Jiu-Hwa Lo Upshur Kingdom of God The Kingdom of God is central to the message of Jesus Christ of Nazareth.. The literature between the Old Testament and the New Testament, called the Pse
Trang 1lived in the 12th century b.c.e and played an
impor-tant role in advancing civilization in Korea The Korean
peninsula is located in northeastern Asia, adjoining
Chi-na The ancestors of the Koreans moved into the
penin-sula from the Manchurian region of present-day China
and belong to the Mongoloid family of peoples, akin to
the Chinese and Japanese The early Koreans lived in
tribal units, fi rst by fi shing and hunting, gradually
devel-oping agriculture Korean mythology has Tan’gun, the
fi rst ruler of Korea, as born of a union between a female
bear and the son of the divine creator, in 2333 b.c.e
Another legend has a prince of China’s fi rst historic
dynasty, the Shang (or Yin) dynasty, migrating to
Ko-rea c 1122 b.c.e with his followers and founding a state,
called Choson, with a capital city near modern
Pyong-yang in northern Korea The last king of the Shang,
re-putedly cruel and vicious, listened only to the advice of
his evil advisers and his wicked concubine In despair
his kinsman Qizi, or Lord of Qi, decided to leave the
Shang realm before its inevitable fall He led his
follow-ers across Manchuria to Korea and founded a dynasty
Korean legends have Kija ruling Korea for 40 years, cite
several locations as his grave site, and credit him as the
founder of a dynasty that ruled for generations
Archaeological evidence indicates a gradual fl ow of
cultural infl uence from northern China into Manchuria
and Korea during the fi rst millennium b.c.e The wars
that led to the fall of the Shang and consolidation of the
Zhou (Chou) dynasty in China did propel refugees to
seek safe new homes, both to the northeast and south of
the Yellow River Coming from the Yellow River, where
the most advanced civilization in East Asia had
devel-oped, the dispersal of peoples did bring development to
regions where they settled
See also Anyang
Further reading: Gardiner, K.H.J The Early History of
Korea Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1969;
Weems, Clarence N ed Hulbrert’s History of Korea Vol I
London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962
Jiu-Hwa Lo Upshur
Kingdom of God
The Kingdom of God is central to the message of Jesus
(Christ) of Nazareth The idea that God is king of the
world is a concept that every ancient nation utilized for
its propaganda purposes, and the Jewish people were no
exception However, the precise expression is not used
at all in the Jewish scriptures but is found only in the
deuterocanonical book of Wisdom and the New Testa-ment Divine kingship is found in a few books of the Bible: Psalms, the latter half of Isaiah, Daniel, Exodus
15 The idea is closely knit with the idea of God’s in-tervention to bring history to an end and to inaugurate
a new age of direct divine rule It is in this context that the idea meshes with the themes of apocalyptic literature The literature between the Old Testament and the New Testament, called the Pseudepigrapha, more often give attention to the existence of God’s kingdom, though it is not a prominent theme in the literature of Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls
Jesus uses the term uniquely both in its precise ex-pression and in its general meaning In its usage prior
to Jesus it almost always means something that is going
to happen in the future But in the New Testament Jesus also means that it is already present, a concept that theo-logians call “realized eschatology.” Most often, Jesus in-tends the Kingdom of God to be a future event (“may your kingdom come”), but there are times in his speeches when he means that the kingdom has partially arrived in the exercise of his preaching and miracles One notable line from the Gospels suggests this new dimension: “The kingdom is in your midst.” By this he does not mean that the kingdom is an interior and mystical state; this would
be a form of Gnosticism that is simply not present in the Gospels Rather, he means that the kingdom manifests itself through the actions of faith God, in effect, is taking control, and the kingdom is present
Realized eschatology is most commonly found in the last and most theological Gospel of John Here the term
Kingdom of God is less often used, but the effects of the
kingdom are experienced in this present time and space When Jesus says, “I am the resurrection and the life,” he collapses all of time and creation into himself His very presence is the sign that the kingdom has come, and his ongoing presence abides in those who believe, such as the church Questions arise about the realized eschatol-ogy of the Gospel of John because it is debated how au-thentically it represents the historical life and teaching of Jesus In order to understand Jesus in any of the Gospels
it would be better to translate the Kingdom of God as
the reign of God: The stress is thereby on the power of God to act, more than on a physical, spatial, or political dimension It is activated through faith and manifested through divine interventions in space and time, phenom-ena that are called miracles The kingdom is thus present
in part but is mainly imagined as future oriented The future orientation of the term led the way for later Chris-tians to speak more and more of heaven as the Kingdom
of God Later fathers of the church such as Eusebius thought that the Kingdom of God was a political idea
238 Kingdom of God