impatient and over-
zealous publication of certain doctrines that are
called Christian, but which are based, not upon
exegesis, but upon a philanthropy largely unre
strained in both its prejudices and its rhetoric.
Disregarding the mischievous tendency for every
good man to dub as " sociology " his hasty think
ing and hopes as to society; disregarding the
refreshing certainty enjoyed by many amateur
though earnest reformers that in the preparation

INTRODUCTION 7
of millenniums the accumulation of figures and sta
tistics is wholly superfluous ; disregarding the fact
that much so-called sociological teaching is noth
ing more than relabelled ethics ; granting that
sociologies are as easy to produce as political pan
aceas, the fact remains that as yet Christian sociol
ogy has been too much at the mercy of men who
have mistaken what they think Christ ought to
have taught for what lie really did teach. Noth
ing is easier for the brain fertile in generalities
and for the heart burning with sympathy and in
dignation than to evolve a system from a sentence
or a term. In this particular Christian sociology
is re-running the career of Christian theology. As
the dogmatic theologian has too often made a sys
tem of philosophy masquerade as a theology by
dressing it out with a series of more or less well-
fitting proof-texts, so too often modern prophets
to a degenerate church, in sublime indifference to'
the context, time of authorship, and purpose of a
New Testament book, and with an equal neglect
of the personal peculiarity and vocabulary of a
New Testament writer, have set forth as the word
of Christianity views which are but bescriptured
social denunciation and vision. If this be Chris
tian sociology, it is little wonder that the genuine,
albeit less inspired, student of social phenomena

8 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
and Christian teaching should view it with sus
picion and question the worth of an attempt to
discover any such phantasmagoria in the words
of the Teacher of Nazareth. II
There is but one way to the apprehension of
the teachings of Jesus, whether religious or social,
and that is the patient study of the gospels
with the aid of all modern critical and exegetical
methods. The only thoroughly safe method is
the inductive gathering of teachings from the
gospel sources, and their subsequent classifica
tion into a system. Here, as in all scientific
processes, the aim of the investigator must be
the discovery of what is, not the substantiation of
some notion as to what ought to be. It is even
unsafe, as a first step, to gather only such pas
sages as may serve as the basis of a particular
doctrine. The first question is not what sociology
did Jesus teach, but whether he taught anything
that may properly be called sociological. Classi
fication must logically, and generally chronologi
cally, succeed discovery and interpretation. Let
all the materials for a social teaching first be
gathered. Then, whether they be few or many,
let them be shaped into a system.

INTRODUCTION 9
Such a method is not peculiar to the study
of the New Testament. It is that by which one
must gain the system of any writer who has
himself not arranged his thoughts in a formal
order. To such a method the words of Jesus
are as the words of Plato. The greatest rever
ence that may be shown them is to treat them
as if they needed no exegetical odds, and are
not only intelligible and capable of enduring rigid
scrutiny, but the expressions of a mind that was
sane if not systematic.
But in such a method the words of Christ have
more than an archaeological or devotional import.
The student of occidental civilization who disre
gards His teachings is as unscientific as he who
in the history of philosophy should neglect Plato
and Kant, or in the history of the United States
of America should disregard the Constitution.
No man's teaching has equalled his in the mag
nitude of its social results, and there may be mes
sages in His words yet worth hearing. But on the
other hand, quotation is not exegesis, and rhetoric
is not classification. If Jesus is to figure among
sociologists, before he is cited as an authority let
Kim at least be understood. And if He is to be
debarred from the class of social teachers, let
it first be remembered that much which is put

IO THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
forth as his is no more from Him than the school
man's gloss was from Aristotle. Ill
The sources from which it is possible to draw
the social teachings of Jesus are primarily, though
not exclusively, His own words. At first glance,
therefore, no problem could seem easier than the
process of gaining such teachings. With most
theologians of the past, with many of to-day,
the ipsissima verba of the Master are an end of
all discussion. But even if we disregard the possi
ble changes incident to one or more processes
of translation, it is a prime necessity that the
interpreter remember that thought is superior
to word, and that a sentence wrenched from its
context may be quite as misleading as a similarly
detached word. The thought of Jesus is some
times so genuinely Oriental as to elude any
process of interpretation that is purely verbal.
His style is so concrete, and his similes so perfect,
that there is a constant temptation to forget that
a parable, after all, can enforce only an analogy,
and that the real teaching of its author lies not
in its form but in the analogy. Further than
this, Jesus seldom combined complementary or
mutually modifying thoughts. He was not a

INTRODUCTION 1 1
systematic lecturer, but a creator of impulses.
He sometimes puts forth a proposition so cate
gorically as to make it appear that it exhausts
His teachings upon the subject, and yet under
some other circumstances its modification is ex
pressed with equal absoluteness. The two super
ficially appear contradictory. In reality they are
the two hemispheres of the truth. To claim
either of them alone as his teaching is to do Jesus
injustice. His real teaching can be gained only
through their combination. For this reason, so
far as a systematized and complete statement is
concerned, outside of the magnificent summaries
into which Jesus has compressed the essentials
of religion and morals, no one can claim to have
mastered Christian teaching until he has mastered
its entirety. The failure to observe this simple
caution lies at the bottom of much of the heresy
and sectarianism of the centuries, and of no little
crude religious instruction to-day.
It is, therefore, above all necessary to study
the words of Jesus not only as detached maxims,
but as the scattered parts of a complete system
of which they are the outcroppings and in the
statement of which they may be harmonized. If
this central principle be first discovered, many
otherwise hard sayings will be seen to be sim-

12 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
ply striking forms in which it is applied to special
needs. At this point one naturally meets the question,
Are the teachings of Jesus commensurate with the
teachings of the entire New Testament ? In a
certain sense it is perhaps true that Christian doc
trine is thus commensurate. Waiving in this dis
cussion the question of the inspiration of the
apostolic writers, it is yet reasonable to hold that
in the teachings that emanated from the compan
ions of Jesus we have that which must be regarded
as expressive of the spirit and purpose of Christ.
Nevertheless, it would be contrary not only to the
most ordinary processes of historical study but
also to the testimony of Christian consciousness if
no distinction were made between the social teach
ings of the gospels and those of the epistles. In
the latter we have the application of the former
to the needs of the growing Christian societies of
the first century. In some cases these applica
tions are clearly adapted only to the peculiar
circumstances — the " present distress " — of those
early years. At all events, it is very apparent
that in the passage from the social teachings of
the four gospels to those of the other New Testa
ment writings, we are passing from a constitution
to statutory law, from principle to attempted reali-

INTRODUCTION 1 3
zation of principle, from philosophy to conduct.
For this reason, it is better to confine the search
for the data of Christian sociology, as it is defined
above, to the gospel narrative and its brief con
tinuation in the opening section of the Acts.
Yet even here the circle whence these data are
to come must be somewhat further restricted.
Wholly apart from the question as to the origin
and mutual relations of the four gospels, it is be
yond serious question that in their present form
the accounts they contain are the work of writers
who lived at least a generation after the death of
Jesus. The sources of each gospel can be shown
to date from the contemporaries of Jesus, and it is
possible that at least three of the accounts were
brought into their present literary form by these
contemporaries themselves. Yet however this
may be, the gospels now clearly contain two
elements : the teachings of Jesus, and the edito
rial material added to them by their writers.
This second element is considerable in the
Fourth Gospel, but by no means wanting in the
synoptics. It is of various sorts, but may be
mostly classified as introductions, transpositions,
explanations, reflections, prophetic antitypes, and
verbal changes. Many of these are self-evident
to the careful reader, and most are easily sepa-

14 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
rated from the teachings of Jesus by simple pro
cesses of criticism. Their value is considerable,
however, for the understanding of Jesus' own
positions, upon which they form a sort of com
mentary or scholium. In few cases will their
separation affect the force of the passage from
which they are taken, but it is evident that such a
separation might at times be of service in ap
preciating the teaching of Jesus himself.
One other form of editorial work is, however,
of the utmost value as a source of the social teach
ings of Jesus — the narrative of His life. In most
cases such narrative is demonstrably from eyewit
nesses and in its essential elements is beyond
suspicion. From such narrative data may be
drawn of equal importance with those contained
in the words of Jesus. His example and life,
quite as much as his spoken teachings, have
universally been accepted as a basis for Christian
doctrine, but nowhere are they of more importance
than in the sphere of His social teaching. No
student of the life of Jesus would venture to predi
cate inconsistency between his outward act and his
inward belief. It is impossible to think of him,
simply as an honest man, practising that which
he would forbid his followers. In certain cases,
it is true, he did accommodate himself to circum-

INTRODUCTION 1 5
stances and demands that He regarded as peculiar
and even unjust, but seldom without specific ex
planation or comment. Speaking generally, the
doings of Jesus, when once viewed in the light of
their attending circumstances, quite as much as
His words, are materials from which to construct
a systematized statement of his social teachings.
There is still another source of_ such teaching
which, though negative, is not to be disregarded
— the silence of Jesus on many points upon which
the age in which he lived was interested quite as
much as is our own. For example, such social
evils as slavery, gambling, prostitution, are unas-
sailed in the g'ospel narrative. So far as many
deeper social and political questions are concerned
Jesus was also silent. This fact is not only re
markable, it is significant of a distinct element in
what we venture to call His social philosophy.
Just what this element was does not concern us
here. It is enough to call attention to the fact
and to suggest that a vocalization of this silence,
be it with never so eloquent a philosophy or
never so ingenious play upon words and texts, is
to make exposition presuppose, if not dangerously
resemble, imposition.

l6 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
IV
If one adopts the conventional division of the
study of sociology — descriptive, static, and dy
namic — it at once becomes evident that little that
can be termed descriptive sociology is to be found
within the gospels. Jesus was not a student of
society in the technical use of the term. His
interest in publicans and sinners was not simply
scientific, and His work was not that of the investi
gator, but of the revealer and inspirer. It is
impossible to think of him as laboriously gathering
material for a treatise upon social phenomena — a
measurer of foreheads and a compiler of statistics.
Not only was the age in which he lived innocent
of any such scientific processes, but the whole
career of Jesus makes it evident that while no man
— not even Socrates — ever possessed a keener
perception of human nature alike in its strength
and weakness, his main effort was the presentation
of ideals and the gift of spiritual powers through
which they might be attained. For this reason
any systematized presentation of his teachings
must content itself with a very incomplete and
incidental presentation of his views of humanity
as it is, and devote itself almost exclusively to his
conceptions of what society may become, and the

INTRODUCTION \f
means and process through which its desired con
summation may be reached. If it should appear
that Jesus occasionally characterized life as he
found it, it will also be clear that such characteri
zation was but a part of this effort at portraying
an ideal society and the enforcing of effort for its
attainment.

CHAPTER II

MAN

While from many considerations it would be
advisable to begin the examination of Christ's
social philosophy with a study of the Kingdom
of God, it is at once obvious that logically the
doctrine of the individual precedes the doctrine of
society. With Jesus, as with all thinkers, the pos
sibilities of the component parts of a social whole
must limit the possibilities of that whole. With
him, " sociology as a whole rests primarily upon
psychology." 1 If in the thought of Jesus man is
not a social being, but rather is a repellent whole,
his conception of society must be radically differ
ent from that of an organism. If, on the other
hand, Jesus regards man as living not merely
within the insulated limits of his own individu
ality, but as essentially a social being, reaching
normality only in social life ; and if it should
further appear that Jesus further regards this
1 Ward, Psychic Factors of Civilization, p. 2.
18

MAN 19
social personality of a man as distinctively human
as is the egoistic, then it is evident that normal
humanity may in some way resemble an organic
whole, and its development the growth of an or
ganism. Within the limits of this conception of
what human beings are and can be, will be found
of necessity his conception of what they and
humanity should be. For if it would beget duty,
the ideal must be possible. I
It is at the outset necessary to set clear limits
to expectation in regard to the character of the
Christian anthropology. Incomplete data do not
warrant complete systems. Even in Plato a phys
iological psychologist finds little worthy of serious
consideration, and the psychologist proper is often
obliged to content himself with pregnant analo
gies when he seeks definitions.
Writers upon biblical psychology have for many
years debated as to whether the human life is
trichotomous or dichotomous. In favor of the tri-
chotomist view 1 it is urged that such expressions
as " may your spirit and soul and body be pre
served entire," 2 "piercing to the separation of soul
1 See especially Delitzsch, Biblical Psychology/.
* I Thess. 5 : 23.

20 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
and spirit," 1 affirm a threefold division of man's
nature. And it must be admitted that the settle
ment of the question is not altogether easy. The
difficulty lies quite as much in the variety of ex
pressions as in their indefiniteness. The older
Jewish Scriptures were written at such different
times and by such a variety of authors that, so
far from having a common, to say nothing of a
definite psychology, it is impossible to formulate
even those persistent presuppositions which might
be expected to underlie popular vocabularies.
The same difficulty lies to a considerable degree
in some of the writings of the New Testament
collection. But here the smaller number of writ
ers, as compared with that of the older literature,
makes the diversity of opinion less apparent, and
to a considerable degree makes the discovery of
definitions less difficult. Yet no one of these
authors was a trained student of experimental
science. Paul, the best educated of them all,
gives little evidence of any training beyond the
severely scholastic methods of the professional
schools at Jerusalem. It is true he has the
schoolman's accuracy in the use of terms, but he
suffers also from the schoolman's lack of scien-
1 Heb. 4: 12. To these passages might be added several from
the Old Testament, as well as Matt. 22 : 37 and parallels.

MAN 21
tific experiment. In a word, he is not a scientist
but a moralist.
If this last be true of Paul it is truer of Jesus.
He did, indeed, know what was in man, but his
was a knowledge like that of Socrates — a prac
tical and accurate intuition of human nature,
rather than the accumulated facts of the psy
chologist. He has left no attempt to reduce to
a system the various phenomena which the stu
dent is to-day taught to observe in consciousness.
To Him the soul was neither a specimen nor a
laboratory, but the supreme treasure of the man.
For this reason it is idle to search in his teach
ings for a detailed exposition of its powers.
Nevertheless, the terms of his thinking were not
without definition. It is a contradiction to sup
pose that one who thought so keenly thought at
the same time vaguely. If one makes due allow
ance for a colloquialism that was inevitable from
his method of teaching, it is at once apparent
that with Jesus, as with Socrates, words were
the representatives of things. For this reason it
is, that, although definitions are uncommon, Jesus'
terminology is consistent as well as concrete.
The rabbis like all scholastic nominalists might
haggle over words. Jesus took them as he found
them, and used them steadily as the implements

22 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
of real thought, able to make deep and con
sistent impressions without attempting formal
distinctions. Perhaps it is because of this consistency that
the difficulties mentioned above are far less evi
dent in the gospels than in the epistles. The
unity of their teaching is the unity of a domi
nating personality. Peter and James and Paul
and John and the other authors of letters, each
had his own more or less consistent psychologi
cal terminology, and in their combination these
terminologies are sometimes confusing. But in
the words of Jesus such confusion is wanting, for
the gospel writers do not allow themselves suffi
cient editorial license to affect the fundamental
conceptions of their Master.1
It is these fundamental conceptions that one
must seek if one would get the logical point of
departure for not merely the social but the reli-
1 It is, of course, here quite unnecessary to go into any complete
discussion of biblical psychology — even if there be any such. It
may, perhaps, be noted in passing that any method that attempts
to set forth scriptural teachings by a mere aggregation of texts is
always liable to the uncertainties and suspicions that will be found
to attend any unhistorical search after any developing truth. Be
sides, it is only too easy to erect a merely practical into an absolute
distinction. Cf. Broadus, Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew,
p. 366 n. See also Orr, The Christian View of God in the World,
p. 160 sa. and especially Laidlaw, Bible Doctrine of Man.

MAN 23
gious teachings of Jesus. It is not impossible that
in the search for them modern ideas may be
read into ancient words, but none the less is the
search to be made. And if it should appear
that beneath prayer and analogy, maxim and
exhortation, there should lie a common concep
tion of an ideal that is to be found among the
possibilities of every member of the race, and
of psychical capacities that make this ideal a pos
sibility, it would be nothing more than one would
expect of a thinker at once so artistic and pro
found as Jesus. II
With Jesus man is essentially body and soul, flesh
and spirit — an incarnate soul or life. But the two
elements are not of equal worth. As the body is
more than clothing, so is the soul more than the
body. The body is destructible, but the soul
may be saved, although it may also be (morally)
destroyed.1 Jesus does not, like many thinkers,
regard the body as necessarily evil. It is simply
subordinate. So long as the race is in this aeon,
the body is necessary. Upon it depend both the
perpetuation of the race through marriage,2 and,
also, death.3
This view of man was not altogether peculiar
1 Matt. 10:28. 2 Mark 10: 8; 12:25. 3 John 6: 51, 53.

24 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
to Jesus. The teaching of the Jewish schools
of his time illustrates and, doubtless, to some
extent explains his position. According to rab
binical authorities, mankind consisted of body 1
and soul, the former composed of dust, the other
descended from God.2 Further it was held that
the soul was preexistent3 and was the salt that
kept the body from corruption.4 The gospels
nowhere give foundations for the popular notion
that the soul is a lower, more physical life-
principle, and the spirit a higher, more divine
substance. Indeed, it would be quite as reason
able to quote the development of Jewish thought for
a precisely opposite view. Still less is there to
be found in the words of Jesus the remoter con
ception ' of the soul as a sort of connecting link
between the body and the spirit.
Just what the relationship is that exists between
the soul and the body Jesus does not describe.
If the words put into his mouth by Luke, " a
spirit hath not flesh and bones as ye see I
have," 5 were actually his, he apparently distin-
1 At first of double sex. The woman was taken from the man.
Weber, Lehren des Talmud, 203.
2 Gen. 2:7. 8 Weber, 204.
* See in addition the curious teaching in regard to the threefold
origin of a man quoted in Hershon, A Talmudic Miscellany, p. 67.
6 Luke 24 : 39.

MAN

25

guished between a ghost and a genuine human
personality. But these words introduce so many
difficulties, both critical and philosophical, that
it will hardly be advisable to rest much argument
upon them until they have been given a more
careful examination than is here desirable.
In general Jesus distinguished between only
physical and spiritual phenomena, and his lan
guage, though never technical, is yet sufficiently
definite to make it certain that he never held
to the trichotomy that possibly characterized the
cruder psychology of the early Hebrew script
ures. At all events, the one class of phenomena
did not spring from the other. That which is
born of the flesh is flesh. Only that born of the
spirit is spirit.1
It would certainly be inadmissible to consider
his reply to the lawyer, " Thou shalt love the
Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all
thy soul, and with all thy understanding,"2 as
anything more than a Hebrew cumulative em
phasis.3 So far was Jesus from being a trichot-
1 John 3 : 6.
2 Matt. 22 : 37. These words are variously reported by the other
evangelists. They are a quotation of Deut. 6:4 so., apparently
modified by popular Greek psychological expressions.
3 It is true, however, that there seems at times a shade of differ
ence between fvx^t (life, soul) and iri/eifui. (spirit). Thus in

26 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
omist as sometimes to seem to approach a sort
of psychological monism, in which the unity of
body and soul constitutes a single life.1 How
ever this may be, the significance of Paul's treat
ment of the resurrection of Jesus, the type of the
race, lies not least in the support it gives to the
belief that a man can never become a disembodied
spirit. His future immortality is to be clothed
in a new, though inexplicable body, or sensuous
nature.2 A belief in a union of the physical and
psychical lies also behind the account of the birth
of Jesus as it is contained in the infancy sections
of Matthew and Luke, and even more clearly in
Matt. 23 : 35, and Luke 6:9; 12 : 19, the soul is apparently physi
cal life, the sensuous nature, while " spirit " is generally used when
the thought is concerned with moral and religious matters, and
especially with the soul's divine origin. Yet it is also true that in
Matt. 10 : 28 the former of the words overlaps in meaning that of
the other, while in Matt. 27 : 50, Luke 8 : 55, the reverse is the
case. And these are by no means the only instances. See in
addition Wendt, Fleisch und Geist, p. 46.
1 Such is the implication of the destruction of the body in
Gehenna (Matt. 5 : 29, 30; 10:28). For even if due allowance
is made for the figurative language, the reference is clearly to
moral suffering. In Matt. 6 : 25 the Hebrew parallel arrangement
may not impossibly hint at a similar conception. Yet these and
similar passages imply nothing as to an identity of the physical and
psychical substances.
2 1 Cor. 15 : 23, 44 ; 2 Cor. 5 : 1-4. Compare the opinion of
Rabbi Judah the Holy, "God will reunite soul and body, and judge
them both as one together."

MAN 27
the noble conception of the writer of the Intro
duction to the Fourth Gospel, " the word became
flesh and tented among us." 1 In each of these
cases we have a very early formulation of the
philosophy of the incarnation, and one that may
very well be taken as representative of the teach
ings of Jesus himself.
It certainly, therefore, is not too much to say
that in the thought of Jesus, the individual man
is a unity, which is the outcome of the organic
combination of two complementary elements, body
and soul. Humanity in its unit is thus a union.

Ill
One essential characteristic of this physico-psy-
chical being is its capacity to merge its life with
that of similar beings — that is, its capacity for
social life. The ideal human life, as Jesus con
ceives of it, consists in transcending the limits of
an egoistic individuality. By this it is not meant
to maintain that Jesus taught a pantheism or a
generic humanity that is a sort of scholastic
m/ltmge. Sociability does not mean the extinction
of individuality. It means simply that in the con
ception of Jesus the self is altruistic as well as
1 John I : 14.

28 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
selfish, social as well as individualistic.1 There
are attracting and correlating powers of the per
sonality that reach out to others and form, much
like chemical atoms, a new substance that is essen
tially a unity derived through union. To disre
gard the promptings and needs of this social part
of the personality is to invite an intellectual and
moral death whose earliest symptoms are sin and'
abnormality of all sorts. Just as the complete life
of the individual depends upon the union of the
soul and body does the normal life of the person
ality demand a similar union with other personali
ties. The failure of theology to emphasize this
fact is the outcome of a psychology that has been
so much concerned with the deliverances of a
single consciousness as to slight .evidences of
social psychical forces.
In the time of Jesus men recognized more or
less distinctly the need of establishing a social
unity if right, living was to be attained — even
when their knowledge had little effect upon social
institutions. " Man," says Philo,2 " is a social ani-
1 See Bax, The Ethics of Socialism. Whatever one may hold
as to many positions taken in this essay, it is at least worthy of
notice that apparently from a purely non-scriptural, and to some
extent anti-scriptural position the author has occasionally arrived
at conclusions which are but a paraphrase of the teachings of Jesus.
2 See the article by Montefiore, " Florilegium Philonis " in the

MAN 29
mal by nature. Therefore he must live not only
by himself, but for parents, brothers, wife, chil
dren, relatives and friends, for the members of
his deme and of his tribe, for his country, for his
race, for all mankind. Nay, he must live for the
parts of the whole, and also for the entire world,
and much more for the Father and the Creator.
If he is, indeed, possessed of reason, he must be
sociable, he must love the world and God, that
of God he may be beloved."
The corresponding position of Jesus, though
not expressed so minutely, is quite as distinct
and is far more fundamental to his philosophy.
Men's capacity for union renders attainable the
purpose of his teaching and his life. It is deep
in the ideal which he sets before mankind.
IV
Nowhere docs this conception of the necessity
of union more predominate than in those teach
ings that are the most characteristic of the mind
of Jesus and which are the most valuable and
resultful of all times — the ideal relations that
may exist between the human soul and God.
Jewish Quarterly Review, April, 1895. Pmlo may be i^en as a
representative of a school of thought that both preceded and sur
vived Jesus.

30 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
This ideal union is expressed continually and
with great variety. The vine with its branches1
symbolizes that relation between Jesus and his
followers, which, whatever attitude one may hold
towards current evangelical theology, is univer
sally felt to include the relation of the divine
and human. His followers are through him to
be one, not only with each other, but with God,
and thus constitute one great family.2 In his
Father's home3 were, to use his incomparable
figure, many mansions, in which he and they were
to live. And in his invitation so artistically intro
duced by Matthew, there is proffered to the weary
and the heavy laden a companionship that shall
at once make them yoke-fellows with himself and
friends of the Father.4
It is in illustration of this unity of human life
with that of the divine that Jesus repeatedly sets
himself forth in mystical language as the food of
the soul, the bread that came down from heaven.5
And if at times his language grows more striking
than our colder western imaginations often vent-
1 John 15: 1, 2. It is, perhaps, not without significance that
Jesus here speaks of himself as the true vine — as if the relation
ship thus described was not confined alone to that between himself
and men, but that such union was characteristic of men.
" John 17 : 23. Compare with this, John 13: 20.
K John 14 : 2, 3. * Matt. II : 27-30. 6 John 6: 32, 35.

MAN 31
ure,1 and indeed becomes a hard saying even to
his disciples, he instantly explains his analogy in
terms that are at once profound and intelligible.
The same is true of the symbolical teaching of the
Eucharist.2 So great and essential did this rela
tionship appear to the earliest church that the
whole significance of Jesus as a mere ethical
teacher is overtopped by it, and in the writings of
Paul and John it becomes the leading conception
of both the person and the influence of the Christ.
He was the incarnate God — the perfect realiza
tion of this capacity for union between the human
and divine, and at the same time the channel
through whom the race itself might be brought
into union with God, that it might enjoy those
blessings promised God's sons. Indeed, it is not
too much to say that Christianity as a system is
but an unfolding of the conception of the Godward
social capacities of mankind. From this point of
view the cardinal doctrines of the incarnation,
faith, atonement, justification, and immortality,
cease to be abstract, and appear rather the formu
lation of actual religious experience and the de
scription of psychical possibilities and phenomena.3
1 See especially John 6: 51-64.
2 Matt. 26 : 26-30 and parallels. Cf. 1 Cor. 1 1 : 23-26.
3 While superficially the current of theological teaching seems to

32 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
V
In a very true sense Jesus identifies the powers
of the soul that make union with God an essential
of the normal man, with those that force a normal
man into union with other human beings. If a
man be imperfect who is apart from the divine, so
is he who is apart from his fellows. Wherever
Jesus holds up a picture of a man's ideal, he makes
have drifted away from this point of view — especially under the
influence of the "Nature" philosophy of the last century — it is
nevertheless true that the doctrine of the so-called Vital or Mystical
Union has been characteristic of many if not most of the chief
theologies. Thus Augustine (Serin. 144) : "Qui ergo in Christum
credit, credendo in Christum, venit in eum Christus, et quadam-
modo unitur in eum." So, too, Calvin, Works (Brunswick ed., 1870),
IX., 30 : " We coalesce with Christ in a sacred unity and the same
flesh breathes life into us." The Larger Catechism, Question 66,
expresses the fact more formally : " The Union which the elect have
with Christ is the work of God's grace, whereby they are spiritually
and mystically, yet really and inseparably, joined to Christ as their
head and husband ; which is done in their effectual calling." See
H. B. Smith, System of Christian Theology, p. 531 so., and a notable
essay on the Mystic Union of the Believer with his Saviour, in
Sanday and Headlam, Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans.
Recently the importance in theology, not merely of this religious
union but of social activity as well, has considerably increased. If
one cares to see how the terminology of a theological past may yet be
found full of the spirit of Jesus and applicable to modern conditions,
he cannot do better than read Hyde, Social Theology. See also Free-
mantle, The World as the Subject of Redemption, and Westcott, Social
Aspects of Christianity, and The Incarnation and Common Life.

MAN 33
this second element of the twofold extension of
personality not only .essential but fundamental.
The perfect man, if he be true to his nature,
must live in fellowship not only with God but with
man.1 To begin with his conception of the kingdom.
If it were allowable to anticipate somewhat the
later discussion of this term, it would appear that
man is to become righteous — that is, normal —
through life in a normal and righteous social order.
This new phase of civilization, further, is not a
mere aggregation of unrelated individuals, but is a
family. The king is a father and the subjects are
brothers. It is no insignificant fact that in certain
of its aspects, notably its perfection, the life of an
isolated individual received little attention from
Jesus. Indeed, when the fate of some single
person was in question, as for instance " the dis
ciple whom Jesus loved," 2 his words became
enigmatic and, for his immediate audience, unintel
ligible. His mission included the salvation of

1 Primitive, that is pre-Pauline, Christianity recognized this
distinctly. Indeed, James makes the true content of religion con
sist in social service. James I : 26, 27.
2 John 21 : 22. In the case of Simon Peter (Luke 22 : 30) we
have an apparent exception to this general attitude and others also
occur. But in all of them it is paiv to perceive a purely personal
interest.

34 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
individual souls ; but salvation with Jesus, so far
as his words are witnesses, did not consist in living
a detached life. The kingdom can no more be dis
integrated into unrelated lives than righteousness
can be gained by society en masse. In this outer
dependence of the individual and society, Jesus
clearly recognizes human life as essentially social.
This conclusion is by no means the truism that
it may seem. Among religious teachers, at least,
social life has not generally been held to be the
normal life for the man who seeks an ideal devel
opment. Withdrawal from society, monachism,
the literal flight from a corrupt world — these
have been the characteristics of the great mass of
the religions of the past. Modern evangelicism is
often guilty of the same mistake in its attempts to
distinguish and withdraw from "worldly" influ
ences. But with Jesus the entrance into a trans
formed society, the kingdom,1 is the goal and the
reward of the individual's endeavor. He is above
all to seek such entrance ; within it is he to heap
up true riches : to miss it is the saddest lot ; to
gain it is the consummation of happiness.
'Matt. 5:20; 7:21; 18: I so.; 19:23; 25 : 34; John 3 : 3 and
numerous other sayings. In the same line are those sayings in which
the kingdom is the reward to be reached by men of high morality,
e.g., the poor in spirit, Matt. 5 : 10, the humble and child-like, Mark
10: 14, 15.

MAN 35
In sharpest opposition to all this is the Christian
conception of the un-ideal, the abnormal, the sin
ful condition of mankind. In a word this may be
described as one of unsocial relationships. The
evil man is a dead limb,1 a lost sheep, a lost coin,
a lost son.2 It is a little remarkable that although
the earliest Christian writings have much to say
upon the results of such a condition, Jesus is
silent as regards universal sinfulness. With Him
it would appear as if sin were the reverse of socia
bility, and a sinful race, as distinct from sinful
individuals, a contradiction of terms. In failing to
follow the fundamental instincts and capacities of
his nature, a man becomes at once selfish, unsocial,
and sinful. His punishment is the outcome of
his abused nature. Destined for companionship
with high spiritual beings, he necessarily turns in
upon himself, grows less and less capable of open
ing his nature to him who seeks his love. He
loses those powers by which he might become a
member of God's family and of the brotherhood of
man. Exclusion from the kingdom is his natural
punishment — he is not fit to be one of its mem
bers.3 In one case at least,4 Jesus states this
cause explicitly. At the day of judgment the
'John 15: 6. 3 Matt. 8:12; 21:43.
2 Luke 15 : 3-32. 4 Matt. 25 : 34-46.

36 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
ground on which exclusion from the kingdom will
be based is a failure to fulfil the social duties of
the present age. Hell is thus at once the opposite
and the horrible caricature of heaven, for it is not
merely an accommodation of his thought to Jewish
terminology when Jesus describes the selfish rich
man as suffering alone in Gehenna, and the poor
man as in the companionship of Abraham.1
Translated into the language of to-day this
parable illustrates a principle that would not be
altogether different from this : As long as a king
dom and a brotherhood are the goal of human
effort, so long must man be capable of social life,
and sociability a characteristic element of a normal
man. The degeneration of the social nature that
arises from the neglect of social duties, unfits a man
for, or participation in, the enjoyments of the ideal
life. Selfishness — that is, an over-developed indi
vidualism — must according to the laws of nature
result in abnormality and consequent suffering.
But the ideal is the evolution of the attempted.
Jesus recognizes the sociability of men, not
merely as a condition of the new and divine
age, but as the capacity that underlies the devel
opment of sinful men into a sanctified and nor
mal brotherhood. In other words, man's capacity
1 Luke 16: 22 so.

