10 The Logic of Mission
Can one speak of "meaning" in history? Only if there is some sense in which history moves toward a goal which is worth achieving. The historicist school of historians claimed that the meaning-in the sense of worthwhileness-of history is particular to each nation or culture. As Ranke said, each period of history is equally near to God. If this is so, history as a whole does not move toward a goal and human unity is an impossible dream. Humankind may come from one origin, but the different peoples go their separate ways. We have seen the bitter fruit of this in the nationalist wars of Europe. James Barr attacks the Biblical Theology movement for its alleged exaggeration of the distinctiveness of the Hebrew view as against the Greek, saying that the Greeks were better historians than the Hebrews. Perhaps Herodotus was a better chronicler of events than the authors of the Pentateuch, but what is distinctive in the Hebrew understanding of history is the belief that it has a goal. For Greek thought this was impossible since the essence of perfection is changelessness, and perfection cannot arise from the changes of human history. By contrast the Old Testament writers look forward to a glorious and terrible consummation of history. History has meaning in the sense that it has a goal. This is not, of course, an evolutionary view. History does not reach its goal by the development of the forces immanent within it. Human existence is not to be understood in these terms. On the contrary, all human life is a gift from God and all things exist by his will. History, therefore, is not the story of the development of forces immanent within history; it is a matter of the promise of God. History has a goal only in the sense that God has promised it.
One could say that the theme of promise and fulfillment runs like a thread through the whole Bible. There is the mysterious promise to Adam that humankind will crush the power of evil (Gen. 3:15), the promise to Noah that the world of nature will be sustained for all time (Gen. 8:22), the promise to Abraham that in him and in his posterity all the nations will be blessed, the promise to the patriarchs of the gift of the land of Canaan, the promises in the Psalms that God shall reign over all that opposes him, and the many specific promises in the prophetic writings regarding the events of their immediate future. And all these lead up to and find their culmination in those writings which we call "apocalyptic," which speak of a final consummation of all history, both human and cosmic. As Berkhof has emphasized, there is no sharp line to be drawn between prophecy and apocalyptic; they form parts together of one unbroken movement (H. Berkhof, Christ, the Meaning of History, p. 54). And of course Jesus, with his fundamental message that the kingdom of God is at hand, speaks as a representative, rather the final representative, of the apocalyptic tradition. In him the end has come. In him, therefore, history finds its meaning.
Since the publication of Schweitzer's famous book The Quest of the Historical Jesus, which demonstrated that Jesus stood firmly within this tradition of apocalyptic writing, there has been a belief, something constantly repeated and hardly questioned, which can be summarized as follows. Jesus and the early church believed that the end of the world was about to happen. Everything in the New Testament is to be understood from this point of view. But in fact the end of the world did not happen. Jesus was mistaken. The Church had to adjust its thinking to this reality and so learn to settle down, live like sensible people in this world as it is, and put away wild ideas about the end of the world.
Let us begin by granting an element of truth in this picture. It is true that the Church did come to settle down and become part of the established order, even though there have always been groups on the fringes of the Church which have retained and still cherish vivid hopes of a coming new age. Such groups are normally also on the fringes of society-the poor and the marginalized. These are facts. The question, however, is whether the received opinion is a correct reading of the New Testament and of the teaching of Jesus. It is indeed difficult to believe, on the face of it, that the Church in its first two or three decades of existence had managed to come to terms with the fact that Jesus was completely mistaken in the very heart of his message, that in spite of this the early Church could speak of him in the terms they did, and that this enormous volte-face could be accomplished without leaving any larger traces of the convulsion in the pages of the New Testament. That is indeed difficult to believe. But the main business is to look at the teaching of Jesus as we have it in the four Gospels, and to ask whether it corresponds to this scenario.
1. In Mark's version of the story, the primary statement of the message of Jesus is in the words: "The kingdom of God has come near" (Mark 1:15). From the predominant use of the verb engiko in the New Testament it seems clear that "near" is to be interpreted spatially rather than temporally. The reign of God is now confronting you as a present reality. It is "among you" (Luke 17:21). Its powers are now at work in your midst (Matt. 12:28). This is so because in fact the reign of God, his kingly power, is present in the man Jesus.
2. But at the same time this presence is veiled. It is not obvious to the naked eye of unconverted men and women. They cannot see because they face the wrong way and look for something which is not in truth the power of God. They must make a mental and spiritual U-turn, be converted, in order to believe (not see) that the good news is true: the reign of God is present.
