The Catholic Church holds that the kingdom of God is not a
government that began operating on a calculable date, but the
reign of God, present first of all in the person of Christ the
King, welcomed in the hearts of those who receive Him, and made
visible now in His Church: inaugurated in His ministry,
established in power by His death and resurrection, and to be
revealed in glory when He comes again. It has never been absent
from the earth, and it did not begin in 1914.
That Jesus preached the kingdom is granted freely; it is named well
over a hundred times in the Gospels, and no one disputes that it
stands at the center of His teaching.1
But the good news and the kingdom are not one thing. The kingdom is
the reign that has drawn near; the good news is the announcement of
what God has done to bring it, and of the King who brought it at the cost of
His life. Collapse the two, and the announcement of a government
takes the place the crucified and risen Lord is meant to hold.
The Kingdom Is a Person
The great surprise at the center of the good news is that the kingdom
is not merely near in time; it is present in Christ Himself. Charged
with casting out demons by the prince of demons, He answers:
“if it is by the Spirit of God that I cast out demons, then
the kingdom of God has come upon you” (Matt. 12:28). The verb
is past tense. Where the King is and acts, the kingdom already is:
in the healings, the forgiving of sins, the raising of the
dead.
Benedict XVI put it directly: the Kingdom is not a thing, and not a
geographical dominion like worldly kingdoms; it is a person, and
that person is Christ. Origen had said the same by calling Him the
autobasileia, the Kingdom in person.
Not Coming With Signs to Be Observed
This bears directly on any attempt to fix the kingdom’s arrival
by calculation. Asked when the kingdom would come, Jesus turned His
questioners away from exactly that: “The kingdom of God is not
coming with signs to be observed; nor will they say, ‘Lo, here
it is!’ or ‘There!’ for behold, the kingdom of God
is in the midst of you” (Luke 17:20–21).
A kingdom whose coming must be computed from a chronology
(seven prophetic times, a starting date in the sixth century before
Christ, an arithmetic of years) is precisely the observable
sign Christ said would not be given. And it lands nineteen centuries
after He said the kingdom had already come upon those standing in
front of Him.
The computation also fails on its own terms. Everything depends on
dating the fall of Jerusalem to 607 B.C.; that destruction is
one of the better-fixed dates of the ancient world, established by
Babylonian chronicles, astronomical-diary tablets and dated
business records, and it falls in 587 or 586. Correct the starting
point and the 2,520-year reckoning arrives not at 1914 but around
1934, a year of no significance in the doctrine. Nor is 1914 the
original answer, only the surviving one: the same style of calculation, applied to different prophetic spans, produced 1799, 1874, 1878, 1915 and 1925, each affirmed in its turn and
revised when the predicted events failed.
All Authority Was Already Given
There is a further difficulty, and on the Watchtower’s own terms
it is fatal. Before the ascension the risen Christ told the eleven,
“All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to
me” (Matt. 28:18), and commissioned them on the strength of
it: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations”
(Matt. 28:19–20). The ‘therefore’ is the hinge:
the mission begins because the authority is already held.
If all authority was already His, nothing remained to be conferred
in 1914. Matthew 28:18 does not by itself rule out later phases of
Christ’s reign — Paul himself looks to a consummation
when the last enemy is destroyed (1 Cor. 15:24–28)
— but it denies the one thing the doctrine needs: that His
kingship waited for 1914 to begin. The argument is cumulative,
and it is the next three sections together that carry it. The promise closing that commission, “I am with
you always, to the close of the age,” describes a King already
reigning through the whole age in which the Church does its work,
not one waiting in the wings until a date in the twentieth
century.
