eschatological material, Weiffenbach stumbles upon the discourse at the
sending forth of the Twelve in Matt. x., and finds himself face to face
with the fact that the discourse which he was expected to regard as a
discourse of instruction was really nothing of the kind, but a collection
of eschatological sayings. As he had taken over along with the Marcan
hypothesis the closely connected view of the composite character of the
Synoptic discourses, he does not allow himself to be misled, but regards
this inappropriate charge to the Twelve as nothing else than an impossible
anticipation and a bold anachronism. He knows that he is at one in this
with Holtzmann, Colani, Bleek, Scholten, Meyer, and Keim, who also made
the discourse of instruction end at the point beyond which they find it
impossible to explain it, and regard the predictions of persecution as
only possible in the later period of the life of Jesus. “For these
predictions,” to express Weiffenbach’s view in the words of Keim, “are too
much at variance with the essentially gracious and happy mood which
suggested the sending forth of the disciples, and reflect instead the
lurid gloom of the fierce conflicts of the later period and the sadness of
the farewell discourses.”
It was a good thing that Bruno Bauer did not hear this chorus. If he had,
he would have asked Weiffenbach and his allies whether the poor fragment
that remained after the critical dissection of the “charge to the Twelve”
was “a discourse of instruction,” and if in view of these difficulties
they could not realise why he had refused, thirty years before, to believe
in the “discourse of instruction.” But Bruno Bauer heard nothing: and so
their blissful unconsciousness lasted for nearly a generation longer.
The expectation of His Second Coming, repeatedly expressed by Jesus
towards the close of His life, is on this hypothesis authentic; it was
painted over by the primitive Christian community with the colours of its
own eschatology, in consequence of the delay of the Parousia; and in view
of the mission to the Gentiles a more cautious conception of the nearness
of the time commended itself; nay, when Jerusalem had fallen and the
“signs of the end” which had been supposed to be discovered in the horrors
of the years 68 and 69 had passed without result, the return of Jesus was
relegated to a distant future by the aid of the doctrine that the Gospel
must first be preached to all the heathen. Thus the Parousia, which
according to the Jewish‐Christian eschatology belonged to the present age,
was transferred to the future. “With this combination and making
coincident—they were not so at the first—of the Second Coming, the end of
the world, and the final Judgment, the idea of the Second Coming reached
the last and highest stage of its development.”
Weiffenbach’s view, as we have seen, empties Jesus’ expectation of His
return of almost all its content, and to that is due the fact that his
investigation did not prove so useful as it might have done. His purpose
is, following suggestions thrown out by Schleiermacher and Weisse, to
prove the identity of the predictions of the Second Coming and of the
Resurrection, and he takes as his starting‐point the observation that the
conduct of the disciples after the death of Jesus forbids us to suppose
that the Resurrection had been predicted in clear and unambiguous sayings,
and that, on the other hand, the announcement of the Second Coming
coincides in point of time with the predictions of the Resurrection, and
the predictions both of the Second Coming and of the Resurrection stand in
organic connexion with the announcement of His approaching death. The two
are therefore identical.
It was only after the death of their Master that the disciples
differentiated the thought of the Resurrection from that of the Second
Coming. The Resurrection did not bring them that which the Second Coming
had promised; but it produced the result that the eschatological hopes,
which Jesus had with difficulty succeeded in damping, flamed up again in
the hearts of His disciples. The spiritual presence of the Deliverer who
had manifested Himself to them did not seem to them to be the fulfilment
of the promise of the Second Coming; but the expectation of the latter,
being brought into contact with the flame of eschatological hope with
which their hearts were a‐fire, was fused, and cast into a form quite
different from that in which it had been derived from the words of Jesus.
