Christianity and the Social Crisis; A Theology for the Social Gospel

which the individual stepped out of pagan society and into the fellowship of the Christian group, with its love, its dangers, and its limitations.

This change in the meaning and content of baptism was confirmed by the spread of infant baptism since the middle of the second century. The immediate cause for the baptism of young children was the belief that baptism is necessary for salvation, combined with the ever urgent facts of infant mortality. Origen, and still more Augustine, tied up the church practice with the doctrine of original sin. Baptism had been the symbol of a revolutionary hope, an ethical act which determined the will and life of the person receiving it. It was now a ceremony performed on a babe to save it from the guilt and power of original sin and to assure its salvation in heaven in case of its death.

Here again new social elements sprang up. The practical necessities of the case created a social backing for the young candidate. Since its own responses were still inarticulate, grown-up sponsors recited the creed and other formulas for him, and this service established a social relationship which often lasted for life. Since the faith of the child was still undeveloped, theology taught that the sponsors and the Church were to supply it.

In modern time much finer ideas have been attached to infant baptism. The act is based on the organic unity of the family; the parents thereby dedicate the child to God and pledge themselves to give it Christian nurture; the child is by baptism incorporated into the organism of the Church and made to share in its saving power; the act expresses the consciousness of the Church that the child is a child of God and has a right to claim the divine paternity. These are much more Christian ideas than those which first called infant baptism into existence.

Scarcely any Christian institution has experienced such changes and deteriorations as baptism, but of them all the loss of outlook toward the Kingdom of God was one of the most regrettable. Could the social gospel — at least in some instances — fill baptism with its original meaning? We could imagine a minister and a group of candidates who unite in feeHng the evil of the present world-order and the promise and claims of the impending Christian world-order, together using baptism to express their solemn dedication to the tasks of the Kingdom of God, and accepting their rights as children of God within that Kingdom. In those churches in which baptism is administered in infancy, confirmation would offer the next best opportunity to impress and express such convictions. In the catechumenate the ancient Church put the candidate through lotig processes of exorcization to expel the demon powers which had infected him in his pagan life. Those churches which practise confirmation have shifted the instruction of the catechumenate to precede confirmation; those churches which practise adult baptism are much in need of a period of systematic instruction before baptism. It would be a really rational and Christian form of exorcization to break the infection of the sinful and illusive world-order and to explain the nature of a distinctively Christian order of life.

Such a restoration of its earliest meaning might save baptism from the religious and theological emptiness which now threatens its very existence. Its older doctrinal meanings have leaked away or evaporated. In the ancient Church it was closely connected with the prevalent belief in demonism. Patristic and scholastic theology bound it up with original sin. But we do not live in a realizing sense of demon powers, and original sin and baptismal regeneration seem to be marked for extinction. To say that Christ commanded it and that we must obey his ordinance, is equivalent to confessing that the act has lost its enthusiasm and its religious conviction. It is simply an order, which must be obeyed. Why not connect baptism with the Kingdom of God? It has always been an exit and an entrance; why not the exit from the Kingdom of Evil and the entrance into the Kingdom of God? That would, under right teaching and with the right people, give it solemn impressiveness. It would make it a truly Christian act. Baptism has always been dogged by superstitions, and thrust down into paganism. The individualistic interpretation of it as an escape from damnation tainted it with selfishness. Contact with the Kingdom of God would restore baptism to its original ethical and spiritual purity.

The Lord's Supper, like Baptism, has had a tragic history.

The meal in the upper room at Jerusalem was the last of many meals in which Jesus had broken the bread with his friends in the close intimacy of their wandering life. The spirit of all the previous meals was in this last meal. It was pervaded by the same strong and holy feelings of friendship which make the disappointment of Jesus in the garden so pathetic. It is a question whether Jesus' thought ran beyond the group of his friends when he asked for a repetition of the meal; it seems at least very unlikely that he purposed a cult act such as actually developed. His purpose was to create an act of loyalty which would ser\'e to keep memory and fidelity alive until he should return and eat and drink with them again in the Kingdom of God. Jesus had created a wonderful social group. He wanted it to hold together. The Lord's Supper came into existence through strong religious and social feeling and its purpose was the maintenance of the highest loyalty.

