EASTER QUINTET ON THE CHURCH’S DAWN// Part IV// A kingdom of questions

It is impossible to understand the actions of the martyrs––though Roman reactions to Christianity were fluid and erratic––without understanding the time in which successive generations of Christians felt they lived. Followers of Jesus had expected the Kingdom to arrive in their own lifetimes. After all, Jesus' resurrection seemed to validate His prophecy that ‘The Kingdom of God is at hand!’ (Mark 1:15). They all lived in the gap between the Resurrection and the Second Coming which, if not securely dated, spanned a narrow void.

Paul spoke to these hopes in his earliest letter, 1 Thessalonians, written only two decades after the Messiah’s death. The community had grown perturbed by the deaths of Christians before the Second Coming, forcing Paul to stoke their faith by way of an explanation: ‘The Lord will appear with the cry of command… The dead in Christ will rise first; then we who are alive will be caught up together with them in the clouds’ (1 Thess. 4:16). At Corinth, he taught that ‘The form of this world is passing away’ (1 Cor. 7:31). Christ’s parousia (appearance) would occur within the lifetime of hearers.

Christ still had some fighting to do upon his return, however. Only after a final battle would the dead be raised. In his first letter to Corinth, Paul noted that rulers had to submit to the authority of Christ––these, however, are not governments in the modern sense but pagan powers, typically designated ‘gods’ in antiquity, that ruled the universe and had grown hostile to God’s designs as proven by the enslavement of gentiles to their worship (1 Cor. 15). Christ would be aided by those who were imbued with the Holy Spirit, which would be the same force that would move them towards their final transformation , when both the quick and the dead would rise––as spirits (1 Cor. 15:44)––to the air (1 Thess. 4:17) and then into the heavens (Phil. 3:20).

Paul was an eccentric Jew in the sense that most prophets had referred to God’s kingdom manifesting on earth yet the apostle insisted that flesh could not inherit the kingdom. For him, redemption was a celestial rather than a terrestrial matter with corporeality reduced to a soma pneumatikon (body made of spirit). Yet Paul looked increasingly lonely as a thinker when Luke and John returned to the conventional Jewish notion that God had bestowed physicality before the Fall and not as some sort of punishment after it, meaning that it must be capable of harnessing God’s grace. In Luke, Christ eats some fish to persuade the apostles he is not a ghost; in John, doubting Thomas is famously invited to finger his scars.

Much of the confusion surrounding whether the Kingdom of God occurred in heaven or on earth related to the use of ‘Kingdom of Heaven’ as a more accurate translation of the Jewish expression ‘malkut shamayim.’ Matthew for example preserved the ‘Kingdom of Heaven’ for this reason and John the Baptist announced the coming of this heavenly kingdom in opposition to the Kingdom of Rome (Matt. 3:2). When Christianity became incorporated by the empire, political expectations that might be framed as antagonistic to Rome tended to be glossed over, and ‘kingdoms’ were increasingly couched as a spiritual abodes best identified with the ‘olam ha-ba’ (‘the world to come’), the spiritual life, in which ‘there is no eating and drinking but righteousness and peace and joy in the holy spirit’ (Rom. 14: 17).[1] Nevertheless, the original Jewish meaning of malkut shamayim related little to heaven and was intended to contrast God’s reign over earth with the kingdom of the worldly powers: the hope that God would initiate direct rule and banish all idolatry was repeatedly emphasised in prophecy and song.[2]

As generations passed between Christ’s passing and non-arrival, people tried to claim that certain events had to occur before the End Times would commence, in spite of the fact Christ had explicitly said "the kingdom of God cometh not by observation [that is, calculation] . . . for, behold, the kingdom of God is among [not within] you" (Lk. 17: 21). Mark 13’s reference to the permanent fall of the Temple was increasingly used as proof that great tumults would occur before Christ arrived, even though Mark was almost certainly written anonymously in Rome after the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70. The Pauline author of Second Thessalonians, not content with Christ’s victory over pagan powers over the universe added a pagan power on earth by introducing a ‘man of lawlessness’ who exalted himself before taking a seat in the temple. Currently restrained, this man, abetted by Satan, would be slain by Christ before His Kingdom would be heralded on earth (2 Thess. 2).

Revelation supplied the most elaborate scenario. Written in AD 95, a date which closes the canon, the book is a pastiche of older Jewish prophecies which revolve around the figure of the apocalyptic Christ whose message came heavily encoded in symbols, numbers and visions. One of its most meaningful cultural exports was the idea that the End Times would be marked by people who excluded believers from the forum [the economic and political centre] and could be distinguished  via the charagma, the mark of the beast, 666, a sign of fallenness.[3] Moreover, its Kingdom of God involves the descent of a heavenly Jerusalem, not the ascent of people into the ether, and the book sustains Paul’s sense of imminence by reminding readers that the ‘Time is near. Behold [Christ] is coming soon’ (Rev. 22:20). ‘Soon’ in theological terms turned out very different from human understanding of the word. The author of the pseudonymous epistle ‘Peter’ reminded flocks that ‘With the Lord, one day is as a thousand years, and a thousands years as one day,’ (2 Peter 3:4, 8; Ps. 90:4). In an attempt to get on board with God’s clock many looked at the chronology of Creation in Genesis and reconfigured time according to the cosmic week so that God’s six days of work equated to six thousand human years with Christ taking over on the seventh millennium (the sabbath had shifted to Sunday after Christ’s death on that day). This understanding included an earthly conception of the Kingdom in a restored Jerusalem but limited it to a thousand years, and therefore kicked the can (of whether the Kingdom might still contain a stronger heavenly element) firmly down the road.

