• Haupt, Die Eschatul. Aussajm Jem in den Sifnopt. Emn- qdien. Berlin, 1895.
" t Johannes Weiss, DU Predlgt Jesu, vam Reiehe GotUt, Cottinjren, 1900.
; Titius, Die mutest. Lehrc vm der Seliijkeit, pt. i. 1895.
ESCHATOLOGY
ESCHATOLOGY
529
lowly love. (6) It was a Kingdom which, while coming ultimately from God and heaven, came through a Mediator, by whom it would be ad- ministered. Since His baptism Jesus had the witness within Himself that He was the Mediator. He was the Messianic King who was truly the 'Son of God' (Ps 2). To Him the whole trust of the Kingdom was given, even all power in heaven and earth. Barring the mystery revealed at His baptism, which concerned primarily Himself only, we must admit that such a view of things was inevitable to One who found the form and sub- stance of His faith in the OT, and at the same time believed, in harmony with the earlier Prophets and the prevailing tendency of His own time, in a personal Messiah. We seem therefore warranted in assuming that such was the view of Jesus at the commencement of His ministry. The King- dom was coming from heaven. He Himself was the Person appointed to establish it on earth. Beyond this, liowever, the witness of the OT and His own special experience previous to and at the time of His baptism would not necessarily carry Him. It is perhaps permissible to find in the story of the Temptation (Mt 41t-, Lk 4"^-) the record of a period when, not without a struggle with the prince of this evil world. He renounced the idea that the Kingdom was to come immediately tlirough some dramatic catastrophic exercise of the heavenly power with which He felt Himself to be charged. It is more to our purpose at present to note that while He renounced this catastrophic ideal (if we may call it so) to the extent of refusing to allow it to deflect Him from obedience to the l3ivine word. He did not, according to the Synoptics, renounce it so far as His general view of the mode of the Kingdom's advent was concerned. To the last He spoke in apocalyptic fashion of the Son of Man coming on the clouds. The glorious Parousia would illuminate simultaneously all quarters of heaven like the lightning (Lk 17"*). It would happen within that generation although He could not tell the day nor the hour, and it would be pre- ceded by disasters on a "reat scale, affecting not simply the human world, but the cosmical system. How far it is true to the mind of Jesus, as He spoke on earth, to take the language of the so- called 'great eschatological discourse' (Mk 13, cf. Mt 24) with strict literalness, has been of late keenly debated, and some have been disposed to see in this discourse and matter harmonizing with it in the Gospels, an example of the way in which our Lord found it necessary to accommodate His lan- guage to conceptions which were inevitable for the hearers if not for Himself. Others may perhaps incline to a view which has been advocated by the present writer,* that the phenomena of this peculiarly apocalyptic discourse otter an occasion on which it is profitable to remember that the thoughts of Jesus far transcended those of even the most forward of His disciples. But, while we may well acknowledge a certain elusiveness in tlie language of Jesus in which He deals with the future, we cannot without violence to the Synoptic record refuse to admit that in His habitual view the Kingdom of God was not something that had already come with Himself, but was ratlier some- thing that still lay in the future. Everyone sees that when Jesus said, ' The kingdom of God is at hand' (cf. ijyyi.Kcv = has come near), or bade the dis- ciples pray, 'Thy kingdom come,' He must have thought of the Kingdom as being still in the future.
But what of the passages in which it seems to
be implied that the Kingdom is already present?
For instance Mt 11" (cf. Lk7^), in which John the
Baptist is declared less than tlie least in the King-
' Op. cit., Lect. 1.
dom of God, or Mt 12-» (cf. Lk IP"), in which the expelling of demons in the name of God is ottered as proof that the Kingdom of God has come, or the para,bles (Mt IS""-, Mk 4^'"f-) in which the Kingdom of God is represented as actually in process of coming to its proper magnitude in the world, and therefore already rooted there? It is the crux of the student of eschatology in the Gospels to show how these two modes of conception, presential and futuristic (sometimes distinguished as ethical and cschatoloqical), can be reconciled. Perhaps the most satisfactory recent treatment of the subject is to be found in a brief but brilliant essay of Professor Wernle.* Wernle lays probably ex- cessive stress on what he considers the ' ecclesias- tical' element in the construction of even the Synoptic Gospels (esp. Matthew). But his book, read in the light of the contributions of prede- cessors to the same discussion (esp. Haupt, Titius, and Job. Weiss), shows very convincingly that we must, in fairness to our authorities the Synoptics, and in view of the entire historical situation reflected in these writings, start from the fact that our Lord habitually thought and spoke of the Kingdom — however much He might identify it with Himself — as, so to speak, an objective wonder of the future. It does not, indeed, follow that this was the sole or even the most important aspect of it present to His mind ; but it seems right that we should accommodate to it, if possible, those passages in which the Kingdom seems to be spoken of as if it were already present, and tliat this accommodation should be made apart from the intrusion of distinctively modern thoughts. This Wernle has done with great plausibility in the case of the passages above referred to, pointing out that when regard is had to the context, literal or cir- cumstantial, the difficulty disappears. Thus in the passage Mt 11" (Lk 7^) a main element in the situa- tion is a certain rivalry between the circle of John the Baptist and the circle of .lesus. The former approach the latter in an attitude of aggressive doubt. If Jesus is the Messiah, where is tlio Kingdom that should come with Him ? In what respect are those who have attached themselves to Jesus better than those who hold to tlieir old master, John ? To such aggressive questioning the answer is : ' The Kingdom has come already. Its powers are seen working among us (v.='-). Those who keep apart from the sphere of these wonders, however truly they may fulfil otherwise the con- ditions of membership in the Kingdom, are yet actually standing on the outside.' On this read- ing, the passage, so far from being antagonistic to the eschatological view of the Kingdom, in reality strongly supports that view. For a main point of the argument is the assumption that, while a high ethical standard in practice may be expected of the children of the Kingdom or may be a condition of entrance into it, the Kingdom itself is some- thing more than this. It is the product of a power altogether supernatural and ajiart from the will of men. Not righteousness, but tlie working of this power, is the criterion of the Kingdom. Else surely the Kingdom would be with the greatest of men born of women, and not (as it actually is) with men of even much less stature than his.