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, [pg 238] 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 [pg 239] 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.