In the primitive Church the memorial act was part of a fraternal meal in which the Christian group met in religious privacy to express its peculiar unity and coherence. Such communistic meals, to which every member contributed his portion of food, were quite common among the religious and fraternal societies of the time. Communistic meals produce solidaristic fdelings even today. Paul was not a marked exponent of democratic emotions, but he was deeply shocked when he learned that the social character of the common meal at Corinth had been debased by the intrusion of the class divisions of the outside world. The welltodo gathered in coteries to eat their plentiful supplies, while the poor sat neglected and ashamed. His feeling testifies to the social beauty and power which the Lord's Supper then possessed. (I Cor. xi, 17-34.)

There can be no doubt that the Lord's Supper has always had a powerful influence in consolidating the fra- ternal organization of the Church. It has always been an inner privilege, for which preparation had to be made, and from which a man might be excluded; consequently it was prized. In the European State Churches, people who have become wholly indifferent to church life, still attend communion once a year and would regard it as a loss to be shut out from it. In the early Church, discipline consisted largely in barring offenders from communion. The humiliation and sacrifices assumed by penitents in order to get back into the full solidarity of the Church shows that strong social feelings were at work here. Reconciliation among the members preceded communion. None could share in the Lord's Supper who were in a state of enmity with other Christians. Thus people were compelled to face Christ's law of love and forgiveness, and pluck the bitter root of pride and ill-will from their hearts. This, too, was a social value of the ceremony. The rubric of the Book of Common Prayer still empowers the minister to warn notorious offenders to stay aw^ay, and to do the same " with those, betwixt whom he perceiveth malice and hatred to reign, not suffering them to be partakers of the Lord's Table, until he know them to be reconciled." This is expressed also in the beautiful invitation:

" Ye who do truly and earnestly repent you of your sins, and are in love and charity with your neighbours, and intend to lead a new life, following the commandments of God, and walking from henceforth in his holy ways: Draw near with faith, and take this holy sacrament to your comfort, and make your humble confession to Almighty God, devoutly kneeling."

In the first generation, and perhaps later, the Lord^s Supper still had an outlook toward the coming of the Lord. We find this still in a significant phrase in Paul, who otherwise emphasized other lines of thought: " For as often as ye eat this bread and drink this cup, ye proclaim the Lord's death till he come/' Now, to the larger part of the primitive Church the coming of the Lord signified the coming of the millennial reign of peace and righteousness on earth. The Lord's Supper was, therefore, connected with the realization of the social ideals and hopes of the Church. The prevalence | of prophecy in the charismatic life of primitive Christianity points in the same direction. It acted as an interpretation of the Lord's Supper.

The outlook toward the coming of the Lord became dim as time went on. The eucharistic act was cut loose from the fraternal meal, and thaFwas a great lessening of its social value. The meal was still held occasionally in the evening, but turned into a charitable performance where the rich fed the poor, and it finally ceased. The eucharistic act was connected with the church worship on Sunday morning. It developed sacramental qualities in two directions; it was mystic food, in which the Lord was present and through which his grace and power and immortal life nourished the soul; and it was a sacrifice offered to God. The fact that it was the central mystery of the esoteric ritual of the church made it very important as a bond of unity, but the fraternal feeling of the early days was lessened. It intensified the consciousness of God rather than the consciousness of man. The fraternal meal of Jesus became a chief

means of creating the priesthood of the CathoHc Church, and the main door through which superstitious behefs came in. In time it became the mass, in which the priest partook of the bread and wine while the people watched him doing it. He might even go through the whole performance alone, for the benefit of a deceased person, according to the terms of an endowment. Thus the Lord's Supper lost its meaning because it was in the hands of a body which had neither social outlook nor democratic emotions.

The Protestant Reformation concentrated on the reform of the Lord's Supper. The laity shared more fully in it. The private mass was abolished. Some of the social feeling was restored. But not the social outlook. The act turned backward and not forward. It is an act of remembrance; in it we appropriate the atoning death of our Saviour. Where it is experienced most deeply, it is a mystic act of fellowship between the unseen Lord and the silent soul of the worshipper.

For a time the great act of fraternal love became the object of bitter controversial feelings between Catholic and Protestant, and between Lutheran and Calvinist, and exercised a very unsocial and divisive influence.