MAN 37
for union with other beings is the hope of his
regeneration. It would lead too far afield to
develop this conception of the dynamic forces
of society as it deserves. The main thing to
emphasize at present is the recognition by Jesus
of this characteristic in the man but imperfectly
righteous. He as well as the ideal man is a
social personality. It is not merely in the glori
ous age to come that men are to be brethren,
it is in the present evil age as well. " One is
your Master," he declared in one of his most
searching charges to the little band of disciples,
" and all ye are brethren." 1 It is no mere happy
choice of words that gave to those who attempted
to incorporate his teachings this name. Altru
ism, self-sacrifice, was the constant lesson Jesus
taught his followers. The sons of Zebedee, over-
ambitious to monopolize the glories of the king
dom, the other ten who murmured quite as much
from jealous disappointment as with indignation
at their comrades' zeal, are bidden to serve rather
than be served.2 In the new order that was to
be worked out upon the earth men were to be
neighbors3 and brothers. To exclude a man from
the companionship of such was to reduce him
1 Matt. 23 : 8. 2 Matt. 20 : 20-28; Mark 10 : 35-45.
3 Luke 10 : 25-37.

38 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
to the lowest social grade the Jewish vocabulary
could describe.1 To enter into brotherhood and
sonship was the first step toward a future per
fection. VI
Thus from whatever point of view we examine
the Christian conception of man, we find it in
cluding a capacity for union. And this union
is not thought of by Jesus as one of mere col
location. It is essential to the truest life. To
avoid it is to become abnormal and sinful. Out
from the picture of a possible human life pre
sented by his own living we gain a corroboration
of his words to his followers. He himself was a
social being. On the one side he was joined with
physical forces, but on the other lay the needed
sonship with God and fellowship with men. If
we omit all doctrinal formulas it is neverthe
less clear that in this teaching and its exempli
fication by Jesus, we have a presentation of
humanity that must condition all theological and
sociological statements that claim to be Christian.
Further than this, there is gained a point of
departure for the interpretation of less obvious
teachings. If the Christian conception of man
1 Matt. 18: 17, "The gentile and the publican."

MAN 39
is thus that of a social being that finds his com
plete life only in losing it in the life of others,
we have as the Christian conception of society
that of a necessary thing — that of an entity
that is the complex not merely of physical envir
onments but of personal as well. All unions
that are the promptings of normal human instincts
are therefore natural and helpful. All separa
tions that are approved by such instincts are
equally natural and necessary. And what is
of especial significance, a Christian sociology
becomes possible and necessary as the comple
ment of a Christian theology.

CHAPTER III

SOCIETY

To speak of Jesus as anticipating a regenerate
society may appear to some as savoring of literal
ism and to others as a mere modernizing of the
simple records of the gospels. Both objections
would not be altogether without foundation.
There is constant danger that, in the attempt to
restate the teachings of Jesus in the terms of
to-day's thought, exposition may wait too subser
viently upon desire. The first century, albeit sur
prisingly like the nineteenth, was nevertheless not
the nineteenth, and Jesus the Jew was not a prod
uct of Greek syllogisms and German hypotheses.
Nevertheless, were one to come to the words of
Jesus unbiassed by traditional interpretations, the
impression would be inevitable that the goal of
his efforts was the establishment of an ideal soci
ety quite as much as the production of an ideal
individual. At any rate so his audiences thought.
They sometimes sought to make him a leader of a
40

SOCIETY 41
revolution ; sometimes they endeavored to pre
empt the chief offices in the future state. At one
time they hailed him as the successor of David
and carried him in triumph to the Temple ; while
in the hopes of his followers the chief significance
of his return from the tomb and his newly revealed
life lay at first in the possibility of revolution and
the reestablishment of a puissant Hebrew king
dom.1 That Jesus did not yield more completely to
some of the efforts made by his hearers to hurry
the realization of these hopes is less a testimony
to their misunderstanding than to his own sagacity.
And even if one does not choose to lay much
stress upon these early guesses at the thought of
Jesus, is it altogether without significance that he
so uniformly speaks of himself as the Son of Man ?2
1 John 6 : 15 ; Matt. 20:21; Mark 11 : 10 ; Acts 1 : 6. In
this connection the charge brought against Jesus before Pilate (Luke
23 : 2-5) as well as the famous conversation of John 18 : 33-38 de
serve consideration. Beyschlag tNeutestamentliche Theologie, I.,
155) in this connection has a couple of pregnant sentences as a
sort of introduction to his study of the church.
2 The use of this term by Jesus can hardly be said to commit him
to a conception of humanity as an organism of which he was the
typical exponent. Such an interpretation is attractive but less easily
supported than that which sees in the expression one that had al
ready a partially recognized Messianic content among the Jews {cf.
Dan. 7 : 13 and Booh of Enoch"). By using it Jesus connected Kim-

42 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
But we are not left to conjecture or a priori
argument. Jesus himself has chosen as his term
for the highest good : (or at least for one of the
prerequisites of its attainment) one that in itself
suggests social relations — the kingdom of God.2
No other term, unless it be Son of Man, is so
characteristic of Jesus ; none is more certainly his.
Early Christianity, it is true, soon displaced it with
the more concrete term " church," and later Chris
tianity has not hesitated to confound the two ; but
with Jesus there was neither the substitution nor
the confusion. Throughout the gospel sources
whether of the synoptic or the Johannine3 cycle,
the usage is constant. The kingdom is the goal
of effort, the reward of persecution, and the abode
of blessedness.
self with the current Messianic hopes, but in so veiled a way as to pre
vent a hasty acceptance of himself by the people as a leader of revolt.
1 For a justification of this term see Matt. 13 : 44, 45. See also
Issel, Die Lehre votn Reiche Gottes im Neuen Testament, p. 52 so.
2 Or kingdom of heaven. For present purposes the distinction
between the two terms is unessential. The content of each is the
same, although there are doubtless subjective if not critical grounds
for the use of each in different accounts. See Wendt, Teaching of
Jesus, I., 370 n.
3 In the few cases in which it is used. In the Johannine teach
ing the idea of eternal life seems to have replaced that of the king
dom. It is at least emphasized as the prerequisite of entrance into
the kingdom. John 3 : 3, 5, 15, 16. See Wendt, Teaching of Jesus,
I., 174, 242 so., 403 so.

SOCIETY 43
If any weight is to be given to the teachings of
Jesus, it is imperative that the meaning of this
term as He used it should be accurately gauged ;
and it is characteristic of to-day's theological
thought that, alike from its Christocentric ten
dency and from its mastering desire for the
purely objective presentation of New Testament
teachings, it should especially seek to discover and
expound the " mysteries of the kingdom " as the
centre of all essentially Christian doctrine. The
effect of such exposition has been felt almost as
much in the realm of dogmatics and apologetics
as in that of biblical theology, but as much as in
either within the circle of earnest searchers after
a philanthropy and politics that shall be at once
scientific and Christian.1
1 "No one can read attentively many modern theological works
without observing that the kingdom of God occupies a much more
prominent place in them than it has in the writings of former times.
This is partly due to the fact that scholars of the present day are
more careful to preserve the genuine historical ideas of other ages
and peoples instead of casting them into the forms or moulds of
later thought. . . It is not merely an old Jewish form of thought,
which it is useful to study for the elucidation of the Biblical litera
ture ... it is regarded by many as the most natural and ade
quate conception that we can take to guide us in forming a system
of Christian theology. Further this' notion of the kingdom of God
has not merely a speculative but a practical bearing ; it is an idea
that craves to be realized in fact, or rather, it is not merely an idea
but a great reality, which has not yet fully attained its perfection,

44 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS

If investigation in regard to Christ's conception
of the individual's ideal state was hampered by
the scarcity of data, the difficulties in the present
case result from their abundance.1 In one way
this is extremely fortunate. Jesus never formally
defines the term, and we are left to the discovery
of that which is common in its usage. Naturally
the investigator congratulates himself that the
scope of his search is large. Yet the wealth of
material is not without its drawbacks. A term
thus frequently used will of necessity express at
various times and in different connections differ
ent shades of thought. To discover the substance
that lies behind this varying usage and is common
to it all is no small task.
It is easy to discover that Jesus does not mean
i a merely political kingdom, or theocratic state. It
is as easy for political enthusiasts to-day as it was
in his own time to mistake here.2 There are some
but in the perfecting of which men's help and labor may and should
be employed." — Candlish, The Kingdom of God, pp. 2-3. These
words are even truer to-day than when written eleven years ago.
1 There are 106 passages in the gospels that contain references
to the kingdom ; 50 occur in Matthew, 15 in Mark, 38 in Luke,
3 in John. Many of these, however, are parallel.
2 As do some of the Christian Socialists. See for a brief account,

SOCIETY 45
of Christ's statements that will bear a political
interpretation, but they will also and indeed more
naturally support another. Here, as always in
dealing with language not containing formal defi
nitions, it is necessary to canvass the entire field
before recording decisions. He is indeed a singu
lar exegete who discovers in either the early or
the later language of Jesus anything that savors
only of revolution or constitutional propaganda.
The progress made by Jesus in the exposition of
his mission does not consist in the erection of an
eschatology out of the ruins of political hopes.
At the beginning of his career he refuses the
tempting suggestion to become a new Caesar ; 1
later his disciples are warned against "the leaven
of Herod"2 — that is of an overweening political
ambition; he flees from those who would force
him into politics,3 and the Roman Pilate has no
difficulty in convincing himself that in his extraor
dinary prisoner he has the opposite of Barabbas
the revolutionist.4
Nor does Jesus use the term kingdom of God
as figure of speech merely to indicate a perfect
the article on Christian Socialism in the American Journal of So
ciology, I., 62. Wendt, Teaching of Jesus, I., 364 sq., has an ad
mirable critique of this view.
1 Matt. 4 : 8-10 ; Luke 4: 5-8. "John 6: 15.
2 Mark 8:15; cf. Mark 10 : 42. 4 John 18 : 33-38.

46 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
method of life for the individual.1 While of
course it was not without ethical content, the
term is not a mere synonym for personal holiness
or righteousness. Indeed, there is but one saying
of Jesus 2 that in any way lends support to the
view that he thought of the kingdom as a sub
jective state of the individual, and even that can
hardly be used as a basis upon which to build
an individualistic system of self-culture. It is
true that Jesus repudiates any grossly material
istic conception of his kingdom. It is not to be
achieved by the ordinary means of world-rulers.3
It certainly is not to be established by the sword.4
Properly defined, it is spiritual. But men are its
members, entering into it, or if unworthy, rejected
and cast out from it. In the thought of Jesus it
is a kingdom, not a congeries of kingdoms as
1 See Tolstoi, The Kingdom of God is within You.
2 Luke 17 : 20, 21, where it is very likely, judging from the con
text, that the expression Ivrhs ifiuv is used as rhetorically equivalent
to iv /i&rijj ii^Cov. With either interpretation it need not of neces
sity refer to a subjective appropriation of the kingdom. Jesus would
hardly have credited his opponents (to whom the words were ad
dressed) with the possession of the kingdom of God — especially
as we know he more than once charges them with the opposite
(John 8: 44). Taken in a collective sense the words are very
natural : The kingdom was in the midst of the Jews in the persons of
Jesus and his disciples.
3 Matt. 4:8; cf. Matt. II: 12. "John 18:36.

SOCIETY 47
numerous as there are God-fearing men. If Paul
in one instance1 seems to speak as if it were a
discipline, — " not eating and drinking, but right
eousness and peace and joy in the Holy Ghost,"
— it is because his readers can be trusted to recog
nize the boldness of the metonymy. Jesus never
so speaks. With him ethical teachings are ex
pressed explicitly and literally by such terms as
"perfect,"2 "righteousness,"3 and the like. In
one case he is reported as making righteousness
and the kingdom as coordinate goods,4 but we
do not find in His words taken altogether justifica
tion for the closely allied conception that "the
kingdom is the rational idea of the chief good " 6
which "can by no means be identified with the
universal moral society which is being developed
in the world." 6 While there is in these words a
gratifying recognition of the supreme position
accorded by Jesus to the kingdom, and while
such a view emphasizes what is certainly a domi
nant teaching of his, namely, that the highest
1 Rom. 14: 17.
2 Matt. 5 : 48 ; 19 : 21.
3 Matt. 3:15; 5 : 6, 10 ; cf. John 16:8, 10.
11 Matt. 6 : 33.
6 Kaftan, The Truth of the Christian Religion, II., 377.
11 Kaftan, II., 379. J. Weiss 'Die Predigt Jesu vom Reiche
Gottes, p. 64) deals rather summarily with Kaftan's views.

48 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
good consists in entering the kingdom, it is as
certainly doing violence to some of the analogies
that furnish much of the content of its definition
when the kingdom is made altogether supra-mun
dane. Many of the figures and words employed
by Jesus1 in speaking of this "Highest Good"
show that he regarded it as by no means merely a
super-sensuous, super-rational postulate of morality
" which has the kingdom of moral righteousness
on earth as its intra-mundane correlative."2
It is doubtless true that, with Jesus, the term
filled the same office as some rational postulate
that is the dominant conception of any modern
philosophy. But the identification of the content
of the two dominant thoughts is dangerous. It is
one thing to appreciate the exact position of Jesus,
and it is quite another to translate it into the terms
of one's own philosophy. The first step is one
of interpretation and must always condition the
second. The chief criticism of this appropriation
of the kingdom as the capstone of a philosophy is
the same that must be passed upon so much of
the work of the theologian — it is attractive, it is
doubtless in the main true, but it is not the
thought of Jesus. With him the kingdom was
1 See for instance Matt. 13: 38 sq.
2 Kaftan, IL, 366.

SOCIETY 49
not a subjective but a concrete, objective reality:
one that could be expected and enjoyed, if not
here and now, at any rate in another world and
age- When thus we have rejected as incomplete
these two conceptions, the one the gift of eco
nomic and the other of philosophical zeal for
Christian truth, we have to deal with a very
simple alternative. Did Jesus think of this con
crete, objective kingdom of God as an eschato-
logical or as a present reality ? Was it, with him,
to use current expressions, heaven, or was it so
ciety ? Upon the answer given to this question
will depend one's conception of the kingdom as
purely religious or as both religious and social.
There is much that is worthy of consideration
in the view that the use of the word by Jesus
meant a Messianic millennium to be enjoyed by
the righteous after death, or after the coming of
a new age. On the historical side there may be
urged the very conservative argument that Jesus
"lived and spoke within the circle of eschatological
ideas which Judaism had developed more than two
hundred years before ; but he controlled them, by
giving them a new content, and forcing them into
a new direction."1 On the exegetical it may be
1 Harnack, History of Dogma, I., 62.

50 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
even more forcibly argued that " the kingdom of
the Messiah is the actual consummation of the
prophetic idea of the rule of God," and that the
term kingdom of God and kindred expressions
" never signify anything else than the kingdom
of the Messiah, even in those passages where they
appear to denote the (invisible) church, the moral
kingdom of the Christian religion, and such like,
or to express some modern abstraction of the con
crete conception which is one given in the his
tory." x While the historical and exegetical spirit
when once touched with the glow of religious
feeling can say : " We await no kingdom of God
which is to descend from heaven upon the earth
and destroy this world ; but we hope to be
assembled with the church of Jesus Christ in the
heavenly fiaaikela. In this sense can we yearn
and say as did the ancient Christians : " Thy
kingdom come." 2
The worth of each of these grounds for holding
to an apocalyptic and eschatological conception of
the kingdom is considerable, but especially can one
1 Meyer, Commentary on Matthew, 3 : 2. For excellent state
ment of the similar views of Schmoller and J. Weiss, as well as the
opposing views of Ritschl, see the mediating article of Schneder-
mann in Neue KirchliJie Zeitschrift, 1 894, No. 7, an abstract of
which appears in The Thinker, January, 1S95.
2 J. Weiss, Die Predigt Jesu vom Reichc Gotles, p. 76.

SOCIETY 5 1
appreciate the historical position. Probably the
recognition of the importance of the apocalyptic
literature in the formation of the early Christian
vocabulary, if not Christology, may yet be still
further emphasized. Nor can it be denied that,
especially in the latter part of his life, Jesus often
used expressions 1 which, were they the only ones
he had left, would be sufficient to justify the sweep
ing statement 2 that "the gospel entered into the
world as an apocalyptic eschatological message,
apocalyptical and eschatological not only in its
form, but in its contents." But notwithstanding
all this, the total impression made by the state
ments of Jesus in regard to the kingdom is not
that of a post-mortem or post-catastrophic condi
tion. At the outset of his preaching he announced
its approach ; 3 in the synagogue at Nazareth he
declared the glowing promises of Isaiah fulfilled
in the ears of his hearers;4 unbelieving and hostile
professional religious teachers were told that there
was no longer need of straining after a glimpse of
1 For instance, Luke 13 : 28 sq.\ Mark 9:1; Matt. 25 : 31 sq.
2 Harnack, History of Dogma, I., 58. — ¦ In the sentence next to
that quoted, however, " apocalyptical " is given so broad a definition
as to modify the force of this statement, and a few pages later
(I., 62) the author gives what appears like a hesitating assent to
the belief in a present kingdom.
3 Mark 1:15. 4 Luke 4 : 17-21.

52 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
a distant glory, for the kingdom was among them ; ]
his followers are congratulated on seeing that for
which their ancestors had longed, but had not
seen ; 2 the kingdom in the person of its members
was already the good seed in the field, that is the
world,3 some of these members having had to
struggle mightily in order to gain their entrance ; 4
and the word of the kingdom is described as hav
ing different results in the hearts of different men.5
The natural force of some of these passages may
be evaded, but it is impossible in the light of them
all and of other sayings of Jesus to believe that he
occupied an exclusively eschatological point of
view. Only on one or the other of two alternatives
can the opposite opinion be supported : Either
Jesus saw the impossibility of his early plans for
social or political revolution and looked to a
heavenly Messianic kingdom, or such passages as
are not clearly eschatological are to be rejected
as the mistaken reports and interpretations of the
/gospel history. But so far as the last possibility is
concerned the contrary is quite as likely ; 6 while
in regard to the first suggestion, it may be replied
1 Luke 17 : 20 sq. 8 Matt. 13 : 24-43.
2 Luke 10: 23. 4 Matt. 11 : 12-15.
6 Mark 4:3^.; cf. Matt. 13 : 3 sq.
0 Especially in the case of the apocalyptic elements in the dis
courses of Mark 13 and Matt. 24 and 25 where it has been suggested

SOCIETY 53
that an unbiassed chronology and exegesis fail to
disclose any such change on the part of Jesus.
And finally, the apparent contradiction, or at least
variation in the presentation of the kingdom, as
invisible and yet seen, as future and yet present,
may be naturally explained as indicating first,
that Jesus thought of the kingdom as a concrete
reality rather than an idea, and second, that this
reality was not to be left as an unattainable ideal,
but was to be progressively realized, perhaps
evolved. The question, however, yet remains. If we are
thus led to reject as incomplete such interpreta
tions of this term of Jesus as would restrict it to
politics, or character, or heaven, can we hope to
discover an approximate definition which shall
combine the elements of truth each can be seen to
contain and yet be consonant with the general
course of the thought of Jesus ? :
that a Jewish Apocalypse may have been combined with the words
of Jesus. 1 Were it desirable to take the space, it would be possible to give
more fully the exegetical process by which the above definitions are
rejected and another suggested. It may, perhaps, not be out of
place to add a few representative authorities, whose definitions
favor the social content. The author of Ecce Homo distinctly calls
the kingdom of God a divine society (p. 48). Bruce {Kingdom of
God, p. 46) thus summarizes possible interpretations : " It signi
fies some form of divine dominion. Abstractly reviewed, it might

54 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS

II
By the kingdom of God Jesus meant an ideal
(though progressively approximated)' social order
in which the relation of men to God is that of sons,
and (therefore) to each other, that of brothers.
denote the reign of the Almighty over all creation through the
operation of natural law ; or of the moral Governor of the world
rendering to every man and nation according to their works ; or of
the God of Israel ruling over a chosen people, and bestowing on
them power, peace, and felicity as the reward of obedience to his
divine will. Or it might mean something higher than any of these
things, the highest form of dominion conceivable, the advent of
which is emphatically fit to be the burden of a Gospel, viz., the
reign of divine love exercised by God in his grace over human
hearts believing in his love, and constrained thereby to yield him
grateful affection and devoted service.'' He further quotes with
approval the words of Keim {Jesu von Nazara, p. 54) : " Briefly
stated, the religious heaven of Jesus meant the Fatherliness of God
for men, the sonship of men for God, and the infinite spiritual good
of the kingdom of heaven is Fatherhood and Sonship." Edersheim
{Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah, I., 270) gives a character
istic definition of the term : " The rule of God, which was manifested
in and through Christ is apparent in the church, gradually develops
amidst hinderances; is triumphant at the second coming of Christ;
and finally, perfected in the world to come." Stead {Kingdom of
God, p. 69) regards it as " the fellowship of souls, divine and human,
of which the law and life are love, wherein the Fatherhood of God
and the Brotherhood of man as both are embodied in Jesus the
Christ, are recognized and realized." Weiss {Biblical Theology oj
the New Testament, I., 63) does not accurately define the term as
used by Jesus, but gives an approximate definition as follows :
" What this kingdom of God is, is nowhere expressly said; the idea

SOCIETY 55
The point of departure for any interpretation of
the term must be the historical expectation of the
Jews in the days of Jesus. What that expectation j
was is now pretty accurately known.1 If all nec
essary allowance is made, on the one hand for
the materialistic hopes of the masses, and on the
other for the completed eschatology of the later
is regarded as one quite familiar to the people. In fact, no one in
Israel, which was from the first to be a kingdom whose supreme
Lord and King was Jehovah, could thereby understand anything
else than a kingdom in which the will of God is fulfilled as perfectly
upon earth as by the angels in heaven." Candlish {Kingdom of
God, p. 197) gives what "may be taken as a basis at least for an
exposition of the idea : The gathering together of men, under
God's eternal law of righteous love, by the vital power of his re
deeming love in Jesus Christ, brought to bear upon them through
the Holy Spirit." Beyschlag {Neutestamentliche Theologie, I., 41)
declares that " the kingdom of God is wherever the will of God is
done on earth as in Heaven ; that is, where it is observed in an
ideal manner. Accordingly . . the kingdom is that ideal condi
tion to which mankind and the world's history shall arrive, when
God according to his inmost being, as eternal spirit and sacred love,
shall be the all-filling and the all-conditioning element in the world."
Denney {Studies in Theology, pp. 175-176) regards the kingdom as
"a separate society in the world, in which there is a real union of
persons who are conscious that they have what binds them to each
other and separates them from the world ; but there is nothing
formal or institutional about it." An even more concrete definition
is given by those who identify a moral community with the kingdom;
e.g., Ritschl, Issel, Nitsch.
1 Liitgert, Das Reich Gottes nach den Synoptischen Evangelien,
ch. i.; Schiirer, The Jewish People in the Time of Jesus Christ, Div.
II. , Vol. II., p. 170 sq.

56 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
Jewish writers, it will appear that the kingdom
which was awaited was a new and divine Israelit-
i ish state, of which the Messiah, as the representa
tive of God, was to be the head ; all Jews, the
members; and all peoples, the subjects. Pales
tine was to be the seat of its capital ; the right
eousness of the Jew, the qualification of member
ship. It was as intensely national as the proud
spirit of a nation that remembered a Solomon and
a Judas Maccabasus, and whose Jah was the only
God, could imagine and describe under the smart
of the Idumean and the Roman. To exhaust its
glories was not within the power of literal lan
guage, and apocalypse and prophecy could but
faintly foretell the glories of the new age and king
dom. No Jew thought of it as an abstract ideal.
The proclamation of its approach by the people's
preacher as he came in prophetic guise to the
wilderness of Judea and summoned all to the
washing of repentance, never would have so thrilled
a nation had it been the ghostly thing announced
by so many later Johns. It was as real as the
men who sought to join it through repentance
and renewed lives. The eternal religious influ
ence of the Jew has lain not in his capacity to see
the abstract in the concrete, the general in the spe
cific, but in his noble genius for a rational anthropo-

SOCIETY 57
morphism — the sight and the proclamation of
the Invisible in that which his senses revealed
to him. And his idea of the kingdom of God
was no sweet Greek dream of a past Golden
Age, but an intoxicating belief in a new state in
which righteousness was to reign and his enemies
were to bow before the Anointed of Jehovah.
His hope for the future was for an everlasting
Jerusalem that was to descend from heaven,
arrayed like a bride for her bridegroom, as free
as God's own realm. Even when the new king
dom grew more remote, and the hopelessness of
a tranquil realization of its sway grew weak, the
Jew never thought of it as anything but social.
Its members might have passed through a resur
rection, and have survived the fearful woes that
ushered in its glories, but they were yet members
of a kingdom, inseparable from each other and
from the Messiah.
It was with the approaching fulfilment of this
undefined expectation of an actual, concrete,
though divine, political society, that Jesus began
His preaching. He took the hope as he found
it. He never needed to define it. He had
simply to correct and elevate the immanent idea.
The Christian kingdom is the Jewish kingdom,
but transfigured and made universal by the clari-

58 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
fications of Jesus. Membership jn it is no longer
to be a matter of birth. The " children of the
kingdom " were to know that the despised Gen
tile might enter in before them. Thus it is that,
although Jesus sometimes refers especially to
the dominion of God in his kingdom, he generally
keeps prominent the social conception.
And as a new social order the kingdom of God
had really begun to be appreciable if only men
would so believe. It was among them ; 1 the
divine benefactions of Jesus were evidence that
it had come upon them ; 2 the unworthy hamlet
that refused the entrance of its heralds was yet
to know that in rejecting them it had rejected
the object of its hopes.3 And the analogies with
which this present and appreciable kingdom is
described are full of social signification. As in
its very genesis the term denoted social relations,
so is it a net,4 a great feast,5 a family,6 into each
of which men enter and from which they may
be excluded. Its members are seeds scattered
over the field of the world; its enemies are the
tares sown by the king's enemy.7 For so true
1 Luke 17 : 20. 6 Luke 14 : 15 sq.
2 Matt. 21 : 28. 6 Matt. 23: 28;"iLuke 15: 11-32.
3 Luke 10: 10-12. ' Matt. 13: 24-30, 36-43.
4 Matt. 13:47-50.

SOCIETY _ 59
is Jesus to the old terminology that he even re-
expresses with new force the conception of King
Messiah. He is this king,1 and, to use the con
ventional imagery of the prophets, his coming in
supremacy is to be upon the clouds of heaven.2
This conclusion that by the kingdom of God
Jesus meant a society, is confirmed by the posi
tion which the kingdom, as the ideal, occupies in
relation to the world,3 as the actual social order.
The world is not the demoniacal kingdom sup
posed by some scholars to have been established
by Satan as a sort of counterpart to the Messianic,
and from whose agents Jesus won a glorious
victory. Such a view finds little foundation in
the gospel records. Jesus does, indeed, argue
pointedly that His deeds of kindness cannot be
taken as substantiating his partnership with
Satan — "a kingdom cannot be divided against
itself." 4 But, even if it were possible to make
this the basis of a Christian demonology, it is
1 Luke 22 : 28 sq.
2 Matt. 26 : 64; Mark 13 : 26. These apocalyptic sayings are here
used as those of Jesus. For a discussion of the possibly composite
character of the discourses, see Wendt, Die Lehre Jesu, I., 35 so.
3 6 k6(t/xos. It is hardly necessary to call attention to the fact
that in the English version of the New Testament "world" is the
translation of aliiv (age) as well.
4 Mark 3 : 22-27.

60 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
exposed to a suspicion of semi-accommodation on
the part of Jesus such as does not affect his use
of the term world. By this word Jesus evi
dently meant the environment within which and
out of which his kingdom was to grow. And
this environment is not merely physical, it is
social. From it he chose his followers.1 To it,
as the ultimate bounds of their activity, his dis
ciples were to go, from its members to win still
other subjects of the divine rule.2 In the midst
of its influences his followers were to be left,3
the light that should illumine it,4 the salt that
should preserve it.5 In it, as in a great field, was
to be reaped the harvest of good and bad men.6
In the Johannine gospel we find this conception a
part of the very structure of the philosophy that
interprets the life of Jesus. The world needed him
as a Saviour, and, because of God's love, received
him,7 only to hate and reject him.8 And yet he
was its light, its life.9 Gradually, as the story of
the defeat of Jesus grows darker, its opposition is
more dwelt upon. The world lost the vision of
its Saviour,10 rejoiced at his departure,11 hated and
1 John 15: 19. 6 Matt. 5:13. 9 John 8: 12; 6: 26 sq.
2 Matt. 26:13. c Matt. 13:3s. 10 John 14: 19.
3 John 17: 15. 'John 3: 16; 17:18. n John 16 : 20,
1 Matt. 5 : 14. 8 John 3 : 19.

SOCIETY 6 1
persecuted his followers.1 That which should
have been full of a divine harmony grows discord
ant, the abode of evil.
To all this the kingdom of Jesus stands in oppo
sition. So far as this social environment is thus
evil, it could not account for the disciples, still less
for himself. Yet the contrast is helpful, for if the
one Kingdom be social, so must also be the other.
Indeed, it is clear that Jesus foresaw that his ideal
society would be composed of members drawn
from the old. If, as it slowly grew in the midst of
such surroundings, it was to suffer, it nevertheless
was to be cheered by its founder's victory and
expect likewise to conquer2 — if not in this age,
at least in the next. But its very conquest would
be thus that of a new over an old social order.
This is the substance of the vision in what is per
haps an early Christian emendation of a Jewish
apocalypse, " the kingdoms of the world are be
come the kingdom of our Lord and His Christ."3
It is in this contrast, also, that the general char
acter of the new Christian social order is most
distinctly seen. The old is evil ; the new is ideal.
The old is under a prince who is to be judged;4
the new is of God. The members of the one are
1 John 15 : 19. 3 Rev. 11:15.
2 John 16:33. 4 John 16 : 8.

62 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
dominated by selfish ambition ; those of the other
are not so to be, but are to seek greatness in
service.1 Within one there is to be found the
restless, anxious search for material goods ; 2 with
in the other food and drink and dress are to be
provided by a loving Father as great but not the
greatest needs of the trustful soul.3 In a word,
in the old social order Jesus saw the tyranny of
selfishness and hatred ; in the new, he sees a
universal reign of love — the fatherhood of God
and the brotherhood of men.
Ill
This expression, the fatherhood of God and
brotherhood of men, is in many minds the sub
stance of Christianity. And such is the case if
these terms are given their proper meaning. But
at this point we have to distinguish sharply be
tween two possible conceptions of divine sonship,
neither of which is inconsistent with Christian
doctrine. On the one hand there is the noble sen
timent that holds sway in most religious thought
to-day, according to which all men are the sons of
God in that they were created by him, possess
moral attributes, and are capable, however wicked,
1 Matt. 20: 26-28; 23:11; Mark 9: 35; 10:43,44; Luke 22: 26.
" Luke 12 : 30. 3 Luke 12 : 30; Matt. 6 : 31, 32.

SOCIETY 63
of rising to nobility in self-sacrifice and devotion —
in a word, in that they possess simply by virtue
of their humanity an ineradicable likeness to God.
According to this view, God is always humanity's
loving Father, ready to forgive, and yearning after
his lost children. On the other hand, there is the
more intensive conception of sonship, which, while
never denying that in a general sense men may be
spoken of as the sons of God, and affirming stren
uously the love of God for men, yet uses the word
to express the more intimate and responsive rela
tion with God actually enjoyed by those who are
seeking noble ends, who are consciously seeking
moral strength from prayer, who in a personal
sense love God while seeking to keep his com
mandments, and who, through this personal con
tact with God, gain a new character, which, while
possessed of the same powers as before, is yet
fuller of the divine likeness.
These distinctions are evidently those of termi
nology rather than of thought and are based upon
different uses of words that, since the literal idea
of begetting a son is clearly impossible, must at
bottom express an analogy. Whatever of mutual
love and similarity of nature is connoted by the
human relationship of son and father is used as the
best analogue for the relations of man and God.

