By now we should be able to understand without being disturbed or disconcerted how deeply this process of ‘Allegorization’ is bound up with the flowering of the New Testament. We have now gone beyond the form to the essence of the Gospel message. After the explanations we have given, we need no longer fear to say it; the very concepts, the fundamental ideas in the preaching of Jesus and the Apostles are now revealed, not simply in their imaginative clothing but in their most intimate substructure, as allegorisations of ideas in the Old Testament. To prove this we will consider just three ideas, but they are the most central in the New Testament: that of the Kingdom, of the Messias, and of Sacrifice. On these three themes alone all Christian dogma could be reconstructed.

Where do they come from? How do they arise? It is unnecessary to point out the place assigned to the Kingdom in the preaching of our Lord as given in the Synoptics; that preaching is the ‘Gospel of the Kingdom’ and nothing else. But where does the idea itself come from? One can assign it a double origin; on the one hand the old eschatological concept (going back to the origins of the religion of Israel) of the ‘Day’ when ‘all will be changed’, when God will intervene in the affairs of this world as an all-powerful judge and will re-establish all things in conformity with his will. And on the other hand the ‘mother-idea’ from which the expression ‘people of God’ arises.