3. It follows from this that this hidden presence creates crisis and conflict. The powers that be, both in their outward form as the established religious and cultural and political structures, and in their inward reality as the principalities and powers of this age, are challenged and fight back. The presence of Jesus precipitates the hour of the power of darkness (Luke 22:53). This conflict with the powers is portrayed in the Synoptic Gospels as gradually intensifying until it comes to its climax on the cross. In the Fourth Gospel it is present throughout. The presence of Jesus strips the masks of righteousness and piety from the face of the powers. It does so precisely because in him the kingship of God is veiled, hidden in a humble and powerless man. The power of God is not of the same kind as the powers of this dark age.
4. Those who are in the thick of this conflict as disciples of Jesus are therefore taught to pray for the day when what is hidden will be revealed, uncovered (the strict sense of apocalypse), when the rule of God will be manifest on earth as it is now in heaven. The key to the seeming contradiction between the statements which speak of the kingdom as present and those which speak of it as future is to be found here. It is not the difference between the incomplete and the complete; it is the difference between the hidden and the manifest. This is expressed in the frequent use by New Testament writers of the words of Psalm 110: "The LORD says to my Lord, 'Sit at my right hand till I make your enemies your footstool."' Jesus does now reign at God's right hand, but this reign is hidden in heaven. It will become manifest. What is now hidden will be revealed: this is the exact meaning of apocalypse. Jesus who has come will come again. In Mark 14:62, Jesus before the supreme court conflates words from this psalm with words from Daniel: "You will see the Son of God seated at the right hand of power and coming with the clouds of glory." In Daniel the Son of Man comes to the throne of God with the clouds of heaven and is given dominion over the nations (Dan. 7:13). In Jesus' reinterpretation of this prophecy, as the New Testament writers understand it, a time is given during which the Son of Man, Jesus, is at God's right hand until the nations come to accept his dominion, and he comes to reign in manifest glory.
5. Thus there is a precise meaning to this gap which opens up between the coming of the kingdom veiled in the vulnerable and powerless Jesus, and the coming of the kingdom in manifest power. That meaning is to be found in the mission of the Church to the nations. It is in the mercy of God that the final unveiling of his power is held back so that all the nations may have the same opportunity that was given to the first hearers in Galilee, the opportunity to repent, to be converted, and to believe and recognize the presence of the reign of God in the crucified Jesus. "The gospel of the kingdom will be preached throughout the whole world as a testimony to all the nations; and then the end will come" (Matt. 24:14). And this preaching of the kingdom will be accompanied, as Jesus' preaching was, by the signs of the kingdom. There will be evidence of the power of the kingdom at work, even in this age. The authority which is given to Jesus as he sits at the right hand of God will be shown in the fulfillment of the mission to all the nations (Matt. 28:18ff.). Because Jesus goes to the Father, the disciples will do even greater works than he did (John 14:19). When the Spirit (the arrabon of the kingdom) comes upon the disciples, they will receive the powers of the kingdom and thus become Jesus' witnesses (Acts 1:6-8). In this sense some of those who heard Jesus speak will live to see the kingdom of God coming with power (Mark 9:1).
6. There is therefore great need for patience. The disciples do not and cannot know how long is the time given for this witnessing and repenting. A great deal of the teaching of Jesus is about this watchful patience. Patience is needed because "you know not the day or the hour." Watchfulness is needed because that hour is certainly coming. Be warned. Do not sleep. Do not say to yourself, there will always be time. There will not. A day will come when you will hear those terrible words: too late. The two elements in this teaching are not contradictory: they belong together-the sense of immediacy which calls for the alertness and readiness of the good watchman, and the call for patience because no one-not even Jesus himself-can know the times and seasons which the Father has kept in his own authority, the Father who alone knows what possibilities remain for human history. To see a contradiction between the sayings which speak of an immediate unveiling and those which speak of long waiting is to miss the central message of the gospel. It is the same message which is found in St. Paul, who can tell his friends to rejoice because the Lord is at hand and also remind them of the need for patience and forbearance. The two elements are brought together in exemplary fashion in Romans 8, where we are told that it is precisely those who have received the firstfruit of the kingdom, namely the Spirit, who also suffer and groan as they wait for redemption, who are saved in hope and who therefore wait with patience for that which is promised.