64 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
These relations are regarded by the one party as
already existent, and by the other as dependent
upon regeneration. Yet the two positions are not
exclusive. The man who especially emphasizes
universal, racial divine sonship will be sure to
admit widely different degrees of filial obedience
and love ; while, as already intimated, he who
does not prefer to use thus indiscriminately the
only words capable of supreme religious content,
nevertheless is most eager to urge at the same
time God's love for the race and the possibilities of
reformation on the part of the evil man.1 Neither
party would of necessity disregard the punishment
of sin, though giving it a greater or less prominence
in their theological systems, according to the em
phasis laid upon the justice or benevolence of God.
Of these two uses of the same terms, which was
the one adopted by Jesus ? The second and more
restricted. Not that he denies that relationship of
God and men which we moderns denote as the
divine paternity and sonship. The most casual
reading of the New Testament shows that this
conception of the love of God is the very core
1 The advocates of this view sometimes claim that God is always
the Father of men, but that all men are not the sons of God — a use
of terms which singularly confuses literal and analogical conceptions.
It would be better to drop the figure altogether and substitute its
content.

SOCIETY 65
of the Christian teaching1 of which Jesus was
himself the living revelation. It is not impossible,
though it is by no means beyond question, that
in the third of the three parables preserved by
Luke 2 he sets forth this love of God in the terms
of fatherhood. Further, it may be true, as Wendt3
says, that " he proceeds upon the certainty of it,
as upon an undoubted axiom." But even with
these admissions, it seems certain that Jesus in
his positive teachings, with a characteristic sense
of that which is appropriate, reserved ever the
noblest words of humanity for designating the
noblest relations ; that is, the relations of those
persons who were members of the kingdom of
God — who, to use the Johannine expression, had
been born anew.4 Unless Jesus were to invent a
new vocabulary familiar terms must be used to
express his relationship, and what could be nobler
or more expressive than those which express the
more sacred and unselfish in human life? In fact,
he almost explicitly thus defined his words when
he repudiated physical relations and made those
his family who did the will of his Father in
1 Matt. 6: 31 sq.; Luke 18 : 14; Matt. 18: 14 ; 5 : 44, 48.
2 Luke 15: 3-32. 3 Teaching of Jesus, I., 199.
4 John 3:3. If the other less likely, though possible transla
tion of dvu$ev " from above " be adopted, the expression gains in
explicit reference. F

66 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
heaven.1 This appears also in the Johannine
comment upon the significance of Jesus, "As
many as received him, to them gave he power
to become the children of God."2 From the
exactness of these statements one cannot help
concluding that to extend the use of these terms
of Jesus to all mankind is to confound what was
in his mind a possible condition with that which
was real only in the case of far too small a
number. It would probably also be true to his
conception to say that the terms son and father
in the ethical sense — which was the only force he
gave them except that of purely physical relation
ship — are correlative, the one relationship not ex
isting without the other.3 But it is not a question
of abstract ethics that here concerns us, but of fact.
And the fact of a real spiritual union with God, the
outcome of man's natural and normal powers, in
default of better terms is described by Jesus and
the earlier Christian writers as a sonship and a
fatherhood. It may be urged that the point at issue is
trivial. If Jesus recognizes and enforces that uni
versal love of God for men which is to-day denoted
1 Matt. 12 : 49, 50 ; Mark 3 : 34, 35 ; Luke 8:21.
2 John I : 12.
3 Sec Wendt, Teaching of Jesus, T., 191, 199.

SOCIETY 6f
by the expression fatherhood of God, and that
moral nature and possibility in man that we judge
to imply the divine image ; and if, indeed, his use
of the words themselves is simply a question of
terminology, why attempt any sharp discrimina
tion ? What does it signify if, while teaching to
day's doctrine of the universal fatherhood of God,
he prefers to limit the extent of words and to call
only the members of the new society brothers one
of another and sons of God ?
The answer is threefold. To give to a specific
term a general meaning is to confuse all a man's
teaching. That which is true of the Jdivine pater
nity in the sense of Jesus, is not true of the divine
paternity in the larger sense. Promises made to
those who in this deeper sense pray to their Father
are not to be transferred to those who will not so
pray, but prefer hatred to love, wickedness to
purity. A bad man cannot honestly desire that
the Father's kingdom should come and that his
will should be done on earth as in heaven. A
man full of selfishness and licentiousness cannot
seek first the kingdom of God and his righteous
ness in firm trust that a heavenly Father will
provide for his necessities. The example of a
merciful heavenly Father is hardly sufficient to
move a cruel and rapacious man to deeds of

68 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
love. As a result, therefore, to extend the usage
of Jesus farther than the limits he himself has
set, is to contravene one of the fundamental dis
tinctions of his teachings : the eternal distinction
between goodness and badness. A bad man can
become a good man — even in his wickedness he
is loved by God ; but he must attempt to realize
his nobler possibilities, he must begin to be a good
man before Jesus will call him a son of God. We
may not ourselves prefer such a terminology, but
if we are to represent Jesus we must use words
as he used them — and few indeed have been the
teachers who, by a reservation of common terms,
have expressed more accurately an ethical distinc
tion so fundamental. But further, upon this ideal
sonship is based the ideal brotherhood. Men are
brothers through the possession of a life derived
from the same parent. So in the new social order
of Jesus, those men who have satisfied the deepest
possibilities of their nature and are living in union
with God — that is, are righteous — are brothers.
Here again we meet with an accurate use of terms.
The members of the kingdom alone are called
brothers by Jesus.1 Outside of those that clearly
1 Wendt {Teaching of Jesus, I., 337) holds to the opposite but
admits that "Jesus has nowhere in his recorded utterance expressly
given a universality of extent to this idea of brother."

SOCIETY 69
refer to physical relationship there is not a saying
of Jesus preserved for us that does not restrict
this most expressive term to the description of this
new social relationship, the possibility and nature
of which it was his mission to reveal. In actual
society as he saw it, fraternal relations were not
prevalent. Men quarrelled, lusted, hated, deceived,
fought. Their very philanthropy1 and religion2
were tinged with selfishness. But in the new
social order he sought to portray and inaugurate
none of these things were to be. Men were to
be perfect as their heavenly Father was perfect,3
and among them reconciliation, purity, love, were
to be the outcome of their consciousness of their
Jlivine brotherhood. And what is this but saying
that the ideal society that awaits the world as a
fulfilment of man's social capacities is no mere
collocation of dissimilar, repellent individuals, but
a union of men similarly righteous, all alike pos
sessed of a consciousness of noble possibilities,
seeking the good one of another, with moral im
pulses springing from their religious life — a unity
whose bonds are organic and spiritual ?
1 Matt. 6:2; cf. Luke 14 : 12 sq.
2 Matt. 6:5, 16.
3 Matt. 5 : 48.

JO THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
IV
Such, then, is in essence the ideal social order of
Jesus — a divine brotherhood. It is necessary
now to reexamine his words in order to discover
whether or not they have any practical bearing upon
to-day's social life. Does Jesus regard this ideal as
a Utopia, an idealist's heaven which is to hang for
ever over the world an unattainable dream ? Or
does he think of it as at least partly realizable in
human life ?
It is at once evident that Jesus does not regard
this new social order as isolated. Some time it will
embrace all the earth. In this particular he both
follows and enlarges the idea of the Jtjngdom of
God as he found it. It is not therefore a school
or brotherhood in the narrow sense of academy or
monastery that he founded, but a social force cap
able of expressing itself in a universal society.
It is also clear that the new society may be
very widely distributed. The bond of union is
not that of organization, but that of a common
relation to the King and Father. Distance
is therefore not an element adverse to a pro
gressive social unity whose unity is not that of
a circumference but of radii. Jesus himself in
his own estimation is the visible expression of the

SOCIETY

71

centre in which all relations converge and unite.
In his death he drew all men to Himself.1 Where-
ever a little group of brethren is, there is also the
Son of Man.2 The parable of the leaven3 indicates
at once a diffused and growing unity.
All this points to a spiritual element in the
character of the new society. It is not to be a
mere coercive aggregation of men; its essential
element is not its form but the coordinating and
unifying spiritual life that is common to all.
Membership is psychical, not external, and its
blessings are also spiritual. The poor in spirit4
are to be its members ; within it the mourner is to
be comforted ; 5 those hungry for righteousness
are to be fed ; 6 the poor cared for,7 perplexed and
worrying souls reassured,8 the pure in heart to see
God.9 The Johannine conception is even more
explicit. Entrance to it is dependent wholly upon
a spiritual renewal,10 and in the sonship thus ob
tained are the forces11 that are to make for the
complete realization of the specific ideals Jesus
presents as the features of the perfect social life.
In this spiritual character of the kingdom lie its
1 John 13 : 32. 6 Matt. 5:4. 9 Matt. 5 : 8.
2 Matt. 18 : 20. « Matt. 5:6. ln John 3 : 3.
3 Matt. 13 : 33. 7 Matt. 6 : 24 sq. « John 15:1,4.
4 Matt. 5:3. * Matt. 6:31, 32.

J72 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
energy and its practicability. Membership within
it is possible for all since all are spiritual.1 It can
move not merely in organized but in unorganized
ways. It can remake alike the ambition of one
of its members and public opinion and social
conceptions. In a word it is dynamic — a power
as well as a condition. And this power lies within
the new possibilities of, divine sonship.
In its turn this points to the possibility of a
beginning and progressive social order here and
now. Jesus in his double revelation of God to
man and humanity to man inaugurated its histori
cal life.2 If consciousness of sonship is possible
for men, and moral development along both indi
vidual and social lines is made possible by man's
very constitution ; if Jesus could speak of his
immediate disciples as enjoying the blessings of
the kingdom 3 and as brethren with God as their
Father ; and if the number of these followers was
to increase numerically just as their virtue might
deepen, — the conclusion seems unavoidable that a
"divine society " is thought of by Jesus as already
within the world. Its spiritual elements save it
1 Matt. 8: ii.
2 In the full Christian meaning of the term. This is not to deny
a pre-Christian history of the kingdom of God. See Bestmann,
JinstehungsgeschicJite des Reiches Gottes, Vol. I.
3 Matt, u : u, 12 ; cf. Luke 17 : 21 and Matt. 12:28.

SOCIETY 73
from the limbo of Utopias. True, it is not yet
complete, either intensively or extensively. In its
social as in its individual aspect the progress of
righteousness is gradual, first the blade, then the
ear, then the full corn in the ear.1 But Jesus was
no believer in a dualism either in heaven or on
earth, and this regenerate society in the world is
slowly to spread until, like yeast in the dough, it
transforms its entire environment. To use the
noble words of an early Christian writer, " What
the soul is in the body that are Christians in the
world."2 The method and the means by which the world
is thus to be transformed into the kingdom do not
concern us here. It is enough to point out the
fact that the kingdom is thought of by Jesus as
present as well as future, and that its history is an
evolution. Each stage of the growth will be to
a considerable degree determined by the character
of the men — or groups of men — with whom the
new order has to deal.3 Naturally the rates of
progress will vary at different developing points.
The influence of the old social environment will
always be felt, and its elements will yield them-
1 Mark 4 : 28. 2 Epistle to Diognelus, chap. vi.
3 See the familiar parable of the sower, Matt. 13: 3 sq.; Mark
4:3^.; Luke 8:5^.

74 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
selves with unequal readiness to the new ideal.
But the process nevertheless will go on. Accord
ing to Jesus, it will be remembered, men from
their very constitution, if only that constitution be
allowed its normal operations, will unite in some
social bond. To make this social bond religious
and social relationships moral is to bring in the
new order of things.
Historically speaking the stages thus involved
are, the appearance of Jesus, the formation of the
first group of men whom Jesus gathered as the
nucleus of future greatness, the gradual develop
ment of other similar groups of men throughout
the world, the gradual leavening of all social en
vironment, the consummation of this process in
the new age.
What, then, is this consummation, this end of the
age ? Certainly not death. Jesus seldom con
siders the death of the individual. The transition
between "this age" and "the coming" is be
tween eras and societies. The glorious kingdom
is to come after the period of growth and conflict
is past. The catastrophic completion of the slow
process is after the possibilities of that process
are exhausted, and with it will begin a new and
better age.
It would not be safe to say that this is not to be

SOCIETY 75
after death. From some of the words of Jesus it
seems as if such were the case. But in this con
nection Jesus ignores death. He never for a
moment thinks that men cease to be men simply
because they are dead. No more does human
society. But whether before or after death, the
realization of this ideal to which the age has
slowly been leading the race is certain. The time
of conflict will pass. The power of the new order
will be so great that all opposition will have passed
or have been crushed. That for which men have
prayed will appear. The kingdom will then in
truth have come, and the will of God will be done
as in heaven. Those who wilfully refuse to join
in the society will grieve most miserably, their
suffering being the result of their inability to share
in the blessings of the new humanity.
Although this triumphant establishment of the
ideal society is the goal of human evolution under
the impulse of the newly revealed religious forces,
Jesus does not allow Himself to weaken the practical
operation of an attempted realization of its laws by
any over description of its joys. In fact, beyond
general allusions in the way of warnings or
exhortations, his concern with them is compara
tively little. He was no Mahomet with alluring
visions of a sensuous Paradise, or even a Sweden-

76 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
borg, with noble mysticism delighting to symbol
ize the deepest truths of life. He has, for instance,
much more to say about marriage and wealth than
about heaven and hell. As may appear later,
his descriptions of what should be special social
relationships are never temporizing but absolute,
yet the consummation of the age's progress is chiefly
described as an incentive to approximate its ideal
conditions in the present. In a word, Jesus con
centrates his attention upon the period of develop
ment. And this is the same thing as saying that
the nearest approach to a realization of a Christian
society is to be found where the principles of his
ideal society are most nearly expressed in the
institutions and life of a people, where this divine
sonship and the consequent human fraternity
become facts, not the premises of a doctrinaire
sociology. Is, then, this new social order, as it develops in
scattered groups and attempts to transfigure the
world, coextensive with the life of the church ?
Jesus gives us no clear answer, but his position,
to judge from the few uncertain expressions of the
gospel,1 seems to imply that the church is one
form of the attempt to realize the principles em
bodied in the kingdom of God. But there is not
1 Matt. 16: IS; 18: 17.

SOCIETY fj
a trace of any belief on his part that the two
would ever be coextensive. The new social order
was to be religious ; historically, it has made much
progress through the aid of religious organizations.
But it is as much grander than the church as an
ideal is grander than the actual ; as much wider as
social life is wider than any one institution ; as much
more catholic as Christianity is more catholic than
ecclesiasticism.1 V
Jesus, then, thinks that an ideal society is not
beyond human attainment, but is the natural pos
sibility for man's social capacities and powers.
The new social order, as a spiritual fellowship
between men and between God and men that
expresses itself in social relations, may at once be
established potentially in the midst of that other
social order, which is based upon a disregard of
the normal religious and social capacities of men,
and which becomes of necessity self-destructive
and in tendency anarchistic. In His conception
of this progressively realized social order we see
that two elements are essential : the divine sonship
1 For an exceedingly well balanced discussion of this point see
Denney, Studies in Theology, ch. viii. See also Fairbairn, The
Place of Christ in Modern Theology,^. 515-519; Orr, The Chris
tian View of God in the World, especially, pp. 402-412; Freemantle,
The World as the Subject of Redemption.

78 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
as seen in the moral regeneration of the individual ;
and the organic union of good men typified by
the family. To describe in some detail the exten
sion of these principles of sonship and brotherhood
to the various phases and institutions of social life,
and to show in what lie the forces that aid in their
incarnation, must be left to subsequent chapters.

CHAPTER IV

THE FAMILY

If society be the union of those who by nature
demand social life, all its various phases will be
expressions of this need of union. But this,
as we have already seen, does not exhaust the
social principles of Jesus. Humanity can be
normally social only when it is fraternal. The
ideal is not merely a union, but a union of
brothers. And what is thus true of society in
the aggregate is true also of its various institu
tions. There too must fraternity be the ideal
and the test of normality. This principle is not
hard to trace, but in some particulars it has singu
larly escaped attention. In nothing, however, is it
more apparent than in Christ's teaching in regard
to the family. I
As one might expect a priori, the family is
regarded by Jesus as one manifestation of the
essential social character of men. The sexes
19

80 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
complement one another as the two halves of a
whole. This finds expression in his well-known
use of the words and incidents of Genesis. Mar
riage has a divine origin. Husband and wife
are joined together by God, so that they are no
longer two but one. It is noteworthy that Jesus
thus regards marriage as monogamous — not in
deed as the result of an evolving conventionality,
but as the result of the divine creative act.1
Monogamy is thus regarded by him as the only
normal, the only divine basis of family relations.
By this reaffirmation of the noble social teaching
of Moses,2 Jesus sets his disapproval upon all
forms of plural marriage, whether illegal or legal.
In none of his teachings have we greater economy
of expression, but in none is his meaning less in
doubt. But it would be an incomplete presentation
of the position of Jesus to stop at this point.
If we attempt to arrange his thought in any
system, the union of two persons in marriage
becomes one factor in the union of the race ; a
1 Matt. 19:5,6; Mark 10 : 6-8. No words reported as those of
Jesus are more certainly his than these concerning marriage and
divorce. 2 It should not be overlooked that in using the expression
"twain" Jesus follows the Septuagint rather than the Hebrew,
which reads simply " them."

THE FAMILY 8 1
union which appears at once natural for man
kind, and also a symbol of that divine social
order which is to come, when all men are to be
sons of £lod and society thus a brotherhood.
Marriage is not the creature of law. Law can
simply recognize and protect it. With Jesus
on its physical side marriage is an actual union
of complementing personalities — a forming of
one flesh. It is one of the primal facts of
human life, and because it is a conditioning fact
and not a merely formal conception of the law
books, it is especially sacred and inviolable. It
is in itself a fraternity — a microcosmic kingdom
of God.
On its physical side Jesus regards marriage —
like the other physical elements in the evolving
social order — as an institution to be found only
in the present seon. The much-married woman
of the Sadducees' riddle,1 in the life beyond the
grave was no longer to be subject to the perplex
ing levirate law, for in the resurrection humanity
neither marries nor is given in marriage, but is
to be as the angels of heaven. And yet while
Jesus thus recognizes the physical basis of mar
riage, he never regards it as in any way sinful
or ignoble ; so far is he removed from the perver-
1 Matt. 22: 23-30; Mark 12: 18-25; Luke 20: 27-36.
G

82 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
sions that an ascetic faith has so frequently forced
upon humanity.1 As long as human nature and
human relations are as they are, so long will
marriage be the first human tie. For itJies other
wise the closest are to be broken. Filial depend
ence, the family itself are to yield before the
marital union and the future family. But it is
altogether within the spirit of Jesus' teaching,
although perhaps not to be derived from any of
his recorded words, to say that the physical is not
the only, nor by any means the permanent ele
ment in marriage. This must be found in the
same fraternal spirit which guarantees a perpetu
ation of the kingdom. Just as this ideal society
is independent of physical bounds and changing
physical elements, so, we may infer, is the ulti
mate basis of the marriage relation to be found
in spiritual rather than physical unity. Between
man and wife here is to be a union in spirit that
springs from a love that is not mere passion but
is volitional and moral. When physical surround
ings have passed, away, when there is no longer
need of this means of perpetuating the race, then
will the spiritual union, which must have accom
panied the physical, alone survive, and the ties of
1 Nor is there a hint of the later Christian teaching that it is
unwise for a widow or widower to remarry.

THE FAMILY 83
family become merged in those of the all-embrac
ing fraternity, and the love and union of husband
and wife transmuted into the love and union of
children of a common Father.
Thus here, as in other social relations, if the
family is to be a phase of the divine society, the
spiritual union must supplement and ennoble
the physical. " If trust be incomplete, marriage,
we know, cannot have its perfect work. If trust
be broken, marriage perishes. But by interchange
of thought and hope and prayer in marriage, trust
ripens into faith."1
It is unnecessary for the appreciation of this
position of Jesus to follow him in his terminology.
It is of little or no consequence whether the basis
of this conception of the marriage relation be
regarded as a literal divine word or as human
nature itself ; whether the institution itself be
the outcome of a creative fiat or of evolution.
The one essential point is its absolute truth from
the point of view of both ethics and human his
tory. Marriage is indeed a fundamental human
relation ; it is in its normal condition when
monogamous ; it is something more than a living
together of man and woman ; it is a psychical
as well as a physical completion of individuals ;
1 Westcott, The Social Aspects of Christianity, p. 25.

84 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
and as such it is in the largest sense of the
term a fraternity that depends for its perpetua
tion upon love.1 II
From this point of view Christ's teaching in
regard to divorce becomes not only simple but
inevitable. So long as marriage is not a mere
matter of law or conventionality, but is one ex
pression of the fundamental social nature of man
in both its physical and spiritual expression ; and
so long as it is monogamous, to be characterized
by the modesty that is possible alone in such a
relation ; so long must it be unbreakable by stat
ute. Divorce by Jesus is regarded as impossible,
except as a formal recognition of an already
broken union. As marriage gives rise to an
actual union of personalities it can be broken
only by an actual severance of this union. When
this is not the case, law can no more annul it
than it can annul an arch. " What God hath
joined together let not man put asunder." In
1 " It is clear that monogamy has long been growing innate in
the civilized man. For all the ideas and sentiments now associated
with marriage have, as their implication, the singleness of the
union." — Spencer, Principles of Sociology, I., 673. See also p.
752 where he declares such a marriage to be "manifestly the ulti
mate form." So Westermarck, The History of Human Marriage,
p. 510. Drummond, The Ascent of Man is here suggestive.

THE FAMILY 85
this again Jesus was in contrast with his times.
The astonishing laxity which prevailed among the
fashionable clique at Rome, even if all due allow
ance be made for the natural exaggeration of
moralists and poets, is well known from the litera
ture of the empire,1 to say nothing of the early
Christian writers.2 But the same tendencies were
at work among the less corrupt circles of Judea.
There, too, the general laxity in regard to divorce
was quite as striking. The liberal school of Hillel
was here more the offender than that of Shammai.
By an exceedingly broad interpretation of Deut.
24 : 1 (the sole ground for divorce in the Mosaic
code), it was judged permissible to divorce a wife
if she had spoiled her husband's dinner, and later,
if we are to accept the words of R. Akiba, even if
the husband discovered a woman more to his lik
ing.3 Jesus was in fact opposed by his country
men, to whom, thanks to the popular teaching, his
doctrine seemed fanaticism. Moses, they objected,4
1 See Friedlander, Sittengeschichte der Homer, I., ch. 5 ; Dollin-
ger, The Gentile and the Jew, IL, 230 sq.
2 See, for instance, Clement of Alexandria and Jerome.
3 But there is here opportunity, as in the case of Juvenal, for a
large allowance for rhetoric. Yet the general ease of divorce is
undeniable. The Talmud devotes an entire tractate {Gitlin) to
the subject. (See Edersheim, Life of Jesus the Messiah, II. , 332
sq. ; Stern, Die Frau im Talmud; Weill, La Femme Juive.)
4 Matt. 19:7.

86 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
had allowed divorce, had even commanded that a
"bill of divorcement" should be given in case of
separation. Jesus was not to be shaken from his
position by any quotation of ancient authorities.
He admitted that Moses had allowed divorce as
an expedient, a choice between two evils, but,
appealing not to statute but to life, he protested
in words his hearers would have regarded as older
even than the law of Moses, that such permission
was in violation of a primary fact of human so
ciety, an undoing of the law of creation, a viola
tion of human nature.
It is a little remarkable, but indicative of the
importance Jesus accorded the family, that, not
content with thus enunciating a general principle,
he should have gone into minuter treatment of this
one social relation. His position upon many sub
jects which are of burning interest to-day, and, to
judge from the writings of the time, were often
quite as much so in his own day, is often non
committal, almost always reserved, although occa
sionally, as in the case of ceremonial uncleanness,
he expresses in a pregnant sentence a specific
principle. But in the matter of divorce he has
left us some of the most explicit legislation the
gospels have preserved. Under no circumstances,
provided that the marriage union is not actually

THE FAMILY 87
broken through the unfaithfulness of one of the
parties, is a husband to divorce his wife, or a wife
her husband.1 In case there is no such actual
breaking of the marriage tie, a husband who puts
his wife away, be it never so legally, causes her to
be judged as belonging to that class of women
who have really given grounds for divorce ; he
brands her an adulteress.2 If, on the basis of
such divorce she should marry, both she and the
new husband commit sin. The original union is
still existent. Yet if adultery has actually been
committed, the guilty party may be divorced.3 In
1 This addition is noteworthy. It had not been customary
among the Jews for wives to divorce their husbands, although about
the time of Jesus we meet several cases of its occurrence among the
official class. Thus Salome, sister of Herod I., divorced her husband
(Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, 15:7: 10), and later Herodias,
at least nominally, divorced her husband Herod, in order to live
with his brother, Herod Antipas. The Mishna also grants the wife
the right of seeking divorce. Yebumoth, 65, a. b. Cettubboth, 77, a.
But the custom was more Roman than Jewish.
2 Matt. 5 : 32.
3 This view presupposes the exceptive clause in Matt. 5 : 32 and
19:9. This position is not beyond question, especially since that
clause does not appear in Mark 10: n, although Meyer maybe
correct in saying that it is there understood as a matter of course.
It is also lacking in Luke 16 : 18, but the omission by Luke is not
so serious as that by Mark. Wendt {Teaching of Jesus, I., 354)
judges this omission as sufficient ground for the view that " the
simple, unqualified statement ' to put away a wife on the ground of
unchastity is not culpable adultery,' does not correspond with the

88 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
such a case it would appear as if the two parties
became de facto unmarried ; since their union is
broken both in its physical and its psychical
aspects, they are no longer one flesh, nor is theirs
a community of love. They are not, therefore,
forbidden by Jesus to marry again.1
But two things are here very evident : (i) Jesus
meaning of Jesus." That meaning is " that the obligation of
marriage is absolute, and no dissolution of it is possible without
incurring the guilt of adultery." And it must be admitted that on
critical grounds the addition of the clause by Matthew (so Bleek,
Weiss, Holtzmann, and others) is quite as probable as its omission
by Mark. (Yet see Gould, Critical and Exegetical Commentary
on the Gospel according to Mark, in local) Yet on the grounds
stated in the text the exception does not appear foreign to the
thought of Jesus. Even were the clause omitted, we should have
very possibly a strong rhetorical statement like others of Jesus.
(For example, Matt. 5 : 29, 30, 34.) And in any case the main
thought of Jesus would be unaffected. An interesting commentary
upon his position is to be seen in the interpretation put by Jesus
upon the status of the much married Samaritan woman, John 4:18.
1 See Hovey, The Scriptural Law of Divorce, and Studies in
Ethics and Religion, p. 321 sq. and commentaries (especially Meyer,
and Broadus) on the above passages. See also Strong, Philoso
phy and Religion, 431-442, and Woolsey, Divorce and Divorce
Legislation, ch. 2, although so far as his interpretation of the teach
ing of Jesus on this point is concerned, President Woolsey's views
were later reversed. (See the essay by President Strong just men
tioned.) The church has not generally favored this interpretation.
See Schmidt, Social Results of Christianity, p. 201 sq., and, espe
cially for the Roman Catholic position, Convers, Marriage and
Divorce, and Pascal, " L' Association Catholique, " Revue des Ques
tions Sociales et Ouvriercs, January, 1896.

THE FAMILY 89
does not command a divorce even in the most
extreme cases. His recognition of the possibility
of such a course of action is, so to speak, paren
thetic. The ideal of brotherhood and the need of
reconciliation would certainly favor a maintenance
of old relations even after divorce is permissible.
Forgiveness and reconciliation are as much the
supreme needs in the family as at the altar.1 (2)
There is nothing in his teachings that would lead
us to believe Jesus disapproved of the separation
of a married pair for other causes than the one
which would justify divorce. But remarriage on
the part of either husband or wife who are thus
separated would be regarded by him as a violation
of the marriage union that still exists between
them. The ground for this definiteness is not difficult
to discover. Marriage, both in its lower and its
higher aspects, is the basis of family unity. Family
life is the most sacred of all relations outside of
the relation between God and man. It is not to
be violated even in look and thought. Adultery
may be committed even when lust never passes
beyond the licentious glance.2 In the same pro
portion as the natural sanctity of marriage is
1 Matt. 5 : 23, 24.
2 Matt. 5 : 27, 28.

90 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
injured, in the same proportion is the nature of
man outraged and ideal fraternity broken. To
dishonor this first of human relationships is to
loosen the bonds of society, to lower present social
ideals, to do injury to the essential nature of both
the man and the woman. It was, therefore, not
in the spirit of a purist or a fanatic that Jesus thus
put checks upon divorce, but in that of the ethical
and social philosopher. Nor — and this is a re
markable thing — is there a trace of the current
formal conception that the husband had any prop
erty rights in his wife. On the contrary, as will
presently appear, Jesus, to a surprising degree,
anticipated to-day's belief in the equality of the
sexes. It was this as well as the underlying
principles of his ideal society that led him in the
face of popular opinion thus to formulate these
strict statutes. Modern sentiment, like the legis
lation and the sentiment of the professional
teachers of his day, is opposed to such severity in
the morals of matrimony. Marriage is assuming
much more the character of a legal status than of
a natural union. Its continuance is increasingly
believed to be dependent upon the desires of the
parties concerned and the decision of the courts.
So far as the mere legal separation of unequally
or ill-matched persons is concerned, the ideal

THE FAMILY 9 1
described by Jesus would not antagonize this
modern tendency, but the general consent of past
and present moral teachers and statesmen agrees
with his noble rejection of the admissibility of the
scandalous travesties of life's most sacred union,
to which nowadays these separations generally
lead. We are not now concerned with the prac
ticability of such an ideal ; it may be too absolute
for an imperfect society. But it can at least be
suggested that there are grounds for hesitation
before one admits that the spirit animating this
part of the social teaching of Jesus has been
materially surpassed by much of to-day's divorce
legislation.1 Ill
It is characteristic of the balance of Jesus that
at this point he introduces something in the nature
of an exception to this general teaching. Although
marriage is thus sacred, and although in it there is
one of the nucleus points of the kingdom, yet all
men are not to marry. There is something pathetic
1 For an opposite view of the teaching of Jesus, see Tissot, Le
Mariage et le Divorce, ch. ix., and a careful statement by Carroll D.
Wright in Crafts, Practical Christian Sociology, 446-452. It should
not be forgotten that the attempt is being made here simply to
discover the exact ideal of Jesus. The question of its practicability
and its gradual realization belongs to the discussion of sociological
dynamics.

92 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
as well as humorous in the anxiety shown by the
disciples over his stern teaching.1 It seems to
them that if divorce be thus forbidden it were
better not to marry at all ! Jesus, with character
istic tact, grants them their conclusion, but supplies
it with premises of a much loftier standard, and in
his treatment of the matter presents one of the
fundamental teachings of his entire system, viz.,
that a good thing must always be sacrificed for a
better thing. No man, unless like Origen he be
utterly blinded by an ascetic and fanatic fervor,
could ever misinterpret the intense words in which
Jesus expresses this axiom. They simply form one
of those characteristic additions with which he so
often modifies a truth otherwise absolutely stated.
While marriage is supremely good, yet if for any
cause it stand in the way of accepting the blessings
of the kingdom of heaven, it is to be avoided.
The welfare of others, the advancement of the
ideal society require the individual to yield private
rights. Whether it be to avoid the propagation
of an hereditary disease or criminal proclivity, or
whether it be that some great mission in life may
be the better fulfilled, celibacy may often be the
only form of life a man should adopt. But the men
who have thus "made themselves eunuchs for the
1 Matt. 19 : 20.