That is all finely observed. For the first time it had dawned upon
historical criticism that the great question is that concerning the
identity or difference of the Parousia and the Resurrection. But the man
who had been the first to grasp that thought, and who had undertaken his
whole study with the special purpose of working it out, was too much under
the influence of the spiritualised eschatology of Schleiermacher and
Weisse to be able to assign the right values in the solution of his
equation. And, withal, he is too much inclined to play the apologist as a
subsidiary rôle. He is not content merely to render the history
intelligible; he is, by his own confession, urged on by the hope that
perhaps a way may be found of causing that “error” of Jesus to disappear
and proving it to be an illusion due to the want of a sufficiently close
study of His discourses. But the historian simply must not be an
apologist; he must leave that to those who come after him and he may do so
with a quiet mind, for the apologists, as we learn from the history of the
Lives of Jesus, can get the better of any historical result whatever. It
is, therefore, quite unnecessary that the historian should allow himself
to be led astray by following an apologetic will‐o’‐the‐wisp.
Technically regarded, the mistake on which Weiffenbach’s investigation
made shipwreck was the failure to bring the Jewish apocalyptic material
into relation with the Synoptic data. If he had done this, it would have
been impossible for him to extract an absolutely unreal and unhistorical
conception of the Second Coming out of the discourses of Jesus.
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The task which Weiffenbach had neglected remained undone—to the detriment
of theology—until Baldensperger(158) repaired the omission. His book, “The
Self‐consciousness of Jesus in the Light of the Messianic Hopes of His
Time,”(159) published in 1888, made its impression by reason of the
fullness of its material. Whereas Colani and Volkmar had still been able
to deny the existence of a fully formed Messianic expectation in the time
of Jesus, the genesis of the expectation was now fully traced out, and it
was shown that the world of thought which meets us in Daniel had won the
victory, that the “Son of Man” Messiah of the Similitudes of Enoch was the
last product of the Messianic hope prior to the time of Jesus; and that
therefore the fully developed Danielic scheme with its unbridgeable chasm
between the present and the future world furnished the outline within
which all further and more detailed traits were inserted. The honour of
having effectively pioneered the way for this discovery belongs to
Schürer.(160) Baldensperger adopts his ideas, but sets them forth in a
much more direct way, because he, in contrast with Schürer, gives no
_system_ of Messianic expectation—and there never in reality was a
system—but is content to picture its many‐sided growth.
He does not, it is true, escape some minor inconsistencies. For example,
the idea of a “political Messiahship,” which is really set aside by his
historical treatment, crops up here and there, as though the author had
not entirely got rid of it himself. But the impression made by the book as
a whole was overpowering.
Nevertheless this book does not exactly fulfil the promise of its title,
any more than Weiffenbach’s. The reader expects that now at last Jesus’
sayings about Himself will be consistently explained in the light of the
Jewish Messianic ideas, but that is not done. For Baldensperger, instead
of tracing down and working out the conception of the Kingdom of God held
by Jesus as a product of the Jewish eschatology, at least by way of trying
whether that method would suffice, takes it over direct from modern
historical theology. He assumes as self‐evident that Jesus’ conception of
the Kingdom of God had a double character, that the eschatological and
spiritual elements were equally represented in it and mutually conditioned
one another, and that Jesus therefore began, in pursuance of this
conception, to found a spiritual invisible Kingdom, although He expected
its fulfilment to be effected by supernatural means. Consequently there
must also have been a duality in His religious consciousness, in which
these two conceptions had to be combined. Jesus’ Messianic consciousness
sprang, according to Baldensperger, “from a religious root”; that is to
say, the Messianic consciousness was a special modification of a self‐
consciousness in which a pure, spiritual, unique relation to God was the
fundamental element; and from this arises the possibility of a spiritual
transformation of the Jewish‐Messianic self‐consciousness. In making these
assumptions, Baldensperger does not ask himself whether it is not possible
that for Jesus the purely Jewish consciousness of a transcendental
Messiahship may itself have been religious, nay even spiritual, just as
well as the Messiahship resting on a vague, indefinite, colourless sense
of union with God which modern theologians arbitrarily attribute to Him.
Again, instead of arriving at the two conceptions, Kingdom of God and
Messianic consciousness, purely empirically, by an unbiased comparison of
the Synoptic passages with the Late‐Jewish conceptions, Baldensperger, in
this following Holtzmann, brings them into his theory in the dual form in
which contemporary theology, now becoming faintly tinged with eschatology,
offered them to him. Consequently, everything has to be adapted to this
duality. Jesus, for example, in applying to Himself the title Son of Man,
thinks not only of the transcendental significance which it has in the
Jewish apocalyptic, but gives it at the same time an ethico‐religious
colouring.
