1-2 Peter - An Expositional Commentary by R.C. Sproul

Author:R.C. Sproul
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ligonier Ministries, Inc. - USA
Published: 2019-08-27T07:27:13+00:00

Already and Not Yet

The next major milestone took place when a British New Testament scholar by the name of C.H. Dodd wrote an analysis of the parables of Jesus as well as of the Gospel of John and introduced to the church a theory called “realized eschatology.” Dodd’s thesis was that Jesus’ future kingdom actually did come to pass in the first century. Concerning Jesus’ words, “Assuredly, I say to you, there are some standing here who shall not taste death till they see the Son of Man coming in His kingdom” (Matt. 16:28; cf. Mark 9:1; Luke 9:27), Dodd said that this references the ascension of Christ and things related to it, such as Pentecost and the outpouring of the power of the Holy Spirit. In the ascension, Dodd said, Jesus was elevated to His position as the King of kings. He ascended to His coronation, and all that He taught during His earthly ministry about His kingdom was fulfilled in those few years from the announcement to its realization. Dodd became famous for taking the opposite position from Schweitzer and the skeptics, saying not only was the kingdom of God not postponed but that it had actually come to pass in its fullness at that time.

However, other scholars said that if we carefully examine the concept of the kingdom of God in the New Testament, we must take seriously the manifold passages that teach that the kingdom will not take place in the distant future, as the dispensationalists believe, but that the kingdom was inaugurated during the ministry of Jesus, the ascension, the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, and the destruction of Jerusalem. Yet, these scholars say, elements of a future eschatology have not yet taken place, such as the resurrection of the dead from their graves that will occur at the time of the return of Jesus in glory, and therefore the church is to adopt a posture of diligent and vigilant expectation.

This idea was championed by the Swiss scholar Oscar Cullmann, who gave us the D-day analogy we looked at in an earlier study. He said all that pertained to the consummation of the kingdom of God was accomplished during the ministry of Jesus. It was like D-day, he said, in that, for all intents and purposes, the war was over, but there were still things that had to take place before hostilities would cease. However, D-day occurred in June 1944, but the Germans did not surrender until the spring of 1945. There was no two-thousand-year lapse between D-day and the end of the war, which rather strains Cullmann’s analogy.

Cullmann’s analogy was further argued by a Dutch New Testament scholar, Hermann Ridderbos, who wrote a book entitled The Coming of the Kingdom. In the book Ridderbos dissects the different theories of the Liberals and concludes that in order to understand the biblical concept of the kingdom, we must grasp the “already and not yet,” by which he meant that a large dimension of the kingdom has

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