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 word translated “kingdom” carries less the sense of a territory than of a ruling, an act of governance rather than a place on a map.

The image did not begin with Jesus. It grows out of the Hebrew scriptures’ insistence that the Lord is king, and more immediately out of the apocalyptic literature of the centuries on either side of the turn of the era — Daniel above all, with its vision of earthly empires overturned and an everlasting dominion given to “one like a son of man.” When the Gospels report Jesus announcing that the kingdom “has come near,” they place him inside that expectation: a future in which the present order is broken open and set right.

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. Some sayings speak of it as imminent and catastrophic, arriving with power within a living generation. Others speak of it as already present — “the kingdom of God is in the midst of you” — and describe it in the parables not as an event but as a seed, a leaven, a hidden treasure: something small, working quietly, easily missed. A line preserved in the Gospel of Thomas pushes the inward reading furthest, locating the kingdom “spread out upon the earth” and unseen, and this interiorizing strain was carried much further by various Gnostic readers, for whom the kingdom named an inner awakening rather than a public future.

Scholarship has spent more than a century arguing over which register is primary. One influential line, following Albert Schweitzer, took the apocalyptic sayings as the bedrock and read Jesus as a thoroughly eschatological figure expecting an imminent end. A counter-reading, associated with C. H. Dodd, emphasized the “realized” sayings and held that the decisive arrival had already occurred in Jesus’s own ministry. Most later scholarship has settled on neither extreme but on a tension the sources seem to hold deliberately — a kingdom both “already” inaugurated and “not yet” consummated, present as a pledge and awaited as a fulfillment.

The traditions that inherited the phrase divided it further. The mainstream churches came to read it 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. Reform-minded and social movements have heard in it a summons to remake the present order; mystical and esoteric currents have heard the inward saying loudest, taking the kingdom as a condition of the soul. The phrase has proved able to hold all of these because the earliest texts already do — it is named more often than it is defined, and pointed to more often than it is mapped.

→ Related: Eschatology · Revelation · Book Of Daniel · Ebionites · Epistle To The Colossians