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These considerations are extremely important for understanding Christ's apocalyptic teaching about the coming kingdom with its judgment and salvation. Evil is condemned at its very root, condemned and defeated in the God-consciousness of Christ – here we can refer to the fourth Gospel: "Now is the judgment of this world, now the prince of this world will be cast out" (12:31). The judgment that is about to be revealed is already valid even now – as effective as the very truth of God, as the holiness and mercy of God. The coming kingdom is understood as unconditionally universal, and the coming judgment as a universal judgment before which all the tribes of the earth and all people, living and dead, will appear. Nowhere is there an idea of a more terrible and severe judgment: every idle word will be judged (Matt. 12:36), every impure thought, every evil deed – everything that is worthy of condemnation, which is inwardly

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condemned even now. Everything that the Heavenly Father did not plant will be uprooted (Matt. 14:13).

The preaching of renunciation finds a new force in this notion; everything in the world is death, and all human fear is insignificant before the thought of unconditional condemnation. "Do not be afraid of those who kill the body, but cannot kill the soul; fear rather him who can destroy body and soul in hell" (Matt. 10:28).

It is in vain that writers who seek to modernize the teaching of Christ try to convince themselves and others that these ideas are either ascribed to Him by the Evangelists, or outwardly borrowed by Him from the apocalyptic of His time. If only they were to be found only in His apocalyptic speeches: but His entire preaching is imbued with the thought of judgment, the thought of the incompatibility of the kingdom of God with the evil that reigns in the world: in God evil is condemned, and this judgment cannot but be revealed; God's righteousness would not be unconditional truth if God's judgment were not justified in reality in a universal and unconditional way. Since the world opposes this truth, it judges itself, as indicated in the fourth Gospel, which opposes God as life and light to death and darkness, which rule in the world. Even if this antithesis belongs to the fourth evangelist, it corresponds to the teaching of the synoptics about judgment, about the world, about God, and corresponds to the entire God-consciousness of Christ. If in John everything that does not have life in itself is doomed to death, then in the Synoptics everything barren and perishable, everything that is not of God and that "does not grow rich in God" is doomed to it.

Christ preaches salvation because He is aware of the nearness and inevitability of righteous judgment. Salvation is understood in God and with God, since death is outside of Him; salvation is given freely, together with forgiveness, by the mercy of God. But this salvation must be accepted and assimilated, which requires active repentance or conversion of the will (μετάνοια). Judgment is the condemnation of inner unrighteousness or sin, an unconditional condemnation, which therefore cannot but be revealed in its external consequences: forgiveness, on the other hand, by destroying the moral barrier between God and man, is a necessary condition for the restoration of communion with God, communion in which man receives "life." Therefore, finally,

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and repentance itself must be an active conversion (μετάνοια), with which regeneration is connected. For repentance is recognized as necessary for salvation, and it has its source in God, who, filling the mind and heart of man, regenerates him, gives him a new meaning and content to his life. But an effort is required from the will of man to accept and assimilate the will of God, as it is directly indicated in the Gospels: having heeded the preaching of repentance, the people and tax collectors "justified God"; on the contrary, the Pharisees and lawyers, not accepting it, "rejected the will of God for them" (Luke 29-30).

The gospel of the kingdom begins with the preaching of repentance, and this alone is sufficient to show how closely the concept of judgment is bound up with it. With the baptism of John the "gospel" begins (Mk. 1:1; cf. Acts 1:22, 10, 27; John 1:6 ff.). "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand... Spawn of vipers, who inspired you to flee from the wrath to come? Those who bore fruit worthy of repentance... Already the axe is at the root of the trees: every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. I baptize you with water, but he who follows me is stronger than I... He will baptize you with the Holy Ghost and fire. His spade is in His hand, and He will clear His threshing floor, and gather His bread into the garner, and the chaff He will burn with unquenchable fire" (Matt. 3:1-12; Lk. 3:7-17). "Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand" – thus Christ began His preaching, and so the Apostles continued it (Mk. 1:14-15; b:12; Matt. 4:17; cf. Lk. 24:47). John's preaching is "the beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ" (Mark 1:1); and Jesus' last word to the Sanhedrin of priests, the word for which he was condemned to death, was a solemn testimony to the coming judgment that the Son of Man would perform: "I am (the Son of the Blessed), and you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of power, and coming with the clouds of heaven" (Mark 14:62). In view of these testimonies, all recent attempts to diminish the significance of eschatological teaching, or even to isolate it altogether from the preaching of Jesus, appear to be false from a purely historical point of view. Historians and moralists are free not to accept this teaching, but nothing gives them the right to strike out from the gospel what they do not like on the basis of personal sympathy or antipathy. Jesus