VOL. I!. — 9
future Parousia, and that he has identihod the Parousia entircily with our Lord's assumption ot a spiritual slate at'ler His resurrection. The coming of the Spirit is always distinguished from the Par- ousia, and spoken ot as the consequence of Christ 8 departure and absence. Hence Scott has to argue that the account of the coming of the Spirit is not logically connected with tlie writer's view of a present Parousia of Christ in His spiritual condi- tion. It appears rather that the eschatology of the Fourth Gospel does not lit the mould into which Scott seeks to press it. The fact is that while the Parousia is retained as part of the belief ot the Church, and is even felt l.y the author of the Gospel to have a definite place in our Lord s atti- tude towards the future and to be necessary as the consummation of the Church's hope, yet, like bt. Paul, his interest is not in the ]iurely escliatological aspect of the subject but in the working out ot tlie consequences of life. Indeed, St. Paul is more occupied with the Parousia as the supreme display of the working oTit of this risen life m the bodies and spirits of believers. But St. John has hardly the same sense of the vital relation of the 1 arou.sia to the life, since his conception of eternal life in the believer is timeless. The difference in his attitude towards the Resurrection corresponds to his attitude towards the Parousia. The Kesurrec- tion is the central point of St. Paul s working out of his new lines. For St. John the central thing is that the Eternal Life, the Father s Logos, the Word of Life, has touched and entered into human life, and thus made it capable of a Divme trans- formation which takes place now. llie believer cannot come into judgment, and has already passed from death to life. God dwells in him and he in God. Hence while the Parousia may be retained as a future hope and stimulus to holiness of life, yet it is not in any way such a crisis ot attainment as it appears to be in St. Paul s thought. St. Paul desires to attain to the resurrection from among the dead. For St. John death is past al- ready and the believer in Christ will never die. Hence Charles seems to sum up tlie Johanniiie view of the Parousia more truly than Scott, when he distinguishes between the view of the Parousia as a future event and the conception of it as a spiritual experience. It is the fuller expression of the latter that constitutes the great advance of the I'ourth
T^)^The Epistles.— T\^e Epistles present the same tw-o-fold view. On the one hand, the Antichrist belief is explained as the working of opposition to the Christian revelation of the Father m the Son ; the Son of God has come, and believers already dwell in God and have no fear of a day of judgment. On the other hand, there is the expectation of Christ's appearing, the desire not to be ashamed before Him at His coming, the expectation of being like Christ when He is manifested, and ot seeing
Him as He is. , , t, . j t
The Johannine view of the Parousia does not seem to be occupied with the probhnn that occu- pied St. Paul as to the place of the body in the Icheme of redemption. Apparently the author of the Fourth Gospel has either transcended the con- ception of the material expression of life altogether or has not felt the pressure of the problem. 1 rob- ably the truth is that he is so much occupied with the moral expression of the life, the lite of the spirit, that the mode of expression of per- sonal identity did not greatly troub e lum. Ihe post-Kcsurrection appearances of Christ cannot safely be taken as an indication of the w'riter s view of the resurrection state of the believer. When he siieaks at all of such a state it is always in spiritual terms : even the word ' glory has a more exclusively spiritual and moral sense than
130
PAEOUSIA
PAROUSIA
with St. Paul. The consummation desired by Christ is that believers may be ' with him,' may be one as the Father and tlie Son are. He has <;iven them already tlie glory wliieh the Father pave Him ; when He appears they shall be like Him. Hence what is characteristic in St. John i.s the liberation of the thought of the Parousia from conceptions of time and space, wliile he still retains, like St. Paul, something of the older point of view. Space forliids a di.scus.sion of Schweitzer's ingenious but unconvincing theor_y of a sacramental qu.asi- material eschatology, where matter through the incarnation and glorifying of Christ becomes the vehicle of the Spirit's operation, and so, working by the s.acraments in the believer, transforms the purely material elements of his body into what is eternal. But this view suggests that an exhaustive inquiry into both the Pauline and the Johannine attitude tow.ards the relation between matter and spirit is greatly needed in the interests of eschat- ology.
V. The Apostolic Fathers.— The place of tlie Parousia in the Apostolic Fathers must be dealt with briefly.
The Parousia is connected by 1 Cletnent with a future resurrection of the just (xxiv. 1, xxvi. 1); gifts of immortality and righteousness accompany it (xxxv. 4) ; the righteous who have fallen asleep from all generations will be manifested at the visitation (^iriir/fOTrj) of the Kingdom of Christ ; the combination of Is 26-° and Ezk 37'^ possibly from a catena, is interesting in this connexion as illus- trating the methods of proof from the OT (1. 3, 4).