Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 1.djvu/376

364 It is doubtless true that, with Jesus, the term filled the same office as some rational postulate that is the dominant conception of any modern philosophy. But the identification of the content of the two dominant thoughts is dangerous. It is one thing to appreciate the exact position of Jesus, and it is quite another to translate it into the terms of one's own philosophy. The first step is one of interpretation, and must always condition the second. The chief criticism of this appropriation of the kingdom as the capstone of a philosophy is the same that must be passed upon so much of the work of the theologian—it is attractive, it is doubtless in the main true, but it is not the thought of Jesus. With him the kingdom was not a subjective but a concrete, objective reality: one that could be expected and enjoyed, if not here and now, at any rate in another world and age.

3. When thus we have rejected as incomplete these two conceptions, the one the gift of economic and the other of philosophical zeal for Christian truth, we have to deal with a very simple alternative. Did Jesus think of this concrete, objective kingdom of God as an eschatological or as a present reality? Was it, with him, to use current expressions, heaven, or was it society? Upon the answer given to this question will depend one's conception of the kingdom as purely religious or as both religious and social.

There is much that is worthy of consideration in the view that the use of the word by Jesus meant a Messianic millenium to be enjoyed by the righteous after death, or after the coming of a new age. On the historical side there may be urged the very conservative argument that Jesus "lived and spoke within the circle of eschatological ideas which Judaism had developed more than two hundred years before; but he controlled them, by giving them a new content, and forcing them into a new direction." On the exegetical it may be even more forcibly argued that "the kingdom of the Messiah is the actual consummation of the prophetic idea of the rule of God," and that the term kingdom of God and kindred expressions "never signify