While the great churches were bitterly contending over the question whether their Lord was physically or spiritually present, and if physically, whether by transubstantiation or consubstantiation, the persecuted Anabaptists, who had neither the right to meet nor to exist, had the spirit of the original institution among them. As in the primitive Church, their service was preceded by searching of heart and reconciliation, so that all might be one in Christ. As in the upper room at Jerusalem, they acted in full view of death, and their main thought was to gain strength for imprisonment and torture by once more touching the garment-hem of their Lord. They often dwelt on the fact that many grains of wheat had been crushed and had felt the heat of the oven to make this bread, and many berries of the vine had been pressed in the wine-press to make this wine; in the same way the followers of Jesus must pass through affliction and persecution in order to form the body of the Lord. Thus these poor proletarians, hunted by the tyrannical combinations of Church and State, Catholic and Protestant alike, returned to the original spirit of the Lord's Meal and realized that Real Presence about which others wrangled.

Can the social gospel contribute to make the Lord's Supper more fully an act of fraternity and to connect it again with the social hope of the Kingdom of God?

In the Lord's Supper we re-affirm our supreme allegiance to our Lord who taught us to know God as our common father and to realize that all men are our brethren. In the midst of a world full of divisive selfishness we thereby accept brotherhood as the ruling principle of our life and undertake to put it into practice in our private and public activities. We abjure the selfish use of power and wealth for the exploitation of our fellows. We dedicate our lives to establishing the Kingdom of God and to winning mankind to its laws. In contemplation of the death of our Lord we accept the possibility of risk and loss as our share of service. We link ourselves to his death and accept the obligation of the cross.

It is open to any minister to emphasize thoughts such as these, connecting the Lord's Supper with the Kingdom of God. All who have the new social consciousness would feel their appeal. Any person encountering antagonism or loss for the sake of the Kingdom would find comfort and strength in connecting his troubles with the cross of Christ. The Lord's Supper was instituted by Jesus in full view of his death. We can fully share his spirit only when we too confront the possibility of suffering in the same cause.

The emphasis on such thoughts would be the reaction of the social gospel on the religious and theological content of the Lord's Supper. They would be a challenge to the Church to realize its mission as the social embodiment of the Christ-spirit in humanity. They would constitute a spiritual preparation for the actual experience of the Real Presence — that Presence which requires a social group of two or three because love and the sense of solidarity are necessary to enable him to be in the midst of us.

EscHATOLOGY raises two questions of profound interest to the human mind. First, What is the future of the individual after his brief span of years on earth is over? Second, What is to be the ultimate destiny of the human race?

These questions are important to every thoughtful mind, and they are inseparable from religion. Religion is always eschatological. Its characteristic is faith. It lives in and for the future. In all other parts of our life we deal with imperfect things, fluctuating, conditioned, relative, and never complete. In religion we seek for the final realities, the absolute values, the things as God sees them, complete, in organic union.

All religions of higher development have some mythology about the future. The Christian religion needs a Christian eschatology. To be satisfying to the Christian consciousness any teaching concerning the future life of the individual must express that high valuation of the eternal worth of the soul which we have learned from Christ, and must not contradict or sully the revelation of the justice, love, and forgiving mercy of our heavenly Father contained in his words, his life, and his personality. Any doctrine about the future of the race which is to guide our thought and action, must view it from distinctively Christian, ethical points of view, and must not contradict what is historically and scientifically certain.

In fact, however, our traditional eschatology never was a purely Christian product, growing organically from Christian soil and expressing distinctively Christian convictions. It is more in the nature of an historical mosaic combining fragments of non-christian and pre-christian systems with genuine Christian ideas. It took shape under special historical conditions, and was broken up and shaped afresh to express other conditions, but in no case was it shaped to suit our modern needs. Like all eschatologies it expresses ideas about the universe, but these cosmic conceptions are pre-scientific. The world protrayed in them is the world of the Ptolemaic system, a world three stories high, with heaven above and hell beneath. During the formative centuries the Oriental and Greek religious life, which deeply influenced Christianity, was dualistic, and whatever influences have come from that source are not only historically but essentially unchristian. A Christian mind can get most satisfaction by contemplating how the genius of the Christian religion took this heterogeneous and often alien material and made something approximately Christian of it after all.