7. I have said that it is clear from the New Testament that the early Church saw itself as living in the time between the times, the time when Jesus, having exposed and disarmed the powers of darkness (Col. 2:15), is seated at the right hand of God until the time when his reign shall be unveiled in all its glory among all the nations. The character of this time is given to it by the character of the earthly ministry of Jesus. It is marked by suffering, and by the presence of the signs of the kingdom. That is why the Fourth Gospel, in its portrayal of the missionary commission, says that when Jesus said, "As the Father sent me, so I send you," he showed them his hands and his side-the scars of his passion-and he breathed into them the Spirit who is the foretaste of the kingdom (John 20:19-23). The Church in its journey through history will therefore have this double character insofar as it is faithful to its commission. On the one hand it will be a suffering church, because the powers of darkness, though disarmed and robbed of final authority, are still powerful. As Jesus in his earthly ministry unmasked the powers and so drew their hostility on himself, so the Spirit working through the life and witness of the missionary Church will overturn the world's most fundamental beliefs, proving the world wrong in respect of sin, of righteousness, and of judgment (John 16:8). Consequently the world will hate the Church as it hated its Lord. But, on the other hand, just as the ministry of Jesus was marked by mighty works which, for those with eyes to see and ears to hear, were signs of the presence of the kingdom of God in power, so in the life of the Church there will be mighty works which have the same function. They are not-so to say-steps on the way to the kingdom, but unveilings of, glimpses of that kingdom which is already a reality, but a reality known only to those who have been converted, have been turned from false gods to the living God. These negative and positive elements in the life of the Church will be related to each other in the same way as cross and resurrection were related to each other in the ministry of Jesus (cf. 2 Cor. 4:10). The cross was a public execution visible to all-believers and unbelievers alike. The resurrection was as much a fact of history as the crucifixion, but it was made known only to the chosen few who were called to be the witnesses of the hidden kingdom.
8. This hiddenness is what makes possible the conversion of the nations. The unveiling of the glory of God's kingdom in all its terrible majesty could leave no further room for the free acceptance in faith which Jesus called for. Only when that glory was veiled in the lowliness of the incarnation could it call out freely given repentance and faith. When the Church tries to embody the rule of God in the forms of earthly power it may achieve that power, but it is no longer a sign of the kingdom. But when it goes the way the Master went, unmasking and challenging the powers of darkness and bearing in its own life the cost of their onslaught, then there are given to the Church signs of the kingdom, powers of healing and blessing which, to eyes of faith, are recognizable as true signs that Jesus reigns. All of this is portrayed in the New Testament as forming the substance of the mission to the nations. The mission is an expression of the authority Jesus has on earth and in heaven as he sits at God's right hand. It is manifest in the powers which the presence of the Spirit confers on the Church so that it becomesboth in its words and in its deeds-a witness to the reign of Jesus. And mighty works are promised as part of the fulfillment of the mission.
9. It follows that the Church will always be tempted to deviate from this path either to the one side or to the other. On the one side is the temptation to look for an immediate end to history. It is the temptation to ask, as the disciples are represented as asking Jesus after they had come to believe in his resurrection, "Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?" (Acts 1:6). It is the temptation of those referred to in the Gospel who supposed that "the kingdom of God was to appear immediately" (Luke 19:11). It is the temptation of those who, when things fall apart, think that this is the end of the world and do not recognize that it is "but the beginning of the sufferings" (Mark 13:8). The material in the Synoptic Gospels which is often referred to as the Little Apocalypse is full of these warnings. There will be many happenings which some will interpret as signs of the end. There will be false Christs claiming to bring in the final kingdom. But the end is not yet. God's patience is not exhausted, and as long as God is patient, the Church must be so also. The gospel must first be preached to all the nations. All must have the opportunity to repent and believe in the hidden reality of the kingdom. The other temptation is the one which has most constantly beset the comfortably established churches. It is the temptation to say, "Where is the promise of his coming? For ever since the fathers fell asleep all things continue as they were from the beginning" (2 Pet. 3:4). It is the temptation of the lazy servant who says, "My master is not coming back and I can do what I want with his household." In its more dignified theological form it goes by the name of realized eschatology: we have already had everything that there is and we cannot look forward to anything radically new. The confident hope expressed in the words "He shall come again in glory to judge the living and the dead" drops out of our working creed. The future will be nothing more than an extension of the past. We must make do with the world as it is. Against both of these temptations the New Testament warns us with its insistent call for a patient hope, a hope which is-on the one hand-confident and sure, an anchor of the soul, and on the other hand patient and enduring. These are two sides of the same thing. Impatience is a sign of unbelief. Firm belief in the one who has promised will lead to patient endurance. That, I suggest, is the central thrust of the New Testament's teaching about what we can look forward to.
