Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains
Thus Jesus to Pilate at John 18:36.
What does 'this world' refer to? In the "Our Father" we pray: "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven." Reading these two texts side-by-side one might conclude that God's kingdom is to be realized on earth and not in a purely spiritual realm, and that therefore 'this world' at John 18:36 refers to this age of the earthly realm and not to the earthly realm as such.
Yes or no?
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His Kingdom will be realized on this planet, but won’t originate from (be “of”) this kosmos (John 18:36), or world-order.
The Anglican biblical scholar N.T. Wright in his commentary on the Gospel of John offers a sound explication of this verse:
“Jesus’ answer is both apparently incriminating and deeply revealing. His kingdom (yes, he agrees he has a kingdom; Pilate seizes on this) doesn’t come from this world. Please note, he doesn’t say, as some translations have put it, ‘my kingdom is not of this world’; that would imply that his ‘kingdom’ was altogether other-worldly, a spiritual or heavenly reality that had nothing to do with the present world at all. That is not the point. Jesus, after all, taught his disciples to pray that God’s kingdom would come ‘on earth as in heaven.’
No: the point is that Jesus’ kingdom does not come from ‘this world’. Of course it doesn’t. ‘The world’, as we’ve seen again and again, is in John the source of evil and rebellion against God. Jesus is denying that his kingdom has a this-worldly origin or quality. He is not denying that it has a this-worldly destination. That’s why he has come into the world himself (v. 37), and why he has sent, and will send, his followers into the world (17.18; 20.21). His kingdom doesn’t come from this world, but it is for this world. That is the crucial distinction.” (114-15)
Vito,
The Wright quotation addresses my question very well. Given my Platonic-Gnostic predilections, my tendency was always to read “My kingdom is not of this world” as referring to a purely spiritual realm other than the material world. But then one day, while trying to heed Simone Weil’s advice to say the Pater Noster with perfect and undivided attention — which, by the way, is practically impossible in any social setting such as that of a church service — it occurred to me that “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” is subject to two interpretations.
1) Giving up self-will, we should align our wills with the divine will, as best we can discern it, both with regard to spiritual matters and with regard to mundane matters, but that the kingdom that is to come will be a purely spiritual one that we will enter after the death of the body. This is the gnostic interpretation, or one kind of gnostic interpretation.
2) The verse could also be interpreted to mean that the divine kingdom to come is an earthly and thus material kingdom that is not wholly other than the present material world but a transformation of it. If so, then there is a sense in which the Eschaton CAN be immanentized, though not by our effort. Do you understand what I am driving at, Vito?
Wright makes a good case for (2). He might also have mentioned the Incarnation (as understood at Chalcedon) and the resurrection of the body in support of his reading.
Many perplexities remain. One is: what sense does it make to say that JC is one person with two natures given that the two natures include contradictory properties? For example, impassibility is ingredient in divine nature whereas passibility(the capacity to be acted upon, affected, and made to suffer) is ingredient in human nature? Attempts have been made by powerful minds to square this circle, but none have succeeded as far as I can tell.
It is the incomprehensibility of the two nature one person doctrine that is the source of the various Christological heresies as theologians tried to render intelligible to themselves how God could become identical to a particular man.
And there is the problem of spiritual materialism . . .
The Kingdom is coming. We can see slow progress. No great-power wars now for about 80 years so far.
And here is a song for Good Friday: “Will You Remember Me” by the Pine Box Boys:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zh1RDwUYZlw
. . . ” Today you will be with me in paradise. ”
“Do you understand what I am driving at, Vito?”
Yes, I believe that I do. And in regard to this divinely ordained immanentized eschaton, we should consider, for instance, such verses as Isaiah 65:17 (“new heavens and new earth”), Rev. 21: 1-4 (“a new heaven and a new earth’), and, of course, 1 Cor 15 on resurrected bodies.
I concur that the Incarnation is, given our present state of being, an unresolvable mystery.
Vito
Vito,
I will join my wife for a Novus Ordo mass tomorrow morning, but as indicated above, I am skeptical of the value of corporate worship, especially given the leftist takeover of the liturgy by bonehead Bergoglio and his bunch. They deep-six the Latin liturgy and then mock us with the Latin ‘novus ordo.’ I expand upon the parenthetical point I made above here: https://williamfvallicella.substack.com/p/on-corporate-prayer-and-institutionalized?r=f3tzc&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true
As for Simone Weil and the Pater Noster, you absolutely must read her “Spiritual Autobiography” in Waiting for God. On p. 29 of the Craufurd translation she mentions the “Our Father” and her saying it with “absolute attention.” It is evident to me that she achieved, or was rather granted, infused contemplation.
I would say that one hour of solitary prayer/meditation-contemplation in the direction of infused (as opposed to acquirerd) contemplation is vastly more important spiritually than attendance at church services even if one can find Latin services. Of course, this remark of mine reflects my psychological type (Myers-Briggs INTP). But I could easily show, basing myself on Augustine and and many others that the royal road spiritually speaking is the inner path, the path of introversion. Augustine: “Do not wander far and wide but return into yourself. Deep within man there dwells the truth” (Noli foras ire, in te ipsum redi. In interiore homine habitat veritas).
The temporal construction you’re placing on kosmos is not absolutely false, but you have to consider that word in other, preferably all, of its contexts in the NT, most famously John 3:16. Our words “order,” “system,” and “arrangement,” cover them all. “Age” better translates aion, our “eon.” Like its Hebrew counterpart olam, aion conveys the idea of “outflowing,” to which it’s not hard to attach temporality. Five years ago, I posted three mini-essays on this. Here’s the first one: https://anthonygflood.com/2020/10/the-divine-interchange-principle-of-bible-interpretation-otis-q-sellers-on-olams-control-of-aion-part-1/
Happy Easter, Bill, and thank you for the book recommendation. Up to now, I have only read Weil’s La pesanteur et la grâce.
Vito
Happy Easter, Vito. You will profit immensely from a careful study of the scant eight pages at the end of Waiting for God in which Weil interprets with originality and penetration the six petitions of the “Our Father.” We learned this prayer when we were young children and have prayed it countless times through thick and thin, but even now as we come to the end of the trail we have only begin to penetrate it.
I like the N.T. Wright explanation too. And I’ve been taught that God’s kingdom is “already and not yet.” In other words, the kingdom is now in the hearts of believers but will be fully realized at the end of time when Christ returns and makes all things new.
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