importance as
regards the extent of their influence:

(a) The Gospel of Jesus Christ.

(b) The common preaching of Jesus Christ in the first generation of
believers.

(c) The current exposition of the Old Testament, the Jewish speculations
and hopes of the future, in their significance for the earliest types of
Christian preaching.[57]

(d) The religious conceptions, and the religious philosophy of the
Hellenistic Jews, in their significance for the later restatement of the
Gospel.

(e) The religious dispositions of the Greeks and Romans of the first two
centuries, and the current Graeco-Roman philosophy of religion.

Sec. 2. _The Gospel of Jesus Christ according to His own testimony
concerning Himself._

I. The Fundamental Features.

The Gospel entered into the world as an apocalyptic eschatological
message, apocalyptical and eschatological not only in its form, but also
in its contents. But Jesus announced that the kingdom of God had already
begun with his own work, and those who received him in faith became
sensible of this beginning; for the "apocalyptical" was not merely the
unveiling of the future, but above all the revelation of God as the
Father, and the "eschatological" received its counterpoise in the view
of Jesus' work as Saviour, in the assurance of being certainly called to
the kingdom, and in the conviction that life and future dominion is hid
with God the Lord and preserved for believers by him. Consequently, we
are following not only the indications of the succeeding history, but
also the requirement of the thing itself, when, in the presentation of
the Gospel, we place in the foreground, not that which unites it with
the contemporary disposition of Judaism, but that which raises it above
it. Instead of the hope of inheriting the kingdom, Jesus had also spoken
simply of preserving the soul, or the life. In this one substitution
lies already a transformation of universal significance, of political
religion into a religion that is individual and therefore holy; for the
life is nourished by the word of God, but God is the Holy One.

The Gospel is the glad message of the government of the world and of
every individual soul by the almighty and holy God, the Father and
Judge. In this dominion of God, which frees men from the power of the
Devil, makes them rulers in a heavenly kingdom in contrast with the
kingdoms of the world, and which will also be sensibly realised in the
future aeon just abo