THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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and the promise to those that labour and are heavy laden. The Bible did not elaborate any social utopia, and it is certainly not exhausted by the latter, nor does it
constitute its decisive value; to believe that would be both a false overestimation of the Bible and a shallow approach. Christianity is not just an outcry against
deprivation, it is an outcry against death and the void, and inserts the Son of Man into both. But even if the Bible contains no elaborated social utopia, it does point
most vehemently, in both negative and positive terms, to this exodus and this kingdom. And when the scouts told of the land flowing with milk and honey, there was no
shortage either of warriors who wanted to conquer it, nor afterwards, when the land proved to be no Canaan, of tough and ardent dreamers who sought for it further
and further afield, lavished more and more stirring superlatives on it, and wanted to bring it ever closer to mankind. No mercy was shown to the great Babel: ‘Babylon
the great is fallen, is fallen … And the kings of the earth … shall bewail her, and lament for her … And the merchants of the earth shall weep and mourn over her; for
no man buyeth their merchandise any more’ (Revelation 18, 2ff.). But the kingdom is nowhere regarded in the Bible as a baptized Babel, not even — as Augustine later
regarded the millennium — as a Church.
Augustine's City of God from rebirth
Nearly all the forward dreams of the Greeks were well and truly directed towards this world. Life itself, without any outside contribution, was to be improved in them,
in a sensible though colourful way. Even the distant islands in the pagan wishful image lay in a still coherent world, together with their happiness. This happiness, with its
institutions, was immanently inserted into existing life, and held up as an example to it. But to the Rome which was going to pieces nothing could be set up as an
example of an immanent kind any more. A completely different example, something completely new, was longed for; in the end, in the competition between various
salvations, Pauline Christianity — making political use of this new element — was triumphant. Jesus had by no means demanded the leap, as we have seen, out of this
world into inwardness and the other world, but the fresh leap on to a new earth. The Christian­utopian wish for community formed around the core of Jesus, though in
such a way that it shifted more and more into the other world, into an inwardly transcendental gathering, and empty promises. Instead of a radical renewal of this