the nations, the future of humanity, the future of all living things and the future of the earth, on which and from which everything that is here lives. In the biblical writings ‘the kingdom of God’ is the broadest, most comprehensive horizon of hope for the general well-being of the world. If the church is only one historical form of God’s coming kingdom, then theology cannot be merely a function of the church, and must not confine itself to offering what Schleiermacher (in the German title to his