The Kingdom of God and the Will of God

Abstract

IT is a commonplace that the prevailing modes of thought in our contemporary Western world are naturalistic. That is to say, the categories of the sciences are today regarded as ultimate, rather than those of religion. In consequence it is widely assumed that God can exist only as an idea in the human mind. Even within the Christian Churches this presupposition is evident in various forms of religious naturalism, or naturalistic religion, according to which statements about God, instead of referring to a transcendent divine Being, are expressions of ethical policies,¹ or of ways of seeing and feeling about the world,² or of convic-tional (as distinct from cognitive) stances,³ or of one’s existential situation.⁴ Neither the general naturalistic or positivistic climate of our culture as a whole nor the growing enclave of naturalistic religion within Christianity has any use for the idea of an after-life. From the point of view of secular naturalism, human survival after death is a scientific impossibility of which only the superstitious still allow themselves to dream. For religious naturalism the notion of the life everlasting remains as a symbol of the worth of human personality, with its capacity to appreciate timeless truths and values.