The text most often offered for a delayed reign is Psalm 110:1,
which Hebrews applies to Christ: He “sat down at the right
hand of God, then to wait until his enemies should be made a stool
for his feet” (Heb. 10:12–13). But the waiting is done
at the right hand, which is the seat of a reigning king, not of a
king in waiting. Peter preaches the same psalm at Pentecost as
already fulfilled, “God has made him both Lord and
Christ” (Acts 2:34–36), and Paul says Christ
“must reign until he has put all his enemies under his
feet” (1 Cor. 15:25): reigning now, with the enemies
subdued during the reign, not before it begins.
The Kingdom and the Church
The relationship must be stated carefully: the Church and the
kingdom are neither simply identical nor wholly separate. The Church
is not yet the kingdom in its final glory; that comes only at the
end. But the Church is the kingdom as it exists now on earth,
in the words of the Second Vatican Council, “the kingdom of
Christ now present in mystery,” growing visibly through the
power of God in the world.
The scriptural anchor is Christ’s charge to Peter. In the same
breath in which He founds His Church (on this rock I will
build my Church) He adds, “I will give you the keys of
the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 16:18–19). Church and
kingdom are named together, the keys of the one being the keys of
the other. A kingdom that began ruling invisibly in 1914 leaves
those keys unaccounted for during the whole interval.
Already and Not Yet
To say the kingdom is already present is not to say it has arrived
in fullness. Scripture holds both poles together everywhere. The
kingdom has come upon us, and believers have already been
transferred into it (Col. 1:13); yet Christ teaches His disciples to
pray “thy kingdom come” (Matt. 6:10), and tells parables
(the nobleman who journeys to a far country to receive a
kingdom and return) precisely to teach that its consummation
still lies ahead.2
The Watchtower’s scheme resolves that tension by dividing it in
time: nothing, then a date, then everything. Scripture does not
divide it. The kingdom grows like a mustard seed and works like
leaven, from the ministry of Christ until He comes.
A Curse on “Another Gospel”
If the kingdom is not a dated government, then neither is the good
news the announcement of one, and here Paul sets the stakes
higher than anywhere else in his letters. Twice in two verses he
pronounces the anathema on anyone, even an apostle, even
“an angel from heaven,” who preaches “a gospel
contrary to” the one received (Gal.
1:8–9).3
A man does not curse an angel over a matter of emphasis. The content
of the good news is not adjustable.
What Paul Says His Good News Was
We are not left guessing, because Paul states it twice. At the head
of Romans it is “the gospel concerning his Son …
designated Son of God in power … by his resurrection …
Jesus Christ our Lord” (Rom.
1:1–4).4
To the Corinthians he sets out what he received and delivered as
“of first importance”: “that Christ died for our
sins … that he was buried … that he was raised on the
third day” (1 Cor.
15:1–5).5
Neither definition mentions a government, and neither mentions a
date.
The preaching in Acts matches. What the apostles carried was
“the good news about the Christ,” and that
rendering is the New World Translation’s own, at Acts
5:42.6
Paul tells us a third thing: what the good news does. It
is “the power of God for salvation to every one who has
faith” (Rom. 1:16); it is the message through which Christ
Jesus “abolished death and brought life and immortality to
light” (2 Tim. 1:10). And by Paul’s day that good
news had already been “preached in all creation that is
under heaven” (Col. 1:23) — the rendering is the
New World Translation’s own — a worldwide
proclamation the apostles considered a present fact eighteen
centuries before the Watchtower’s message existed to be
preached. The test is open to anyone with a concordance: read
every occurrence of “good news” in the New Testament
and ask whether a single one announces an invisible enthronement
in 1914.7
And this settles the appeal to Matthew 24:14 as the Witnesses’
identifying mark: on the New World Translation’s own
rendering, the worldwide preaching Christ foretold was declared
accomplished in the apostles’ lifetime — a campaign
begun in nineteenth-century Pennsylvania cannot be the thing
Paul said had already happened.
The invisibility itself rests on one word. The doctrine renders
parousia as unseen “presence,” but in
first-century Greek the term named a visible, public arrival
— the state visit of a king — and Matthew 24:27
likens the parousia of the Son of Man to lightning
seen “from the east … as far as the west.”