Significantly, imposing a human logic on divine timekeeping frustrated a group Christians, known as the Montanists, who insisted on the imminence of the End Times, an evaluation backed up by New Testament sentiments and personally communicated via prophetic revelations. Moreover, given their references were undeniable and prophecy considered a genuine charism, the group was not deemed heretical––indeed Tertullian is considered one of their most significant defenders––until later when their ranks had already dwindled (as the passage of time diminished expectations).

Still, big thinkers could not agree on the heavenly vs terrestrial binary of the Kingdom. Christians that imagined their new selves surrounded by an ‘Earthly Jerusalem rebuilt with precious stones’ for instance annoyed Origen.[4] And Lacantius’ celebration of saints procreating in lands of milk and honey forced Augustine to lament that the best the human mind could do when contemplating the divine realm was to project feasting and drinking onto it.  Yet Augustine’s real target was the feasting that occurred on the graves of saints and martyrs, and the churches that grew up around them. Today it would seem odd to set up a party in a graveyard but to early Christians the saints and martyrs were pathfinders who were leading mankind on the same journey as Christ had to resurrection, which they believed would be marked by feasting, drinking and merriment. What annoyed Augustine was that others saw Christians much as civilians might today see ravers––dissolute revellers––rather than a flock focusing on walking the narrow, difficult path (Matt. 7:14) and picking up the fallen (Ecc. 4:10). He agreed with the consensus that the resurrected would have bodies––clarifying that their spiritual nature referred to its moral orientation not its material substance––but placed them in heaven as part of a beatific vision of God (celebrated as an episode not a permanent state of affairs in Rev. 22:4) instead of a transformed earth.

In the background of all this was the confusing fact that Christian Rome had fallen––to Christian barbarians no less––while the Christian New Rome, Constantinople, flourished. Augustine argued that after the apostolic age had drawn to a close, time had become eschatologically opaque and so it was no use using events to convey either the triumph of the Church or disasters that presaged the End Times. Despite this, however, the book of Revelation’s promises were repeatedly tied to the Church: Christ’s Second Coming occurred through the Church’s actions, the Saint’s Reign in Heaven manifested through the Church, Satan had been bridled by Christ in the desert and the Church inherited His powers. The effect was to see events not as a preface to the End Times but to see the battles of End Times manifesting through current events.

Speculation also swirled around the exact nature of God, as the results of such inquiries would determine who was going to heaven or hell when these two cosmic fixtures eventually arrived. Origen had reckoned all would be saved through divine mercy as anything less would undermine the grace and omnipotence of God. Majority opinion shifted the other way, however, with God resembling a grumpy Roman magistrate (Ps. 7:11) more than the font of mercy (Lam. 3:22). Against Christians who argued that hell was purgative, eventually surrendering to its own terminus once the price of sin had been exacted, Augustine claimed symmetry between the eternal beatitude and damnation.[5] Just as the changed flesh would be able to stand in God’s presence, so the changed flesh would be able to withstand everlasting torment.

According to Augustine, all start from the lowest position as post-Adamic humanity constituted a massa damnata, hence subsequent controversies surrounding babies that die before baptism: even today the Church must ‘entrust’ that God shows ‘mercy’ to such little ones. To Augustine, such a dismal fate was not the mystery but rather why God had bothered to show any mercy at all, after all the latter were in a tiny minority given the thinker’s belief that ‘Many more are condemned by vengeance than released by mercy.’[7]

NOTES

[1] Though some biblical references were too explicit to be easily recontextualised. John’s apocalyptic Babylon, seated on seven hills, for example, is clearly Rome (Rev. 17:9). Irenaeus, too, claimed the name of John’s apocalyptic beast, encoded with 666, was ‘Latinus,’ the ruling power (Against Heresies 5.30,3), as did Victorinus of Pettau who ‘awaited the ‘ruin of Babylon,’ which is Rome’ (Apocalypse of John 8.2).

[2] For example, Ex. 15:18; Zech. 14:9; Isa. 24:23, 3:7; Micah 4:7 and Ps. 24:10, with special emphasis in the later Psalms 93-94.

[3]  If the number refers to a particular individual, the best guess is Nero and the fallenness his life represented. If “Nero Caesar” is transliterated from Greek to Hebrew, the letters can be counted to 666. The advantage of seeing a reference to Nero is that he fits the time period in which John wrote. Still, seeing a reference to Nero is neither easy or obvious, for one must transliterate from Greek to Hebrew to get the number 666, which seems like a stretch. More usefully, if 777 represents perfection and John says 666 is the number of a man, the latter probably represents what is anti-god and antichrist. If 777 represents holiness and perfect goodness, then 666 signifies the enormity and totality of evil. Hence, John does not intend to point to any particular individual here. Rather, the kingdom of the beast is a human kingdom, an evil kingdom, instead of a divine one. The nature of humanity apart from God is demonic. 

[4] Origen, On First Principles 2.11,2-3.

[5] David G. Hunter, 'The End of the Body: Heaven and Hell in The City of God,' Augustine's City of God, ed. Fr. David Meconi (2021). https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/cambridge-companion-to-augustines-city-of-god/books-21-22/2E9BD2E686B3CC9073537900771AAB39

[6] 'The Hope of Salvation for Infants...' Vatican (accessed April 1, 2025) https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/cti_documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_20070419_un-baptised-infants_en.html [7] Augustine, City of God 21.12