and cast out from it. In the thought of Jesus it is a kingdom, not a congeries of kingdoms as numerous as there are God-fearing men. If Paul in one instance[1] seems to speak as if it were a discipline,—"not eating and drinking, but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Ghost"—it is because his readers can be trusted to recognize the boldness of the metonymy. Jesus never so speaks. With him ethical teachings are expressed explicity and literally by such terms as "perfect,"[2] " righteousness,"[3] and the like. In one case he is reported as making righteousness and the kingdom as coordinate goods.[4] But we do not find in his words taken altogether justification for the closely allied conception that "the kingdom is the rational idea of the chief good"[5] which "can by no means be identified with the universal moral society which is being developed in the world."[6] While there is in these words a gratifying recognition of the supreme position accorded by Jesus to the kingdom, and while such a view emphasizes what is certainly a dominant teaching of his, namely, that the highest good consists in entering the kingdom, that is gaining salvation, it is as certainly doing violence to some of the analogies that furnish much of the content of its definition when the kingdom is made altogether supra-mundane. Many of the figures and words employed by Jesus[7] in speaking of this "Highest Good" show that he regarded it as by no means merely that super-sensuous, super-rational postulate of morality "which has the kingdom of moral righteousness on earth as its intra-mundane correlative."[8]
- ↑ Rom 14; 17.
- ↑ Matt. 5:48, 19:21.
- ↑ Matt. 3:15, 5:6, 10; cf. John 16:8, 10.
- ↑ Matt. 6:33.
- ↑ Kaftan, The Truth of Christianity, II., 377.
- ↑ Kaftan, II., 379. See also his Wesen der Christlichen Religion, 2d ed., p. 236 sq,. J. Weiss (Die Predigt Jesu vom Reiche Gottes, p. 64), deals rather summarily with Kaftan's views.
- ↑ See for instance Matt. 13:38 sq. and below.
- ↑ Kaftan, II., 366.
