Kingdom of God

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The Kingdom of God — basileia tou theou in the Greek of the Gospels, rendered in Matthew as the Kingdom of Heaven — is the phrase the Synoptic Gospels place at the center of Jesus’s preaching: the reign of God breaking into history, the moment when God’s will is finally done on earth as it is held to be done in heaven. The Greek noun basileia names less a territory than an act of ruling — a reign, a kingship exercised, rather than a kingdom drawn on a map. To say the kingdom comes is to say that God begins to rule where another power has ruled. That grammatical fact governs everything that follows: the dispute over the phrase is not over where the kingdom lies but over when and how the ruling takes hold.

The roots: the kingship of God

The image did not begin with Jesus. It grows out of the Hebrew scriptures’ insistence that the Lord is king — the enthronement psalms that cry the LORD reigns (Psalms 93, 96–99), the confession that dominion and majesty belong to God alone. In that older register the kingship of God is a standing fact of creation: God rules now, has always ruled, and Israel’s worship acknowledges a sovereignty that does not need to arrive because it never departed. What changed, in the centuries on either side of the turn of the era, was that this eternal kingship acquired a future tense. Under foreign empires — Babylonian, Persian, Hellenistic, Roman — the claim that God reigns came to sit in painful tension with the visible fact that other kings did. The gap between the two was filled by expectation: a day when the rule already true in heaven would become true, finally and publicly, on earth.

That expectation took its sharpest form in the apocalyptic literature of Second Temple Judaism, and above all in the Book of Daniel. Daniel’s seventh chapter sees four beasts rise from the sea — four empires — and then a court convened in heaven, the books opened, and dominion stripped from the beasts and given to “one like a son of man” who comes with the clouds: an everlasting dominion that shall not pass away, a kingdom that shall not be destroyed. Here the kingship of God becomes a verdict rendered against history, an act that overturns the present order of empires and hands rule to a figure and a people of God’s choosing. When the Gospels report Jesus announcing that the kingdom “has come near” — engiken, in the programmatic summary of his preaching at Mark 1:15, the first words he speaks after the baptism in the Jordan that opens his ministry — they place him inside that expectation, and the petition he teaches his disciples, your kingdom come, asks for precisely the day Daniel saw: the reign made manifest. The whole architecture of the concept rests on the difference between a sovereignty confessed and a sovereignty consummated.

The threefold reading

What the kingdom actually is, in the sayings attributed to him, has been read in sharply different ways, and the texts themselves pull in more than one direction. Three registers can be heard, and a serious reading of the sources must account for all three rather than choosing one and silencing the others.

The imminent and catastrophic. Some sayings speak of the kingdom as a coming event, near and overwhelming, arriving with power within a living generation — the harvest at the end of the age, the master returning unannounced, the generation that will not pass away before it sees the thing come. On this hearing the kingdom belongs to the genre of the apocalypse: a future in which the present order is broken open and set right, continuous with Daniel’s everlasting dominion and with the wider hope of eschatology for last things. The figure of the son of man who returns in glory binds the preaching back to Daniel 7 and forward to the expectation of a second coming.

The already-present. Other sayings speak of the kingdom as something already at work — the kingdom of God is in the midst of you — and the parables describe it not as an event but as a seed cast on soil, a measure of leaven hidden in dough, a treasure buried in a field, a single pearl: something small, working quietly, easily missed, present before it is visible and growing toward a harvest not yet reaped. To heal, to cast out, to forgive, on this reading, is not to predict the kingdom but to enact it — the reign already breaking the grip of another power, in the present tense, wherever it is exercised.

The inward. A third register locates the kingdom within. A line preserved in the Gospel of Thomas pushes this reading furthest. Its third saying has Jesus dismiss those who would point to the kingdom in the sky or the sea — the birds and the fish would arrive first — and turn the seeker inward: the kingdom is within and without, found in coming to know oneself. Its hundred-and-thirteenth saying answers the disciples’ question of when the kingdom will come by refusing the question’s terms: it will not come by watching for it, nor by saying here it is or there it is; rather the Father’s kingdom is spread out upon the earth, and people do not see it. The event has become a condition; the future has become a seeing. This interiorizing strain was carried much further by various readers in the orbit of Gnosticism, for whom the kingdom named an inner awakening — a gnosis, a recognition of one’s origin in the living Father — rather than a public future breaking over the world. Where the apocalyptic register waits and the present register enacts, the inward register recognizes: the kingdom was always here, and the change is in the eye.

A century of argument

Scholarship has spent more than a century arguing over which register is primary, and the modern debate has a definite shape and a documentary record. The nineteenth-century liberal Protestant reading, in the line of Albrecht Ritschl, had domesticated the phrase into an ethical and social ideal — the kingdom as the moral commonwealth that human effort builds. Against this, Johannes Weiss, in his short and pointed Die Predigt Jesu vom Reiche Gottes (1892) — and Weiss was Ritschl’s own son-in-law — argued that the kingdom in Jesus’s preaching is nothing of the kind: it is wholly future, wholly apocalyptic, wholly God’s act and not humanity’s project.

Albert Schweitzer took Weiss’s thesis as bedrock and pressed it to its limit. In Von Reimarus zu Wrede (1906), translated as The Quest of the Historical Jesus, he named his position thoroughgoing, or consistent, eschatology (konsequente Eschatologie): the Jesus of history was a thoroughly eschatological figure who expected the kingdom to arrive imminently and catastrophically within his generation, and whose career is unintelligible apart from that expectation. Schweitzer’s book closed the older lives of Jesus by showing that each had remade Jesus in its author’s image; his own Jesus, certain the present world was ending, stood deliberately strange to the modern reader.

