• Loisy (L'Smngile et L'jSgllse, 46 f., Autour d'un petit Livre, 130 f.) has attacked Mt 1127 on the ground that the unique Divine Sonship which it ascribes to Jesus is of a sort which it was not historically possible for Him to conceive or assert. Jesus, he holds, couid only have used 'Son of God' in the Messianic official sense of Ps 2? ; here, therefore, where the meaning: is clearly more than official, it cannot be the voice of a Jewish Messiah which is heard, but the voice of the Christian consciousness in a Gentile environment : the larger Church has universalized the Jewish conception, elevated the official Son- King— into a Son by nature, and put its own 3wn experience of Jesus into Jesus' own lips. lOUgh to say in refutation of this, that the words question, as found both in Mt. and Lk., in all probability belong to Weiss's ' apostolic source,' the oldest record of words of Jesus ; and that the same unique relation of ' the Father * and ' the Son ' is implied in Mk 13^'-, the genuineness of which no one doubts, Schmiedel (Eiici/c. Bibt. ii. 2627), without dis- puting the words in Mt 11^, tries by recurring to the Western text to reduce them to the ' official ' Messianic meaning which Loisy could recognize as possibly historical. Harn.ack, on the other hand, treats them .as authentic, and indeed as the most important and characteristic words of Jesus on record for determining His thought regarding Himself (Z>«s Weseii ties Christentums, p. SI).
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heaven, and it is a strong measure to assume that in cherishing this hope, by which the NT is in- spired from beginning to end, the early Church was completely misapprehending the Master. He must have said sometning— when we consider the intensity of the Apostolic hope, surely we may say He must have said nmch — to create and sustain an expectation so keen. But there are considera- tions we must keep in mind if we would do justice to all the facts. (1) The final triumph of His cause, which was the cause of God and His kingdom, was not for Jesus an Item in a list of dogmas, but a living personal faith and hope ; in this sense it has the authority of His personality behind it. It was as sure to Him as His own being that the cause for which He stood in the world would triumph ; and it is as sure for everyone who believes in Him. (2) He Himself, with all this assurance of faith, explicitly declares His ignorance of the day and hour at which the final triumph comes. He longed for it intensely ; He felt that it was urgent that it should come ; and urgency, when expressed in terms of time, means imminence ; but the dis- claimer of knowledge remains. The one thing cer- tain is that He spoke of the time as uncertam, as sometimes sooner than men would expect, and sometimes later : the moral attitude required being always that of watching (Bruce, Kingdom of God, p. 278 fl". ; Wendt, Teaching of Jesus, i. p. 127). (3) When Jesus bodied forth this hope of the future triumph of His cause, and of His own glorious com- ing. He did it in language borrowed mainly from the OT apocalypse, the Book of Daniel. It would be hard to say that the Apostles completely mis- understood Him when He did so, but it is hard for anyone in using such language to say what is literal in it and what has to be spiritualized. No one in reading Dn 7 takes the four great beasts, and the sea out of which they rise, literally ; why, then, must we be compelled to take the human form and tlie clouds of heaven, literally? The Book of Acts (2'^-=i) sees in the experience of the Church at Pentecost the fulfilment of a prophecy in Joel (2*") which speaks of ' blood and fire and vapour of smoke, of the sun turning into dark- ness and the moon into blood,' though no such phenomena actually accompanied the gift of the Spirit. May not modern Christians, and even tlie early believers, have taken poetic expressions of the living hope of Jesus more prosaically than He meant them ? (4) We must allow for the pos- sibility that in the reports of Jesus' words which we possess, the reporters may sometimes have allowed the hopes kindled in their own hearts by Jesus to give a turn or a colour, quite in- voluntarily, to what they tell us. They might not be able to distinguish precisely between the hopes they owed to Him and the very words in winch He had declared His o\vii assurance of victory. And finally (5), we must remember that in a spiritual sense the prophecies of Jesus liave been fulfilled. He came again in power. He came in the resurrection, and He came at Pentecost. He filled Jerusalem with His presence in tlie early days of the Church as He had never done while He lived on earth ; from the very hour when tliey condemned Him (Mt 26'''') it was possible for His judges to be conscious of His exaltation and of His coming in power. It may be that in all propliecy, even in the prophecy of Jesus, there is the eliinent which we can call illusive, without having' to call it delusive. To be intelligible, it must speak the language of the age, but it is going to be fuUilled in another age, the realities and experiences uf which transcend the conceptions and the speecli of the present. Even if this be so, it does not sliake our faith in Jesus and His authority. The truth which is incarnate in His person is the truth