As a consequence eschatology is usually loved in inverse proportion to the square of the mental diameter of those who do the loving. Calvin was the greatest exegete of his day and he wrote commentaries on nearly all the books of the Old and New Testaments, but he gave the Apocalypse a wide berth. No interpretation of this main biblical source ever won general consent as long as it was interpreted doctrinally. The wise threw up their hands; those who devoted their minds to it, often suffered from mild obsession. Our generation is the first in eighteen hundred years to understand this book as its author, or authors, meant it to be understood, and now it is one of the most enlightening and interesting books of them all. In primitive Christianity eschatology was in the centre of religious interest and thought. Today it is on the circumference, and with some Christians it lies outside the circumference. Theologians of liberal views are brief or apologetic when they reach eschatology. This situation is deeply regrettable. Perhaps no other section of theology is so much in need of a thorough rejuvenation.

Those who believe in the social gospel are especially concerned in this element of weakness in theology. The social gospel seeks to develop the vision of the Church toward the future and to co-operate with the will of God which is shaping the destinies of humanity. It would be aided and reinforced by a modern and truly Christian conception about the future of mankind. At present no other theological influence so hampers and obstructs the social gospel as that of eschatology. All considerations taken from the life of the twentieth century cry out for something like the social gospel; but the ideas of the first century contained in eschatology are used to veto it Those who have trained their religious thinking on the Hebrew prophets and the genuine teachings of Jesus are for the social gospel; those who have trained it on apocalyptic ideas are against it. This is all the more pathetic because the pre-millennial scheme is really an outline of the social salvation of the race. Those who hold it exhibit real interest in social and political events. But they are best pleased when they see humanity defeated and collapsing, for then salvation is nigh. Active work for the salvation of the social order Eefore the coming of Christ is not only vain but against the will of God. Thus eschatology defeats the Christian imperative of righteousness and salvation.

Historical science and the social gospel together may be able to affect eschatology for good. Historical criticism by itself makes it look imbecile and has no creative power. The social gospel has that moral earnestness and religious faith which exerts constructive influence on doctrine.

In the first place, the social gospel can at least give us a sympathetic understanding and right valuation of some of the elements contained in the inherited body of ideas. A merely theological comprehension of it is a false understanding. It must be understood historically in connection with the social situations which created its parts, like the buildings on an old college campus, or like the Constitution and its amendments.

Those parts of Christian eschatology which deal with the future of the race are on the whole derived from Judaism, and we owe their ethical qualities to the valiant democratic spirit of the prophets. Their " Day of Yahveh " became our " Great Judgment "; the time of peace and righteousness which was to follow it became the Christian millennium. The whole was originally the religious equivalent of a wholesome revolution in which the oppressing class is eliminated and the righteous poor get relief. This central section of Christian eschatology was the product of the brave fight which Jehovah and his people made together for the ancestral freedom of the common people. The idea of a resurrection of the dead did not come into eschatology through growing individualism, but out of the feeling that the righteous who had died before the inauguration of the new order were entitled to a share in the common happiness. Demonology and satanology, which pervaded Jewish eschatology after the exile, were, as we have pointed out, in part a religious expression of social and political hatred and despair.

Those parts of eschatology which deal with the future of the individual were in the main derived from contemporary Greek life. Greek religion was characterized by a profound desire for immortality and an equally deep sense of the sin and sadness of this earthly life. The "mysteries" ministered to this desire; Christianity did it more effectively. In turn these religious desires brought out and strengthened those eschatological facts and ideas in Christianity which could serve them. Here we have one chief cause for the increasing other-worldliness of Christianity. Now, this attitude of weariness and resignation, which led to the immense popularity of ascetic ideals of life, was in part a product of the Roman Empire. It had clamped down its bureaucracy and its tax-gathering apparatus on all Mediterranean civilization; the method was political subjugation; the aim was economic exploitation. The self-government of the

Greek states by which the citizens might have been protected, had been put under safe control. Revolt was useless. If we imagine a single empire today permanently holding the seas and continents in its grip, and* enriching its aristocracy from the industry of others, with every way of escape barred, we shall understand the apathy of men under the Roman Empire. The escape into immortality was the only way to freedom left to all. This social condition left deep traces in Christian eschatology.