THE FAMILY 93
kingdom of heaven's sake " 1 are no more holier
than" men who have sacrificed other individual
desires and goods for the common weal. The
words of Jesus are a restatement of the familiar
teaching of the sacrificed eye and hand.2 And
Jesus himself lived by this standard, a celibate but
not an ascetic.
But possibly it may be urged that another excep
tion may be derived from the admission by Jesus
that Moses had yielded to the "hardness of heart"
on the part of the Jews,3 and had allowed divorce
on such grounds as might easily be made to per
mit no small latitude. In the light of this recog
nition of an adjustment of legislation to a people's
capacity, may we not have a modifying clause of
the ideal legislation ?
The objection is weighty, but, disregarding the
advisability of admitting such an accommodation
in case of reformatory legislation, as a modifica
tion. of an actual ideal of family life set forth by
Jesus it is not to be admitted. Jesus is here con
fessedly setting forth a social ideal for the present
age and for the very people he addressed. By
his own statements it cannot possibly apply to the
perfect society of the age to come, since then
divorce like marriage will be a question outgrown.
1 Matt. 19:12. 2 Matt. 5 : 29, 30. 3 Matt. 19:8; Mark 10:5.

94 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
To admit this modification would be to destroy his
social ideal of mutual fraternity. It would make
him in the same breath with which he declares
the indissoluble union of two persons to be the
divine plan of creation, also declare that after all
such a union is not essential in every case, but may
be replaced by a more or less indiscriminate multi
plication of partners. Such a contradiction, it
must be remembered, does not confront the man
who regards marriage as simply a contract which
guarantees certain peculiar rights to the two con
senting parties. In such a conception law makes
and law can unmake the union. But with Jesus
marriage is a fact, not a definition. God and
nature join ; man and law cannot separate. He
may be a dreamer. He certainly is not incon
sistent.1 Two further questions are, however, not an
swered : Would not this position of Jesus admit
divorce in case the marriage were broken in its
psychical side, though not on its physical ; that
is, in case of an utter destruction of conjugal love,
although neither husband and wife had otherwise
broken marital obligations ? and, second, would
1 For a brief discussion of these two possible conceptions of mar
riage see Dike, " Theory of the Marriage Tie," Andover Review,
December, 1893.

THE FAMILY 95
not the spirit if, indeed, not the letter of Jesus be
met in case of a divorce granted for an absolute
desertion; that is, would not Jesus so far favor the
position of modern law as to grant that desertion
is, if not constructive adultery, at least a real sev
ering of both physical and psychical union ?
So far as the first of these questions is concerned,
a moment's thought will convince one that this is
precisely the thing Jesus is attacking. Metaphysi
cally, it may be, such a position would be per
missible. Practically, it would be free love. And,
further, it is necessary to remember that in this
social teaching Jesus is not dealing with the possi
ble situations of isolated individuals, but with soci
ety as such. He is here subject to the necessities
that surround all those who provide for the com
mon good. It is not to the point, therefore, to
plead a resulting hardship in specific cases. But
it is not so easy to answer the second of these two
questions categorically. It is evident that deser
tion might easily be regarded as a redefinition of
"adultery," and that it has good reasons for being
admitted on the very grounds by which Jesus
establishes his general position. In this case,
therefore, we have a question of interpretation of
legislation, and there will always be opportunity
for question. But it nevertheless seems tolerably

96 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
clear that, except perhaps in extreme cases, such
redefinition is at once repugnant and dangerous.
Waiving the exceedingly important considerations
as to the ease by which such a conception of adultery
could be abused, it seems sufficient to say that as
a general interpretation this view is to be rejected.
It involves Conditions too similar to those which
Jesus immediately attacked, and it is a too severe
strain upon the plain meaning of the term1 used
by Jesus ; it is hinging too many possibilities upon
an exceptive clause which is itself omitted by an
original source.
But it should again be said that we are not so
much concerned with the applications of the teach
ing of Jesus as with the discovery of his concep
tion of the ideal forms of social life. It may very
likely appear that in an attempt at realizing his
ideal of social purity, legislators and reformers
must, like Moses, concede much to the hardness
of men's hearts. IV
It follows from this noble conception of mar
riage that woman is placed by Jesus upon a
plane of equality with man. She is neither the
creature of his fancy, nor is she in a relation of
either real or formal subjection. Here, it is true,
1 ivopvela..

THE FAMILY 97
Jesus was less out of accord with the tendencies
of his time. Throughout the Roman Empire
there was an appreciable advance in the position
of woman. Except in the ascetic philosophy
of the Essenes, among the Jews the wife
had always held a relatively high position, and
among the Romans this was increasingly true
through the neglect of the forms of marriage
involving in manu relations. But even after this
has been said, no person acquainted with Jewish
or Roman life of the first century would deny
that Jesus gives woman a position essentially
different from that accorded her by either philoso
phy or custom.
While among the Romans the steady emanci
pation through which woman was passing was
winning the contempt of the professional moralist
and the laughter of the writer of comedy ; and
while in Judea the noble ideal of motherhood
was being lowered by the ease by which divorce
might be obtained ; with Jesus there is neither
a recognition of a past subjection of woman, an
attempt at her emancipation, nor a lament over
the difficulties to be foreseen in the enforcement
of his teaching in regard to marriage. He simply
treats woman as an equal — equal in the matter
of marriage and divorce, equal as a companion.

98 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
More than once is the despicable conceit of some
Pharisee or disciple rebuked by his exhibition of
unconventional sociability. They might wonder
or complain ; but none the less he taught and
loved. All through the gospel story we find a
surprisingly high position accorded women. The
life of Jesus was to give them something more
than protection. It made them the companions
of men — equally privileged members of the new
human brotherhood. It was a virgin who bore the
Saviour ; a woman to whom he, as a child, was
subject, and by whom, in all probability, he was
trained and educated ; 1 to a woman, so far as
we have any record, he gave the first clear proc
lamation of his Messiahship.2 His first miracle
was wrought because of the faith and at the
solicitation of his mother.3 A woman, who be
cause of her grateful faith poured over him the
costly ointment, is the only person to whom
he promised an immortality of remembrance.4
Women ministered to his needs and supplied
him the means of support.5 Among the last
words Jesus spoke upon the cross were those
with which he commended Mary to the care of
1 Luke 2: 52. For training of children see Edersheim, Life of
fesus the Messiah, and Stapfer, Palestine in the Time of Christ.
2 John 4: J sq. 3 John 2 : 4 sq. " Mark 14:9. r' Luke 8 : 3.

THE FAMILY 99
his beloved disciple.1 A woman was the first
at the tomb,2 the first to see the risen Christ,3
the first to believe on him, and the first to bear
testimony to the resurrection.4 And is it alto
gether without suggestiveness that in his words
to Martha he should have carried his teaching
into the heart of housewifely cares and have
lifted women's life above cooking as he lifted
men's above money-getting ? 5
The by no means improbable story 6 of his
encounter with one unfortunate woman, which so
long held a position in our canonical collection,
is a natural outgrowth of the thought of a gen
eration upon which his infinite tact and delicacy
had made a profound impression. And it was
but an application of his noble conception of
the dignity of womanhood and wifehood when
the apostles and early Christians proscribed licen
tiousness as a defiling of the temple of the Holy
1 John 19 : 26, 27.
2 Matt. 28:1; Mark 16: 1; John 20:1.
3 Matt. 28:9; John 20: 11. 4 John 20: 18.
5 Luke 10 : 38-42. It cannot have escaped notice that Luke espe
cially among the evangelists gives prominence to the liberality of
Jesus. See Plummer, Critical and Exegetical Commentary on
the Gospel according to Luke, xlii.
''John 7:53-8:11. It is not, perhaps, without significance
that ayairau is the word used to describe the attitude of Jesus
toward women. Luke 7:47; Johnny.

tOO THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
Ghost,1 and refused to break irregular though
real marriages that were found to exist among
converts from heathenism at the time of their
entrance into the church.2
And throughout the gospel story the same
equality is observed. He made them members
of his society with no distinctively low position,
and within the early church their worth was
recognized and their needs supplied as in the
case of men. As he says who more than all
the New Testament writers has appreciated the
real significance of this phase of the work of Jesus,
"In Christ there is neither male nor female."3 •
Two objections may be raised to this position :
On the one hand it may be urged that he some
times spoke brusquely to women — • even to his
mother.4 But this objection is trivial and would
doubtless never have been raised except for the
unusually awkward and harsh expression in our
English version. On the other hand, it may be
urged with far more force that Jesus never ex
pressly attacked those social customs that force
women into infamy, or those conventionalities that
have for centuries made her politically and legally
the inferior of man ; in short, that he never poses
1 i Cor. 6:15-20. 3 Gal. 3:28.
2 1 Cor. 7 : 10, 1 1 ; 1 Tim. 3:2. * John 2 : 4; Matt. 15 : 21-28.

THE FAMILY IOI
as the champion of the rights of women. But
neither does he expressly attack many other social
sins and injustices. Nor — and time has proved
this — was it needful that he should. The genus
includes the species, and if once men get to incor
porating the social principles he has enunciated,
special forms of evil will of necessity disappear.
Fortunately for the world, he who championed the
cause of a repentant harlot was not the statistician
of prostitution, much less its casuistical defender.
He was its deadliest enemy. To demand that the
friend of Mary Magdalene and the eulogist of
the heathen mother and the self-sacrificing widow
should preach woman suffrage ; or to complain
because he whose life was a continuous argument
for equality and fraternity among men and women
did not revise the Old Testament until it accorded
with the Christian conceptions of to-day, is to ask
that which is as silly as it is impossible and
needless. V
And what is true of his honoring of woman, is
strikingly apparent in- his regard for childhood.
Jesus himself was a man without home,1 without
wife, without child ; but he has left words which
1 For this seems the most natural interpretation of Luke 9 : 57,
58, notwithstanding the proposal of Professor Bruce {Expositor,

102 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
have for all ages sanctified childhood. In his own
life, despite the scantiness of the records found in
Luke and Matthew, there is presented an ideal of
boyhood. He rendered filial obedience to his
parents and as a " child grew and waxed strong,
filled with wisdom, and the grace of God was upon
him."1 In his words over the little children who
were forbidden by the disciples to come to him,
he has lifted childhood into a type of character,
and has given children their share in the kingdom
of God.2 In fact, with Jesus the vocabulary of
the family becomes one of choicest affection. His
disciples are his " little children," doubly dear
when he is about to leave them.3 All earnest
members of his divine brotherhood are his family.4
In the comparisons of Jesus we again see clearly
the underlying Christian ideal of the family.
Here, as in the case of women, among his words
there is no exhortation to either paternal or filial
love. The apostle, less filled with a profound
confidence in the inmost nature of man and more
concerned with halting converts, bids sons obey
their parents and fathers not to provoke their
October, 1896) to regard the words as figuratively portraying his
rejection by the leaders of his fatherland.
' Luke 2 : 40 ; cf. Luke 2 : 52.
2 Matt. 19: 13-15; Mark lo : 13-16; Luke iS: 15-17.
:' John 13 : 33; Mark 10 : 24. d Matt. 12 : 49, 50.

THE FAMILY 103
children to wrath.1 But such commands were
impossible for Jesus. With him paternal love is
as human and natural as life. To command it
would have been to make the holiest of instincts
the product of effort. From the very method of
his teaching Jesus must needs have started with
some absolute ideal to which he might compare
spiritual relations, and which, already understood,
would make intelligible that which was difficult to
understand. Other teachers have felt the same
need, and this highest type of holiest relations has
been found in many things — numerical harmo
nies, nature, the state. Jesus found it in the family.
Even among evil men the paternal instinct gives
good gifts and the deception of a child is unthink
able.2 Love and kindliness between brothers are
spontaneous3 and their absence is a type of all
that is selfish and ungodlike.4 To give up family
relations is the supreme test of loyalty.5 Thus it
is that, as has already appeared is his habit, Jesus
here using the noblest forms and words for his
noblest teaching, makes the members of the
1 Eph. 6:1, 4; Col. 3: 20, 21.
2 Matt. 7:9-11; Luke 11 : 11-13.
3 Matt. 5 : 47; John 8 : 42.
1 Luke 15 :25, 32 ; cf. Matt. 5 : 22; 10 : 21.
5 Matt. 19: 29. Here belong the severe commands of Luke 9 :
57-62.

104 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
divine society brothers ; while paternal love is
his representation of the love of God,1 and the
family as a unit, his type of that divine society
toward which humanity with a Christ within it
must move.
It is because of this supreme position of family
relations, assigned and presupposed by Jesus, that
he has no need to prescribe any minute regula
tions as to education and the other duties owed
to and by children. His own day was full of
educational opportunities for boys and girls, both
Roman and Jew, but this was not the cause of
his omission of this phase of child-life. As in the
case of the position of women, his ideal of the
family is dynamic. Here, as in so much of his
work, the real significance of Jesus lies farthest
from that of a mere tabulator of duties. He could
afford to leave his ideal society with its details not
filled in, because with the ideal he gave also evolu
tionary forces. Once possessed by the ideal of
brotherhood, and once, be it never so feebly,
under the influence of these spiritual forces, each
generation could be trusted to transform the world
in which it lived into a greater or less approxima
tion to the kingdom. In this disregard of the
temporary, and in his sublime trust in the salva-
1 Luke 15 : 11-32.

THE FAMILY 105
bility of human society, and especially in the pos
sibility of recuperation that lies in the health
and goodness of social instincts if once they are
allowed a normal spiritual environment, Jesus
stands infinitely removed from even the best of
his followers. They argue where he believes.
They legislate where he inspires. The office of
each is necessary, for the apostles, like the Chris
tians of subsequent epochs, must needs incarnate
the principles of Jesus in the midst of different
social forces and thus form one stage in the suc
cessive approaches to that new society whose ideal
Jesus set before humanity. But he is the archi
tect ; they are the craftsmen, the hewers of wood
and stone. VI
It is at this point that Jesus leaves the family,
the first social unit. He has given no specific
regulations in regard to the up-bringing of chil
dren. He has not concerned himself with those
difficult domestic problems with which the apos
tles were to be so mightily tried. It was enough,
apparently, for him to have applied clearly the
supreme social ideals of divine sonship and human
fraternity to this first great union of humanity.
He has shown that such applications involve above
all unity of the family and therefore the sanctity

106 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
of the marriage tie and the dignity of woman.
The carrying of such principles into the details
of human relationship, with the accommodation
of them to the needs and possibilities of an im
perfect society, was left by Jesus especially to
his immediate followers. But his words were
enough. Through all the difficulties that such
accommodation involved they kept fast hold upon
the noble parallel of their Master. As with him
the new social order was to be a family with God
as its father and men as its children, so with them
the church was the bride of the- Lamb, and every
fatherhood and family in heaven and on earth was
named of that great Father before whom they
daily bowed the knee.

CHAPTER V

THE STATE

"The conception of the state," says Bluntschli,1
" has to do with the nature and essential charac
teristics of actual states. The idea or ideal of the
state presents a picture, in the splendor of imagi
nary perfection, of the state as not yet realized,
but to be striven for. The conception of the state
can be discovered only by history ; the idea of the
state is called up by philosophical speculation."
No one will be apt to expect from Jesus an his
torical study of the conception of the state. He
was a student neither of history nor of politics.
But there is no lack of facts that go to prove that
men since his day have looked to him as furnishing
an ideal of statecraft almost as much as of morals
and religion. I
If one looks to the early Christian communities
for their political attitude, one is immediately
1 The Theory of the State, Eng. trans., p. 15.
107

108 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
struck with the prevalent policy of laissez faire.
It is true that the hospitable Jason1 of Thessa
lonica suffered at the hands of his fellow-citizens
for harboring those who were acting " contrary to
the decrees of Caesar, saying that there is another
king, one Jesus," and it is by no means impossible
that others of the Christian community may also
have become involved.2 But both he and they
were the victims of a religious persecution that
sought to justify itself by the use of terms treason
able in sound. The attitude which the churches
ordinarily held to the Roman administration was
that seen in the anti-revolutionary advice given by
Paul to the Christians at Corinth — " Let each man
abide in that calling wherein he was called"3 —
and in the more specific teaching of the later
epistles, to "pray for kings and all that are in
high places,"4 and to be "subject to every ordi
nance of man for the Lord's sake : whether it be
to the king, as supreme ; or to governors, as sent
by him for vengeance on evil-doers and for praise
to them that do well," to "fear God, honor the
1 Acts 17: 1-9. 2 I Thess. 2: 14.
3 1 Cor. 7 : 20. The attitude of Paul himself is seen in his appeal
to Cajsar (Acts 25 : 10) as well as in his use of his Roman citizen
ship as a means of escaping the designs of the Jews (Acts 16:37;
22: 25).
4 I Tim. 2 : 2.

THE STATE IO9
king." 1 This law-abiding spirit of the early Chris
tians is further evidenced not only by similar ap
peals of Clement of Rome 2 and of Polycarp,3 but
also by the well-known incident reported by Pliny4
to Trajan of their giving up their religious com
mon meal in order not to appear guilty of break
ing the imperial law against sodalities.
But by the time of Justin Martyr5 we find the
Christian expressions concerning the kingdom of
God less carefully guarded, and a misconception of
their teachings on the part of the heathen grow
ing easy. Probably these misconceptions were
not altogether unfounded. For it would be but
natural if the persecutions through which the
church passed should lead it to emphasize the
coming kingdom. To Tertullian the conversion of
the Caesars seemed as unlikely as the elevation of
a Christian to the imperial throne,6 while Origen
1 1 Peter 2: 13, 17.
2 Epistle to Corinthians, chs. 60, 61.
3 Epistle to Philippians, ch. 12. Other instances are given in
Sanday and Headlam, Romans, p. 372.
* Pliny, Epistles, bk. x., ch. 97. See also Ramsay, The Church
in the Roman Empire, ch. a. The absence of revolutionary ten
dencies is also evidenced by the -tradition preserved by Hegesippus
and Eusebius that Domitian sent to Palestine for the relatives of
Jesus on the ground that they were planning a revolt, but finding
them innocent peasants he sent them back.
5 For instance, Apology, ii., 58. c Apology, ch. 21.

IIO THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
replies to the sneer of Celsus that Christians had
best undertake the management of the state, " In
whatever city we are, we have another country,
which is founded by the word of God."1 From
this time on the more ascetic bodies of Christians
seem to have withdrawn themselves as far as
possible from civil duties, while the more moderate
party was content to endure the state as a neces
sary evil.
The new significance in the empire given the
church by Constantine and his successors placed
the political import of Christianity in an entirely
new light. On the one hand the Christians saw
the triumph of Christ in their unexampled political
power, while on the other, especially in the West
where the misery of the fifth century began to be
felt, pagan writers charged the misfortunes of the
time to the new Christian rulers. In meeting this
charge, Augustine rightly enough emphasizes the
evil political tendencies to be seen under the
heathen emperors, but in the De Civitate Dei also
defends Christian teaching from the charge of
being inimical to the state. " Let them give us,"
he urges, " such warriors as the Christian doctrines
require they should be ; such subjects ; . . •
1 See Neander, History of the Christian Religion and Church,
I., 272.

THE STATE III
such kings and judges ; such payers and receivers
of tribute as they ought to be according to the
Christian doctrine ; and would they still venture
to assert that this doctrine is opposed to the state ?
Nay, would they not rather confess without hesi
tation, that, if it were followed, it would prove the
salvation of the state." Yet Augustine does not
attempt to construct any theory of the state from
scriptural data. He distinctly turns away l from
such an endeavor. The City of God is not an ideal
commonwealth, but a heavenly, an eschatological
reign of peace which is to be expected, but not
enjoyed in this age. Priests and prophets had
foretold it, the saints of Israel had prayed to see
it ; the sacred books were full of its ceaseless con
flict with its evil counterpart, that fruit of Adam's
fall, the earthly state. And before this glorious
millennial age could come, this enemy must for
ever disappear.
With the revival of the Roman Empire by
Charlemagne, and especially with the later at
tempts at a dual empire during the Middle Ages,
the theoretical side of politics became increasingly
dependent upon scriptural supports. It was char
acteristic of the exegetical processes of the time
that such support should often be gained by a sort
1 De Civitate Dei, bk. 19, ch. 17.

1 12 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
of allegorizing process from expressions utterly
lacking in political content. Not to plunge into
the mysteries of Daniel and the Apocalypse, noth
ing is more fundamental in the argument one
meets constantly in mediaeval documents concerned
with the bitter struggle between pope and emperor,
than the appeal to the two swords.1 It is impossi
ble to discover who for the first time used this
remarkable argument to establish the need of a
spiritual and temporal head for the state. By the
time it is used by the first combatants of the
eleventh and twelfth centuries, it has acquired
universal assent as inspired teaching, and the only
matter of concern is whether both swords were
given to Peter, thus proving the superiority of the
pope ; or one each to Peter and John, thus estab
lishing the coordinate power of the emperor. By
the time of the formularies found in the Sachsen-
spiegel, so far as the Holy Roman Empire is con
cerned, it has become the epitome of mediaeval
political theory. It is not to our purpose to notice
the extraordinary logic of the vigorous letter of
Henry IV. which accompanied the equally vigor-
1 Luke 22 : ^8. And they said, Lord, behold here are two
swords. And he said unto them, It is enough. Boniface VIII.
and the Bull Unam Sanctam show the possibility of this sort of
reasoning.

THE STATE 113
ous letter of the German bishops to Gregory VII.,1
but it cannot be overlooked that not only does
Henry appeal to the words of Peter2 and Paul,3
but that he also expressly states that the royal
authority, like the papal, is the gift of Jesus Christ.
Frederick Barbarossa argues quite as directly and
forcibly.4 On the other hand, the popes estab
lished their claims to superiority by the "plurality
of the keys."5
These are by no means all the texts used by the
mediaeval writers and combatants. As Bryce says,
" Every passage was seized upon when submission
to the powers that be is enjoined, every instance
cited where obedience had actually been rendered
to imperial officials, a special emphasis being laid
on the sanction which Christ himself had given to
Roman dominion by pacifying the world through
Augustus by being born at the time of the taxing,
1 Monumenta Germanics Historica, Leges II. , 44 sq.
2 I Pet. 2: 17.
3 Gal. I : 8.
4 For instance, in his remarkable proclamation following the affair
at Besancon : " Cumque per electionem principum a solo Deo reg-
num et imperium nostrum sit, qui in passione Christi filii sui duobus
gladiis necessariis regendum orbem subjecit, cumque Petrus apostolus
hac doctrina mundum informaverit : 'Deum timete, regem honorifi-
cate,' " etc. Bluntschli reprints {Theory of the State, p. 40 n.) the
sentence from the Sachsenspiegel mentioned above.
5 Matt. 16: 19.

114 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
by paying tribute to Caesar, by saying to Pilate,
' Thou couldest have no power at all against me
except it were given thee from above.' " : It is not
too much to say that mediaeval political theory is
one branch of the all-embracing theology of the
times. Not merely within the circle of imperial
ideas, but generally, " the state was held to be an
organization willed and created by God." 2 Thus
Thomas Aquinas, although he does not greatly
appeal to Scripture, regards the political state not
as did Augustine as a consequence of the fall, but
as a necessary part of the world's life. Law in his
estimation was an outflowing of the divine nature.
But the attempt to discover a divine and script
ural basis for the state has been by no means
limited to the Middle Ages. There have always
been Savonarolas who would make Christ king in
their cities, and Cromwells who would establish a
kingdom of saints. Throughout the fierce struggles
that gave birth to modern Europe and erected in
America the United States, armies have repeatedly
alternated drill with prayer and fighting with
catechising. One has but to recall such careers as
1 Holy Roman Empire, p. 113. Dante {De Monorchia) is
probably the best representative of this mediaeval political theology
from the side of the empire.
2 Bluntschli, p. 57.

THE STATE 115
those of Calvin and Zwingli, William of Orange
and Winthrop ; such extravagances as those at
Minister; such reigns as that of James II. of
England ; such hereditary hatreds as that between
the north and south of Ireland ; such legislation
as that of Massachusetts Bay, to feel at once that
politics have always been profoundly affected by
theologies. But after all, few if any of the theologico-political
thinkers of the past have troubled to separate the
teaching of Jesus from the general teaching of
both Old and New Testaments. It may very well
be that in this failure to distinguish, not only
between the history of the Jews and the teachings
of Christianity, but also between the teaching of
Jesus and that of the apostles, men have lost some
of the distinction that appears between the aims
of Jesus and those of the apostles, as well as
between his ideal and their more or less incomplete
attempts at realizing such an ideal.
II
Jesus nowhere gives systematic teaching in
regard to politics. His attitude towards the
state and political relations is to be seen, if at
all, in his own life, in scattered statements, and
in general comparisons and implications.

Il6 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
As regards his own life, it is very evident
that he obeyed the local and imperial govern
ments under which he lived, and that he dis
tinctly refused to be made a governor or a king,
or in any way to be involved in political revolu
tion, preferring death to political agitation.1
While it is, of course, in the main true that
this attitude of conformity was due to the con
ditions which governed his work as a religious
teacher, it is none the less probable that in it
there was a recognition of the necessity and the
rightful claims of the state.
The principles which he enunciates are very
general and scattered. Nowhere have we any
thing like the fulness and the explicitness that
mark his teachings in regard to marriage and
divorce. The most celebrated text,2 " Render
unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and
unto God the things that are God's," is rather
an avoidance of specific teaching than an enun
ciation of a principle. The position in which
Jesus found himself precluded any unequivocal
answer.3 That was why his opponents asked
1 John 6:15; IS : 36; Acts 1 : 5 sq.
2 Matt. 22: 18-22.
3 The taxes were a constant cause of revolt. See Josephus, An
tiquities of the Jems, IS : 1 : 1-6; 20 : 5 : 2; Acts 5 : 37.

THE STATE 117
the question. His answer, therefore, was one
that might be interpreted either favorably or
unfavorably according to the conception his op
ponents held as to whether or not Caesar really
owned the coins. Once grant (as the account
would lead us to suppose they did grant) that
"the image and superscription" on the coin
implied the sovereignty of Caesar, and the reply
of Jesus would of necessity pronounce the pay
ment of taxes legitimate.1 Deny that implica
tion and his reply says nothing of the law. It
is, therefore, obvious that any wide application
of this text to the exigencies of politics must
first of all presuppose the sovereign rights of
the ruler. Besides, it is clear that in the mind
of Jesus the emphasis was upon the thought of
rendering to God the things that were his.
The entire reply was a rebuke to their insidious
quibbling. If, however, Jesus be credited with something
more than an ad hominem argument, it is pos
sible to go a step farther and discover in these
words something like a genuine political prin-
1 That the effigy was regarded by the Jews as implying sover
eignty is clear from the fact in the revolt against Hadrian they re-
stamped the Roman coins. See Madden, Coins of the Jews, 176, 203,
and Renan, Life of Jesus (Am. ed., 1895), 337 n-

Il8 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
ciple. The Jews by using the coins — for we
dismiss as trifling the question as to whether
such coins were actually in existence — in so far
were served by the Roman government. They,
therefore, owed it some service in return. This
service was the payment of taxes. But it will
not do to press this, and it is much safer to say
that in these words Jesus lays down no princi
ple as to the righteousness or unrighteousness
of any form of government than to plead them
either as an excuse for submission to tyranny or
as an incentive to a struggle for independence.
Hardly more direct is their application to the
relations of church and state. Despite the use
made of them to lay "the foundation of spirit
ual as distinct from temporal power, thus mak
ing firm the base of true liberalism and true
civilization,"1 it is self-evident that Jesus was
not arguing in regard to a state church or any
kindred subject, but was calling his questioners
back to a sense of their duties to God. In the
light of what has been said it seems by no
means clear that Jesus would exclude obedience
to law from the duties of a religious man.
In Matthew 17:27 we have another instance
in which he apparently submitted to the de-
1 Renan, Life of Jesus (Am. ed., 1895), 33^-

THE STATE U9
mands of the tax collector and even justified it
by the aid of a miracle. But even if one were
not to reject the entire account on the ground
that the miraculous element contained is inhar
monious with the other miraculous elements of
the New Testament, it would by no means fol
low that even in this text we have data for po
litical teaching. The tax which he so paid was
not a political tax, but a religious levy for the
support of the temple at Jerusalem.1 It is still
true that Jesus submitted to an existing author
ity, albeit ecclesiastical rather than political,
although not altogether without certain protests.
At any rate, the illustration would far better
serve as an argument for tithes than for taxes.
But the whole incident reads quite as much as
anything else like a rebuke for the over-zealous
haste with which Peter promised to pay the
temple tax. It is a most astonishing exegesis
that finds in it an argument for freeing the
clergy from taxation !
More distinct is the answer given by Jesus to
the well-meant boast of Pilate 2 that he had the
power of punishing or acquitting : " Thou wouldst
1 Edersheim, Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah, II., m-113.
See also Exodus 30 : 1 1 sq. ; Neh. 10 : 32 sq. The Mishna has a
separate treatise on the subject. 2 John 19 : 11.

120 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
have no authority against me, except it were
given thee from above." At the first glance it
would appear as if these words are to be taken
according to their historical interpretation and
thus commit Jesus to the theory of the divine
right of kings, not to mention the whole mass of
pusillanimity and casuistry known as the doctrine
of Passive Obedience. But it seems somewhat
strange to think of Jesus at this supreme hour
setting forth a political theory. It is much more
natural to regard these words as a part of his
philosophy of providence.1 They do indeed
justify Pilate as a judge, and express submission
to a government as to any fact of society, but
they by no means make the right of kings
any more divine than a myriad other rights.
The song of Pippa,
" God's in his heaven,
All's right with the world,"
would come far nearer expressing the attitude of
Jesus than the sermons of Bishop Berkeley.
Nor when we pass from the search for definite
statements to a consideration of the implications
and the comparisons of the teachings of Jesus do
we gain any more definite results. He frequently
1 Compare Matt. 6 : 25-34.

THE STATE 121
uses certain phases of royal life to illustrate his
teachings : the kingdom of God in some respects
he said was like a would-be king who had rebel
lious subjects ;' or a king who gave a marriage
supper to his son, only to find himself insulted ; 2
or a king who was more merciful than one of
his subjects ; 3 while the misfortunes that come
upon a kingdom torn by civil war, furnished him
arguments for proving his own innocence of com
plicity with Satan.4 These comparisons, coupled
with the absence of any serious5 criticism of
royalty, make it safe to say, that while we are
lacking in definite political teaching emanating
from Jesus, we cannot maintain to the contrary,
that he regarded government as an evil. But
his kingdom was indeed not of this world,6 and
these comparisons yield no data for generali
zation. In the light of these facts it is certainly a
strange use of language to speak of the words
1 Luke 19 : II sq. 3 Matt. 18 : 23 sq.
2 Matt. 22:2. 4 Mark 3: 24; Matt. 12:25.59.
0 For no one except a fanatic would see in the somewhat cut
ting reference to the luxury of courts (Matt. 11:8; Luke 7: 25)
anything opposed to monarchy as such. Nor do the references
to trials before kings and judges (Matt. 10: 18) imply any opposi
tion to the institutions they represent.
"John 18:36.

