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Some Rhode Island Quakers issued a “testimony” during the war elucidating the peace testimony and criticizing their brethren in government. The testimony stressed that peace was the fruit of righteousness, and was the way of the Kingdom of God where love and good will toward enemies led to the purity of the soul. The Kingdom of God had no room for weapons whether offensive or defensive, nor for fighting nor killing nor standing watch. The testimony chastised those Quaker magistrates who had once been in the Kingdom of God, but had returned to an unredeemed world by placing faith in the use of weapons and by encouraging war, thereby wounding their own souls. This collective discipline regarding the peace testimony was unusual because previously the testimony had not been a subject of discipline, since each had to transform his own motives in his own time.

As the central metaphor of Jesus’ teaching in the synoptic gospels, the “Kingdom of God” (basileia tou theou) has inspired and authorized both Christian empire building and its anti-imperial opposition. Interpreters often seek to shore up or undo one or the other position contrapuntally, leveraging the structuring binaries of Western thought, insisting that the Kingdom of God should be understood as theological or political, spiritual or material, and universal or particular. Attempting to recognize the Janus-faced nature of religion, which both “inspires and terrifies,” this essay explores the basileia tou theou and strands of its interpretation as utopian political thought and practice. Literary and theoretical features of what Ernst Bloch calls the utopian impulse—such as negation, question-posing, paradox, and open-endedness—can be seen in the aspects of the Kingdom of God that have long stymied scholars who wish to categorize, clarify, and supply it with robust content. Drawing on contemporary utopian studies that reject the equation of utopia with social perfectionism and useless fantasy, this essay positions the basileia of God and often its interpretation as a method of social dreaming, that is, as the imaginary reconstitution of the world as it is not and might be. This locates the Christian social imaginary of the common good within the sphere of the political without translation out of the theological. It also configures the basileia as ever moving, undoing, and reconstituting itself lest it be drained of its creative and animating utopian energy.

This chapter seeks to show how the dogmatic content of Ritschl’s system is closely bound up both with his historical and his philosophical ideas. To this end, the chapter is focused on Ritschl’s central idea of the Kingdom of God. Its principal significance is first established on the basis of the whole range of Ritschl’s writings. Its background is then established in what Ritschl calls ‘biblical theology’, a historical reconstruction of the New Testament setting of the Church, which Ritschl offers in the second volume (hitherto not translated into English) of his theological opus magnum, The Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation. A third part of the chapter goes on to examine in detail how Ritschl’s leading ideas about the Kingdom of God shape one specific doctrine—his doctrine of God.

This chapter links the parable of the Doorkeeper and other “parables of vigilance” with the eighteenth‐century spiritual writer Jean Pierre De Caussade's “spirituality of the present moment.” It points out that the metaphor of the doorkeeper illuminates the idea of fulfilling God's appointed task (being a watchman, a doorkeeper) and the idea of urgency, and that it is aimed in particular at the following way of thinking:

If God wants me to do something I don’t have to do it now

I can do it at some other time (later)

This chapter argues that de Caussade's notion of “the sacrament of the present moment” illuminates the parable's message that God appears incognito in the duty or task of the present moment, and that watchfulness and readiness to recognize him, alert one to the opportunity to enter the Kingdom of God, by meeting God in the present moment.

If the Presbyterian churches were to develop a social theology that was capable of contributing to the urban crisis, they had to find a different model that would enable them to become engaged with social issues. It was provided for them by a young minister in Aberdeen, Robert Flint, who published Christ's Kingdom upon Earth in 1860, and who crucially argued that the Kingdom of God is advanced not only by the Church but by secular agencies and individuals who may not acknowledge a religious motive. The paradigm shift in the Church's thinking about its role in social reform which Flint brought about is illustrated through an examination and critique of Flint's view of the Kingdom which remained unaltered until his death in 1911, and its originality is compared to contemporary expressions of social theology.

This chapter discusses the problems besetting any study of the Beatitudes. Most important among these is the fact that the Beatitudes are found in two distinct places: in Matthew 5 and Luke 6. One must pay close attention to the differences and each Evangelist’s distinctive presentation. The chapter also explores the Beatitudes in the history of interpretation from Gregory of Nyssa through Augustine, showing that what the Beatitudes originally meant is inextricably bound up with what they have meant ever since.