Finally, the duality is explained by an application of the genetic method,
in which the “course of the development of the self‐consciousness of
Jesus” is traced out. The historical psychology of the Marcan hypothesis
here shows its power of adapting itself to eschatology. From the first, to
follow the course of Baldensperger’s exposition, the eschatological view
influenced Jesus’ expectation of the Kingdom and His Messianic
consciousness. In the wilderness, after the dawn of His Messianic
consciousness at His baptism, He had rejected the ideal of the Messianic
king of David’s line and put away all warlike thoughts. Then He began to
found the Kingdom of God by preaching. For a time the spiritualised idea
of the Kingdom was dominant in His mind, the Messianic eschatological idea
falling rather into the background.
But His silence regarding His Messianic office was partly due to
paedagogic reasons, “since He desired to lead His hearers to a more
spiritual conception of the Kingdom and so to obviate a possible political
movement on their part and the consequent intervention of the Roman
government.” In addition to this He had also personal reasons for not
revealing Himself which only disappeared in the moment when His death and
Second Coming became part of His plan; previous to that He did not know
how and when the Kingdom was to come. Prior to the confession at Caesarea
Philippi, the disciples “had only a faint and vague suspicion of the
Messianic dignity of their Master.”
This was “rather the preparatory stage of His Messianic work.”
Objectively, it may be described “as the period of growing emphasis upon
the spiritual characteristics of the Kingdom, and of resigned waiting and
watching for its outward manifestation in glory; subjectively, from the
point of view of the self‐consciousness of Jesus, it may be characterised
as the period of the struggle between His religious conviction of His
Messiahship and the traditional rationalistic Messianic belief.”
This first period opens out into a second in which He had attained to
perfect clearness of vision and complete inner harmony. By the acceptance
of the idea of suffering, Jesus’ inner peace is enhanced to the highest
degree conceivable. “By throwing Himself upon the thought of death He
escaped the lingering uncertainty as to when and how God would fulfil His
promise....” “The coming of the Kingdom was fixed down to the Second
Coming of the Messiah. Now He ventured to regard Himself as the Son of Man
who was to be the future Judge of the world, for the suffering and dying
Son of Man was closely associated with the Son of Man surrounded by the
host of heaven. Would the people accept Him as Messiah? He now, in
Jerusalem, put the question to them in all its sharpness and burning
actuality; and the people were moved to enthusiasm. But so soon as they
saw that He whom they had hailed with such acclamation was neither able
nor willing to fulfil their ambitious dreams, a reaction set in.”
Thus, according to Baldensperger, there was an interaction between the
historical and the psychological events. And that is right!—if only the
machinery were not so complicated, and a “development” had not to be
ground out of it at whatever cost. But this, and the whole manner of
treatment in the second part, encumbered as it is with parenthetic
qualifications, was rendered inevitable by the adoption of the two
aforesaid not purely historical conceptions. Sometimes, too, one gets the
impression that the author felt that he owed it to the school to which he
belonged to advance no assertion without adding the limitations which
scientifically secure it against attack. Thus on every page he digs
himself into an entrenched position, with palisades of footnotes—in fact
the book actually ends with a footnote. But the conception which underlay
the whole was so full of vigour that in spite of the thoughts not being
always completely worked out, it produced a powerful impression.
Baldensperger had persuaded theology at least to admit the
hypothesis—whether it took up a positive or negative position in regard to
it—that Jesus possessed a fully‐developed eschatology. He thus provided a
new basis for discussion and gave an impulse to the study of the subject
such as it had not received since the ’sixties, at least not in the same
degree of energy. Perhaps the very limitations of the work, due as they
were to its introduction of modern ideas, rendered it better adapted to
the spirit of the age, and consequently more influential, than if it had
been characterised by that rigorous maintenance of a single point of view
which was abstractly requisite for the proper treatment of the subject. It
was precisely the rejection of this rigorous consistency which enabled it
to gain ground for the cause of eschatology.
‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
But the consistent treatment from a single point of view was bound to
come; and it came four years later. In passing from Weiffenbach and
Baldensperger to Johannes Weiss(161) the reader feels like an explorer who
after weary wanderings through billowy seas of reed‐grass at length
reaches a wooded tract, and instead of swamp feels firm ground beneath his
feet, instead of yielding rushes sees around him the steadfast trees. At
last there is an end of “qualifying clause” theology, of the “and yet,”
the “on the other hand,” the “notwithstanding”! The reader had to follow
the others step by step, making his way over every footbridge and gang‐
plank which they laid down, following all the meanderings in which they
indulged, and must never let go their hands if he wished to come safely
through the labyrinth of spiritual and eschatological ideas which they
supposed to be found in the thought of Jesus.
In Weiss there are none of these devious paths: “behold the land lies
before thee.”
His “Preaching of Jesus concerning the Kingdom of God,”(162) published in
1892, has, on its own lines, an importance equal to that of Strauss’s
first Life of Jesus. He lays down the third great alternative which the
study of the life of Jesus had to meet. The first was laid down by
Strauss: _either_ purely historical _or_ purely supernatural. The second
had been worked out by the Tübingen school and Holtzmann: _either_
Synoptic _or_ Johannine. Now came the third: _either_ eschatological _or_
non‐eschatological!
Progress always consists in taking one or other of two alternatives, in
abandoning the attempt to combine them. The pioneers of progress have
therefore always to reckon with the law of mental inertia which manifests
itself in the majority—who always go on believing that it is possible to
combine that which can no longer be combined, and in fact claim it as a
special merit that they, in contrast with the “one‐sided” writers, can do
justice to the other side of the question. One must just let them be, till
their time is over, and resign oneself not to see the end of it, since it
is found by experience that the complete victory of one of two historical
alternatives is a matter of two full theological generations.
This remark is made in order to explain why the work of Johannes Weiss did
not immediately make an end of the mediating views. Another reason perhaps
was that, according to the usual canons of theological authorship, the
book was much too short—only sixty‐seven pages—and too simple to allow its
full significance to be realised. And yet it is precisely this simplicity
which makes it one of the most important works in historical theology. It
seems to break a spell. It closes one epoch and begins another.
Weiffenbach had failed to solve the problem of the Second Coming,
Baldensperger that of the Messianic consciousness of Jesus, because both
of them allowed a false conception of the Kingdom of God to keep its place
among the data. The general conception of the Kingdom was first rightly
grasped by Johannes Weiss. All modern ideas, he insists, even in their
subtlest forms, must be eliminated from it; when this is done, we arrive
at a Kingdom of God which is wholly future; as is indeed implied by the
petition in the Lord’s prayer, “Thy Kingdom come.” Being still to come, it
is at present purely supra‐mundane. It is present only as a cloud may be
said to be present which throws its shadow upon the earth; its nearness,
that is to say, is recognised by the paralysis of the Kingdom of Satan. In
the fact that Jesus casts out the demons, the Pharisees are bidden to
recognise, according to Matt. xii. 25‐28, that the Kingdom of God is
already come upon them.
This is the only sense in which Jesus thinks of the Kingdom as present. He
does not “establish it,” He only proclaims its coming. He exercises no
“Messianic functions,” but waits, like others, for God to bring about the
coming of the Kingdom by supernatural means. He does not even know the day
and hour when this shall come to pass. The missionary journey of the
disciples was not designed for the extension of the Kingdom of God, but
only as a means of rapidly and widely making known its nearness. But it
was not so near as Jesus thought. The impenitence and hardness of heart of
a great part of the people, and the implacable enmity of His opponents, at
length convinced Him that the establishment of the Kingdom of God could
not yet take place, that such penitence as had been shown hitherto was not
sufficient, and that a mighty obstacle, the guilt of the people, must
first be put away. It becomes clear to Him that His own death must be the
ransom‐price. He dies, not for the community of His followers only, but
for the nation; that is why He always speaks of His atoning death as “for
many,” not “for you.” After His death He would come again in all the
splendour and glory with which, since the days of Daniel, men’s
imaginations had surrounded the Messiah, and He was to come, moreover,
within the lifetime of the generation to which He had proclaimed the
nearness of the Kingdom of God.
