Robertson (F. W.), The Human Race, 297.
Sitterly (C. F.), in Drew Sermons on the Golden Texts for 1910, 157.
Tipple (S. A.), The Admiring Guest, 76.
Vallings (J. F.), The Holy Spirit of Promise, 137.
Westcott (B. F.), Social Aspects of Christianity, 85.
Whitefield (G.), in The Great Sermons of the Great Preachers, 253.
Winterbotham (R.), The Kingdom of Heaven, 223.
Christian Age, xxxvi. 114 (M'Kaig).
Christian World Pulpit, viii. 187 (Beecber) ; xxvii. 75 (Rogers) ; Ivii. 97
(Douglas) ; Ixv. 265 (Fleming) ; Ixxix. 65 (Ruth). Examiner, June 18, 1903, 608 (Jowett). Expositor, 2nd Ser., 1. 266 (Matheson).
434
A Definition of the Kingdom.
For the kingdom of God is not eating and drinking, but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Ghost. — Rom. xiv. 17.
" The kingdom of God is not eating and drinking, but righteous- ness and peace and joy in the Holy Ghost." That is a glorious saying, because it is so strong, so clear, so sweeping. It lays down a principle to which one may always appeal ; it is a fundamental law of the Kingdom which can never be abrogated, or shelved, or made of none effect by human explanations.
St. Paul's readers were scarcely so ignorant and unspiritual as to suppose that the Kingdom of God did consist in eating and drinking. But they were much engrossed just then with questions relating to meat and drink, with warm disputes among themselves as to whether flesh that had formed part of idol sacrifices and had come from heathen altars could consistently be eaten by Christians. They were greatly agitated and exercised about this, some maintaining that it ought not to be eaten, and rigidly refusing to touch it, and others insisting that it might without any inconsistency be eaten ; some strenuous for abstinence and urging it as a solemn duty, and others condemning and seeking to draw away from it as a pitiable weakness. St. Paul tells them that this controversy about meat and drink is not furthering the interests of the Kingdom of God. It does not touch the things which belong to the Kingdom, except in the way of hindering them. " For the kingdom of God is not eating and drinking, but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Ghost."
The text falls naturally into three divisions : —
L The Kingdom of God — What are we to understand by it
in this connection ?
435
436 A DEFINITION OF THE KINGDOM
11. The negative statement — What the Kingdom of God
is not. III. The positive statement — What the Kingdom of God is.
The Kingdom of God.
1. It is not a little startling in such a connection to find any mention of the Kingdom of God. We should have expected some very different expression — " the right principle of conduct," or " the true rule of life," or " the proper bond of brotherhood," or " the teaching of the Gospel," or " the Church of Christ." Any of these phrases would have appeared quite natural. But " the Kingdom of God " seems not a little out of place. It seems so only because we do not realize, as the Apostle realized, that the dispensation of the Gospel, the Church of Christ, is itself the very Kingdom of God. Notwithstanding the warning which stands recorded, we persist in thinking that the Kingdom of God cometh by observation, that it must be a kingdom of pomp and circumstance, that therefore it is something very remote and distant and distinct from anything we see about us. But St. Paul viewed it quite otherwise. This little society of men and women ; this motley group of Jews, Greeks, Syrians, immigrants from all parts of the world ; gathered together mostly from the middle and lower classes of society, artisans and small shop- keepers, struggling for a livelihood ; despised where they were not ignored by mighty Rome, in the heart of which they lived — this little society, with its trials and its sufferings and its dissen- sions, is the Kingdom of God.
•[j It may almost be said that it is to Coleridge's Aids to Beflection we are indebted for Bushnell. He began to read it in college, but it seemed " foggy and unintelligible," and was put aside for " a long time." He took it up later with this result : " For a whole half-year I was buried under his Aids to Beflection, and trying vainly to look up through. I was quite sure that I saw a star glimmer, but I could not quite see the stars. My habit was only landscape before; but now I saw enough to convince me of a whole other world somewhere overhead, a range of realities in higher tier, that I must climb after, and, if
ROMANS XIV. 17 437
possible, apprehend." This book stood by him to the end, and in old age he confessed greater indebtedness to it than to any other book save the Bible. We have only to quote one passage, taken almost at random, to show what a fountain of light was unsealed to him in this volume. It was an epoch-making book, but Bushnell was one of the first to turn its light upon the theology of New England.
" Too soon did the Doctors of the Church forget that the heart, the moral nature, was the beginning and the end ; and that truth, knowledge, and insight were comprehended in its expansion. This was the true and first apostasy, — when in council and synod the Divine Humanities of the Gospel gave way to speculative Systems, and Keligion became a Science of Shadows under the name of Theology, or at best a bare Skeleton of Truth, without life or interest, alike inaccessible and unintelligible to the majority of Christians. For these, therefore, there remained only rites and ceremonies and spectacles, shows and semblances. Thus among the learned the Substance of things hoped for passed off into Notions ; and for the unlearned the Surfaces of things became Substance. The Christian world was for centuries divided into the Many that did not think at all, and the Few who did nothing but think, — both alike unreflecting, the one from defect of the act, the other from the absence of an object." ^