Does this New Testament teaching about the kingdom of God enable us to speak of "meaning" in history? Can history be said to have a goal? Once again we must remember that responsible human action is not possible without some vision of the future. In Scott's account of his tragic journey to the South Pole there is an incident which poignantly illustrates the point I want to make. On one occasion the weather conditions were such that a white haze blended with the unbroken whiteness of the snow and no horizon was visible. Wherever they looked there was simply one unbroken whiteness. There was no point on which they could direct their course as they drove their sledges forward. Before long they were coming upon their own tracks. Thinking that they were going forward, they were in fact only going around in a great circle. To solve the problem they began throwing snowballs ahead of them in the direction of true south so that they had something to fix their eyes on. Without some vision of the future, how is it possible to direct one's course in a rational way? In practice we do what Scott did; we have projects, literally things we throw forward, long- or short-term projects, and we measure our progress by the degree of success we have in reaching our self-set targets. But where do these projects lead in the end? Scott had a compass to tell him in which direction to throw the snowballs. Without a compass, how do we know whether our success in reaching our targets is in fact progress or regress? When we look back we can easily see that a great many of our "successes" were in fact disasters. Does our journey have, in fact, a definable goal? That is a question which at some time or other has to be answered if we are to live a rational life.
The New Testament evidently envisages a goal, one toward which we can make progress. "Now is salvation nearer than when we first believed," says Paul (Rom. 13:11). The eager expectation of a real end is vibrant on almost every page. The Bible ends with the vision of the city of God from which all that is evil will have been excluded and into which all the nations will bring their treasures. Even the Johannine texts which are often quoted as evidence for what is called "realized eschatology" nevertheless speak emphatically of a future consummation, of a "last day" in which believers will be raised up (John 6:39) and unbelievers judged (John 12:48), and in which "we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is" (1 John 3:2). This vision of a real horizon, a real goal toward which we move, is what gives to the whole New Testament its most distinctive character, the character of a hope which is both alert and patient. The last day to which all the prophets had looked forward has dawned. The resurrection of the crucified Messiah is the breaking in of the last day. It is the day of the Lord, the Lord's Day. But here a parable from Karl Barth is illuminating. The Bernese Oberland seen from Berne looks like a single ridge; when you reach it, you find that it is not one ridge but a whole world of mountains and valleys and lakes and forests. The day of the Lord seen from afar looked like a single day. Now that it has dawned we find that it is not just a single day but a new age, an age in which the powers of the kingdom, the powers of the new day, are at work alongside and among the still continuing powers of the old. We have seen why this is so. It is so that there may be time for the mission to all the nations and for the calling of all peoples to repentance and faith. The extending of the Day into an age is the work of God's mercy. He holds back the final unveiling in order that there may be time for repentance. Therefore we who live in the new day and rejoice in it, knowing that Jesus already reigns, yet knowing that this reign is hidden from the world, are not impatient but patient and watchful, redeeming the time and using it to set forward until its completion the work of bearing witness to that hidden reign. Yet this patience must never deteriorate into sloth, into a lazy acceptance of things as they are. The unveiling of the hidden kingdom is not going to be delayed forever. To think that would be to make nonsense of all that Jesus is and has done. The time given to the world to repent will not last forever. The new age is defined by the threefold affirmation in which we declare the mystery of faith:
• Christ has died, once for all disarming the principalities and powers.
• Christ has risen, and now reigns at the Father's side until all his enemies submit.
• Christ will come again, and the glory of his reign will be manifest to all.
And if that final day is delayed it will not be a cause for impatient complaining on our part. We will recognize the delay as a sign of God's patience. In the words of Berkhof, "the joy of the great beginning removes all alarm about the delay in the end" (Christ, the Meaning of History, p. 77).