122 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
of Jesus as those of a teacher of politics, and
the Sermon on the Mount as a political document.1
It is true that the teachings there contained, if
once carried out, will, as Augustine protested,
produce good men and, therefore, in so far, good
citizens. And it is by no means difficult so to
use language as to make Jesus one of the long
line of victims upon the altar of political reform.
Was not the treasurer of his little society of a
dozen men a type of the " boodler " who, having
made what he could from the proposed kingdom,
sold out its king? And did not Jesus himself
perish as a revolutionist — a king of the Jews ?
But, after all, such a view is a tribute to its pro-
pounder's homiletical ingenuity rather than to his
understanding of the real life and significance
of Jesus. If he were indeed essentially a political
reformer or idealist, is it not an astonishing thing
that he should have left no more teachings in
regard to the state than these scattered, and on
1 So, if we can understand his position, Herron, The Christian
Society, p. 51. "It [The Sermon on the Mount] is in no sense a
sermon, least of all a discourse on individual piety, but a political
document, given on a political occasion, as truly as the Great
Charter or the Declaration of Independence." But it is possible
that the author does not expect these words to be taken literally,
but rather as impassioned rhetoric to express the fact that the
teachings of Jesus have a bearing upon political questions.

THE STATE 1 23
the whole, obscure texts ? Even the apostles gave
more political teaching than he.
Ill
Was Jesus then an anarchist ?
The question is absurd if one means by anarchy
the philosophy of dynamite and, terror. But this,
of course, is only a caricature of a far more ten
able political philosophy. Proudhon's " anarchic
government" was to be no more full of violence
than the " natural " state of Rousseau. The name
has unfortunate associations, but, at least as the
name of a philosophy, may stand for an ideal con
dition, which is to be the expression of law. But
this law is no longer as with Thomas Aquinas the
outflow of the divine nature, but is rather the
expression of a human nature that is instinctively
to do that which is good not only in the eyes of
its possessor, but also in those of his neighbors.
" Anarchy is not inconsistent with association,
but only with enforced association. It means
simply a state of society in which no one is bound
or obliged to do anything (whether to associate
with others or anything else); it is not opposed
to order, but only to enforced order ; nor to rule,
but only to obligatory rule. In other words it is
synonymous with liberty. Under such a system,

I24 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
individuals would simply be left free to do as
they chose; compulsion would disappear; the only
bonds in society would be moral bonds."1
There could be no inherent objection to calling
Jesus this sort of anarchist if his teachings were
sufficiently distinct to justify the use of any politi
cal term. It might, indeed, by its sensational con
nections attract new attention to his words. It
would not be the first time novelty has done
yeoman service as truth. And it must be ad
mitted that at first glance there is something of
similarity between Jesus' conception of his new
social order and this benign and harmless politi
cal metaphysics, which, like a sheep in wolf's
clothing, is doing its best by masquerading under
an ill-omened name to startle the world into be
lieving it of practical importance. But unless our
conception of the teaching of Jesus is altogether
incorrect, not only would it be ill-advised to use
the term anarchy in speaking of his teaching, but
1 Salter, Anarchy or Government, p. 7. Two other opinions
may be requoted from this little work : " In heaven nothing like
what we call government on earth can exist." — Channing, Works,
p. 361. "Strict anarchy may be the highest conceivable grade of
perfection of social existence ; but, if all men spontaneously did
justice and loved mercy, it is plain that all swords might advan-
tageouslv be turned into ploughshares, and that the occupation of
judges and police would be gone." — Huxley, Essays, I., 39.

THE STATE 1 25
it would commit him to notions of government
and society, which, if we may judge from his
words, were utterly absent from his thought. For
instance, much of the plausibility of this irenic
anarchy depends upon the conception of the state
as a mere coercive regulator of individuals who
need an umpire to decide and enforce the extent
to which each must yield to the other in the
interest of social peace. Once conceive of the
state as something more than this agent of coer
cion, and the most captivating argument of the
anarchist weakens before some Utopia of the
socialist pure and simple. Now the words of
Jesus should not be forced to train with those
of either school. His thought is not political.
He stands no more committed to an idea of gov
ernment as a keeper of the peace than to the
idea of government as a sort of executive com
mittee of a democracy. We may say that in
certain particulars his teaching would agree with
either conception. But the point of its agree
ment is not within the sphere of speculative or
practical politics, but within that of individual
duties and social regeneration. One can no more
call him an anarchist because he gives no political
teaching than he can call him a surgeon because
he never speaks of medicines.

126 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
And, indeed, his silence in itself is opposed to
all anti-governmental opinions. For it is not of
the same sort as his silence with regard to social
infamies. In such cases as slavery and prostitu
tion, his silence was possible because in his gen
eral teachings are contained forces which would
inevitably bring about their destruction. But, in
the case of government, it is by no means true
that the fundamental principles of his ideal social
order are destructive. If we once more look at
the matter historically, it becomes evident that
in the interpretation of his own age his silence
was not regarded as anarchistic ; and in later
times it has been true that while some peoples
who have come under his direct influence have
developed democracies, in no case of importance,
at least, is it true that they have been hostile to
governments as such. The Puritan was no less
a champion of strong government than the Cava
lier. The contrary interpretation which has been
placed upon his teachings by some Christians of
different centuries was clearly sporadic and due to
a misapprehension of the kingdom of God. That
the Christians of the early centuries regarded their
faith as inimical to the Roman Empire may be
true, but even in this case, in a singularly mate
rialistic fashion, they expected that in the place

THE STATE 1 27
of that empire which was persecuting them, or
which was going down before the barbarians be
cause of its vice, there would come, not anarchy,
but another kingdom which would be genuinely
monarchical — the everlasting kingdom of their
Christ. In other words, the very misconception
of the Christians of the third and fourth centuries
of the teachings of Jesus in regard to the king
dom is an evidence that they did not regard these
teachings as anarchistic.
And, indeed, the whole philosophy of Christ in
regard to man, both real and ideal, points to the
same conclusion. The union which he holds up
is not that of an aggregation, but is organic. The
kingdom of God is the union of brothers over
whom God himself is to reign. Mankind is not
composed of insulated individuals, but of social
beings, who seek not a convenient association for
exchange and other economic purposes, but an
absorbing and organic union with one another as
members of a family. If Jesus forbids his disci
ples to be called rabbi,1 it is not only that he may
teach them a lesson of humility and equality, but
also because he himself is their Master. Indeed,
within the little group of his immediate followers
there is a hint of there having been some organiza-
1 Matt. 23 : 8.

128 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS'
tion.1 To imagine that Jesus was so visionary as
to fancy that the unregulated promptings of a
community are sufficient to insure order, is to
forget his feeding of the five thousand,2 his regard
for fhe conventionalities of ceremonial purifica
tions ; 3 his unwillingness to interfere with the
work of John ; 4 his systematic evangelization of
Palestine ; 5 the repeated counsel and instruction
which he showered upon his followers. These
facts, it is true, do not point towards a theory of
the state, but they certainly suggest a mind that
was eminently ordered and respectful of formal
rather than instinctive order.
IV
Was then Jesus a socialist, a monarchist, a demo
crat ? Again must it be said he was neither. He
stands committed to no political teaching. In this
particular he is unique among the great teachers
who have affected the West. Others, like Plato
1 This may be conjectured from the arrangement of the names
in the lists of the apostles (Matt. 10:2-4; Mark 3: 16-19; Luke
6: 14-16). In all accounts the same names (so far as they can be
identified) occur in the same group of four, and the first of each of
these groups is always Peter, Philip, James.
2 Mark 6 : 14. 3 Mark 1 : 44. 4 John 4: 1-3.
6 Mark 1 : 35-37. Compare his sending out of his disciples for
the same purpose.

THE STATE 1 29
and Mahomet, have yielded to the temptation of
systematic thought or circumstances, and have
weighted their philosophy and their religion with
political teachings that were either so ideal as to
be impracticable or so practicable as to be soon out
grown. Jesus felt the force of the same tempta
tion.1 It was not through apathy that he refused
to enter the sphere of political thought. The
people demanded it, the professional teachers ex
pected it, the Romans finally punished him for
it. But with that concentration and foresight that
continually grows upon the student of his life, he
held himself sternly to the duties of a preacher of
religion and life. It was enough when he had
shown the fatherly monarchy of God, and the
fraternal obedience of men. As in the case of the
family, the details through which this conception
of society should be realized would be determined
by the spirit of brotherliness and the exigencies of
circumstance and time.
If men desire the sanction of Jesus for any form
of government, they must appeal not to specific
sayings, but to this spirit which is the basis of
the ideal order. The test of a theory or a fact
of government must not be Does Jesus teach it ?
but Does it make for that fraternity that is his
1 Matt. 4 : 8.

130 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
ideal for society ? Such a tendency is conceiv
ably the result of almost any form of political
organization. Jesus himself most naturally used
the monarchical vocabulary of his people just as
Plato used that of the Athenian aristocratic de
mocracy. But he thereby stands not at all com
mitted to monarchy as the ultimate form of
government. Yet for that reason the democrat
and the socialist cannot claim his exclusive au
thority. For it cannot be too strongly reiterated
that Jesus was not a political thinker, and that
he has left no divinely sanctioned form for politi
cal association. A government is Christian, not
because it is of this or that form, but because it
is attempting to realize the principles of fraternity
and love that underlie the entire social teachings
of Jesus. If it be objected that no such govern
ment can exist, that force and not love is still the
essential element of the state, the only rational
reply is one of doubt that is itself hope. For it
may well be doubted whether the teachings of
Jesus are not more operative in politics than
men think ; and it may well be hoped so long
as this possibility lasts, that, as the conceptions
of man and society and the family have more
and more come under the sway of the thought
of Jesus, so too politics are approaching, be it

THE STATE 131
never so slowly, that justice and altruism which
are to be the world's when once its kingdoms
have become the kingdom of the Lord and his
Christ. And one dares hope thus in the face of Euro
pean diplomacy and American municipalities !

CHAPTER VI

WEALTH

If ever sanity is needed, it is in economic
discussion. From the time when the Roman
plebs marched back from the Sacred Mount,
agitation and indignant pleas for justice have
won their victories through strikes or revolution,
but only when men have refused to admit the de
cisions of those who were able to see the issue
in its proper perspective. When some strong,
honest man has appeared in whom both war
ring parties trusted, his foresight has repeat
edly averted strife and reestablished industrial
peace. And so it has come about that not the
agitator but the arbitrator has been the real
conserver of economic progress. But the weight
as well as the need of sane judgment is doubled
when the religious leader of a community under
takes the amelioration of economic distress. Too
often, it must be confessed, the sympathies of a
dominant religious order have been with the
132

WEALTH 133
wealthy or the feudal class. Too seldom has
the plea of the curate been heard in the convo
cation of the bishops. But when decision has
fallen to those religious workers most closely in
contact with the people, then, as when the curates
of the States- General dealt the death-blow to the
first and second estates of France, traditional
privilege has given away before a new public
opinion. I
Perhaps it is with an intuition of this fact that
so often of late men have looked to Jesus as a
possible source of industrial peace. It is not
difficult to discover an incipient reaction against
a purely materialistic sociology, and a beginning
of the enunciation of teachings, which, whether
their propounders are aware of it or not, are in
many respects similar to his. It is no longer,
merely in the interests of a sanctified rhetoric
that his name is so often used, for men who
are bitterly hostile to the church and to the
Christ of fhe church are respectful towards the
Carpenter of Nazareth.
It would indeed be strange if one who at
tempted to establish a regenerate social order
should have overlooked those ambitions and striv
ings that make up so much of human life. We

134 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
should expect, too, that Jesus, if for no other
reason than completeness of thought, would not
merely give, but, as in the case of marriage,
would apply his general principles. It would
be, of course, unreasonable to expect him to legis
late specifically for every new combination in the
kaleidoscope of economic history. An itinerant
preacher in Judea could hardly be expected to
know of the great trade combinations of Alex
andria and Rome, to say nothing of those eco
nomic changes through which the centuries were
to pass. Even supposing that he had been able
to foresee thus minutely the future, had Jesus
attempted after the rabbinical fashion to draw
up minute rules for the conduct of industrial
life, he must needs have filled his brief career
with toil that would have been as superfluous
as incomplete. It is characteristic of genius to
distinguish between the accident and the essen
tial in human experience. Judged by the same
standard Jesus is the consummate genius, for
there is no phase of generic human life with
which he has not sympathy and to which his
great principle of fraternity does not reach.
Thus inevitably Jesus touched upon economics.
Not, indeed, as the man who collects material and
discovers its laws : far less as those who, after

WEALTH 135
the fashion of the schoolman, struggle with defi
nitions in which there is neither hope nor reality ;
nor yet as those prophetic hearts imagine who
see in his words panaceas of their own uncon
scious devising ; but as the economic philosopher
who seeks properly to relate all economic desires
and efforts to those other desires and strivings
which together constitute life. On no subject
does he speak oftener or with more emphasis.
Indeed, in so startling a form did he sometimes
throw his teachings that men instinctively have
refused to carry their letter into life, and when
occasionally some zealous soul has thought that
duty lay in literally following such teaching, the
courts have entrusted him to a guardian.
For this, if for no other reason, men have
slighted this phase of the teachings of Jesus,
daring to trust him as a saviour from a hell of
which he seldom spoke, but judging him incom
petent to establish upon earth that reign of love
which was the chief object of his thought. The
Jews erected monuments to the prophets their
fathers killed : Christians in worshipping the Son
of God have done despite to the Founder of
the Kingdom.

136 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
II
Misinterpretation is here easy. In many of his
sayings Jesus discriminates harshly against the
rich. To the rich, to the well-fed, to the merry, is
foretold woe.1 "It is easier," he once said, after
he had seen an earnest, rich young man turn from
him, " for a camel to go through a needle's eye
than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of
heaven." 2 In the most awful of his parables he
portrays the beggar Lazarus as sharing in the joys
of the blessed, unable to carry the least of his
comforts to the rich man suffering torments across
the great gulf.3 Our one monument of the earliest
Christianity is full of this severity.4 It seems but
the corollary of this discrimination when Jesus
called upon his disciples to share their wealth with
the poor. Such of them as had property were
bidden to sell it and to give alms,5 and no one who
asked for aid was to be denied. The young man
who had lived an exemplary life from his youth
was told that if he would be perfect he should sell
1 Luke 6 : 24. There is a critical possibility that these words are
not those of Jesus himself, but it is supported by argument so purely
subjective as to render conviction difficult.
- Matt. iS: 24. 4 James I : 10, II; 2:1-7; 4 : 13; 5:1-6-1
8 Luke 16: 19-31. 5 Luke 12:33.

WEALTH 137
what he had and give to the poor.1 Nay, even if
one had his goods taken from him he was not to
seek them again.2 And charity was not only to
be extended, it was to be enjoyed. When Jesus
first sent out the Twelve and (according to Luke)
subsequently the Seventy, among other directions
he gave them was to take no money and to accept
hospitality from all whom they deemed worthy.3
Within the immediate circle of his friends the
same principle to some extent held good, for not
only did Jesus apparently give to the poor,4 but he
himself was supported, at least in part, by devoted
women.5 For Jesus was a poor man without home
of his own,6 and dependent upon others not only
for support but for that hospitality which his own
kinsmen seemed to have refused or so to have
offered as to have made its acceptance a confession
of insanity.7
From one of these cases it would seem as if the
renunciation of wealth was one of the conditions of
joining the new society. But it is not without par
allels. The fishers of the lake were called to leave
a prosperous business to become fishers of men.8
1 Matt. 19 : 16-22. 5 Luke 8 : 3.
2 Matt. 5 : 42. 6 Matt. 8 : 19, 20; Luke 9 : 57, 58.
3 Luke 10: 5-7. 'Mark 3: 21.
* John 13: 29. 8 Mark I : 16, 17; Matt. 4: 18, 19.

138 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
Matthew left his octroi station near Capernaum1
to follow Jesus, and even the money-changers of
the Temple saw their tables overturned and their
fellow monopolists fleeing before the Galilean who
had found his Father's house made into a den of
thieves.2 It would not be at all strange, therefore, if from
these teachings and facts men should have con
cluded that the pursuit of wealth was unchristian
and wealth itself an evil rather than a good. And
so men have thought in all times since the days of
Jesus. The preaching of the church against
wealth has been equalled only by its zeal to obtain
it. Those early ascetics who saw in the body only
evil, and who sought with Simon of the Pillar to
please God by the hideous mortification of the
flesh, have been far outnumbered by the multitude
of men who have by vows of poverty as well as
celibacy endeavored to make themselves accept
able in the eyes of God. Few have so far imitated
St. Francis as to strip off wealth and clothes alike
and start at the new birth as naked as the new
babe, but every religious revival of the Middle
Ages blossomed into fresh devotions of wealth to
order or church and of life to the sanctifying pro-
1 Matt. 8 : 9.
2 Mark n : 17; Matt. 21:17; Luke 19:46.

WEALTH 1 39
cesses of want. Through the centuries in which
the leaven of Jesus has been working in society,
wealth has enormously increased, but the pro
cesses of distribution have not developed so rap
idly as those of production. The poor have been
always present, and the Christian church has
always endeavored, with more or less wisdom, to
do them good.1 They are God's poor. But too
seldom has such benefaction perfectly understood
Jesus, and too often has it hindered the realization
of his more fundamental principles. While Jesus
sought not the amelioration but the regeneration
of individual and society, charity has for centuries
been too often the palliative of sin and the dead-
ener of conscience. If patriotism has been once
the last refuge of a scoundrel, charity has been a
thousand times the hypocrite's price of heaven.
Even when men have not thought there was
any special merit to be acquired by the giving
away of money, they have frequently believed
that in some way Jesus discountenanced the search
for wealth. A conviction in the absolute author
ity of each unrelated word of Scripture has of
necessity plunged many earnest souls into pro
found difficulties. Tolstoi, finding in the words,
1 See, for instance, Uhlhorn, Christian Charity in the Early
Church.

140 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
" Resist not evil," the key to Christianity, ceased
to be judge and soldier.1 Few men have been
equally honest in following that which they have
professed to believe the only rule of life. These
words of Jesus concerning wealth have been re
garded as those of a visionary, and, instead of
searching for their real significance, men have
been too frequently ready to class them with
sayings which deal with conditions that are so far
from those of the world in which we live as to
belong rather to a Utopia, a land of nowhere.
Ill
We should expect a thinker like Jesus to say
something more. Can he mean to teach that the
new brotherliness is to be asceticism ? Are mem
bers of the new social order to live as parasites
upon an evil world ? Is the normal man to be an
idler and the child of God a beggar ? Such we
must say is the only outcome of these passages if
they exhaust the teachings of Jesus.
It can hardly be replied that Jesus did. not mean
to lay down any principles as regards wealth.
His refusal to divide an inheritance between two
litigious brothers 2 was no more an act of caution
than a rebuke to covetousness, and the request
1 My Religion, Chs. i.-iii. 2 Luke 12: 13-15.

WEALTH 141
itself shows how he was regarded by those who
made it.1 The very fact that Luke has preserved
for us2 so much of this sort of material that Mat-
1 It may also have been that this request was made of Jesus
simply as a rabbi, for it was customary for rabbis to decide knotty
questions of all sorts, including those about property. But the
Jewish laws of inheritance were so precise that there could have
been no question of " division " except one brother wanted to get
something in addition to his share. The warning against covetous
ness that follows this incident is accordingly quite to the point.
Such questions would more naturally come before the authorities of
the village. See Edersheim, Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah,
II. , 243; Stapfer, Palestine in the Time of Christ, 104-5.
2 It is evident that within the synoptic gospels there is a decided
preponderance of the teachings in regard to wealth to be found in
Luke. A comparison of the third gospel with the other two will
discover that much of this social teaching is found in those portions
which are peculiar to Luke himself. If we adopt the most proba
ble view as to the common material of the gospels and make it
dependent upon two great sources, the narrative and the logia, it
must be admitted that in the former there is practically nothing
which looks like any special interest in questions concerning wealth
on the part of Jesus, and in the latter little that cannot be easily
interpreted from another point of view. But when we come to
those peculiarities which mark the gospel according to Luke, it
becomes at once evident that we are dealing with an entirely new
spirit. The writer of the third gospel, who was also undoubtedly
the writer of the Acts, shows himself intensely sympathetic with
the poor. He alone has preserved for us the fact that the mother
of Jesus was a poor woman ; and that his father was a carpenter.
Alone of all the synoptists he never speaks of Jesus' having followed
a trade, and mentions that during his public ministry he was de
pendent upon charity for his support. And all through his teach
ings we find him more than ready to show the interest of Jesus in

142 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
thew has omitted shows that the original sources
whence both derived their gospels abounded with
such teachings. Whatever difficulty there may be
in understanding the economic teaching of Jesus
arises not from its scarcity but from its abundance.
The distorted applications which have been made
of his words have been due generally to an incom
plete collection of the data to be found in the
gospels. His view of wealth is not to be found in
this or that particular saying, but in the entire
scope and course of his life and teachings. We
publicans and poor people, and to preserve for us those words of
denunciation of the rich or encouragement of the poor which have
made Jesus the friend of the lowly of all ages. (Thus I : 46-55 ;
2:7, 16; 2:23,24; 6:21-25; I2:I3_33 5 I4:21; 16:14 sq.)
It is this personal equation of Luke as well as the fact that his gos
pel generally gives evidence of having been composed later than
that of Matthew, that leads to the not very secure conclusion that
in 6 : 21 he has preserved a less original form of the saying of Jesus
found also in Matt. 5:3. It has therefore been omitted in this dis
cussion. But even if the contrary view be held it should be noted that
the thought of the passage in Matthew is undoubtedly the sense of the
statement in Luke. The poor in money are very likely to be poor in
spirit. It should be also noticed that the words of Luke were ad
dressed directly to the disciples. For this reason it seems altogether
probable that if they are the original words of Jesus, they are in a
sense parabolic, like those addressed to the hungry. Plummer,
{Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Gospel according to
Luke. Introduction, xxv), in showing the impossibility of discov
ering Ebionism in Luke, says truly " Throughout the Third Gospel
there is a protest against worldliness, but there is no protest against
wealth."

WEALTH 143
do for Jesus simply what we do for every teacher
whose method was like his, if we attempt the
discovery of a principle which underlies and a
philosophy that binds together all special teach
ings. In the light of this principle and philosophy
the hierarchy of special teachings may be properly
established, and the significance of scattered say
ings more correctly apprehended.
In the teaching of Jesus we discover above
all his recognition of the relativity of goods.
" No servant can serve two masters." 1 His effort
is to induce men to accept not that which is
good, but that which is best. Whenever the
good comes in conflict with the better and the
best, even if it be a hand or an eye or a foot, it
must immediately be abandoned.2 Now so far
as the individual is concerned, his highest good
consists in making his life a part of other lives.
For both manward and Godward a man is essen
tially a social being, and his life is imperfect in
the same proportion as it is not in union with
the life of others. Thus, even on the purely
physical side, Jesus viewed the unmarried man
as so far an incomplete man. But the hermit
is likewise an abnormal man. Jesus' ideal for
humanity is that of a divine family, and in so
1 Matt. 6 : 22-24. 2 Matt. 18 : 8, 9.

144 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
far as any thing or custom renders a realization
of that ideal more difficult, in the same propor
tion is that something to be sacrificed. In the
light of this general principle does he examine
and pronounce upon all those social questions
with which his teachings are concerned. His
question is always not " Is this thing good in
itself?" but "Does it make toward the realiza
tion of the divine brotherhood ? " Thus he
looked at marriage and said that some men for
the sake of the kingdom of heaven would remain
celibate. Thus he looked at wealth. For, like
marriage, wealth concerns not the individual
alone but society as well. IV
Wealth must be used for the establishment of
that ideal social order whose life is that of
brothers — the kingdom of God. This is the
only possible interpretation which can be placed
upon that otherwise extraordinary parable of the
unjust steward.1 As he by trickiness, not to say
dishonesty, had won for himself friends, so is it
possible in a nobler way for men so to use wealth
as to bind others closer to themselves. This is
one of the tests of character, this making of
1 Luke 16 : 1-13.

WEALTH I45
friends by money. For if a man be unfaithful
in the affairs of business, Jesus regards him as
liable to be unfaithful in matters of greater im
portance.1 The rich man suffering in torments
had a thought of his brothers too late, and his
wealth had made no friends. He had served
mammon, but not God. So, too, Jesus con
demned2 the rich fool who, after he had ac
cumulated wealth, planned to use it selfishly for
his own enjoyment. In the genuine epicurean
call to his soul, " Thou hast much goods laid up
for thyself ; eat, drink, and be merry," this man
published his determination to avoid all the
possibilities of benefiting society wealth put in
his hands. Wealth is therefore a desirable good
only so far as it is a means to a man's highest
development — that is, only so long as it ren
ders him more capable of fulfilling Jesus' ideal
of fraternity. For as Jesus pertinently asked,3
"What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole
world and yet lose himself ? " A man's heart will
be with his treasure, and there is more lasting
wealth than silver and gold.4
1 Luke 16 : 10, 12. Clement of Alexandria, in his little tract The
Salvation of Rich Men, puts this admirably : " Earthly property
should be considered in the light of a staff, an instrument for good
uses." 2 Luke 12 : 16-21. 8 Luke 9 : 25. 4 Matt. 6 : 19-21.
L

[46 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
It is this danger which lies within wealth that
Jesus especially warns men against. It is a
simple matter of observation that instead of in
creasing a man's social sympathies, the struggle
for fortune too often makes him selfish and
unsocial in that it breaks down that sense of
dependence which the poor man feels binding
him to other men. In the same proportion as
the semblance of independence increases is there
danger that a man will forget that he is always
an integral part of society and that he can be
truly a man only as he is dependent upon God
and in sympathy with his fellows. This was the
trouble evidently enough with the rich young
man of whom we have already spoken. He was
endeavoring to build up a perfection upon the
corner-stone of a selfish individualism. This is
the secret of Jesus' command to trust the Heav
enly Father for clothes and food.1 These things
are not evil, but if once regarded as the highest
good, they will inevitably lead to a selfish com
petition for personal advantage at the cost of
generous impulses and faith.
With such a conception of the possibilities of
humanity as we find in the words of Jesus it
would of necessity be impossible that his words
' Matt. 6:31-33. See also his warning against covetousness,
Luke 12 : 15.

WEALTH 147
against those things Which are so liable to make
against brotherliness should be sharp and severe.
No man ever had a deeper sympathy with the
poor and unfortunate. He felt profoundly the
misery and injustice which spring from the ir
responsible power of the wealthy, and sought
with all his strength to arouse new feelings of
philanthropy. In this effort, like all teachers, he
occasionally sought to startle men into a truer
conception of their duties to each other. As
Socrates sometimes played at being a Sophist,
so Jesus sometimes spoke like a fanatic. But in
reality he was farthest possible from fanaticism.
He himself was able to live with poor and rich
alike.1 If he was homeless, the houses of the
rich were continually at his service. If his head
was sometimes wet with the dews of heaven, he
knew also what it was to have poured upon him
costly ointment. The rich man Zacchaeus was
welcomed quite as heartily by him as his fellow-
citizen the beggar Bartimaeus. The advice to the
Twelve and the Seventy was evidently due to some
1 It is a mistake to think of early Christians as altogether from
the poorest classes. They were from the well-to-do and even
wealthy classes as well, as appears not only from the Acts and cer
tain allusions in the epistles, but also from evidence furnished by
the Catacombs. See Rossi, La Roma Sotteranea Crisliana; North-
cote and Brownlow, Roma Sotteranea.

148 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
special cause, for afterwards, when giving them
direction for their entire course of life after his
death, he revoked it, advising a more normal man
ner of life.1 Where is there more magnificent
business optimism than his advice to lend money
to those in need, never despairing of its repay
ment ? 2 Throughout the gospels Jesus never
appears in the garb of an ascetic, for the reason
that he was able to maintain the balance and
perspective of his life. Indeed his life expresses
even more distinctly than his words the coordi
nation of his teachings. All the more weighty
therefore is his judgment upon the unworthy rich.
Wealth he showed to be a good, but a good only
when it is a social good and when its pursuit
does not weaken those impulses within a man
that go out towards his fellows and God, and so
render him unfit for the kingdom of heaven.
Inevitable and fearful punishment awaited the
man whose wealth brought no joy to others than
himself. V
All this it must be admitted brings Jesus close
to the general position of socialism. If wealth
1 Luke 22 : 35, 36.
2 Luke 6 : 35. The Authorized Version completely obscures the
thought of Jesus by its arbitrary mistranslation of direXirifocTcs.

WEALTH 149
is not for purely individual enjoyment but is to
be used for the good of society, and if the ideal
society is a brotherhood, it is not a long step to
the belief that any form of private property
is anti-fraternal and that society itself can best
administer economic matters for the good of
its members. Something like corroboration is
given such an interpretation of Jesus' position
by the fact that the company of his followers
had a common purse,1 and that the members of
the primitive Jerusalem church " had all things
in common." 2
It is therefore by no means strange that there
have always been those who have maintained
1 John 12:19; '3;6. These texts are so used by Todt, Der
radikale deutsche Socialismus.
2 Acts 2 : 44, 45; 4 : 32, 36, 37. It is just here that unrhetorical
description seems almost beyond hope. For instance, Leslie
Stephen {Social Rights and Duties, I., 21, 22) : "The early Chris
tians were the socialists of their age, and took a view of Dives and
Lazarus which would commend itself to the Nihilists of to-day .
if the man who best represents the ideas of early Christians were
to enter a respectable society of to-day, would it not be likely to send
for the police?" A master of clever English like Leslie Stephen
has small need of such astonishing nonsense as this to get himself
a hearing. Laveleye {Primitive Property, Intro, xxxi.), though
writing in a different spirit, makes an equally indefensible state
ment : " If Christianity were taught and understood conformably
to the spirit of its Founder, the existing social organism could not
last a day." j

I 50 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
that in some form of socialism lay the true pro
gramme of Christianity. It has repeatedly hap
pened that a revival of faith and zeal has been
accompanied by some doctrine as to community
of goods. " If there were no sin, all temporal
goods would be held in common " has been the
cry of more than one Raymund Lull. The
Waldenses were not singular in going "about
barefoot, two by two, in woollen garments, pos
sessing nothing, like the apostles."1 To a con
siderable degree this is seen beneath the policy
of the great mediaeval monastic orders and of
ultra-reformers like some of the Anabaptists.
But in most of these cases their limited commun
ism has been accompanied by more or less asceti
cism to which the spirit of modern socialism is
radically opposed. No man, however, can bring
any such charge against the Christian socialist of
England, Germany, or America. The great in
ducement to combine Christianity and socialism
lies along the very different line of their professed
search for greater happiness and completeness
in life, and it cannot be denied that the combina
tion has great attractions. Indeed, if socialism
1 Quoted by Neander, History of the Christian Religion and
Church, IV., 60S, from the statement of an eyewitness, the English
Franciscan Walter Mapes.

WEALTH 1 5 I
be only what Maurice 1 declared it to be, " the
acknowledgment of brotherhood and fellowship
in work," it is but a phase of Christianity.
To think of Jesus as gentle idealist who
preached a communism which was neither coarse
nor practicable ; to see in the Jerusalem church a
group of kindred idealists attempting to practise
the same unworldly economy ; to see only sophistry
in the word of any man who ventures to think that
the early church fathers did not regard riches as
the fruit of usurpation ; all this is captivating, but
it will hardly bear severer scrutiny than the less
euphemistic " Le bon sansculotte," of Camille
Desmoulins.2 For it is futile to attempt to discover modern
socialism in the words of Jesus. There is, it is
true, nothing incompatible with such a system
were it once proved to be the means best adapted
to furthering the true spirit of brotherliness ; but
1 Life, IL, 128.
2 So Nitti, Le Socialisme Catholique, especially chs. ii., iii. Less
learned but equally extreme views are constantly to be met. For
instance, R. Heber Newton, Social Studies, 332 sq. It is gratify
ing to find an opposite view presented in so important a work as
Nathusius, Die Mitarbeit der Kirche an der Losung der Socialen
Frage, II., 274 sq. As one would expect, thorough historians
reject the idea of there having been communism in the Jerusalem
church. For instance, Weizsacker, History of the Apostolic Age
(Eng. ed.), I., 56. See also Keim, Jesus of Nazara, III., 345-347.