Thus social causes contributed to the origin of eschatological ideas. Other social causes led to their disappearance. Amid the doctrinal changes of the Protestant Reformation eschatology remained unchanged except that purgatory was cut out. It had no support in the canonical Scriptures. That was one motive. But, also, the belief in purgatory had become a prolific source of income for the Church. Hell was unalterable; no gifts or indulgences could unlock its gates. The penalties to be absolved in purgatory could be lightened by indulgence, and shortened by the prayers and pious works of friends. The indulgence system was built on this belief, and innumerable endowments were provided for masses to be read for the repose of the souls in purgatory. Now, the income bearing property of the Church and the clergy living on it constituted the greatest social and economic problem of the age before the Reformation. Wherever the Reformation received the support of government, church property was " secularized " or confiscated. When Protestant theology denied the existence of purgatory, it denied that the Church could render any quid pro quo for its vested incomes, and this weakened the legal and moral hold of the Church on its -endowments, and cut under some of the most offensive practices of the Church. Unless these practical considerations had made purgatory a social issue, it may be questioned whether the lack of biblical support for the doctrine would have sufficed to suppress it. The resulting contest of Protestant theology against the doctrine of purgatory induced it, by its necessary reactions, to assert that the fate of the soul is fixed at death and the saved enter into glory.

Perhaps the modern hesitancy about the doctrine of hell also has social causes. Despotic governments formerly accustomed men to frequent, public, and very horrible executions, and to long and hopeless imprisonments. Since the spread of democracy has somewhat weakened the cruel grip of the governing classes, the criminal law has become more humane. Capital punishments have become less frequent, less public, and less cruel. The outfit of prisons has improved. There is an increasing feeling that punishment should not be merely vindictive and terrifying, but remedial and disciplinary, aiming at the salvation and social restoration of the offender. Our prisons are our human hells, where men are cut off from all that exercises a saving influence on our lives — the love of wife and child and home, work and play, contact with nature, hope, ambition, — only fear and coercion are in full force. If democracy should further weaken the hold of the governing classes on the penal system of the country; and if Christianity should impress us with the divine worth of " the least of these " in prison and our obHgation to offer them salvation; and if the prison system becomes redemptive; can theology then continue to get the moral approval of mankind for a divine prison which is not educational and redemptive, but wholly without change or end?

Thus eschatology has all along been influenced by social causes, while keeping on its own conservative path of tradition. The Jewish people under social and political oppression, and the primitive Church under persecution wept and prayed our eschatology into existence. Our Apocalypse is wet with human tears and must be read that way. Ever since, some sections of eschatology have been vivified, others modified, and some consigned to oblivion through the pressure of social causes. Has not the social consciousness of our age, speaking through the social gospel, also a right to be heard in the shaping of eschatology?

Any reformatory force taking hold of eschatology can not expect a fresh start, but must reckon with its traditional contents and its biblical and theological sources. It may clear our path to lay down several propositions about this material coming from the past.

I. In everything contributed by the Old Testament we should seek to distinguish what is due to the divine inspiration of the prophets. We are under no obligation to accept the mythical ideas and cosmic speculations of the Hebrew people, their limited geography, their primitive astronomy, the historical outlook of the book of Daniel, or the Babylonian and Persian ideas which flowed into their religious thought. What has authority for us is the ethical and religious light of men who had an immediate consciousness of the living God, and saw him now and hereafter acting for righteousness, for the vindication of the oppressed classes, and for the purging of the social life of the nation. These elements of the Old Testament carry authority because they are in spiritual consensus with the revelation of God in Christ.

2. We should learn to distinguish clearly between prophecy and apocalypticism. There is as much difference between them as between Paul and Pope Gregory I. From apocalypticism we get the little diagrams which map out the history of the human race on deterministic methods, as if God consulted the clock. From the same source the active belief in demonology, the reliance on miraculous catastrophes, and the blue light of unreality have always come into eschatology. Those who fill their minds with it, thereby tie themselves to all backward things. Apocalyptic believers necessarily insist on the verbal inerrancy of Scripture and oppose historical methods, for their work consists in piecing mosaics of texts. Historically we can appreciate the religious value of apocalypticism in later Judaism, just as we can appreciate the religious value of the belief in transubstantiation or of scholastic theology. But as a presentday influence in religion it is dangerous. It has probably done more to discredit eschatology than any other single influence.