Jesus appeared as a prophet, proclaiming the Kingdom (Sovereignty) of God. As regards foreign rule over Israel, he stood within the biblical and prophetic tradition and seems to have accepted the second option noted in chapter 2: he accepted such rule but challenged rulers to remember why they held power and to whom they were answerable. Thus he is delighted when Zacchaeus the tax collector reforms, but does not suggest Zacchaeus stop working for Rome. He regards payment of Caesar’s head-tax as “permitted.” He accepts the faith of the centurion, described in terms of the latter’s service to imperial authority. Jesus is nowhere portrayed as attacking the imperial system. There is no evidence that his healing miracles symbolized the overthrow of Rome.

This chapter examines the concept of the Kingdom of God and the poetics of the impossible. It explains that the Kingdom of God follows a divine logic and it may be considered as the impossible, and it contains an odd predilection for reversals. The poetics of the impossible is a discourse that deals with a prophetic concern to contradict the world, to confound its calculations and to interdict its hardness of heart. The poetics of the Kingdom of God is prophetic; it calls for the rule of God and for things to happen in God's way, and not the world's.

This chapter examines Paul's conviction that Jesus Christ was about to return in the way that a warrior-messiah—a messiah son of David—should return: conquering, triumphant, establishing the Kingdom of God, in power. It was Christ's resurrection, communicated to Paul by his own vision, that convinced him of the nearness of the End. The chapter considers Paul's argument against apostolic competitors who want male believers to be circumcised, in which he insists that huiothesia, or sonship, comes through spirit and not flesh. It also discusses Paul's language of hagiasmos, “sanctification,” with respect to his gentiles-in-Christ, and the way that his thought integrates gentiles with Jerusalem's temple. Finally, it analyzes Paul's letter to the Romans, in which he addresses the issue of gentile Judaizing as well as the “fullness of the nations” and “all Israel.”

The chapter explores the religious and cultural significance of the inner city for white suburban and socially engaged evangelicals, linking it to coterminous evangelical concerns regarding the status of “the city” as an outpost of the Kingdom of God on Earth, and the importance (and difficulty) of achieving racial reconciliation, social harmony, and urban community development as markers of the kingdom. It begins with a discussion of the essential yet polysemic concept of the Kingdom of God, and the ways that evangelicals imagine its social implications while trying to work with and around its ambiguous temporal connotations. Furthermore, it discusses the sense of exilic consciousness expressed among suburban evangelicals in relation to the city, that is, their complicated sense of being exiles from the urban center, with its moral and social dysfunction, and how this informs their belief that they are all the more spiritually obliged, and qualified, to advance the welfare of the inner city.

The concept of “the Church” has remained among the small handful of unassailable keywords at the very core of Catholicism. The faithful argue about the relative power of the papacy, the episcopate, and the laity; some call for reforms in the administrative procedures of the Vatican; some advocate the decentralization of power away from the Roman Curia. But framing every disagreement is an ecclesiological vision that stands at the foundation of Catholicism, one that defines the Church as something more than a mere institution headquartered in Rome, more than a group of bishops and priests, more even than the entire community of the Catholic faithful. Of course, in casual speech the term can be (and often is) understood sociologically, anthropologically, politically, institutionally, or demographically, but we fail to fully comprehend Catholicism if we consider only the colloquial uses of this word. Even when unstated or thinly understood, a distinctive ecclesiology gives form and meaning to Catholic ideas and ideals.

Chapter 3 is devoted to the method of making the kingdom of God the starting point for all other doctrinal loci. The representative of this approach is Frank D. Macchia. He articulates a theology of the kingdom of God and ultimately transitions to a thoroughly pneumatological theology, in which the intersection between the kingdom of God and pneumatology serves as the background for the whole of Christian theology. In moving toward a fully pneumatological theology, Macchia argues that an expanded theology of the pentecostal distinctive of baptism in the Holy Spirit should be the principle around which pentecostal systematic theology is organized.

The 19th-century Church preached political docility and deference and was generally hostile towards a Polish national movement that repeatedly staged violent insurrections. Even setting aside concerns about obedience to “legitimate” authority, it should not be surprising that an institution claiming to be catholic (that is, universal) would have some reservations about an ideology that politicized particularism. Nonetheless, many Catholics wanted to think of themselves as patriotic Poles even as the institutional voices of the Church condemned the national movement. They managed to do so by evoking a distinctly Catholic historiosophy, one that allowed them to hope for independence without engaging in any acts of insurrection or political disobedience. The partitions of Poland were cast as acts of Divine Providence, and the period of “enslavement” that followed was described as a necessary penance. In this scheme, God would restore Poland’s independence as soon as the Poles adequately repented their sins and turned once again to the Church. Willful action to hasten this process by fighting for independence (particularly in alliance with the forces of the left) would only further evoke God’s anger, and thus delay Poland’s restoration.