152 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
just as true is it that there is nothing incompatible
with a rational individualism. One can sympathize
heartily with Maurice and Kingsley as they de
nounce grinding competition or a supposed "iron
law of wages," but as a follower of Jesus one
stands committed to neither socialism nor individ
ualism. Before either is declared unchristian it
must be shown to be hopelessly opposed to the
accomplishment of Jesus' ideal order. Charity,
with Jesus, is not communism. If it could be
proved that he had been an Essene, the identifica
tion might be easier, but that possibility is now
little thought of.1 Probably no one would soberly
commit Jesus to communism because of Judas and
the bag, and so far as any direct word or single
act of his is concerned, it is necessary to say the
same. Even in the case of the primitive Jerusa
lem church it is impossible to discover anything
like communism in the modern sense of the word.
Its members, be they never so rich, were not
required to sell their possessions and to give to
the poor, if we are to accept the words of Peter
to Ananias.2 Indeed, the story of Ananias and
1 See Godet, Commentary on Luke; Lightfoot, Commentary on
the Epistle to the Colossians, Appendix; Renan, History of the
People of Israel, V., 48-66.
2 Acts 4 : 4.

WEALTH 1 53
Sapphira does not make their fate dependent upon
their failure to share all , their property, but upon
their lying to the effect that they had so done.
Nor does it appear that all the members of the
church at Jerusalem disposed of their property,
since the mother of Mark had her own house.1
As a matter of fact, it would seem that this shar
ing of wealth in Jerusalem was simply an expres
sion of natural enthusiasm and Christian love. It
may, perhaps, have involved a too literal inter
pretation of Jesus' words, but even this is by no
means clear. At any rate, a few years after this
so-called communism we find the church at Jeru
salem counselling, not communism, but generosity
to the poor,2 and the " contribution for the poor
among the saints in Jerusalem" replacing the
" having of things in common." 3 If there really
had ever been any communism, its outcome was a
reductio ad absurdum — ¦ a commentary upon the
words of Jesus that will repay reflection.4
In the matter of charity we find Jesus express
ing by his life the common sense that is to be
1 Acts 12:12. 2 Gal. 2:9. 3 Rom. 15 : 26.
4 " What means would be left of communicating one to another,
if none had the means to bestow " {i.e. had given everything away) ?
asks Clement of Alexandria, who doubtless saw that the Christians
of Alexandria needed little encouragement to engage in business if
the words of the Emperior Hadrian to his brother-in-law, Servia-

154 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
used in the interpretation of his more radical
statements. When his friends saw fit to criticise
a woman who had anointed him, on the ground
that the cost of the ointment might much better
have been given to the poor, Jesus rebukes
them, though using those words which so often
have incited to charity, " The poor ye have with
you always, that when ye will ye may do them
good."1 There was a duty higher than charity.
It would, indeed, be far less correct to say that
Jesus taught indiscriminate giving than to say
that according to his general principle of love,
charity would at times be forbidden as hurtful
rather than helpful.
Nor did Jesus approach that form of socialism
that would equalize the sharing of products. On
the contrary, when using commercial matters as
illustrations he did not condemn competition, and
in one instance he distinctly recognized the prin
ciple of difference in rewards. " Unto him that
hath shall be given " 2 comes with ill grace from
a socialist. The parable of the market-place has
no economic force ; but if it had, equality in
nus, are correct. Speaking of the inhabitants of Alexandria he
says, " They have all of them but one God — money; 'tis he alone
that Christians, Jews, and all the rest adore."
1 Matt. 26: 6-II. 2 Matt. 25 : 29.

WEALTH 155
wages is not its point, but the owner's right to
do as he saw fit with his own property.1 Farthest
possible was Jesus from the curse of most social
istic programmes — the assumption that the ideal
social order is based upon an increase in creature
comforts. If there is anything unchristian, it is
the notion that bread and amusements and good
drainage are going to bring in the millennium.
The same Jesus that fed the multitude withstood
the temptation to use his higher powers to sat
isfy mere hunger, and deliberately alienated those
who sought to exploit his philanthropy while
refusing his teaching.2 VI
The translation of this central teaching of Jesus
into modern phrase is by no means difficult, al
though at this point temptation to over-emphasis
is very strong. Jesus was not an economist, and
had little interest in abstract questions. His
position at bottom was practical. The search
for wealth is a moral matter and its use is also
a moral matter. If one cannot be faithful in the
unrighteous mammon, he is unfit to be entrusted
with the true riches. Wealth is a public trust —
a principle that is made no less true from the
1 Matt. 20: 17. 2 John 6: 26, 27, 66.

156 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
fact that its application to the various problems
of any age must be left to the age itself. As
in the teaching of Jesus in regard to the state,
the first point to be settled is as to whether an
> existing economic institution or custom or effort
tends to the establishment of fraternity. If it
does not, the face of Christ is against it, and the
only escape from his woe is to abolish whatever
keeps its possessor from using it or producing it
to the advantage of society. For such minds as
would regard this as an ethical platitude, Jesus
furnishes abundant stimulus in the sayings of the
Sermon on the Mount. For those who itch less
for sensational novelties, this teaching of Jesus
will furnish the point of departure for any eco
nomic philosophy that cares to use his name.
To be more specific, Jesus was neither a syco
phant nor a demagogue. He neither forbids
trusts nor advises them ; he is neither a cham
pion nor an opponent of laissez faire ; he neither
forbids trades unions, strikes and lock-outs, nor
advises them ; he was neither socialist nor indi
vidualist. Jesus was a friend neither of the work
ing man nor the rich man as such. The question
he would put to a man is not " Are you rich ? "
but "Have you done the will of my Father?"
He calls the poor man to sacrifice as well as the

WEALTH 157
rich man. He was the Son of Man, not the son
of a class of men. But his denunciation is un
sparing of those men who make wealth at the
expense of souls ; who find in capital no incentive
to further fraternity ; who endeavor so to use
wealth as to make themselves independent of
social obligations and to grow fat with that which
should be shared with society ; — for those men
who are gaining the world but are letting their
neighbors fall among thieves and Lazarus rot
among their dogs.

CHAPTER VII

SOCIAL LIFE

It is not difficult to see that the principle of
fraternity must especially apply to those forms
of social life outside the family circle which are
neither political nor economic. In nothing do the
better instincts of modern life more strenuously
exert themselves than in the attempt so to adjust
social relations that the chasms caused by differ
ences in wealth and culture may be, if not abol
ished, at least bridged. Almost in the same
proportion as one comes under their control do
altruistic motives result in revolt against conven
tional distinctions, and an attempt at brotherliness,
or at least neighborliness. This is at least one
interpretation to be put upon not only socialism,
but upon our new charitable movements and or
ganizations and especially upon social settlements.
Confessedly these new motives are Christian ;
nothing could be more so ; but it may not be with
out results to follow the application of his general
principle to social matters made by Jesus himself.
158

SOCIAL LIFE 159

It may seem gratuitous to assert that Jesus was
no ascetic or even semi-ascetic puritan. So far
has the pendulum swung away from the mediaeval
conception of holiness that it often seems as if the
chief need of to-day were a Savonarola who should
fascinate the nineteenth century into new burn
ings of novels and gewgaws. But none the less,
so ineradicable is the suspicion that religion is in
some way a sort of counter-agent for the joys of
life, that it is often forgotten that the founder
of Christianity came eating and drinking, in the
envious eyes of contemporary religious teachers a
winebibber and a glutton.1 It was in fact because
he was so normal that Jesus' career was dark
ened by men's distrust. John the Baptist, whose
work in a fashion Jesus may be said to have
continued and completed, was quite another
man. The prophet's dress and the pauper's
food together with his sternly ascetic preaching
gave him a popularity and a position among
the Jews which Jesus during his life can hardly
be said to have attained.2 Even nowadays it
1 Matt. 11 : 19.
2 The hold that John had upon the minds of his contemporaries
is to be seen not only in the oldest sources of our gospels (see for

160 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
is by no means so easy to attract the crowds
by respectability as by eccentricity and sensa
tions. It is infinitely easier to preach against
fashionable extravagances and social absurdities
than to recall men to gentlemanly unobtrusive-
ness in goodness. Too many men yet measure
their goodness by their sense of deprivation, mak
ing misery the thermometer of holiness.
But Jesus was evidently not of this class of
charlatans and semi-ascetics. It cannot have
escaped the notice of even the conventional
reader of the New Testament that in the Fourth
Gospel Jesus begins his Galilean ministry by pro
viding a wedding company with new means for
enjoyment.1 And this was only one instance
out of many in which Jesus used social gather
ings for the furthering of his mission. In
fact much of his teaching was connected with
instance Mark I : 1-8) but also in the pages of Josephus {Ant. 18;
5:2). By the latter writer the misfortunes that filled the later days
of Herod Antipas are said to have been popularly regarded as judg
ments for the killing of John. Even if, as very likely is the case,
this reference to John has been subjected to interpolations, it stands
on much securer critical ground than Josephus' reference to Jesus
himself {Ant. 18; 3:3). Other tributes to the permanence of John's
influence are seen in Acts 18 : 25 ; 19:3.
1 John 2: 1-12. It is impossible to think that the conditions of
this story are fulfilled by the assumption that the wine provided by
Jesus was non-alcoholic.

SOCIAL LIFE l6l
dining, the social meal giving either the occa
sion or the analogy for his thought. He dis
tinctly rejected fasting as a religious form,1 and
destroyed all ceremonial distinctions in food.2
If sometimes he himself fasted,3 it was from
no desire to acquire merit, and if he withdrew
into solitude it was for a brief season of prayer
from which he returned the more devotedly to
enter into public life.4 For months he lived
almost constantly surrounded by crowds.
But while the pleasures of social life are good
in themselves, they are not to be ends in them
selves. Life consists in something more than
food,5 and the kingdom of God, as Paul said
later, was not to consist in mere sensual enjoy
ment.6 That something which can make eating
and drinking goods subordinate to some greater
good is the spirit of brotherliness in which they
become means of furthering the happiness of
others. The member of the new society was
not to flee the world,7 but was rather to stay in
it as a source of light and life.8 Social life
1 Matt. 9: 14; 6: 17, 18. In this connection his picture of the
boasting Pharisee (Luke 18: 10) is especially striking.
2 Mark 7: 17, 19. 3 Matt. 4:12; Luke 4: 2.
4 Mark 6:46 sq.; Matt. 14: 23^.; Luke 9 : 28.
6 Matt. 6:25. 'John 17:15.
6 Rom. 14: 17. " Matt. 5 : 14.
M

1 62 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
was shown both by the words and life of Jesus
to be the normal life of men. Just as marriage
was the ideal form of the life of the individual,
so the family and the feast were used by Jesus
as the nearest analogies to what life in the new
social order was to be. Friendships are to
Jesus' mind instinctive and their fruit of neces
sity, kindliness.1 II
It is not to magnify trivialities if attention be
called to the attitude of Jesus towards the con
ventionalities of life. It is of course possible
that a man should be thoroughly good and
worthy of respect and yet be totally indifferent
to the requirements of society. Many men to
day are undoubtedly nobly affecting the life of
their communities through their sterling integ
rity and deep religious feeling who are ignorant
or careless of conventionalities. But no cult
ured man wants a boor as his religious teacher
any more than he would accept a filthy saint as
his Saviour. Even John the Baptist was less
than the least in the kingdom of God.2 And
it is nothing more than we should have expected
when we find Jesus careful about those matters
which indicate the gentleman. Though a poor
1 Luke 11:5-8; 15:9. 2 Matt. 11: 11.

SOCIAL LIFE 163
man and counting clothes as at best but a sec
ondary good J he seems to have been well
dressed2 and to have followed the ordinary dic
tates of the Jewish fashions except, perhaps, in
the matter of phylacteries.3 His sensitiveness to
matters of common civility appears in the words
forced from him by the rudeness of a host who
allowed conceit to drive out politeness.4 Indeed
it would seem as if the fact that Judas should
have betrayed him by a kiss added bitterness
to the cup he was forced to drink.5
These matters are, of course, of small impor
tance as they stand by themselves, but they gain
in significance when they are seen to represent
an attitude of mind. Conduct is always less
hypocritical than language, and in the case of
Jesus it had the added responsibility of serving as
an example for his followers. Accordingly, it is
1 Matt. 6 : 25, 28. 2 John 19 : 23.
3 Matt. 9 : 20. The rabbis seem to have been as supreme in
fashion as in religion. We know from their decisions not only the
names and styles of the garments worn by Jews but also the order
in which they should be put on and their relative importance. (The
authority in the subject of Jewish costume is Briill, Trachten der
fuden. See also Edersheim, Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah,
I., 621 sq.) The fact to be especially noticed in this connection is
the probability that Jesus wore the tsitsith or tassels on his tallith or
outer garment.
1 Luke 7 : 36-50. 6 Luke 22 : 48.

164 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
doubly necessary in his case to look for the
spirit and ideal of which conduct is the expres
sion. But at the same time that he conformed to
the ordinary habits of polite society as he knew
it, whether it may have been from sensitiveness
or from some other motive, Jesus, with all his love
and eagerness to attract men, never cheapened
himself by indiscriminate friendships. From one
point of view, his brief career was marked by great
reserve ; indeed, it seems hardly more than a series
of withdrawals from men in order that he might
establish a few intense friendships. To the outer
crowd he carefully refused to show the depths
of his character; to the wide circle of mercurial
"believers" he revealed hardly more of himself;
to the Twelve as a whole he showed as much of
himself as he could educate them to appreciate.
But when he found a man or woman to whom
he could open his heart, then all that they wished
to receive of him was theirs to receive. His joys
and his sorrows alike might be shared by them.
Some men are at their best in public ; others,
among their intimates. The first come danger
ously near acting ; the latter are seldom insincere.
Jesus belonged emphatically to the second class.
While he knew something of the intoxicating

SOCIAL LIFE 165
joy that comes to the orator, his choicest teach
ings are those given in some conversation. He
would not cast his pearls before swine.1 Thus
it came about that while he was followed by
multitudes, he was loved by only a few.
Ill
But because he thus chose his companions, it
would be absurd to say that Jesus recognizes the
existence of social classes in the new order of
society. His limitations of intimacy were not
based upon accidental differences. Nor do his
teachings imply such classes. Such anomalies
as exist within an unhealthy society were natu
rally impossible within a society composed of nor
mal men. So long as men were bad, so long
they could not be other than selfish. All of
their efforts could be only for private advantage.
Wealth could not fail to be other than a means
for ungenerous enj oyment.2 Prayer would lengthen
itself immoderately that the Creator might be
wearied into submission to the more persistent
will.3 Social customs would be only new agencies
for forcing an indebted acquaintance to repay
hospitality in kind.4 Jesus saw all this clearly ;
1 Matt. 7:6. 3 Matt. 7 : 7.
2 Luke 12 : 16-21. * Luke 14 : 12.

166 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
and he saw its inevitable outgrowth : the strati
fication of men according to their ability to fulfil
these purely materialistic conditions. With such
stratification fraternity would be impossible. There
fore he who attempted to exalt himself would
be humiliated.1 In the kingdom no man was to
be called master, for they were all brethren,2
serving one another. And not only were they
brothers one of another, they were his brothers
as well, the least as well as the greatest. No
more striking lesson of social equality was ever
given than that of the Christ going about with
a towel washing the feet of his followers.3 So
emphatically does Jesus preach the gospel of
equality as to say that in the coming order, the
last should be first, and the first last.4
Yet he does not, like some modern champions
of the doctrine, attempt the sudden destruction
of all traditional distinctions. There is un
doubtedly need of such iconoclasts, for reforms
like revolutions are seldom made of rose-water,
but that constructive spirit which is everywhere
noticeable in the career of Jesus is present here
^^.23:12. 2 Matt. 23:8. 3 John 13: 1-10.
4 Matt. 19 : 30. No sentence of Jesus seems to have made
deeper impression on his hearers. It is constantly repeated in the
gospels.

SOCIAL LIFE 167
in large measure. Social revolutions quite as
likely as political produce demagogues, and even
more quickly tempt men to denunciations that
are the more violent because more indiscriminate.
But Jesus kept himself from all such extremes.
He himself belonged to the artisan class,1 and
knew what it was to feel the contempt of the
professional teachers of his peo'ple,2 and he did
not hesitate to confess the immense advantage
possessed by the educated man,3 but he never
allowed these facts to lead him into tirade against
other men's advantages.
It is, however, by no means inconsistent with this
attitude that he recognized, that as things are con
stituted, men must of necessity be divided into
servants and employes. He said nothing that
condemned such a relation, and indeed at times
spoke of it as a most natural thing.4 But this is
simply the attitude that any practical man must
take in his reforming of society. Your amateur
reformer would dissolve society into its elements.
Like Robespierre and other doctrinaires, he will
break with the past, even though he brings the
bones of departed kings to the lime-pit. But
Jesus was never so crude a thinker as to imagine
1 Mark 6:3. 3 Matt. 13 : 52.
2 Matt. 13 : 54-56. "¦ Luke 17 : 7-10; Matt. 10: 24.

1 68 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
that society' is a mechanical mixture of elements
into which it must be disintegrated as a step
towards a happier recombination. With him
progress was biological, an evolution rather than
a revolution. And therefore he did not destroy
all social conventionalities or a traditional division
of labor.
But to be a servant is not to be any less a man
or, provided it is really the case, any less the equal
of any man in another calling. If nothing that
goes into a man can defile him, certainly no neces
sary work is dishonorable. If Jesus the car
penter and the son of a carpenter could become
Jesus the Christ ; if his seemingly Falstaffian
army of fishermen, tax-collectors, and reformed
revolutionists could become in a few months the
pillars of the great church at Jerusalem and the
evangelists of the world ; it is unnecessary to
argue as to Jesus' recognition of the equality of
men as men. Indeed, nothing is more admirable
than the catholicity of sympathy and practice that
made him the friend of all sorts of people. Yet
nothing more scandalized the aristocratic teachers
and preachers and lawyers of his own day. How
often did they rail against him as a friend of the
publican and the sinner! In their sight he could
be no prophet, since he dared receive a repentant

SOCIAL LIFE 169
woman of the town.1 With them as with all
legalists the temptation was strong to judge
harshly and superficially of all unusual characters,
and their criticism of the generous habits of Jesus
was a testimony to the openness of his sympathy
with honest effort at reform and his disregard of
all artificial distinctions. To the Pharisees the
common people who knew not the law were ac
cursed : to Jesus they were possible members of
his kingdom.2 He knew of no " lower classes."
And his words were the echoes of his life. One
of the proofs of his Messiahship that the disciples
of John were to carry back to their unfortunate
master was that the gospel was being preached to
the poor.3 As he himself ate with the publican
and the sinner, so when a man would give a feast,
Jesus bade him invite the lame and the halt and
the blind.4 Could social equality combined with
an avoidance of self-seeking be more strikingly
enforced ? IV
Various objections may be urged to this concep
tion of Jesus as a preacher of social equality.
It may be said that he discriminated against
Samaritans and heathen, holding both himself and
1 Luke 7 : 39 sq. 8 Matt. 11:5; Luke 7 : 22.
2 John 7:49; Matt. 11:28. 4 Luke 14: 12 sq.

170 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
his disciples straitly to a mission to " the lost sheep
of the house of Israel."1 Yet even assuming
(which is quite gratuitous) that such a distinction
is a distinction between social classes, it would be
enough to reply that such a limitation was but a
concentration. As the results showed, it was
eminent sagacity that forbade the dissipation of
energy and the extension of preaching by men not
yet thoroughly imbued with his own spirit. In
the plans of Jesus the evangelization of Jerusalem
was to lead to that of Judea and Samaria and ulti
mately of the uttermost parts of the earth.2 But
as a more immediate reply it would be sufficient to
match the story of Zacchaeus3 with that of the
Syro-Phcenician woman ; 4 and the words to the
Twelve as they went out to a final conquest of
the world with the advice given to them as they
made their first experiment at heralding a disap
pointing Jewish Messiah.
It may be also urged that Jesus attacked the
rich and educated classes and championed the
poor. But such attacks and championings are
rather proofs of his equalizing purpose. Princes
were to be put down from their thrones and those
of low degree were to be exalted,5 not that in
1 Matt. 10:6; 15:24. 3 Luke 19 : 2 sq. 6 Luke I : 52, 53
2 Acts I : S. * Mark 7 : 24 sq.

SOCIAL LIFE 171
their new conditions they might perpetuate old
distinctions, but that it might be made evident
that personality and not position or wealth is su
preme. Equality with Jesus was not to be attained
by equalizing wealth or honor, but by the posses
sion of a common divine life, the enjoyment of
equal privileges, and the performance of equal
duties. It is moral, not material.
It is true that Jesus attacked bitterly the upper
classes, and at times seemed unduly to praise the
poor and needy, but it is a superficial study that
does not discover that these attacks spring from
his perception of the evident anti-fraternal, selfish,
contemptuous spirit of the aristocrats. Notwith
standing his intense sympathy with the poor and
miserable, in none of his words is there a touch
of demagogism. A man was no more the worse
because he was rich than he was the holier be
cause he was miserable. Indeed, if there is any
thing that projects above the other teachings of
Jesus it is the duty of every member of the king
dom of God to treat every man as his equal.
This was to be not a mere social fiction but a
test of devotion and character. " By this shall
all men know that ye are my disciples if ye love
one another." 1 To be a neighbor to a man is
1 John 13:35.

172 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
not to belong to the same community, or set, or
nation. It is to disregard all such artificial dis
tinctions and to give him such help as he may
need.1 He who has such a spirit will ever be
the Good Samaritan and to him every sufferer
will be the man fallen among robbers.
Yet probably the strongest objection in the way
of an actual recognition of this ideal of Jesus in
actual life is the ineradicable conviction that social
equality is impracticable. Men have dreamed of
it and have died, leaving their dreams to the
laughter of their times and the libraries of their
descendants. These words of Jesus are beautiful,
but so are those of More and Rousseau — and no
more visionary. Men are not equal and fraternity
is a word for orators and French public buildings.
So men say, or think if they keep silent.
But Jesus does not claim that men in the world
to-day are physiologically equal. There are the
lame and halt. Nor are they mentally on an
equality. There are men to whom one talent
could be entrusted, and those to whom five and
ten.2 Nor does Jesus so far fall into the class
of nature-philosophers as to teach that because
men are to be brothers they are therefore to be
twins. The equality of fraternity does not con-
1 Luke 10 : 25-37. 2 Matt. 25 : 14-30; Luke 19 : 12-27.

SOCIAL LIFE 173
sist in duplication of powers, but in the enjoyment
and the exercise of love.
Further, according to the new social standard
of Jesus two men are equal, not because they have
equal claims upon each other, but because they
owe equal duties to each other. The gospel is
not a new Declaraton of Rights, but a Declara
tion of Duties.1 V
As to what equality shall consist in when the
perfect social order is attained, Jesus gives us
no clear teaching. But one can safely infer that
it would not be uniformity. Men would then be
brothers and society an all-embracing family, but
individuality is not to be lost. And individuality
is synonymous with personal inequalities.
But this is a speculation into which Jesus did
not enter. He is especially concerned with the
evolving kingdom, and here his words are ex
plicit. Social and economic distinctions are arti
ficial and temporary. Differences in wealth and
employment are to be no hindrance to frater-
1 The constitutional history of the French Revolution is a com
mentary upon this position of Jesus. It was a new age that re
placed the Declaration des Droits de T Homme et du Citoyen of
the constitution of 1791, with the Declaration des Droits et ces
Devoirs de I'LIomme et du Citoyen of the constitution of Fructi-
dor, 1795.

174 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
nity.1 To use the noble words of Paul, who
here again seems more than all men of the
first century to have reached the heart of Jesus,
in the new social order "there can be neither
Jew nor Greek, there can be neither bond nor
free." 2 Has the world quite proved that this
is impossible ?
1 Such was to a surprising extent the spirit of the early church.
Almost no titles are to be found among the oldest inscriptions in
the Catacombs of St. Calixtus. And Lactantius pleads, " With us
there is no difference between the poor and the rich, the slave
and the free man. We call ourselves brothers because we believe
ourselves equal."
2 Gal. 3 : 28.

CHAPTER VIII
THE FORCES OF HUMAN PROGRESS
It is comparatively easy to construct an ideal
for society, but it is rare that the reformer suf
ficiently considers the applicability of his ideal
to actual human nature. It is this that has
made an archaeological puzzle of Plato's Republic
and a romance of Utopia. Men instinctively feel
that no dream of a regenerate society is worth
serious consideration that does not in some dis
tinct way show its ability, as Carlyle would say,
"to walk." Jesus cannot escape such a test.
If his ideal is worth anything, and if his teach
ings are to be anything more than a collection
of oriental apothegms, he must be seen to have
approached the problems of human progress with
a full conception of the inertia of life and the
repugnance most men show towards anything
like social effort. In other words, Jesus must
be required to set forth with reasonable fulness
the forces upon which he counted for the reali-
'75

176 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
zation of his new social order. We ask of him
not merely an ideal, but a method.
I
If, in a search for a recognition on Jesus' part
of such forces, one comes to the memorabilia of
his life fresh from the study of modern efforts
at social regeneration, nothing is more surpris
ing than the forces in human society upon which
he does not count.
It is of course to be expected that he should
distinctly refuse to use mere physical force as
a means of establishing his kingdom.1 A Ma
homet may rule as a prophet in a kingdom of
Allah built upon the sword, but a Jesus cannot.
A Charlemagne may build an empire from Saxons
who have chosen baptism as a lesser evil than
death, but not so the followers of him whose
kingdom was not of this world.2 The new
social order was to be spiritual, not material.
But it is less to be anticipated that Jesus should
have so passed over those claims for justice
which to-day are urged with an ever-increasing
passion. It would not do to say that Jesus is
oblivious to the rightful claims of those who 1
have not shared sufficiently in the good things
1 Matt. 4 : 10, 11; John 6:15. 2 John 18 : 36.

THE FORCES OF HUMAN PROGRESS 1 77
of life. No man's teaching has been more po
tent in forcing the strong to yield to the weak,
the rich to the poor, the noble to the lowly.
But none the less is it true that Jesus is far
less interested in the rights than in the obliga
tions of men. It matters little that logically the
two conceptions are complementary. Practically
there is a vast difference between the bald de
mand of men or classes for things due them, and
that extension of privilege which sympathy and
a sense of obligation may induce a favored man
or class to effect. Of the two, it is easier to
inculcate justice, but no one who knows the
crimes that have been committed in the name
of liberty, and the hereditary hatreds that have
been the outgrowth of struggles after rights,
need be told that the victories of justice leave
scars as ineradicable as its demands are right
eous. It was from some appreciation of this
that Jesus made duty paramount to rights. The
Jew was ready enough to grant the rights of a
neighbor — when once neighborship had been
defined and proved. In the estimation of Jesus
to be a neighbor was not to have rights that
put others under obligation to oneself, but to be
conscious of duties. Not the wounded traveller,
but the Levite and the priest and the Samaritan

178 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
needed to show the spirit of the neighbor.1 In
deed, to one who has been assailed loudly with
the evils of to-day's economic inequalities, it is
at first sight surprising to find Jesus so indiffer
ent to much that to-day's reformers emphasize
so strenuously. The ordinary appeal which we
hear addressed to the wage-earner nowadays
seems a paraphrase of Proudhon's "property is
robbery." The poor man is urged to get a larger
share in the wealth he helps produce ; to cease
to be a horse that drags the coach in which the
rich folk ride. Now, again, the position of
Jesus in regard to wealth puts him here uncom
promisingly upon the side of the man who has
not shared justly in the distribution of the prod
ucts of labor and capital. But to urge the poor
man to struggle after wealth might be to spur
him to selfishness as deep as that of the rich
man against whom he struggles. It might be
necessary to subdue nature, to make natural
forces the servants of production, but wealth
and sensuousness and selfishness, Jesus saw, go
hand in hand.2 Mere bigness is not goodness,
and enthusiasm over bank accounts is not the
spirit of the Master. The kingdom did not
come with observation.3 Life was more than
1 Luke 10 : 25-37. 2 Luke 8 : 14. 3 Luke 17 : 20.

THE FORCES OF HUMAN PROGRESS 1 79
food and fraternity more than wealth.1 Social
agitators, John the Baptists of economics, are
needed ; we may yet count Karl Marx and
Lassalle among the prophets, but what sort of
kingdom would a Christ have established whose
evangel was a political economy and whose new
age was set forth in a programme ?
Nor does Jesus appeal to the aesthetic side
of men's nature. It is no sign of disloyalty to
beauty and the educational function of art, to say
that the world yet waits the advent of an aesthetic
philosophy whose guarantee of constant progress
can be accepted. As in the case of the demand
for economic justice, so in the case of an exclusive
appeal to the love of beauty, selfishness crouches
at the door. To say nothing of the fact that
comparatively few men are susceptible to any
persistent moral impulse from the aesthetic side
of their natures, the call to be beautiful and
to love that which is beautiful is not made of
the stuff that makes heroes and martyrs. It is
indispensable as a subsidiary motive, and as
such at least Jesus seems to have recognized
it,2 but from the days of beauty-mad Greece, an
aesthetic spirit has failed to develop a long-
lived, virile, generous civilization. The apostle
1 Luke 12 : 23. 2 Matt. 6 : 28.

l8o THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
of culture finds his case weak, in fact hopeless,
if mingled with the aesthetic conception of the
Greek there be not the stern Hebrew sense of
right and God.
It goes without saying that Jesus does not base
his hopes of a new society upon an " enlightened
self-interest," or any other hedonist philosophy.
That the individual would seek his own good he
seems to have assumed,1 and he never hesitated to
appeal to humanity's hopes and fears. But that
this in any way needed excuse, or that it was
necessary to raise this natural impulse into a
philosophy and reduce all social service to terms
of a whitewashed selfishness, seems never to have
occurred to him. No man ever struck out more
manfully against both self-depreciation and self-
exaltation than Jesus, but the motive upon which he
expected men to act was not that of the improve
ment of the individual atom. Self-preservation
may be the final motive of physical nature, but not
with the followers of Jesus. "Whosoever will
save his life shall lose it." 2
Taken altogether, it is obvious that the forces
upon which Jesus relied to make his ideal society
an actual fact in life, were neither mechanical nor
selfish. Whatever approach society as he found
'Matt. 7:12; Luke 6: 31. 2 Matt. 16:25.

THE FORCES OF HUMAN PROGRESS l8l
it was to make towards that better order which he
described would not be the result of external pro
pulsion or of calculation. As the kingdom of God
is spiritual, so are the forces which bring about
its realization ; and as it is a family, so are its
members to be not self-seekers, but brothers.
II
If, now, we attempt more positively to set forth
those primary forces upon which Jesus counted
for the accomplishment of his ideals, we are forced
back upon his fundamental conception of the
nature of man. Jesus trusts the inherent powers
and capacities of the race. The ideal he portrays
was not intended for creatures less or more human
than the men with whom he associated and out of
whom he hoped to form his kingdom. Individual
and social regeneration is possible because man
and society are inherently salvable. And deep in
the heart of a humanity that could be saved were
its wants. Not that he ever formally classifies
them. Indeed he can hardly be said to recognize
all their categories. But nevertheless he pre
supposes them. In his estimation they are in
themselves morally neutral, yet according to the
relative importance assigned to each of them they
may express either a healthy or decadent person-

1 82 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
ality. It is in this perspective in which he sees
the various wants of men that Jesus shows the
instinct of the practical man and not that of the
fanatic. Thus in the case of purely physical
wants, with a characteristic loyalty to his anti-
ascetic ideals, Jesus assumes the legitimacy of the
child's cry for food,1 bids his disciples pray for
bread,2 and pities a multitude which he saw grow
faint with hunger.3 Yet physical wants are inferior
to many others. Man is not tc live by bread
alone,4 and spiritual intensity might altogether
lift one, as it did himself, quite above mere physical
hunger.5 One of the sharpest rebukes he ever
administered to his disciples was occasioned by
their crass misinterpretation of one of his sayings
as a caution against certain classes of bakers from
whom they might be tempted to buy bread.6 The
same is true of all economic wants. Who better
than Jesus ever appreciated the power of a mer
chant's desire to succeed in business,7 or of a
laborer's passion for a larger wage?8 The Heav
enly Father knows his children have need of food
and raiment,9 but just for that very reason men
¦Matt. 7:9. 6 John 4: 31-34.
2 Matt. 6:11. 6 Matt. 16:5-12; Mark 8: 14-21.
3 Matt. 15:32; Mark 8: 3. 7 Matt. 13:45.
4 Matt. 4:4. 3 Matt. 20 : 2 sq.
9 Matt. 6: 31, 32; John 6: 27.

