JESUS’ SOCIAL PLAN
BY
CHARLES FOSTER KENT, PH.D., LITT.D.
Jesus of Nazareth was so many-sided that each man and each age have found in him the qualities in which they are most interested. He has with truth been characterized as prophet, poet, philosopher, physician, and saviour of men. In the eyes of his contemporaries he was pre-eminently the teacher of the masses, the healer of the sick, and the friend of sinners. The ascetic Middle Ages saw in him only the man of sorrows, and pictured him as sad and anæmic. To the Protestant reformers and the Puritans he was the supreme protestant against the sins of mankind. The discerning thinkers of our present social age are beginning to recognize in him the great social psychologist, who not only analyzed the ills of society but also provided for them a potent cure.
The majority of men, however, fail to appreciate Jesus’ social teachings, because they think of him as far removed from the complex social programme presented by our highly developed civilization; but the enlightened historian well knows that between the first century in which Jesus lived and our own there are many startlingly close analogies. In Jesus’ day the old racial and national bonds had been largely destroyed and many ancient traditions and customs had been rudely shattered or else cast aside. Men were sharply divided into classes separated by clashing interests. Industrial slavery held great masses of men in a bondage that was both physical and moral. Herded together in congested districts of the great cities that had suddenly sprung into existence, they lived a life that was in many respects worse than that of the beast. Lax divorce laws and looser marital relations had undermined the integrity of the home. A great wave of social immorality was destroying the physical and spiritual health of the individual and of society.
At the same time mankind was beginning to feel its unity and to work out its problems in universal terms. The yearning for brotherhood and for vital bonds that would bind each man to his fellows was strong. Consciously or unconsciously men everywhere were seeking for a satisfying philosophy of life that would afford them peace and happiness in this life and a definite hope of even greater joy in the realm beyond. They were also longing for a social organization that would give them freedom and an opportunity for each to live his life to the full. Dissatisfaction with the outworn social programmes of the past was expressed on every side. The expectancy of a dawn of a new day was almost universal.
Practically every type of social programme known to us to-day was found in that old Roman world. Rome, in name still a republic, was in reality an imperial monarchy, ruled absolutely by the will of one man. It was a typical representative of the ancient autocratic idea of government. The old Hebrew commonwealth, like the city states of Greece, was only a memory of the past, but it stood for the democratic ideal—the rule of the people, by the people, for the people—in which the ultimate authority was vested in a popular assembly. Subject to the rule of Rome, the later Jewish hierarchical form of government still survived in Jerusalem as a representative of that peculiar type of social organization in which religious and temporal authority are blended. The rule of the rabble, to be instituted by violence and revolution and maintained by force, found its protagonists in those bloody, relentless Bolshevists of the first century, the Zealots. They only waited the leader and the opportunity to fly at the throats of their Roman masters and to make a mad attempt to overthrow all existing forms of government. On the ruins of society they wished to set up a Jewish state that would rule the rest of mankind with a rod of iron.
Down along the rocky banks of the brook Kedron, less than fifteen miles from Jerusalem, lived the Essene brotherhoods. They represented the purest type of communistic socialism. All property was held in common. The results of the labor of each went into the common store. All shared alike their possessions. It was also a nobler communism than we know to-day, for its chief aim was not the division of the products of human enterprise, but the lofty and unselfish ideals of serving and uplifting humanity.
The learned scribes and Pharisees were dreaming of a far different type of world state: one that was to be suddenly and miraculously established. Jerusalem was to be its capital and a Jewish Messiah its head. The faithful martyrs who had died for their religion were to be reincarnated to share its glories. The heathen nations were to be subdued and the rule of Israel’s God was to be recognized throughout the whole earth.
Only a few humble students of the prophets and psalmists were quietly working and hoping for a society in which justice, good-will, and mutual helpfulness were to be the compelling bonds and the will of God the guiding authority. Autocracy and democracy, hierarchy and anarchy, communistic socialism and nationalistic theocracy each found enthusiastic devoted supporters in that vast laboratory of social experimentation in which Jesus lived. Every type of social programme that we know to-day was there represented.