known.[1] If all necessary allowance is made, on the one hand for the materialistic hopes of the masses, and on the other for the completed eschatology of the later Jewish -writers, it will appear that the kingdom which was awaited was a new and divine Israelitish state, of which the Messiah as the representative of God, was to be the head; all Jews, the members; and all peoples, the subjects. Palestine was to be the seat of its capital, the righteousness of the Jew, the qualification of membership. It was as intensely national as the proud spirit of a nation that remembered a Solomon and a Judas Maccabaeus, and whose Jah was the only God, could imagine and describe under the smart of the Idumean and the Roman. To exhaust its glories was not within the power of literal language, and apocalypse and prophecy could alone faintly foretell the glories of the new age and kingdom. No Jew thought of it as an abstract ideal. The proclamation of its approach by the people's preacher, as he came in prophetic guise to the wilderness of Judea and summoned all to the washing of repentance, never would have so thrilled a nation had it been the ghostly thing announced by so many later Johns. It was as real as the men who sought to join it through repentance and renewed lives. The eternal religious influence of the Jew has lain not in his capacity to see the abstract in the concrete, the general in the specific, but in his noble genius for a rational anthropo-
- ↑ Lütgert, Das Reich Gottes nach den Synoptischen Evangelien, ch. i; Schürer, The Jewish People in the Time of Jesus Christ, Div. II., Vol. II., p. 170 sq.
law of righteous love, by the vital power of his redeeming love in Jesus Christ, brought to bear upon them through the Holy Spirit." Beyschlag, Neutestamentliche Theologie, I, 41, declares that "the kingdom of God is wherever the will of God is done on earth as in Heaven; that is, where it is observed in an ideal manner. Accordingly . . . the kingdom is that ideal condition to which mankind and the world's history shall arrive, when God according to his inmost being, as eternal spirit and sacred love shall be the all-filling and the all-conditioning element in the world." Denny (Studies in Theology, p. 175–6) regards the kingdom as "a separate society in the world, in which there is a real union of persons who are conscious that they have what binds them to each other and separates them from the world; but there is nothing formal or institutional about it." An even more concrete definition is is given by those who identify a moral community with the kingdom; e. g., Ritschl, Issel, Nitsch.