THE FORCES OF HUMAN PROGRESS 183
are not to make the search for them the chief end
in life. A man's life does not consist in the
abundance of things that he possesses.1
The satisfaction, not of these lower wants, but of
those other and higher desires after truth and the
higher verities and experiences of life, is to be the
underlying motive in the new order of life. Men
are not to be compelled to be good, but their desires
are to lead them to goodness, or, if the desire be
lacking, are to be convinced of the sin of the lack.2
Not obedience, but loving impulse, is the key to
noble living. The members of his new society are
to be not servants but friends,3 and conventional
duties are no measure of what friendship may
prompt.4 Chief among these basal desires of men Jesus
would class the desire to know God. To know
him not merely as a truth or principle, but as
a person. The cry of Philip, " Show us the
1 Luke 12: 15.
2 John 16: 8-10. In this connection one recalls the eagerness
with which Jesus met an honest seeker after truth like Nathaniel
and Thomas, Zacchams and Martha, as well as the earnestness, not
to say severity, with which he answered those whose ignorance was
in part due to their own failure to follow their better instincts, as
Nicodemus and Philip. Compare also the philosophy by which the
Fourth Gospel accounts for the presence or absence of the faith
that accepts Jesus. John 3 : 18-21.
3 John 15 : 15. 4 Luke 17 : 10.

184 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
Father,"1 was the outburst of humanity's heart,
and the answer it drew forth has satisfied gen
erations. The chief significance of the life of
Jesus may be said in the light of history to have
lain in himself rather than in his teaching. He
was the revealer of God. So his contemporaries
judged him, though at first but dimly. So the
second century thought of him exclusively.2 And
although Jesus does not describe with any detail
the nature of this want of a more perfect know
ledge of God, and treats it more as a need than
as a desire, it is always present as a postulate
controlling his preaching and life.3 He had come
that men might receive the divine life more abun
dantly.4 And similarly in regard to the relations existing
between men themselves, Jesus, while never ana
lyzing the psychology of ethics, addresses himself
to that which was even more sadly evident in his
day than in ours, men's need of some standard
1 John 14: 8.
2 If there were need, reference might here be made to the epis
tles of Clement of Rome and Barnabas, but the fact is so uniformly
admitted that argument seems gratuitous. How deep an impres
sion this conception of Jesus had made by the very beginning of
the second century is to be seen in our Fourth Gospel.
8 This is especially felt in reading the Fourth Gospel. Thus,
John 6 : 57; 17 : 1-26.
* John 10 : 10.

THE FORCES OF HUMAN PROGRESS 1 85
and motive for better dealings with their fellows.
For this reason it was, that, according to the
oldest sources of our gospel, he received so sym
pathetically the rich young man who desired to
be perfect,1 and the lawyer who could appreciate
the summation of Mosaism in the double com
mand to love God and man.2 These men were
no mere tricksters, but seekers after a more defi
nite ethical standard. And doubtless it was in
large measure for the same reason that the multi
tudes for a while hung upon his words. He
would not be a judge and a divider in matters
of property,3 but he taught freely in regard to
social duties, as he saw men needed his instruc
tion. And it mattered nothing whether the want
was in a hasty woman,4 a timid son,5 or over-zeal
ous disciples.6
Still, the questions return: the duty he set
before men furnished the standard for life — did
it also in any way furnish the motive for more
rational social life ? Granting that men do want,
or at least need a knowledge of God and a better
ethical standard, how does Jesus proceed to turn
the need into motive ? Was he, after all, but
1 Mark 10 : 17-31. 4 Luke 10 : 38-42.
2 Mark 12 : 28-34. 5 Matt. 18:21, 22.
3 Luke 12 : 13-15. 6 Mark 9 : 38 sq.

1 86 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
another in the list of noble men who have com
manded men to love but who have not made love
easy ?
If we revert once more to Christ's conception of
man, we see the basis of this double need. Man
is a social being who finds his normal life only
in union. It is the imperfect union that causes
unrest. Jesus but deepened the need when he
revealed the normal life of men ; a life which, as
has already appeared, involves a twofold social
relationship ; a divine sonship and a human fra
ternity. These are the sources of the Christian
motives that inevitably make toward the building
up of both individual and society.
Ill
It is not necessary again to discuss what Jesus
meant by the terms "father" and "son" as he
used them to describe the relations that may
and should exist between man and God. It will
be enough to consider how the supreme relation
ship they express may furnish motives for social
life. The revelation of the possibility of the divine
sonship of man by Jesus becomes the source of
motive power in two particulars.
As in the case of all ideals, the revelation of

THE FORCES OF HUMAN PROGRESS 1 87
the possibilities of human life made by the char
acter and life of Jesus himself stirred men's hearts
to emulation and duplication. But Jesus never
represents himself in the fashion of the Stoic,
strong enough in his own unaided virtue to con
quer sin within and difficulty without. His was
a life of prayer.1 He did always the will of his
Father.2 The depths of his life were united with
the Divine.3 He and his Father are one. In
these particulars Jesus has always been an in
spiration for all those who have studied his life.
Men who are dubious about the historic records
of his life, nevertheless are anxious to see this
ideal type of character more and more reproduced
in themselves.4 And whatever may have been the
explanations of his influence given by others, in
Jesus' own mind the highest result that could
come from his intercourse with his disciples was
1 Matt. 14 : 23; Luke 5 : 16; Mark 1 : 35; Luke 6 : 12; 9 : 28;
John 14: 16; 16:26; Matt. 26:36.
2 John 6: 39; 8:29; Matt 26: 42.
8 John 10 : 30. This is also the clear implication of the stories
of the baptism. Matt. 3 : 13-17; Luke 3 : 21, 22; John 1 : 32-34.
How quickly this oldest conception of Jesus passed on the one hand
into a confusion of his person with that of the Father and on the
other into a mechanical conception of his power, may be seen in
the literature of the second century. Compare, for instance, the
Epistle of Barnabas with the Gospel of Peter.
4 Sheldon, An Ethical Movement, p. 123.

1 88 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
their sharing in this complete life ; a life that
should satisfy their nature's demands for a life
united with God ; a life in which they were one
with themselves, with him, and with his Father.1
Yet the results of this new relationship — this
sonship — were after all the fundamental things
with Jesus. As his example was calculated to
lead men to something other than an atomistic,
self-centred moral life (if such a thing is con
ceivable), so the new sonship would result in new
moral impulses, new moral states, out of which
might rise new motives and choices. And this
was the condition of entering the kingdom — a
man was to be born again.2 " He that hath
the Son hath the life."3
The older theologians seldom failed to read
the words of Jesus at this point with unanimity,4
and that too while tending to displace the psy
chological fact with forensic justification. Noth
ing is nearer the heart of the teaching of both
Jesus and Paul than the moral change that is
the result of the interpenetration of the human
1 John 17 : 22, 23. 2 John 3 : 3, 6. 8 John 5:12.
4 There may have been wide divergence among theologians in
the explanation and the philosophical placing of regeneration, but
they were at one in emphasizing the fact. For outline statement
see Shedd, Dogmatic Theology, IL, 490 sq. And yet at this point
the Ritschlian school seems weakest.

THE FORCES OF HUMAN PROGRESS 1 89
and the divine personalities — a process that is
with Jesus no more figurative than the ordinary
change which is wrought in the characters of
two friends through their constant intercourse.
It is precisely at this point that the unique sig
nificance of Jesus as an ethical teacher appears.
So far from divorcing morals and religion, or
from making morals the basis of religion, he
makes religious experience the fountain head
of good conduct, and in his own life gave a
concrete illustration of his philosophy. He re
vealed God and he revealed also the possibilities
of human life. It is not necessary to follow the
straitest sect of the orthodox to appreciate the
truth of this revelation made by Jesus of divine
sonship. Nor is it necessary to follow the mystic
into the heights of his ecstasy.1 The thought of
Jesus himself is very simple and concrete. By
sonship he meant an actual likeness in the char
acters of men and God. And this likeness while
made possible by the original capacities of hu
manity is something more distinct. It is the
result of the influence of God upon a man's
1 And one is tempted to add, the newer Ritschlian school into
the mysteries of a new birth that can be neither " seen nor grasped,
but only believed in," something which it is "absurd to suppose
can be experienced as a process in time." See Hermann, The
Communion of the Christian with God.

190 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
heart. Those who thus have come under the
renewing influence of the Divine Spirit are none
the less themselves. On the contrary, they have
found themselves1 in their new ideal — the per
fection of their Father.2 And, if we may so use
the other form this saying takes, the expression
of this new family character is to be expected in
deeds of kindness and mercy.3 Sometimes Jesus,
full of the Divine Spirit, represents himself as
furnishing the new life with moral impulses as
the vine furnishes life to its branches.4 Some
times his followers are conceived of as plants
which his Father had planted.5 Yet always the
new phase in life is the soil out of which noble
impulses are to grow. The doing of noble deeds,6
the keeping of the commands of Jesus,7 these are
the tests of the new and divine living that comes
from the impact and the infusion of divine life.
From the heart thus changed will be the issues
of a new life. As Paul expresses it, the fruits
of the spirit are love, joy, peace, longsuffering,
kindness, goodness, faithfulness, meekness, self-
control.8 So that, although the new man is not
1 Matt. 10: 39. Compare Luke 15. 6 Matt. 15 : 13.
2 Matt. 5:48. "John 15:4.
3 Luke 6 : 36. 'John 14:15; 15:10.
4 John 15 : 1. 8 Gal. 5: 22.

THE FORCES OF HUMAN PROGRESS 19 1
a perfect man, he will progress towards perfec
tion, for he is a new sort of man, a prodigal
faced towards home.1 IV
And here, as the outgrowth of this central
thought of his system, we find a second element
in Jesus' philosophy of social progress ; the love
that springs from a sense of brotherhood. Two
men, brothers in the physical sense, love each
other instinctively, spontaneously. So in the case
of this new fraternity, of this genetic relationship
that exists between two men and God. If each
is a son of God, are they not brothers?2 If once
they realize their common nature, will they not
love one another ? So at any rate thought Jesus.
Love between a man and his enemy was a thing
to be commanded,3 but not between brothers.
1 Harris, Moral Evolution, p. 243.
2 While this would hold true in a sense, in case it be applied to
the universal fatherhood of God and brotherhood of man, as Jesus
uses the terms they gain greatly in force. As a matter of fact, does
a recognition of the universal brotherhood of men prompt to special
deeds of kindness in any such way as a realization of some wretch's
earnest effort to grow nobler and more Godlike ? On the other
hand it should be noted that the term " brother " is not coextensive
with " church member " any more than the kingdom of God is co
extensive with the church. To narrow Jesus to such definitions
would be contrary to the entire spirit of his teaching.
3 Matt. 5 : 44.

192 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
That was to be expected.1 Anything that pre
vented such fraternal feeling was to be removed,
even at the cost of religious punctuality.2 It is
true that if men fail to appreciate their fraternal
relations when they exist, they will need the com
mand to love one another.3 But this, like all law,
is but a provisional matter. As the realization of
their relations to one another as members of a
fraternity deepens, men will love less and less from
a sense of duty and increasingly from impulse.
And this new love was to be like Jesus' own,
ready for any sacrifice that might seem necessary.4
But evidently at this point we are dealing with
social motives. A man thus inspired is no longer
living for his individual, his atomistic self, but for
his social, his altruistic self. In his revelation of
the love of God and the possibility of a new and
1 Matt. 5:47; 18:21,22. 2 Matt. 5 : 21-24.
8 John 13:34; 15:12. Yet even here the example of Jesus
himself is to be an incentive.
4 But self-sacrifice is not the central principle of Christianity as
some urge. A man must be ready to sacrifice himself if there be
need, but sacrifice in itself may be wrong. The centre of the teach
ings of Jesus cannot be found in any such ascetic notion of life. It
lies in the person of Jesus himself — that object-lesson in the divine
life in human life. Love involves self-sacrifice, but self-sacrifice does
not of necessity involve love.
Nor does self-sacrifice mean self-annihilation, be it from never so
holy motives. Jesus is the last man to preach either Nirvana or
pantheism.

THE FORCES OF HUMAN PROGRESS 193
divine sonship, Jesus prepared the way not only
for the saving of each individual sinner. He did
more. Every man who comes thus into a con
scious reinstatement in the love of God, becomes
also a brother of all other men in the same rela
tion. And so is set in motion a multitude of fra
ternal loves which, disregarding place, and time,
and birth, and social station, will forever remain
unsatisfied until they express themselves in recip
rocal deeds of kindness and bring in a new social
order, in which each man will seek to minister,
not to be ministered unto ; to become a servant of
all.1 V
If now we look somewhat more closely at
this new social force which is the dynamic side
of the apprehension of brotherhood (which it
must not be forgotten is itself the outcome of
the new and divine life in man), it will be evi
dent that it is in itself composed of something
more than mere emotional elements, and that
Jesus regarded it as involving to an equal ex
tent the will.2 Were it otherwise it would be
1 Matt. 20 : 26-28.
2 It is not necessary for such a view to strain the difference
between dyairdw and qbCkltii with their cognate forms (Trench,
New Testament Synonyms) . The two words were used in the later
Greek somewhat indiscriminately.
o

I94 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
impossible to see how one whose love was thus
the outgrowth of the sense of a new reality
could ever be expected to love a person in
whose case the reality was not appreciable.
Such a love, it would be urged, is perhaps un
derstandable in the case of two persons who
answer Jesus' conception of brothers, but would
be inconceivable between one man who was a
member of the kingdom, and another man who
was not. How then could there be progress,
or how could the kingdom fail to become a close
corporation ? But if the full sweep of Jesus'
teaching be considered, it will be seen that this
spontaneous love that arises from the sense of
kinship may be directed towards one's enemies.
It may, perhaps, not always be possible for one
to feel the affection for one's opponents that
seems to have been felt by Jesus,1 but one can
always treat one's enemies as if they were
brothers. In such a case the conduct inspired
by loving affection outlines the way for duty.
The same kindness that was done spontane
ously for a lover is now to be done from the
sense of obligation for a persecutor.
And what will these acts be ? Jesus does not
specifically bid the member of the kingdom to
1 Matt. 23: 37.

THE FORCES OF HUMAN PROGRESS 195
do much else than pray for and bless those who
are planning his harm ; x but after all his mean
ing is not hard to find. Both the spontaneous
love and the controlled love will seek the ac
complishment of those conditions which go to
make up Jesus' ideal society. Circumstances
will naturally determine different means and
different processes, but the love that springs
from a sense of brotherhood, will never be sat
isfied until it has established a social order in
which fraternity will characterize all phases of
social life. Sometimes such impulse and duty
will need instruction, and this, it has appeared,
Jesus has given in broad principles ; but in spe
cial cases, he seemed to believe that the divine
life within man thus enlightened could be
trusted to work out better and more Christian
social institutions.2
Therefore it has been that those times and
places in which men have come most under the
influence of the words and life of Jesus have
been those in which institutions at variance with
fraternity — branding, polygamy, the exposure of
children, slavery, drunkenness, and licentiousness
— -have disappeared. Indeed, one might almost
say, that there has been no healthy progress
1 Matt. 5:44. 2 John 16:13.

I96 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
towards fraternity except as it has sprung from
the sense of this divine kinship. Pleas and bat
tles for justice have wrought revolutions and
wrecked institutions ; but only when they have
been supplemented and corrected by this fra
ternal impulse have they yielded the peace
able fruits of righteousness. VI
Thus Jesus is thoroughly consistent with him
self. The new social order which he outlines
is not beyond the powers of man as he conceives
them. It is true that a moral regeneration of
the individual is presupposed before society as
such can be perfected, but here Jesus is true
to human capacities. Religion, just as much
as selfish calculation, is one of the motive forces
in human life, and to disregard it is to throw
away the most powerful source of moral im
pulse. Therefore it is that while one may per
haps wonder that Jesus should have counted to
so small a degree upon other forces that have
made forward movements successful, it is quite
impossible to say that he has erred in thus cen
tring attention upon the religious side of man's
nature and upon that enthusiasm for humanity
which is the outgrowth of a perception of the

THE FORCES OF HUMAN PROGRESS 1 97
consequent new human fraternity. Life is in
deed something more than search for creature
comforts. Those men of the past who have
marked stages in the march of the race have
always so judged. Take from the goodly com
pany of the men who have permanently ben
efited society, those men whose impulses have
not in some way sprung from the sense of God
or the sense of fraternity, and how many will
be left ? In his revelation of divine sonship
and the consequent human brotherhood, Jesus
has furnished the basis for lasting social prog
ress. For if humanity is to become a family
inspired by the love of the divine Father, there
is no power in earth or hell that can prevent
the realization of the noblest social ideals of
which the world has dreamed.

CHAPTER IX
THE PROCESS OF SOCIAL REGENERATION
This, then, is the core of the social doctrine of
Jesus — divine sonship and consequent human
brotherliness. This it is that gives unity to his
varied teachings, and, with all the moral force
it involves, is that upon which he believed could
be based the development of his kingdom. Nay,
may we not say, the moral force generated by
the revelation of this new divine and human
relationship could be trusted itself to work out
reforms ? If this were the position of Jesus, it
would in large measure explain how it came
about that, except as already indicated, he gave
so few detailed directions as to specific reforms.
Was he indifferent to the process of regenera
tion ? Or did he in the case of both individual
and society anticipate if not the details, at least
the general character, of those struggles and de
velopments that have resulted from the work
ings of Christianity ? To put the question in

PROCESS OF SOCIAL REGENERATION 1 99
another form. Has Christianity in its attempts
to regenerate humanity followed the directions
of Jesus or of some other man ?
I
It is by no means impossible that one should
have agreed with the presentation thus far made
of the teaching of Jesus and yet hesitate to be
lieve that the future of the kingdom as he con
ceived of it involved either universality or even
appreciable progress. It is not uncommon to
commit Jesus to the belief that the new king
dom was to be hardly more than an extended
Israel into which a few Gentiles might be ad
mitted.1 That an unknown, uninfluential Jew
like Jesus should have had visions of a universal
empire does, it must be granted, seem somewhat
remarkable. Yet no one can read the words that
he spoke during the latter part of his career2
without being convinced that in his expectations
1 Wendt, Teaching of Jesus, II. , 350-351. See also the commen
tary on Acts (10 : 1 ; 15 : 1) in the Meyer series.
2 Thus John 12:30: I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will
draw all men unto me. Luke 13:29: They shall come from the
east and the west and shall sit down in the kingdom of God. Cf.
John 17:18, 20. It cannot escape notice that Wendt's position
depends largely upon his belief that Jesus expected that the king
dom would be completely established during the lifetime of his
own generation. Teaching of Jesus, II., 345.

200 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
the process of regeneration was not one to be
limited by either geographical or political boun
daries. Nor, even if it be granted as altogether
probable that he did not foresee the astonishing
changes wrought within Christendom, does a
complete synthesis of his words permit the view
that this ignorance extended to the general nature
of the process that was to lead to the end of
one age and the full establishment of that new
social order in which God and righteousness
and love were to be supreme. If it be objected
that Jesus declared that few found the strait
gate and the narrow path,1 it will be enough to
reply that such a remark applied to the immedi
ate circle of his hearers and must be correlated
with the other sayings in which he anticipates
the evangelization and conquest of the world.
Similarly, in ascribing due weight to those say
ings of his in which he spoke of his contempo
raries seeing the fulfilment of his prophecies of
the coming kingdom,2 one must remember that
this coming was a progression whose inaugura
tion in the new opportunities arising from the
fall of the Jewish state might come suddenly,
but whose completion was lost in the depths of
omniscience itself.8 In fact, if we are to regard
1 Matt. 7: 13, 14. 2 Matt. 24:34. 3 Matt. 24:36.

PROCESS OF SOCIAL REGENERATION 201
the " great commission " J as representing in any
faintest way a thought of Jesus, the conclusion
cannot be avoided that he was concerned with
the evangelization of the world quite as much
as with that of Judea and Galilee. The fact
that he himself seems deliberately to have de
clined such wider labors2 is to be explained as
a part of a well-ordered plan in which his own
evangelistic work consisted fundamentally in the
gathering of a few devoted followers who should
be so imbued with his own spirit as to become
at once the instructors and the nucleus of a
new society. The audacity of Jesus in assum
ing that a group of such men had within it the
possibility of indefinite expansion is equalled only
by the superb optimism that saw possibilities of
infinite good in humanity. In both lay his phi
losophy of the growth of the new social order.
If his teaching had been less human and hu
manity less capable of moral rebirth, he would
have been but one of the motley crew of Christs
who have so often appeared only to delude and
destroy. 1 Matt. 28: 19.
2 John 12: 20-32. The well-known correspondence between Ab-
garus, king of Edessa, and Jesus, though undoubtedly apocryphal,
expresses correctly, perhaps through some tradition, the attitude of
Jesus : " I must fulfil all the ends of my mission in this country."

202 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
II
There is disappointment in store for the man
who looks to Jesus for specific teachings as to
reform. He was singularly unconcerned with
those specific injunctions with which the system
of Moses teems. There was no lack of vices
within the Roman Empire, not yet feeling the
weakly revivifying touch of poverty and philos
ophy, against which he might have thundered,
to say nothing of those larger questions that
might be expected to engage the attention of a
developing society. Yet with none of these did
he concern himself. The gospel was to be no
new collection of moral precepts to be forced
upon a world already surfeited with good advice,
but a power that should make towards righteous
ness. The process of the new birth of the Jew
ish and heathen world was not to be that of a
new subjection to law, be it never so inspired,
but that of a growth that showed itself through
such institutions as the process of evolution
might show necessary. The symbol of the new
society was not to be that of stones, graven
though they might be by the hand of God, but
the seed which, planted in the field, grows, one
knows not how, and in proper season produces

PROCESS OF SOCIAL REGENERATION 203
the blade, and the ear, and the full corn in the
ear.1 Thus the general nature of this progress is
described by Jesus as an evolution, although it
could not be expected that he would use the word.
It is to be the transformation of existing powers.
This does not, however, commit Jesus to the belief
that all that is necessary for the attainment of a
perfect ideal of social life is simply the develop
ment of a godless sociability. As has already
appeared, Jesus looked upon the religious capacity
of men as just as truly normal and human as any
other of the capacities of human life. Accord
ingly, when he trusted to humanity to develop
into something like normal living, it was because
he had recognized the religious forces resident in
human nature which were capable themselves of
great development and which possessed the power
of transforming character. The world, or the
existing social environment in which the new
society found itself, was to be won over to the
Christian conceptions of social relations by virtue
of the fact that it contained within it material
which might be regenerated through an appre
hended God. Jesus was no Christ for animals,
but for men. Because the world was evil did not
1 Mark 4 : 26-28.

204 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
argue that it was unsavable. If the leaven was
to leaven the lump, it must have been because the
lump was leavenable. Out from the seething
mass of men and women so largely under the
control of evil purposes and unbrotherly ideals,1
there was to be formed a body whose ideals were
to be noble and fraternal. They were to be the
same individuals, but transformed ; no longer the
enemies one of another, but brothers, each look
ing not alone to his own affairs, but also in the
spirit of helpfulness to the affairs of another.
This process is by analogy organic. The king
dom does not depend upon accretion for its
growth, but upon the assimilation of new mate
rial won from the environment in which it may
find itself. It is indeed surprising to see how
frequently Jesus recurs to biological analogies in
describing the future progress of his kingdom.
One can hardly with safety revert at this point to
the important figure of the leaven, since its biolog
ical content could hardly have been explicitly in
the mind of Jesus. But within the sphere of
1 "The foreigner is a wolf " was altogether a more characteristic
social conception of the ancient world than the noble words of an
Epictetus. One has but to read the Golden Ass of Apuleius to see
how, in the midst of a well-developed commercial system, there
lingered a conception of travellers hardly higher than that held by
brigands.

PROCESS OF SOCIAL REGENERATION 205
observable organic growth Jesus saw in the life
of plants repeated analogies of the growth of that
which he did but inaugurate. Now the progress
of the kingdom is like that of the mustard seed ; 1
now of the seed sown on soils which by their dif
ferent natures condition the size of the harvest ; 2
again it is like the seed that must grow if once it
be planted, since the earth itself compels it — a
most instructive analogy.3 From a somewhat
different point of view, the history of the kingdom
in the world seemed to be like that of a field in
which tares and grain grew side by side until the
harvest ; 4 and, most beautiful and suggestive of
all, the efficiency of the members of the new
family was distinctly taught to depend upon the
closeness of their union with himself, as branch
with vine.5 Such a habit of thought can hardly
be said to have been fortuitous. It is too nearly
akin to the conception of the new kingdom as a
family to permit the interpretation that Jesus did
not intend to emphasize the truth that back of
any permanent social growth there must be, first
of all, a sympathy in purpose and similarity in
capacity, such as can be compared alone to the
apprehension and the assimilation of parts of its
1 Matt. 13:31. 3 Mark 4 : 27. 4 Matt. 13 : 24-30.
2 Mark 4: 3 sq. 6 John 15 : 4 sq.

206 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
environment by the living organism. Indeed,
when once Jesus' conception of " the world " is
clearly gained, the analogy becomes altogether
striking. The kingdom of a few men, filled with
the might that comes from the experience of a
newly revealed sonship of God and brotherhood
with each other, is seen set down in the midst of
societies full of opposite forces, yet composed of
convertible men. Out from this social environ
ment the little group is to select and convert and
assimilate whom it can and what institutions it
can. Through these newly acquired elements it
will grow, ever more capable of further growth,
like the seed in the ground nourished and made
great by the surroundings within which it finds
itself. But at one point the analogy fails. Jesus never
for an instant thought of the kingdom as ulti
mately merely a world within a world. The plant
can never make the earth from which it grows
wholly its own and itself, but there was to be no
such dualism in the case of society. With the
modification to be considered presently, Jesus ex
pected the new society to be at last coextensive
with all society ; or more truly, he expected that
at last the world would be so thoroughly trans
formed into the kingdom as to cease to be distinct

PROCESS OF SOCIAL REGENERATION 207
from it. The three measures of meal would all be
leavened. The prince of this world had already
been judged,1 the twelve were to sit as judges of
the new Israel,2 the Son of Man was at last to
come in the glory of an undisputed ruler.3
But evidently this process of assimilation must
be preceded by a transformation that is moral.4
Evil men are not to share in the joys of this
new society. It is not enough with Jesus to im
prove the conditions of human life. The mere
conquest of matter, the exploitation of natural
resources, as seen clearly enough to-day, need not
of necessity imply any essential advance in civili
zation. To clothe a man and to feed him well,
to enable him to build up great buildings and
establish large businesses, to enable an entire
people so to develop its land and its mineral
deposits as to become rich, may be the furthest
possible from building that person or that people
into a more fraternal life. To each alike comes
the warning of Jesus : " Thou fool, this night thy
soul shall be demanded of thee."5 But to bring
the constructive forces of a man or a nation into
subjection to lofty ideals ; to make that which is
1 John 16:11. 8 Matt. 16:27; 19:28; 25:31.
2 Matt. 19:28. 4 Matt. 12:33; 7 = r7. x8; 12:34,35.
6 Luke 12: 20.

208 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
wrong hated and that which is good loved; so
to transform and improve and ennoble a man
that instead of seeking his own selfish interests
he will find his life by spontaneously losing it in
the society of other lives about him ; to develop
a love for men because one is one's self a child
of God ; in a word, to make normal social life
depend upon goodness — that is the fundamental
position of Jesus. One does not need to be
reminded that in this he stands by no means in
the same class with many other would-be reform
ers. To give large wages, to make the home
more comfortable and happy, to see that the
sanitary arrangements of the city and commu
nity are perfect, to provide a fair income, health
ful food, good amusements, and all the other
requirements of respectable life to-day ; to do
this and let evolution do the rest — this is the
position of more than one social teacher.
But the imperfection that must needs be cor
rected, in the estimation of Jesus, was no chance
of "birth or occupation in life. The Pharisee was
quite as ill as the harlot and the publican.1 The
cause of all inequality and lack of fraternity is
moral ; it is sin. Men cannot reach that divine
sonship in which fraternal love becomes natural
1 Matt. 21 : 31.

PROCESS OF SOCIAL REGENERATION 200,
so long as the spirit of selfishness rules them.
A corrupt tree cannot bring forth good fruit.1
The world can become the kingdom only by a
repentance and a moral change on the part of
its members that replaces the spirit of revolt
against goodness and a loving God with the spirit
of sonship.2
And Jesus saw aright. A perfect society can
not be created from imperfect people. That
which stands in the way of the realization of
many a man's ideal for society has not been its
own logical inconsistency, but its failure to find
or to produce the right sort of men upon which
to work. The plan of the house called for marble
and the only material at hand was mud. Jesus
proposes to furnish good material as well as a
noble plan.
Such a moral transformation of humanity's sin
ful but potentially noble nature must of necessity
be gradual. It cannot be accomplished in a gen
eration. An impatient man with a passion for
hastening his benefactions would have failed to
see this necessity. At the outset of his public
life Jesus had wrestled with the temptation to
hurry the conquest of the world,3 but as he
stood at the end of his ministry and saw the
1 Matt. 7:17. 2 John 3:3. 3 Matt. 4 : 8-10 ; Luke 4 : 5-8.
r

2IO THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
months of earnest effort that lay behind him,
and judged of the future, the progress of his
kingdom appeared not as a thing to be ac
complished by social cataclysms,1 but rather as
the steady growth of a tiny seed into a great
tree.2 It is in the course of this gradual development
of a fraternity that attempts to assimilate an
unregenerate society that we must especially look
to find Jesus' conception of the process by which
his kingdom was to reach its completion.
Ill
Is this process to be institutional and national,
or is it to be individualistic ? Is society or are
men first to be regenerate ? It is a thought that
finds frequent expression that Christianity intro
duced individualism. So indeed did Christianity,
if by individualism is not meant an atomism. For
the Christian doctrine of society is not that of an
aggregation of individuals made repellent through
uncompromising demands for rights. The only
sense in which Christianity can claim to be indi
vidualistic is in its elevation of the worth of each
human life. But the real worth of every life
1 John 18 : 30. 2 Cf. Matt. 13 : 31-33.