Chapter 1 contextualizes Troeltsch’s approach to eschatology by distinguishing his views from those of the emerging apocalyptic interpretation in New Testament studies, while also demonstrating his constructive interaction with contemporary biblical scholars. It demonstrates how a common misunderstanding of Troeltsch as being a noneschatological thinker rests upon bad readings of an isolated passage in his lectures on theology. In fact Troeltsch concurred with the new apocalyptic conception of the preaching of Jesus of Nazareth against earlier Kantian ethical conceptions of the biblical Kingdom of God, although he did reject the possibility of modern theological appropriations of apocalyptic thought. In contrast, Troeltsch advocated a nonapocalyptic eschatology. Further, he argued that a doctrine of eschatology proper was possible only once the apocalyptic expectation of divine judgment of the world had been abandoned as an object of Christian hope.

This chapter begins by pondering a man knocking on your door and saying, simply, “I have experienced God”. What could this mean? At the least, it signals that, if we are to encounter God in any way or to any extent, we must do so in the medium of experience. It does not follow, however, that the divine must present itself as an item of experience. This chapter seeks to determine the figure that “God and experience” cuts against the ground of the New Testament. Accordingly, it grants a privilege to prayer, and notes that all prayer, no matter of what sort, is a response to a prior call. Strictly speaking, we cannot talk of experiencing God. Instead, we must invoke a different figure, one that bespeaks both faith and response, namely “counterexperience”. Counterexperience unsettles us, invites us to stand only in the ground and abyss of faith and there to see our experiences from the perspective of divine love. This chapter resets the question of experiencing God so that it concerns the experience of the Kingdom of God.

God does not usually present Himself as an object to be experienced. Far more common, for mystics as well as for the faithful in general, is a complete lack of experience in prayer. We sense nothing, we feel nothing, and we wonder if any contact is made with the deity. In time we accept that this absence of affect is the condition of a mature life of prayer, and we link it with a wider theology of God. Christianity does not teach that God first hid Himself and then revealed Himself fully in Jesus Christ. Not at all: the revelation of God irreducibly involves a reveiling of God. This chapter explores the hiddenness, or inexperience, of God, focusing on the Psalms rather than the Gospels and taking into account the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas rather than Martin Luther. Phenomenology is brought into conversation with scripture and faith; and, since this chapter follows Levinas in prizing ethics over theory, we are placed in the midst of prayer for the Kingdom of God.

From the earliest times, the concept of the Antichrist has captured the popular Christian imagination. The Antichrist represents the ultimate enemy of Christ who will appear in the final chapter of history to lead the forces of Satan in one last desperate battle against the forces of God. Even though the Antichrist's tyranny and deceit are to be feared, the prospect of his imminent appearance is also a source of hope and even jubilation, for it is the appearance of the Antichrist that will initiate the sequence of actions culminating in the creation of the Kingdom of God on earth. The symbolism of the Antichrist receives its sense of overriding urgency from its close association with what are referred to as apocalyplic beliefs. This book is a narrative history of the American obsession with mythologizing life in apocalyptic terms. Topics and authors have been selected for treatment largely for their ability to illuminate the human drama entailed in efforts to “name the Antichrist.”.

This chapter examines the story of redemption by focusing on the characters of its three chief dramatis personae: God, the nations, and Israel. Drawing on stories in the Jewish Bible, attending to both its Hebrew and its Greek voices, it analyzes the themes shaping Roman-period hopes for the coming of the Kingdom of God. It first looks at the god of Genesis, who simply appears “in the beginning,” and the issue of other gods, before discussing God's vow to never again annihilate all life because of humanity's moral failures. It then considers how God creates Israel by an unexplained choice, over time, through a promise, as well as the exile of the king Zedekiah and the people of the kingdom of Judah. It also explores new themes that begin to sound as prophecy develops and concludes by explaining how Israel's future redemption will redeem as well all of the nations.

This chapter reconstructs the views of Paul's communities and especially of his opponents, taking into consideration the fact that he had a good education, he was passionate in his convictions, and he was a fierce (and trained) word-warrior. It begins with a discussion of “spirit” and “flesh,” which represent two of Paul's favorite and frequent verbal pairings, focusing on the question of circumcision involving Jews. It then considers Jewish missions to turn pagans into Jews through circumcision, along with Jewish speculations about the ultimate fate of gentiles at the End of the Age and eschatological traditions about receiving gentiles into the Kingdom of God. The chapter proceeds by examining the context for Paul's remarks in Galatians that “preaching circumcision” entailed no persecution.