A counter-reading, associated with C. H. Dodd, emphasized the sayings that speak of the kingdom as already arrived. In The Parables of the Kingdom (1935) Dodd coined the phrase realized eschatology, and rested it partly on Greek: the verb ephthasen, in the saying that the kingdom has come upon those who see the demons cast out, and engiken, the verb of arrival at Mark 1:15, which he read as announcing that the kingdom had reached its hearers rather than merely drawn close. For Dodd the decisive event had already occurred in Jesus’s own ministry; the kingdom was not a date on the calendar but a presence to be recognized.

Most later scholarship has settled on neither extreme but on a tension the sources seem to hold deliberately. Joachim Jeremias softened Dodd’s term to an eschatology in process of realization — the hour of fulfillment begun but not yet finished. Oscar Cullmann offered the image that became the field’s working shorthand: the decisive battle is already won though the war is not yet over — the kingdom both already inaugurated and not yet consummated, present as a pledge and awaited as a fulfillment. This already / not yet synthesis — developed across the work of Werner Georg Kümmel, Günther Bornkamm, George Eldon Ladd, and George R. Beasley-Murray — has held the center for most of a century precisely because it declines to dissolve the tension the texts themselves keep.

The registers inherited

The traditions that took up the phrase divided it further, and the division maps onto the three readings. The mainstream churches came to read the kingdom largely as the future consummation of history and the life of the world to come, while keeping the present claim that it is anyhow at work now in word and sacrament; the Eastern Orthodox tradition in particular folds the kingdom into the liturgy itself, treating the gathered worship as the age to come tasted in advance rather than merely awaited. The earliest Jewish-Christian communities, the Ebionites among them, kept the phrase close to its apocalyptic Jewish matrix, expecting a coming reign rather than reading it as an already-accomplished cosmic fact. The letter to the Colossians, arguing the supremacy of Christ over every cosmic power and rule, shows the early movement already translating the kingdom-language of a reign into the cosmic key of a sovereignty exercised over the powers — a step toward the realized pole.

Reform-minded and social movements have heard in the kingdom a summons to remake the present order, taking the parables of growth as a mandate and the petition your kingdom come as a program. Mystical and esoteric currents have heard the inward saying loudest, taking the kingdom as a condition of the soul to be entered now. And the apocalyptic register kept its own afterlife in the prophetic theologies of history — most consequentially in the Joachimite reading descended from Joachim of Fiore (c.1135–1202), the Calabrian abbot who divided history into three ages of Father, Son, and a coming Age of the Holy Spirit. Joachim’s third status turned the kingdom into a future epoch within history rather than its abrupt end, and that periodizing impulse — a coming spiritual age, immanent and this-worldly — ran forward through eight centuries of Western expectation, secular as well as religious. The phrase has proved able to hold all of these because the earliest texts already do.

Texts, editions, and the modern debate {#research}

The dispute over the kingdom is, in the end, a dispute over a handful of Greek sentences, and the scholarship that frames them is unusually well documented. The programmatic summary of the preaching stands at Mark 1:15 — the time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near — and the apocalyptic root it draws on stands at Daniel 7:14, the everlasting dominion given to the one like a son of man. The inward register turns on two sayings of the Gospel of Thomas, recovered among the Nag Hammadi codices in 1945 and read here in Thomas O. Lambdin’s translation; in saying 113 the kingdom is “spread out upon the earth, and men do not see it,” and in saying 3 it is “inside of you” and “outside of you” at once.

The critical literature is largely in copyright but its landmarks are fixed. Johannes Weiss broke the modern debate open with Die Predigt Jesu vom Reiche Gottes (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1892), insisting on the kingdom’s purely future and apocalyptic character against the liberal-ethical reading. Albert Schweitzer carried the thesis to its limit in Von Reimarus zu Wrede (Tübingen: Mohr, 1906), known in English as The Quest of the Historical Jesus (trans. W. Montgomery, 1910), where the position is named consistent eschatology. C. H. Dodd’s The Parables of the Kingdom (London: Nisbet, 1935) coined the counter-term realized eschatology; a concise account of the shift, including Dodd’s reliance on ephthasen and engiken, is set out in the survey of realized eschatology. The mediating already / not yet position was developed in Joachim Jeremias, Die Gleichnisse Jesu (1947; English The Parables of Jesus), Oscar Cullmann’s Christus und die Zeit (1946; English Christ and Time, 1951), Werner Georg Kümmel’s Verheißung und Erfüllung (1945), and George Eldon Ladd’s The Presence of the Future (1974). On the apocalyptic substrate, Bernard McGinn’s work on medieval apocalypticism and Marjorie Reeves’s The Influence of Prophecy in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford, 1969) trace the kingdom’s career as a theology of history into the Joachimite centuries.

The phrase sits at the heart of a tradition still living, and the competing readings are not antiquarian. A church that prays your kingdom come every morning is praying a sentence whose verb it has never been able to fix: the choosing among has come, is coming, and is here unseen is an act of faith before it is an act of scholarship, and the same words are spoken by those who expect the heavens to open, by those who labor to remake the present order, and by those who look only inward. The kingdom is named more often than it is defined, and pointed to more often than it is mapped.

→ Related: Eschatology · Apocalypse · Book Of Daniel · Jesus Christ · Gospel Of Thomas · Ebionites · Epistle To The Colossians · Second Temple Judaism · Gnosticism · Joachimite Apocalypticism · Baptism Of Jesus · New Testament · Eastern Orthodox Christianity