PROCESS OF SOCIAL REGENERATION 211
consists not in separate existence, but rather in
the identification of its interests with the interests
of others in the exercise of that fraternal love
which was both the ideal and the practice of
Jesus himself.
Yet a society must be composed of individuals,
and therefore it was that Jesus devoted himself so
largely to the individual. Reformations do not
proceed en masse. There must be the successive
winning of one man after another until there be
developed something like a nucleus of a more
perfect social life. The method, therefore, of
Jesus in the founding of the kingdom was not the
wholesale righting of political or economic or reli
gious wrongs, although when this was necessary he
did not hesitate to give vent to his righteous indig
nation against men who persisted in perpetuating
them. Rather was his method the successive winning
of separate souls, now a Philip and now a Peter,
until at last he had discovered and won to himself
a few men and women who were so far imbued
with his own spirit of fraternity as to be ready to
inaugurate and evangel a higher and more perfect
social life. Loyola never followed more persist
ently or more successfully a Xavier, John, a fugi
tive robber, than did Jesus the humble fishermen

212 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
with whom his lot was cast. Once let the spirit of
such brotherliness become regnant, and all the
horrid brood of vices that spring from its opposite
will vanish. Men may need to incorporate this
spirit in special laws, but this must be done by
each age and community for itself. Jesus gives a
constitution ; men can frame statutes.
At one point, however, he may be said to have
given specific directions for social life. The
member of the kingdom will submit to abuse
rather than become involved in strife. He will
turn his left cheek to him who strikes his right ;
he will let cloak follow coat rather than go to
law ; he will go two miles with him who would
force him to go one.1 Could rules be simpler ?
Simple indeed these rules appear, but few of
Jesus' teachings are more difficult to estimate.
Shall we with Tolstoi regard their literal readings
as the very core and centre of Christian doctrine,
or shall we with easy indifference thrust them
back into the depths of the mystery of oriental
hyperbole ? Are they to be blindly followed, or
are they to be skipped ?
The proper point of view from which to get
their perspective is given by Jesus' insistence upon
reconciliation as an expression of fraternal love.
1 Matt. 5 : 39-41.

PROCESS OF SOCIAL REGENERATION 213
He who has done a brother an injury is to
obtain forgiveness before he attempts to wor
ship God at the altar.1 But not only this, he
who has suffered an injury must not wait for
such an advance, but must himself come to an
agreement with his persecutor if it be in any
way possible. In a word, reconciliation must not
wait upon repentance.2 This seemed as difficult
to the disciples as to later ages. They thought
there must at least be some limit to forgiveness —
that seven times would exhaust human nature.3
But the answer of Jesus showed that in his estima
tion any surrender of pride was better than the
perpetuation of a cause of dissension.4 And if
the offender after orderly admonition and appeal
prove incorrigible, it is better to break with him
utterly than to run the risk of increased bitter
ness and strife.5 If a house and a kingdom
divided against themselves could not stand, much
less a family.
It is in the light of this imperative demand for
unity in a fraternity and for the opportunity for
an unimpeded exercise of brotherliness that these
other and more extreme words of Jesus must be
regarded. They are no new or central teaching,
1 Matt. 5 : 22-24. 8 Matt- 18:21. 4 Matt. 18 : 22-35.
2 Matt. 18 : 15. 5 Matt. 18 : 15-17.

214 TIIE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
but a new phase of the great teaching of fraternity
as it extends itself to those who have not yet come
under its influence. As between the members of
the Christian society there must be brotherly
unity, so between them and those who are not
fellow-members there is to be at the cost of any
sacrifice maintained a bond of peace that shall
make possible the transformation of an unloving
and evil world. Old laws of retaliation are here
absolutely iniquitous.1 No persecution or oppres
sion or insult, be it never so stinging, is to give
grounds for a refusal to let love beget reconcilia
tion. Jesus knew the strength of the desires for
revenge and justice, and he knew also how impos
sible would be the conquest of the world by men
who were constantly stickling for their rights, or
who in a spirit of revenge attempted to bring their
enemies to justice. It was a severe teaching, but
from his point of view inevitable. It were better
to suffer wrong than to attempt to win the world
to love by fighting with it. Forgiveness should
be spontaneous, and, if need be, he who had been
injured must be the one to make advances toward
a reconciliation. And did Jesus thereby let down the bars for a
mad incursion of evil doers ? Would he have men
1 Matt. 5 : 38, 39.

PROCESS OF SOCIAL REGENERATION 21 5
never protect themselves from injury or punish
criminals ? Would he have swindlers and thieves
and every sort of rascal prey upon a society that
should never seek to purge itself of its criminal
classes ? The questions would answer themselves
even if we did not have the caution of Jesus not to
throw pearls before swine,1 and the example of
his caution in fleeing from danger,2 and his denun
ciations of hypocrites and embezzlers.3 Goodness
in Jesus was not divorced from common sense,
and non-resistance in the sense of a willingness to
forego contention and even a just punishing of one's
personal enemies, is not the same as the attempt a
society should make to reform some of its mem
bers by righteous punishment. There was to be
a burning of the tares quite as certainly as a
gathering of the sheaves into barns.4 But in
a sense, the individual has little to do with such
corporate — or, as Jesus would rather say, divine
— judgments. His duty is simple: by unself
ish love so to win over his neighbors to his own
higher ideals and to the imitation of Christ that
the need of even reformatory punitive action may
grow less, and all men may come increasingly into
that life in which social service grows ever more
'Matt. 7:6. 8 Matt. 23: 27, 28; Luke 20 : 45-47.
2 John 7:1. 4 Matt. 13:30.

2l6 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
spontaneous because of the new motives that are
furnished by the new consciousness of brother
hood. And yet it can be objected, and with truth, that,
as the term is commonly used, good men will not
of necessity make a good society. It is possible
to develop virtue in such a fashion as to make its
possessors unattractive, and, if not self-centred,
at least incapable of aggressive work for the help
ing of surrounding lives. If this were the legiti
mate result of Christian teaching, one could well
despair of a Christian society. But it is sufficient
answer to the objection to point to the life of Jesus.
In him we see a perfect incarnation of his teach
ings, and no man can study his life without feeling
that a society composed of Christs would be a
perfect fraternity. No man feels the same in
regard to Socrates. A thousand men of his ilk
would constitute a very uncomfortable community
within which to live. The same is true of societies
composed of ascetic or semi-ascetic reformers.
But so normal was Jesus' life, so judiciously de
voted to the welfare of others, so regardful of the
conventionalities which experience begets as regu
lators of social life, that he stands as a representa
tive of an individual who has found his completest
mission in the identification of his life with that of

PROCESS OF SOCIAL REGENERATION 217
other men. Indeed, precisely in the same propor
tion that a man imitates the life of Jesus as an
individual does he help establish Jesus' fraternal
society. IV
The expanding Christian society, therefore, will
consist of groups of men and women each pos
sessed of the same spirit and method of life as that
taught by their Master. These little groups of
individuals Jesus likened to leaven which was
thrown into the meal and there remained until it
had leavened the meal. Though they are not of
the world, yet they are to stay in it.1 Conquest,
not flight, is to be their watchword. The progress
of Christian society in the world will depend upon
the power which each nucleus of Christian per
sons gathered into a society will have upon the
surrounding social life. It can expand only by
transforming and assimilating to itself this environ
ment. As the process is not one of mere instruc
tion but of the impartation of new life, Jesus must
have had in mind certain means by which this
impartation could be accomplished. And these
means we should expect would be such as would
render especially easy the bringing of individuals
under the influence of those forces which would
1 John 17: 15.

218 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
make them fraternal by making them Christlike.
Does Jesus specify or imply any such ?
In the larger sphere of life Jesus seems indirectly
to recognize the power of public opinion in modify
ing environment. There is, it must be granted, a
certain Christianization of society going on uncon
sciously. The life of genuine members of the
kingdom has an influence upon those who are
outside its professed members that is as real as
it is unmeasurable. For do they not contribute
something to the formative ideals and opinions of
their society ? Through the influence of individu
als who have come under the influence of Jesus,
others are constantly forced to adopt higher
standards in at least conventional morality. Yet
the force of public opinion, so far as Jesus recog
nizes it, appears at first glance largely evil. His
apostles were not to be of the leaven of the
Pharisee ; 2 they were not to pattern themselves
after the habits of the hypocrite ; 2 they were not,
to use the Pauline expression, to " conform to the
present world."3 But it is not difficult to see
that such a vitiated public opinion must be re
placed by a new and better as soon as hypocrites
are replaced by honest men. If one is not to
1 Matt. 16:11; Mark 8: 15; Luke 12: I.
2 Matt. 6:2, 5, 16. 3 Rom. 12:2.

PROCESS OF SOCIAL REGENERATION 219
conform to a bad social standard it is certainly
incumbent upon him to erect a new. Here Jesus'
influence must be most felt in working deliverance
for the poor of to-day's society. He cannot be
expected to be ever working miracles for the bene
fit of the needy. His regenerating power must lie
in the new consciences and sympathies of those
who are following his teachings and who attempt
to express his principles in legislation and indus
trial life. The optimistic Psalmist could see divine
care for the poor where to-day's pessimism sees
only greed and iron laws. A public opinion that
shall express the real fraternity that Jesus aimed
to establish would show that divine care is not in
consistent with economic principles, and that the
true expression of the Father's love is a brother's
aid. The earliest attempts which the primitive Chris
tians made towards the incorporation of the
kingdom of God were, like those of their Master,
in the line of philanthropic effort. Peter and John
healed the lame man in lieu of alms,1 and within
the little body of believers themselves one of the
first expressions of the new social spirit was in the
sharing of wealth among the brethren.2 In charity
there has always been a point of contact between
1 Acts 3 : 1 sq. 2 Acts 2 : 44.

220 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
the Christian society and the world that has
been of the greatest service. Charity is of neces
sity not a permanent need of the world, if ever
the kingdom of God is to be realized, but as social
life is constituted to-day Jesus saw that it was of
the very utmost importance. He worked out the
details of the social obligations of men of wealth
with deliberation and firm touch. In giving dinners
they are to treat poor people as their equals, even
though they cannot expect equivalent return for
social favors.1 The buyer of land and oxen, as
well as the new-made husband, are seen by Jesus
to serve as the type of those who, because of their
own indifference, are to be replaced at the king's
supper by those of the highways and hedges.2
And if wealth is to be devoted to social purposes it
must be with no sense of superiority or unaccom
panied by the giver's sympathy and love. The
poor widow, he said, gave more than the rich,
though she gave but two mites,3 and the neighbor-
liness of the good Samaritan was certainly seen
less in his expenditure of money than in his ser
vices to the unfortunate traveller.4 As Paul later
so finely said, if one were to give all his goods to
feed the poor, and had not love, it would profit him
1 Luke 14 : 13. 3 Mark 12 : 41-44.
2 Matt. 22: I-IO; Luke 14: 16-24. 4 Luke 10 : 30 *?.

PROCESS OF SOCIAL REGENERATION 221
nothing.1 One's own desires are to be the
measure of acts that affect others.2 Accordingly,
the frequent reference to almsgiving 3 can have
little other meaning than that it may serve as a
means of furthering the reign of fraternity. It is
not an end in itself; like all other good deeds it
must cause its beholders to glorify the Father in
heaven.4 Through it the attention and good will
of men might be gathered, one foundation of the
new social order, brotherly love, made more mani
fest, and thus many brought to a union with older
believers whose fellowship was with the Father
and with his Son Jesus Christ.5
But probably the most effective and historically
about the only appreciable force that has been at
work in the regeneration of society has been the
church. According to one's conception of this
body will one regard it as coextensive with or
less in extent than the kingdom itself.6 If one,
however, takes thought only of Jesus, it becomes
reasonably clear that he was little concerned
with founding a religious institution. In the one
of the two instances in which he speaks of the
1 I Cor. 13: 3. 2 Matt. 7: 12.
3 Matt. 5:42; 6:2-4; Luke 12:33.
4 Matt. 5 : 16; cf. Luke 19:8. 5 1 John 1 : 3.
6 In the former sense we understand the word to be used by
Freemanlle, The World as the Sul)ject of Redemption.

222 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
church1 it is evident that it is a means to the
maintenance of brotherliness ; and in the other
instance, the formula, " binding and loosing,"
that is, the right to teach authoritatively, was
entrusted not to the church, but to that member
of the kingdom upon whom the church was to
be built.2 Indeed, it almost seems as if in the
mind of Jesus the church was simply the religious
phase of the life of the kingdom. As the king
dom was to be fundamentally social the state is
simply the new fraternity in its political aspect.
In the same way the church expresses the com
bination of the members of the fraternity for the
purpose of special philanthropic and religious
effort. So indifferent was Jesus to the church
as an institution that he never spoke of its organi
zation, and left practically no directions for any
thing like a ceremonial. He founded not a
church but a kingdom. Nevertheless, as society
stands to-day, there can be little doubt that the
chief points of contact between those who are
endeavoring to incorporate the teachings of Jesus
in their lives and those who are not so endeavor-

1Matt. 18:17.
2 Matt. 16: 18. It is by no means impossible that this text, as
well as Matt. 18: 17, was not contained in the earlier Logia. See
Wendt, Die I^ehre Jesu, I., 155 sq.

PROCESS OF SOCIAL REGENERATION 223
ing, are the organizations known as the churches.
In the same proportion as each church develops
in its appreciation of Jesus and in its endeavor
to emphasize the social necessities of a perfect
individual life, will its influence be felt in trans
forming the environment in which it is placed.
Further, it is clear that the progress of the
Christian transformation of society must proceed,
precisely as in the method of Jesus, along the
line of conversion or, more exactly, the regenera
tion of the individual. At this point he who
seeks to inaugurate a greater Christian society
has the invaluable aid of the church's effort.
For generations churches of all shades of evan
gelical faith have been endeavoring to lay deep
this foundation of a progressive social regenera
tion. It has often happened that such a pro
gramme has seemed ineffectual ; men have often
endeavored to substitute a system of ethics for
the dynamics of a personal faith in God. But
such efforts have generally resulted from or- pre
ceded a weakening of conventional morals and
a degeneracy in society as a whole. The test of
a Christian society's morale has seldom been the
utterances of its ethical teachers as much as the
religious fervor of its masses. Strip from the
England of the seventeenth century the burning

224 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
zeal of the Separatist and Puritan, and we have the
Restoration and the Court Preachers. Concerts and
kindergartens are very necessary as complements
of revivals and mission halls, but as saviours of a
nation's civilization and purity they are as grass
before the storm. No thoughtful man will under
estimate or antagonize the remarkable combina
tion of professional and amateur philanthropy
that has within a few years burst forth in social
settlements and institutional churches. But, so
far as one can at present judge, such forms of
social effort, profoundly Christian as they are,
can never remove the need for the older and
more permanent work of the missionary. No
civilization can be Christian that balks at the fact
of divine sonship. No social reform will be
thorough-going and lasting that stops before en
deavoring to bring every human being into the
righteousness and fraternal love that spring from
religious experience. Evangelizing effort on the
part of the church, therefore, is to be urged not
merely on the ground of the benefit brought to
the individual who is turned from evil to righteous
ness, but on the ground of its profound signifi
cance and helpfulness in all matters of social
advance. It cannot be too often emphasized that
social regeneration according to the conception

PROCESS OF SOCIAL REGENERATION 225
of Christ cannot proceed on any other line than
that of the replacing of bad men by good men.
And this above all others is the function of the
church. For the Christian ideal is not that of
the monk but of the Christ. To aid in the re
generation of a man is to aid in the regeneration
of society. V
It is evident that such transformation of an im
perfect world into the perfect family Jesus antici
pated must, if this process is to be followed, require
much time. So Jesus foresaw. To those people
who expected that the kingdom of God would
come immediately he spoke the parable of the
nobleman who went into a far country.1 Indeed,
the entire completion of the transforming process
was not to be reached until the end of the age
— an event of such indefinite date that in regard
to it he professed himself to be in ignorance.
And not only was it to be slow, but it was to
be full of struggle and anguish for those men
who attempted to better humanity and human
society. Jesus would, indeed, have been wonder
fully lacking in foresight if his own experience
had not taught him that his followers must ex
pect bitter opposition. The master had been
1 Luke 19: 11 sq.
Q

226 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
called Beelzebub and had been persecuted, and
should the disciples expect to be above their
lord in escaping like treatment ? It was enough
for the disciple to be like his master.1 Helpful
as the new doctrine might be, Jesus saw that it
was such as might well be judged revolutionary
by those whom its insistence upon equality and
fraternity might alienate. His was not a mission
wholly of peace.2 He came to bring both sword
and fire into social life.3 The members of the
new propaganda were to expect severe treatment
at the hand of Roman and Jew alike. They
were to go forth as sheep among wolves.4 Politi
cal power and ecclesiasticism would equally set
themselves against them.5 But there was to be
no compromise. He who would be saved must
endure to the end.6 That which they heard in
the ear they were to tell on the housetop.7 They
were to be cities on hills, lamps uncovered by
bushels, salt that had not lost its savor.8 There
was nothing hidden except that it should be re
vealed.9 And at the same time no members of the
kingdom were to yield to revengeful feelings and
1 Matt. 10: 24, 25. 5 Matt. 10: 17; 23:34; Luke 12: II; 21 : 12.
2 Matt. 10 : 34. 6 Matt. 10 : 22.
8 Luke 12:49. 7 Matt. 10: 26 sq.; Mark 4: 21 sq.
1 Matt. 10: 16. 8 Matt. 5 : 13-15.
9 Mark 4 : 22; Luke 8 : 17.

PROCESS OF SOCIAL REGENERATION 227
lead revolution. On the contrary their arms were
to be prayer and benediction.1 As the forces upon
which he had counted for success were peaceful,
so as far as his followers were concerned, was
to be the process by which the unwilling world
would be transformed into the kingdom.2
Yet a startling thing in this calm anticipation
of a slow and painful process is his recognition
of the possibility of a time when the forces of
human nature should be insufficient; when the
new social order would be so far established as
to have transformed and assimilated all of the
transformable material it found in its environ
ment. Until that time, of necessity the two
opposing worlds must have existed side by side.3
Like tares and wheat growing in the same field
men were to grow together until good and bad
alike had exhausted the possibilities of growth.
Then, through some exercise of the supreme
power of the heavenly Father and King, the
1 Luke 6 : 38.
2 One should not overlook, however, the balance in Jesus' mind
throughout all this dark forecast of the future. He cautions his
followers against quixotic adventures. They were not to cast their
pearls before swine (Matt. 7 : 6). Because of the dangers to which
they were to be exposed, while as harmless as doves, they were to
be as wise as serpents (Matt. 10: 16).
3 Matt. 13 : 24-30.

228 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
agony and the transformation were to cease to
gether. As tares are separated from the wheat,
those incorrigible men who refused to share in
the new sonship and fraternity would be removed,
and thereafter the righteous were to shine like
the sun in the kingdom of their Father.1
As to when this supplementing of growth by
cataclysm shall come, Jesus gives us no informa
tion. But that he should have seen the neces
sity of it is a tribute to his sense of reality.
Men of persistent anti-filial and anti-fraternal
disposition can never be made into loving breth
ren. Their removal is the only hope of a per
manently peaceful fraternity. Just what Jesus
meant by the striking imagery in which he
clothed this thought we cannot clearly see.
That it may mean revolution or some other tre
mendous political change is not clear and yet
not to be absolutely denied in the light of his
references to the destruction of Jerusalem. But,
whatever it may be, it will mark the triumph of
the new social order. Penal action will reach
its consummation in the isolation of offenders.
Individual and institutional life will no longer
testify to the reign of even an enlightened sel
fishness. The world will, by virtue of man's
4Matt. 13:43.

PROCESS OF SOCIAL REGENERATION 229
endeavor and God's regenerating power, have
been transformed into the kingdom. And the
triumph of this new and perfected humanity,
this eternal fraternity which he described and
instituted and for which centuries have travailed
— this is the coming of the Lord.
"There remaineth, therefore, a Sabbath rest
for the people of God." So wrote the author
of the epistle to the Hebrews as he looked back
upon a restless, defeated theocracy, and forward
towards the future of the true Judaism.1 So,
too, many a man beaten back in his endeavor
to bring to an unwilling world Christ's blessing
of brotherliness and love has looked towards
the East, hoping that through the darkness of
the sin and misery and social inequality of the
world in which he lived there might break the
dawn of that great Sabbath. And although we
may no longer expect a new Jerusalem with
streets of gold and walls of jasper, we too wait
for a city in which God shall be King and
Father and in which love shall lead to justice
and righteousness to joy. For it is no dream
or apocalypse that meets us in the words and
life of Jesus, but rather a teaching the embodi-
1 Heb. 4:9.

230 THE SOCIAL TEACHING OF JESUS
ment of which is well worth an effort. He who
to-day feels humanity's need and appreciates
the crisis in which the world is gripped, will
not rashly push one side the ideals and powers
that he revealed who, by his life and words, has
already rewrought civilizations as has no man
or teaching.

INDEX OF TEXTS

Gen. 2 : 7,

24

Matt. 6 : 5,

69, 218

Ex. 30: n sq.,

119

6: ii,

182

Deut. 6 : 4 sq.,

25

6:16,

69, 218

Neh. 10 : 32 sq..

119

6 : 17, 18,

161

Dan. 7 : 13,

41

6: 19-21,

145

Matt. 3 : 2,

So

6 : 22-24,

143

3 : 13-17,

187

6 : 24 sq..

71

3:iS.

47

6:25,

26, 161, 163

4-4.

182

6 : 25-34,

120

4:8,

46, 129

6:28,

163, 179

4 : 8-10,

45, 2°9

6:31, 32,

62, 71, 182

4 : 10, 11,

176

6 : 31-33.

146

4:12,

161

6:33.

47

4 : !8, 19,

137

7:6,

165, 215, 227

5 = 3.

71, 142

7:7.

165

5:4.

71

7:9.

182

5:°.

47.71

7:9-".

103

5:8,

71

7: 12,

180, 221

5:1°,

34,47

7 : 13. 14.

200

S:i3.

60

7:17.

207, 209

S = 13-15.

226

7:18,

207

5:i4,

60, 161

7 : 21,

34

5:16.

221

8:9.

138

5:20,

34

8:n,

72

S : 2i-24.

192

8: 12,

35

S:22,

103, 213

8 : 19, 20,

137

5:23,

89

9:14,

161

5:24,

89, 213

9: 20,

163

S : 27, 28,

89

10 : 2-4,

128

5 : 29, 3°.

26, 88, 93

10: 6,

170

5:32,

87

10 : 16,

226, 227

5:34,

88

10 : 17,

226

5 = 38, 39.

214

10 : 18,

121

S : 39-41.

212

10: 21,

103

5:42,

137, 221

10 : 22,

226

5:44,

65. 191, 195

10 : 24,

167, 226

SH7.

103, 192

10 : 25,

226

5:48,

47. 65. 69. 19°

10 : 26 sq.,

226

6:2,

69, 218

10: 28,

23, 26

6 : 2-4,

221

10 : 34.

226

231

232

INDEX OF TEXTS

Matt. 10 : 39,

190

Matt. 18 : 21, 22,

185

192

":5.

169

18 : 22-35,

213

11:8,

121
18 : 23 sq.,
121
11 : 11,
72
162
18 : 24,
136
11 : 12,
46,72
19 : 5, 6,
80
11 : 12-15,
52
19:7,
85
11 : 19,
159
19:8,
93
11 : 27-30,
30
19:9,
87
11: 28,
169
19 : 12,
93
12 : 25 sq.,
121
19 : T-3-T-S,
102
12 : 28,
72
19 : 16-22,
J37
12:33,
207
19: 20,
92
12 : 34, 35,
207
19 : 21,
47
12 : 49, 50,
66
102
19 : 23,
34
13 = 3 sq.,
5
2,73
19 : 28,
207
13 : 24-30,
205
227
19 : 29,
103
13 : 24-43,
5
2,58
20 : 2 sq.,
182
13 : 3°,
215
20 : 17,
155
13:31,
205
20 : 20-28,
37
13:31-33,
210
20: 21,
41
13 : 33,
71
20 : 26-28,
62
193
13 : 38 sq..
48, 60
21 : 17,
138
13 : 43,
228
21:28,
58
J3 ¦' 44,
42
21:31,
208
13 : 45,
42
182
21 : 43,
35
13 : 47-5°,
58
22 : 1- 10,
220
13 : 52,
167
22 : 2,
121
13 : 54-56,
I&7
22 : 18-22,
116
14 : 23,
187
22 : 23-30,
81
14 : 23 sq..
161
22 : 37,
20, 25
15 : 13,
190
23:8,
37. I27
166
15 : 21-28,
100
23 : 11,
62
15:24,
170
23 : 12,
166
15 : 32,
182
23 : 27,
215
16 : 5-12,
182
23 : 28,
58
215
16: 11,
218
23 ¦' 34,
226
16 : 18,
76
222
23 : 35,
26
16 : 19,
"3
23 : 37,
194
16 : 25,
180
24 : 34,
200
16: 27,
207
24:36,
200
18 : 1 sq.,
34
25 : 14-30,
172
18 : 8, 9,
143
25 : 29,
154
18 : 14,
65
25 : 31 sa-.
5i
207
18 : 15,
213
25 : 34,
34
18 : 15-17,
213
25 : 34-46,
35
18:17,
38,76
222
26: 6-1 1,
154
18 : 20,
71
26 : 13,
60
18 : 21,
213
26 : 26-30,
31
INDEX OF TEXTS

233

Matt. 26 : 36,

187

Mark 11 : 17,

138

26 : 42,

187

12: 18-25,

81

26 : 64,

59

12:25,

23

27 : 5°,

26

12: 28-34,

185
28:1,
99
12 : 41-44,
220
28:9,
99
13 : 26,
59
28 : 19,
201
14:9,
98
Mark 1 : 1-8,
160
16:1,
99
1: 15,
5i
Luke 1 : 46-55,
142
1 : 16, 17,
137
1 : 52, 53,
170
i:35,
187
2 : 7, 16,
142
i:44,
128
2 : 23, 24,
142
1 : 35-37.
128
2: 40,
102
3 : 16-19.
128
2: 52,
98
102
3:21,
137
3 : 21, 22,
187
3 : 22-27,
59
4:2,
161
3:24,
121
4:5-8,
45
209
3 : 34. 35,
66
4: 17-21,
51
4:3 sq.,
52, 73, 205
5:16,
187
4 : 21 sq..
226
6:9,
26
4: 22,
226
6: 12,
i87
4: 26-28,
203
6 : 14-16,
128
4: 27,
205
6 : 21-25,
142
4:28,
73
6: 24,
136
6:3,
167'
6:31,
180
6: 14,
128
6:35.
148
6 : 46 sq.,
161
6:36,
190
7 '¦ 17, 19.
161
6:38.
227
7 : 24 sq.,
170
7 : 22,
169
8:3,
182
7:25,
121
8 : 14-21,
182
7 : 36-50,
163, 169
8: IS,
45, 218
7:47,
99
8:42,
103
8:3,
98
137
9:1,
5i
8 : 5 sq.,
73
9 ¦' 35,
62
8: 14,
178
9 : 38 sq.,
185
8:17,
226
io:5,
93
8: 21,
66
10 : 6-8,
80
8:55.
26
10: 8,
23
9:25,
145
10: 11,
87
9:28,
161
187
10 : 13-16,
102
9 : 57, 58,
IOI
137
10 : 14. 15,
34
9 : 57-62,
103
10: 17-31,
185
io:5-7,
137
10 : 24,
102
10: 10-12,
58
io:35-45,
37
10 : 23,
52
10 : 42,
45
10: 30 sq.,
220
10 : 43, 44,
62
10: 25-37,
37, I72
178
11 : 10,
41
10 : 38-42,
99
'85
234

INDEX OF TEXTS

ii : 5-8,

162

Luke 21 : 12,

226

11:11-13,

103

22 : 26,

62
12: i,
218
22 : 28 sq.,
59
12: 11,
226
22 : 30,
33
12 : 13-15,
14c
,185
22 : 35, 36,
148
12 : 13-33.
142
22 : 38,
112
12: 15,
146, 183
22 : 48,
163
12: 16-21,
145, 165
23 : 2-5,
4i
12: 19,
26
24-'39,
24
12: 20,
207
John 1 : 12,
66
12: 23,
179
1 : 14.
27
12 : 30,
62
1 : 32-34.
187
12:33.
136
221
2 : 1-12,
160
12 : 49,
226
2:4.
100
13 : 28 sq.,
5i
2 : 4 •»?-,
98
13 •' 29,
199
3:3, 34,42,65,71
,i8i
,209
14: 12 sq..
69, 165
169
3:5.
42
I4:i3,
220
3:6,
25
, 188
14: 15 sq..
58
3:15.
42
14 : 16-24,
220
3: l6.
42,60
14: 21,
142
3: 18-21,
1S3
15 : 3-32,
35,6;
3: '9,
60
15:9,
162
4 : i-3,
128
15 : "-32,
58
104
4:7^-,
98
15 : 25, 32,
103
4: 18,
SS
16 : 1-13,
144
4 : 31-34.
182
16: 10-12,
145
5:12,
1S8
16 : 14 sq.,
142
6:15, 41.45,
116
176
16:18,
87
6 : 26 sq.,
60
155
16 : 19-31,
136
6: 27,
155
182
16 : 22 sq.,
36
6:32,35,
3°
17 : 7-10,
167
6:39,
187
17 : 10,
183
6:51,
23
17 : 20,
58
178
6 : 51-64,
31
17: 20, 21,
46
6:53,
23
17 : 20 sq.,
52
6:57,
184
17: 21,
72
6:66,
155
17 : 27,
118
7=i.
215
18 : 10,
161
7:49,
169
18 : 14,
65
7:53-8:11,
99
18 : 15-17,
102
8: 12,
60
19 : 2 sq.,
170
8:29,
187
19: 8,
221
8:42,
103
19: 11 sq.,
121
225
8:44,
46
19 : 12-27,
172
10: 10,
184
19 : 46,
138
10 : 30,
187
20 : 27-36,
81
11 •' 5,
99
20:45-47,
215
12: 19,
149
INDEX OF TEXTS

235

John 12 :
12: 13:13:13: 13:
13: 13
13:
13:14: 14:
14: 14
14:15: 15
15: 15:
15:15:
15:15:15: 16:16:
16: 16;
16:16:16:
17: 17:
17:17:
17: 17:
18:
18:18:19:19:
19:
20:
20:

3°.20-32, 1-10,
6, 20, 29,
32, 33,34,
35,2,3, 8,15,16, 19,1, 1, 2,
4,4-f?., 6, 10,!2,IS,19,8,8, 10,
11, 13,
20,26,
33, 1-26,15.18,

Acts

23,
30,
33-38,36. 11.
23.26, 27,
1,11,
:i8,
: 22,
: 5 '9;

199201 166149 3°
137 71
102192171 3°
184190187 60
71, 190 30
71,190 205 35
190
192183
60, 6161
47, 183
207 195 60
187 61
184
60, 161, 217
60, 199 199188
30, 188
210
41,45
46, 116, 121, 176
119 163 99
999999 33
116

Acts 1 : 6,
1:8,
2:44.2:45.
3 : 1 sq.,
4 = 4.
4 : 32, 36, 37.
5:37.
10: 1,
12 : 12,
15:1. 16 : 37,
17 : 1-9,
18 : 25,
19:3,
22 : 25,
25 : 10,
Rom. 12: 2,
M : 17.
15 : 26,
1 Cor. 6 : 15-20,
7: 10, 11,
7: 20,
11 : 23-26,
13:3. 15 : 23, 44,
2 Cor. 5 : 1-4,
Gal. 1:8,
2:9,
3:28,5:22,
Eph. 6:1,4,
Col. 3 : 20, 21,
1 Thess. 2 : 14,
5:23,
1 Tim. 2 : 2,
3:2,
Heb. 4 : 9,
4:12,
James 1 : 10, 11,
1 : 26, 27,
2: 1-7,
4:13,5:1-6,
1 Pet. 2 : 13,
2: 17,
1 John 1 : 3,
Rev. 11: 15,

41
170
149, 219149219 152
149 116
199 iS3199108
108160160 108
108
218
47, 161
153 100100
108 31
221 26
26
113
153
100, 174190103103
108 19
108 100
229 20
136 33
136
136
136
109, 113"3
221 61

THE GOSPEL FOR AN AGE OF DOUBT.
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