V 



INTEGRATIVE LEVELS 



joy, and will comfort them, and make them rejoice from their sorrow. 

 . . . There is hope for thy latter end, saith the Lord."^ 



Every word shows clearly a strong sense of the progressive time 

 process. Things have been and shall be; they have been evil, it is 

 promised that they shall be better. 



After the period of the Gospels and in the early Church this 

 attitude towards time became associated naturally with the conception 

 of the Kingdom of God, Regnum Dei. In the later development of 

 this conception, it came to mean, either the Church itself as a visible 

 organisation, or an invisible company of the faithful, both of the 

 dead and the living.^ But the more your lecturer considered the 

 history of the concept, the clearer it became that these ideas were 

 later distortions, and that the primitive christians had held a much 

 more materialist view of the Regnum, had thought of it rather as an 

 earthly state of social justice which should, it was true, be brought 

 in by the miraculous second coming of the Lord, but to which 

 meanwhile all their own efforts should be tending. And in conformity 

 with this "socialist" interpretation of the mind of the primitive 

 church, he noted a number of facts to which as a rule little attention 

 is given. Thus the communism of the Church of Jerusalem is generally, 

 but inadequately, explained away by theological historians. Among 

 the early theological movements, some of which were condemned 

 as heresies or schisms, there are many traces of economic significance 

 to be found, e.g. the milites agonistici christi of the North African 

 Donatists, who seem to have been the shock-troops of an agrarian 

 communist rebellion.^ That there were elements of a hatred of com- 

 munism in the mediaeval repressions of the Albigensians and Walden- 

 sians is more than probable.* All through the late middle ages, the 

 peasant risings against their intolerable conditions were carried out 

 in the name of christian comradeship, and often had the support of 

 revolutionary clergy, as in the case of our English priest, John Ball. 

 There are strong grounds for suspecting a social revolutionary 

 element in the Lollards and the poor preachers of Wyclif.^ And when 

 it came to open warfare, the Anabaptists and the Taborites of the 



^ Ch. 31, vv. 2-20. 



^ For the historical development of the idea of the Kingdom, see Bp. A. Robertson's 

 Regnum Dei (London, 1901). 



^ Cf. C. A. Scott, art. "Donatists" in Hastings' Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics. 



* R. Pascal, "Communism in the Middle Ages and the Reformation" in Christianity 

 and the Social Revolution (London, 1935). 



^ Cf. F. Engels, The Peasant War in Germany (New York, 1926). 



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