The word, the discourse it appears in, and the invisible
presence the Watchtower once dated to 1874 are examined on
a page of their own.
A King, Not Only a Government
The difference can be put in a sentence. The Watchtower preaches
good news about a government; the apostles preached good news about
a King: His death for our sins, His resurrection, His
Lordship, and the reconciliation He accomplished. The two are not
unrelated: the King has a Kingdom and the Kingdom has a King. But
which stands at the center determines what is proclaimed, and what a
hearer is asked to believe in order to be saved.
Paul will not let that center drift. “We preach Christ
crucified” (1 Cor. 1:23). “I decided to know nothing
among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified” (1 Cor.
2:2). “Far be it from me to glory except in the cross of our
Lord Jesus Christ” (Gal.
6:14).8
For Paul the cross is not a transaction in the background making a
future government legally possible, but the saving heart of the
message.
Faith Working Through Love
What does the true good news ask of the hearer? Not the transfer of
information, not membership in an organization, not a program of
works performed to qualify for a future place, but
“faith working through love” (Gal. 5:6), a living trust
in a Person. “This is eternal life, that they know thee the
only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent” (John
17:3): salvation is first of all knowing God in Christ, not
relocation to a
paradise.9
The Reply in Brief
The kingdom of God is the reign of God present in the person of
Christ the King; that same reign received in the hearts of those who
welcome Him; and that reign made visible, imperfectly but really, in
His Church. It was inaugurated in His ministry, established in power
at His death, resurrection and ascension, and it endures, never
absent from the earth, until He comes again. Nothing in that account
requires a date, and nothing in Scripture supplies one. What Daniel
foretold was a kingdom set up in the days of the Roman kings that
“shall never be destroyed” (Dan. 2:44), not a
kingdom that would wait nineteen centuries to begin.
And the good news is not an announcement about that reign’s administration but the King Himself, crucified and risen. Putting a
government in His place changes what is preached, changes what
salvation is, and changes what faith is, which is precisely the kind of difference Paul refused to allow.
The full treatment (what Israel awaited in the prophets, the
three dimensions of the one kingdom, the vocabulary of
euangelion in its Greek and Old Testament background, and a
detailed examination of the chronology behind 1914) is in the
Word documents at the end of this page.
Endnotes
- Luke 4:43; the Kingdom is named well over a hundred times in the Gospels, and the point is granted rather than disputed. ↩
- 2 Corinthians 5:17–21; Colossians 1:13–20; Ephesians 2:11–13. The verb at Colossians 1:13 is aorist: the transfer has already occurred for those Paul is addressing. ↩
- Galatians 1:6–9. Paul pronounces the anathema twice, in vv. 8 and 9, having just said he marvels that the Galatians are turning to “a different gospel — not that there is another one.” ↩
- Romans 1:1–4. The genitive is one of content: the gospel concerning His Son. ↩
- 1 Corinthians 15:1–8. The formula Paul says he “received” and “delivered” is generally regarded as pre-Pauline, and so as evidence for the content of the preaching within a very few years of the crucifixion. ↩
- Acts 5:42; 8:12; 20:24. The rendering “the good news about the Christ” at Acts 5:42 is the New World Translation’s own. ↩
- Romans 1:16; 2 Timothy 1:9–11; Romans 15:15–16, where Paul calls his ministry to the nations “the priestly service of the gospel of God”; Colossians 1:23. The rendering “preached in all creation that is under heaven” is the New World Translation’s own at Colossians 1:23; the RSV reads “preached to every creature under heaven.” ↩
- 1 Corinthians 1:17–25; 2:1–2; Galatians 6:14. ↩
- Galatians 5:6; John 17:3. On faith that is living rather than inert, compare James 2:14–26 and the treatment on the companion page What Do We Mean by “Faith”? ↩
