But Kingdom inheritance has other claimants. While, through the long rule of the Holy Roman Empire, the Roman Catholic Church was (and still is) convinced of its unique Kingdom status, individual nations have also burned that conviction into the psyches of their citizens, none more so than the USA throughout its entire history.

“And we Americans are the peculiar, chosen people – the Israel of our time; we bear the ark of the liberties of the world……… Long enough have we been sceptics in regard to ourselves, and doubted whether, indeed, the political Messiah had come. But he has come in us, if we would but give utterance to his promptings.”
Herman Melville White-Jacket (1850)

Such convictions were in no way confined to Melville. Entrenched in the mindsets of its earliest colonists, they also currently surface as American high ranking politicians express their certainty that US involvement in the Middle East can clearly be seen as a ‘victory for the Kingdom’. Likewise many Americans, especially evangelical Protestant Americans, would see themselves uniquely and solely capable of doing God’s will – just as do fundamentalist Muslims and Jews.

Even twenty months ago, toward the end of 2001, when I was impelled to begin writing a book on the Kingdom of God, the project seemed ludicrous and well-nigh impossible. This was to be a book not just for Christians; it was to be a book which reached across religious, philosophical and language barriers to speak to thinking people everywhere.

The doubt went deep. How could I explain to anyone that I was writing a book on the Kingdom of God? How many people, apart from the Christian evangelical right and those following the Trans-Himalayan tradition, would have a clue what the term meant? Who would be even vaguely interested, except at a polite academic level?

Twenty-five years ago, when I had begun teaching things spiritual to ‘serious journeyers’ even the word ‘God’ had been a no-no. To now contemplate dedicating a whole book to an indepth study of the Kingdom of God seemed even more way out. If ‘God’ was untenable (and, in many circles, ‘dead’), how much more untenable the notion of Divine rule in our lives, or doing the will of God. All of that implied giving away one’s power and free will. ‘Kingdom of God’ was also viewed as a Christian term – exclusivist, elitist, demanding that one be converted or ‘saved’, judgmental, other-worldly – with no relevance to anyone else.

Suddenly, over the past twenty months, all that has changed as events have focussed world attention back into the Middle East, and into the USA’s vision of itself as world saviour and chosen vessel of the Kingdom of God on earth. (Perhaps it sees itself taking the place of the Roman Catholic Church, which has certainly lost ground in the race, given its scandals over that same period!)

So, why a book on the Kingdom of God?

The most pressing reason has got to be the need to extricate the Kingdom of God from the clutches of both religion and politics. As the sense of the spiritual increases, there is a dawning realisation that the Kingdom of God, and the externalisation, implementation and growing of that Kingdom, might:
• not equate with Christianity
• not equate with serious membership of a Christian church, or even church attendance
• not be reliant on religion and religious practice within any of the three great Middle Eastern religions, or in fact on formal adherence to any religion