I have tried to indicate what seems to me to be the way in which the New Testament writers understand the meaning of the history of which we are now a part. It does not seem to be the way in which contemporary Christians see it. I said earlier that it seemed to me to be one of the marks of contemporary society that there was a widespread loss of any sense of meaning in history at all. The nineteenth-century beliefs in progress have largely disappeared. It is hard to find people in our society who have any strong sense of a worthwhile future. One becomes aware of this when one contrasts our society with some others, and particularly some Third World countries, where there is a strong sense of commitment to a specific goal for the future, whether in terms of "modernization" in China, or in terms of "nation-building" in Africa, or in terms of "liberation" in Latin America. Whatever may be our opinion of the validity of these goals, there is no doubt that they provide the context for responsible and hopeful action. By contrast Jurgen Moltmann is surely right when he says that over the developed and affluent West ern societies there seems to hang the banner: "No Future." He is not referring only to the fact that millions of people in these affluent societies are not able to articulate any vision of a worthwhile future; not only to the widespread sense that we may all face annihilation in a nuclear catastrophe, not only to the mindless violence and vandalism which is a growing mark of "developed" societies, but also to the fact that our societies appear to be intent on immediate consumption rather than on investment for the future. We are piling up enormous debts and exploiting the natural environment in a manner which suggests that we have no real sense of any worthwhile future. Just as a society which believes in the future saves in the present in order to invest in the future, so a society without that belief spends everything now and piles up debts for future generations to settle. "Spend now and someone else will pay later."
The period in which the wealth and power of the nations now called "developed" were generated was marked by a strong belief in the idea of progress. From the middle of the eighteenth century until the First World War Europe and its cultural offshoots lived largely by and with the faith that progress is the meaning of history. In the strength of that belief they achieved prodigies of scientific, industrial, technical, and political development. It was no accident that this belief developed within the society shaped by Christian teaching. Its roots are in the biblical vision of a meaningful history. The first beginnings of the doctrine can be traced to the revival of millenarian beliefs in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In terms of the theological analysis which I am following, one could say that it was a one-sided development of the New Testament hope-one-sided in that it was an attempt to reproduce in history the power of the resurrection without the marks of the cross. It had an optimistic view of the possibilities of human history and failed to recognize the enduring power of that which works to destroy human life. Its most daring development has been in Marxism, which undertakes to deliver humankind finally and completely from that which alienates and enslaves us, so that humanity can at last take control of its own destiny. It is not an accident, but a matter of inner necessity, that this project has led to the most terrible mass destruction of human beings that history has known. For if the meaning of history is to be found in a state of society which will exist only after all those now living are dead-and this is what the doctrine of progress implies-then those now living are expendable. Their lives have no meaning other than their contribution to the total project. But Marxism is by no means the only form in which the idea of progress has reached its nemesis. Nationalisms of various hues have pursued the same path, sacrificing millions of human beings to a national project. And even in some Christian circles one finds voices decrying the traditional forms of compassionate service to the suffering because these will only delay the revolution after which everything will be put right. This combination of moral cynicism with political naivete demonstrates the way in which a doctrine of progress which seeks to give meaning to history by fixing attention on a future earthly utopia can operate to deny meaning to the life of the human person now suffering the wrongs that society inflicts. The doctrine of progress which sustained Western society through its great period of expansion is now dead. It perhaps only survives among those Marxists who live under non-Marxist governments, and few of those living under Marxist governments are now Marxists.
With the collapse of the belief in progress, Christians in the affluent societies have tended to lapse into a purely privatized eschatology, which pins any hope that it has to the vision of personal blessedness for the soul after death. This naturally diminishes the sense of responsibility for public affairs. It encourages the old to withdraw from involvement in these public responsibilities, to see them as simply a training ground for the virtues that may fit the soul for eternity. The sense that in their work in and for the common life of the nation and the world they are being given a share in God's project for his world disappears. One expression of this, at least in Protestant circles, is the lack of interest in the communion of saints. In the vision which the Letter to the Hebrews gives of the faithful departed as a great cloud of witnesses surrounding us and encouraging us in our journey of faith, and looking with us toward the coming of Jesus to consummate the whole story, we have the impression that they are still concerned about the doing of God's will on earth as in heaven. And if they share the life of God, how could it be otherwise? But a privatized eschatology encourages us as we grow older to turn our back on the struggle and conflict of public life and to withdraw into a purely private kind of piety.
