which accepts this word, justifies it as life and as force, as active power. Salvation, as salvation from judgment, consists proximately in the very mystery of the kingdom, which has approached, but has not yet been revealed universally to condemn the world, and which is revealed inwardly only to those who can penetrate into it. Thus it is revealed in the gospel of Christ; it is sown in His word, but this word is the mighty word of God, which does not return idle to its source (Isaiah 55:10-11).

Whatever our subjective assessment of these ideas, whether we share them or not, we must at least recognize their historical reality. These are genuine Gospel concepts, which we must try to clarify with the objectivity that is only available to us, without putting anything of ourselves into them, and with full readiness to correct any involuntary error. According to these concepts, the kingdom of God, which comes in the Spirit, is to be manifested in power, and Christ is its herald or prophet, its royal bearer, anointed with the Spirit, and its priest. Here we pass from the concept of the kingdom to the idea of its center, Christ, and the basis of this idea is His personal self-consciousness, as it is revealed in His word.

The God-consciousness of Jesus Christ

(a) The Spirit Concept

The human God-consciousness of Jesus is real, not illusory or dreamy. God is not His dream, ideal, idea, or one of His thoughts in the periphery of His consciousness; it is the focus of His consciousness, His thoughts, words, and deeds. It "abides", "rests" in Him as a spiritual force. Therefore, the "knowledge of the Father," which He bequeathed to His disciples, is defined not as rational knowledge, but as the true "Spirit of the Father."

Recently, only scientific thought has begun to pay attention to the so-called phenomena and

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The work of the Spirit in early Christianity, and it seems to us that here is the point of contact between scientific and religious thought, which should serve as the basis for an objective historical understanding of many essential features of early Christianity. Here, again, the very evaluation of a fact, the most religious attitude to it, depends on the faith of each of us, and science cannot decide for a person whether or not he believes in the divine content of a given fact. This question of faith or evaluation was posed in the most decisive form in the time of Christ: Is His Spirit true and holy, or false and impure, is He truth or falsehood, deception, the frenzy of a madman? But the very formulation of this question, the very disputes about the Spirit, show that it was a question of a certain real spiritual phenomenon, of a special kind of pneumatic state, of a special kind of consciousness, word, and activity.

First of all, we will recall the Old Testament ideas about the spirit[602]. We know that the inspiration of the spirit explained prophecies, visions, ecstasy, both prophetic and even morbid, and in the latter case the evil spirit was understood, just as in the case of the frenzy of the false prophet. Intuition explained every powerful emotion under the irrepressible impulse of which a person acted. The prophets acted under the inspiration of the Spirit of God, the false prophets – under the inspiration of their spirits. External signs seem to have often been homogeneous, so that in some cases the number of prophets was decisive, for example, in the case of Ahab (3 Kings 22). In antiquity, therefore, the prophets often formed special communities, for example, the prophets who met Saul (1 Kings 10), or bene nebiim under Elisha. The internal criteria of a true prophet were the power of inspiration, the power of the word, and its truth. In the apostolic church, the manifestations of the "spirit and power" were the main witness of the apostles: the "Spirit" who testified to Christ also witnessed to His church. The spirit manifested itself in a multitude of "gifts" – in inspired ecstasy (D. 10:10; 2 Cor. 12:2), in glossalia or speaking in "angelic" tongues incomprehensible to man (D. 10:46; 1 Cor. 14), in the gift of

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