The Kingdom of God in Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas

THE KINGDOM OF GOD IN ALBERT THE GREAT AND THOMAS AQUINAS HE CALL TO REPENTANCE and conversion on ccount of the imminent corning of the kingdom of God the central theme of the proclamation of Jesus.1 It seems moreover that Jesus was the only teacher of Judaism or early Christianity to make the kingdom the center of his message . Not that the formula was original to him. The idea that God is king is present in early strata of the Old Testament as well as in the religions of Israel's neighbors.2 The formula ' kingdom of God ' derives from the thoughtworld of Jewish apocalyptic and of the Aramaic targummim that were read in the synagogues of Palestine in Jesus's day.3 The kingdom is never precisely defined in the gospels and this is not the place to defend a reconstruction of its meaning. It must suffice here to summarize a view which is common in modern biblical scholarship and which is presupposed in what follows. Interpretations of the Kingdom The kingdom then is a future reign of God upon earth which brings with it peace, justice, joy. It occurs in time, in history; it embraces the political, social, and personalistic dimensions of life and is intended to include all human beings and the entire cosmos.4 Thus from the viewpoint of the Synoptic Gospels the 1 J. Weiss, Jesus' Proclamation of the Kingdom of God (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1971; Germ. orig., 189Q); R. Schnackenburg, God's Rule and Kingdom (New York: Herder & Herder, 1963; Germ. orig. 1959). • K. L. Schmidt, s.v. basileus, etc., in Kittel, Theological Dictionary of the Ne:w Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1965), vol. 1, pp. 573-595; Kleinknecht, Quell, Stauffer, Kuhn, s.v. theos, ibid., vol. 3, pp. 65-123. 8 Schnackenburg, God's Rule, pp. 41-75. •Matt. 6: 33; Rom. 14: 17; P. Tillich, Systematic Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1963), vol. 3, pp. Q97-4Q3, esp. the four defining characteristics, p. 358; 502 THE KINGDOM IN ALBERT AND AQUINAS 503 believer has two hopes: the individual expectation of death, resurrection, judgment, heaven, and the enjoyment of the blissmaking vision of God on the one hand, and an expectation of a future intervention of God through the Son of Man come to earth, in a word, the kingdom of God, on the other hand. This double expectation of the synoptics, that is, of Jesus, quickly began to break up after his death. The kingdom is less central in Paul, and in the gospel according to John it has nearly disappeared (five times only, in 3: 3,5; 18: 36, as contrasted with 121 times in the Synoptics) , to be largely displaced hy the promise of ' eternal life ' begun here on earth and completed in the resurrection.5 As Christianity moved ever further into the Hellenistic world and left behind its Jewish Palestinian roots the apocalyptic kingdom hope faded further and further into the background. This becomes clear from a brief survey of patristic views.6 As a representative of Alexandrian neo-Platonic philosophical Christianity, Origen held that the kingdom was identical with Jesus himself. To express this he coined the term autobasileia, self-kingdom, by which he meant that Jesus was himself the kingdom. Origen went on to interpret the kingdom pietistically as the soul of the believer divinized or transformed by grace. Thus the kingdom came to mean for him the immortality of the soul, eternal life, heaven itself, the goal of the soul. For Eusebius of Caesarea, who had become a kind of court chaplain to Constantine, the first ruler of the Christian empire, the kingdom was obviously the Christian empire itself. Thereby he expressed the hitherto persecuted Christians' astonishment J. Moltmann, Theology of Hope (New York: Harper, 1967); W. Pannenberg, Theology and the Kingdom of God (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1969). 5 J. Blank, Krisis (Freiburg: Lambertus, 1964); P. Ricca, Die Esckatologie des vierten Evangeliums (Zurich: Gotthelf, 1966); M.-E. Boismard, "L'evolution du theme eschatologique dans les traditions johanniques," Revue Biblique 68 (1961): 507-24. 6 R. Frick, Die Geschichte des Reich-Gottes-Gedankens in der alten Kirche bit zu Origenes und Augustin (Giessen: Tiipelmann, 1928); G. W. H...