Why should it be that we are apparently shut up to these two alternatives-meaning for the public life of the world at the cost of marginalizing the human person, or meaning for the life of the human person at the cost of losing the meaning of history as a whole? It is, of course, because of the fact of death. Death removes each of us from the story before it reaches its goal. And death, as the Bible teaches us, is not merely a biological fact. Like every fact of existence it has meaning. Its meaning is that all human life is so flawed and marred that it cannot lead straight to the perfect consummation of history which God has promised. Flesh and blood, unredeemed human nature, is not fit for the kingdom of God (1 Cor. 15:50). Then what place can there be for hope in a meaningful future and a meaningful history? None, unless sin and death have been dealt with. None, unless the goal is beyond the reach of death and yet not in such a manner as to destroy the significance of all that lies this side of death.
Meaningful action in history is possible only when there is some vision of the future goal. But the future is hidden from us-our own personal future and the future of the world. The curtain of death lies across the path. The good news is that Jesus has opened a way through the curtain and has come to lead us on the way which he has opened and which he is, the way which consists in abiding in him, sharing his passion so that we may share his victory over death. Our life is still lived as his incarnate life was lived, in a world in which the power of darkness is still at work. The more actively we challenge these powers in the name of Jesus, the more violently will they attack. But exactly when this attack is most violent and exactly when we are at our most vulnerable, signs will be given of the presence of the kingdom, the power of the Spirit to speak the word that bears witness to Christ's kingly power and assures us that the victory is to him and not to the powers of darkness. Eventually we ourselves must die and much of what we have labored to create may decay and be forgotten. But because Jesus, the one who was rejected, crucified, dead, and buried, has risen from the dead and now lives and reigns, we know that what appears to be lost is not lost but is safely kept against the day of resurrection. The New Testament contains several metaphors to convey both the continuity and the discontinuity between what we now do and what we now are on this side of death, and what we shall see and know in the end. There is the metaphor of the grain of wheat which is buried in the ground and apparently lost, but which brings a harvest of fresh grain. There is the metaphor of childbirth: the travail of the mother is forgotten in the joy of the birth of a child. And there is the metaphor of the building in which the worthless materials are destroyed by fire but what is fit to survive the fire will be preserved.
This faith enables us to be at the same time realistic and hopeful. We can be realistic, knowing that no human project can eliminate the powers of darkness as they operate in human life. This realism delivers us from the utopian fanaticisms which have condemned millions of people to misery and death in the cause of an imagined future. But at the same time we can be hopeful, acting hopefully in apparently hopeless situations, not dreaming of an absolute perfection on this side of death, but doing resolutely that relative good which is possible now, doing it as an offering to the Lord who is able to take it and keep it for the perfect kingdom which is promised. In this sense, to use a phrase of Schweitzer, our actions in the public life of the world are acted prayers for the kingdom. They do not themselves lead directly to the kingdom. They are acted prayers for its coming and as such they act as signs of its reality and so enable others to act in hope.
When the disciples were perplexed and could not understand why Jesus was to leave them and go alone to his death, he told them that he was himself the way by which they were to follow (John 14:1-6). One can always travel hopefully if there is a reliable track and good ground for believing that it leads to the destination. The track on which we walk is one that disappears from sight before it reaches the destination. We may have a vision of the peak we are aiming for, but we do not see the track all the way to it. It goes down into the dark valley of death, and we, with all our works, go that way. We can go forward with confidence because Jesus has gone that way before us and has come back from the deep valley. If he is himself the track, we can go forward confidently even when the future is hidden. We are not lost. We have a reliable track.
What is promised as the goal of history, that which makes possible responsible action in history, is something which heals the dichotomy between the private and the public worlds which death creates. The Holy City as John portrays it in the final book of our Bible is in one sense the consummation of all public history. It represents the goal of the whole story of civilization, which is the creation of the true city. It is perfect in beauty and unity. And into it all the nations of the earth will bring their treasures. The great sculptured panels beside the long flight of steps leading up to the central throne at Persepolis portray all the nations bringing their distinctive gifts to the feet of the Emperor Darius. Perhaps some such picture inspired the writer of the apocalypse. The achievements of human civilization, art, technology, and culture are not obliterated. All that is unclean is excluded, but all that is worthy will find its place as an offering to the King of kings. That is the vision which these words suggest. But at the same time the Holy City is the place where the journey of each soul finds at last its goal. "The throne of the Lamb shall be in it, and his servants shall worship him; they shall see his face, and his name shall be on their foreheads" (Rev. 22:3-4).