The setting up of the Kingdom was to be preceded by the Day of Judgment.
In describing the Messianic glory Jesus makes use of the traditional
picture, but He does so with modesty, restraint, and sobriety. Therein
consists His greatness.
With political expectations this Kingdom has nothing whatever to do. “To
hope for the Kingdom of God in the transcendental sense which Jesus
attaches to it, and to raise a revolution, are two things as different as
fire and water.” The transcendental character of the expectation consists
precisely in this, that the State and all earthly institutions,
conditions, and benefits, as belonging to the present age, shall either
not exist at all in the coming Kingdom, or shall exist only in a
sublimated form. Hence Jesus cannot preach to men a special ethic of the
Kingdom of God, but only an ethic which in this world makes men free from
the world and prepared to enter unimpeded into the Kingdom. That is why
His ethic is of so completely negative a character; it is, in fact, not so
much an ethic as a penitential discipline.
The ministry of Jesus is therefore not in principle different from that of
John the Baptist: there can be no question of a founding and development
of the Kingdom within the hearts of men. What distinguishes the work of
Jesus from that of the Baptist is only His consciousness of being the
Messiah. He awoke to this consciousness at His baptism. But the
Messiahship which He claims is not a present office; its exercise belongs
to the future. On earth He is only a man, a prophet, as in the view
implied in the speeches in the Acts of the Apostles. “Son of Man” is
therefore, in the passages where it is authentic, a purely eschatological
designation of the Messiah, though we cannot tell whether His hearers
understood Him as speaking of Himself in His future rank and dignity, or
whether they thought of the Son of Man as a being quite distinct from
Himself, whose coming He was only proclaiming in advance.
“The sole object of this argument is to prove that the Messianic self‐
consciousness of Jesus, as expressed in the title ‘Son of Man,’ shares in
the transcendental apocalyptic character of Jesus’ idea of the Kingdom of
God, and cannot be separated from that idea.” The only partially correct
evaluation of the factors in the problem of the Life of Jesus which
Baldensperger had taken over from contemporary theology, and which had
hitherto prevented historical science from obtaining a solution of that
problem, had now been corrected from the history itself, and it was now
only necessary to insert the corrected data into the calculation.
Here is the point at which it is fitting to recall Reimarus. He was the
first, and indeed, before Johannes Weiss, the only writer who recognised
and pointed out that the preaching of Jesus was purely eschatological. It
is true that his conception of the eschatology was primitive, and that he
applied it not as a constructive, but as a destructive principle of
criticism. But read his statement of the problem “with the signs changed,”
and with the necessary deduction for the primitive character of the
eschatology, and you have the view of Weiss.
Ghillany, too, has a claim to be remembered. When Weiss asserts that the
part played by Jesus was not the active rôle of establishing the Kingdom,
but the passive rôle of waiting for the coming of the Kingdom; and that it
was, in a sense, only by the acceptance of His sufferings that He emerged
from that passivity; he is only asserting what Ghillany had maintained
thirty years before with the same arguments and with the same
decisiveness. But Weiss places the assertion on a scientifically
unassailable basis.
XVI. THE STRUGGLE AGAINST ESCHATOLOGY
_Wilhelm Bousset._ Jesu Predigt in ihrem Gegensatz zum Judentum.
Ein religionsgeschichtlicher Vergleich. (The Antithesis between
Jesus’ Preaching and Judaism. A Religious‐Historical Comparison.)
Göttingen, 1892. 130 pp.
_Erich Haupt._ Die eschatologischen Aussagen Jesu in den
synoptischen Evangelien. (The Eschatological Sayings of Jesus in
the Synoptic Gospels.) 1895. 167 pp.
_Paul Wernle._ Die Anfänge unserer Religion. Tübingen‐Leipzig,
1901; 2nd ed., 1904, 410 pp.
_Emil Schürer._ Das messianische Selbstbewusstsein Jesu‐Christi.
1903. Akademische Festrede. (The Messianic Self‐consciousness of
Jesus Christ.) 24 pp.