3. In the New Testament it is our business to sift out what is distinctively Christian in origin and spirit. It stands to reason that the leaven of the Christian spirit was not able at once to transform the inherited ideas of Jews and Gentiles of the first generation. For instance, Christianity had to struggle hard with the stubborn nationalistic pride of Judaism which claimed either a monopoly of messianic salvation or at least special privileges within it. Even Paul, the chief exponent of international religion, could not get away from his pro- Jewish feelings, and thought God was saving the Gentiles in order to stir up the Jews and get them saved. Jesus did not make the judgment depend on nationality but on the sense of human solidarity, and repeatedly foreshadowed that the Jews would be supplanted. In the Apocalypse we are carried back into Jewish feeling and points of view. The mind of Jesus Christ is our criterion for an ethical scrutiny of these ingredients.

4. The effort to systematize the eschatological statements of biblical writers has always been muddled by the supposition that they all -thought alike. There was, as yet, no orthodoxy. All were deeply interested in these questions, and men of strong conviction made their own formulations. The Apocalypse, Paul, and the fourth gospel are strikingly unlike.

The Apocalypse expounds the old social hope of Israel. The great woes and the overthrow of the mystic Babylon have political significance. There are a thousand years of messianic peace on this earth. Even after the last eruption of Satan and the great judgment the new earth is still on the old earth; the new Jerusalem comes down here, and there are trees, and a river, and happy people.

Paul, on the other hand, has no room for a millennium of flesh and blood men on a material earth. The coming of Christ would usher in a cosmic change; the material world would end and the groaning of dying creation would cease; the living and the dead would receive spiritual bodies; therewith the last enemy. Death, would be overcome, and God would be all in all. In Paul the Jewish and the Greek streams of thought join. Probably in this, as in other things, Paul stood for a new theology; the Apocalypse comes nearer to being the prevalent view of the first generation.

In the fourth gospel and the epistles of John we see the future translated into the present tense. The chief points of primitive eschatology, the antichrist, the parousia, the judgment, the resurrection, are still acknowleged; but there are many antichrists now present; the coming of the Comforter takes the place of the parousia; the judgment takes place when men accept or reject the light; the spiritual transformation into eternal life takes place now. Eschatology is dissolved into Christology; the Kingdom of God gives way to the Church. It is far more instructive spiritually to see these different views side by side than to see them mangled and forced into conformity.

5. The most troublesome problem at present is to determine what Jesus himself thought about the future. A group of able scholars has put such emphasis on the eschatological sayings of Jesus that he himself has been turned into an apocalyptic enthusiast and the authority of his ethical teaching has been impaired by being yoked with apocalyptic expectations. This school of thought has done valuable work, but the future will probably show that it has overworked its working hypothesis.

Ordinary critical analysis eliminates a good deal of eschatological material as later accretions. The earliest of the documentary sources of the gospels, " Q," contains least. ^

All human analogies make it certain that his followers coloured his ideas with their own previous conceptions. They could not help it. Language is rich on the lower, and thin on the higher, spiritual levels. Men of high religious power have often become poetical makers of language because they had to wrestle with their medium of expression and coin new figures and terms. They must use the lower terminology to express the inexpressible. Their followers, the loyal lower souls, invariably coarsen and materialize their teachings, taking the figures for realities and the accidental for the substance. The more original and spiritual a teacher is, the larger will be the inevitable ratio of misunderstanding. We must remember that the sayings of Jesus were repeated and transmitted orally for years before our earliest documents were written.

We see the whole situation incorrectly when we tacitly assume that the ideas of Jesus were uniform throughout his teaching ministry. If we take the doctrine of his real humanity seriously, he was a growing personality, and his ideas were in the making. A man's ideas

1 Harnack, " Sayings of Jesus," p. 250. " The tendency to exaggerate the apocalyptic and eschatological elements in our Lord's message and to subordinate to this the merely religious and ethical elements, will ever find its refutation in Q."

are developed by reacting on the ideas of his fellow men by assent or dissent. It is vital to this problem to know in what direction Jesus was working, into apocalypticism or out of it. We can see that he began with a Jewish horizon and broke his way into a world-wide and human world. How about his eschatology? His earliest parables are a decisive answer. He chose that form of teaching because he wanted to veil and yet reveal his polemical departure from current messianic ideas. He took his illustrations from organic life to express the idea of the gradual growth of the Kingdom. He was shaking off catastrophic ideas and substituting developmental ideas. John had put the judgment at the beginning of the Messiah's work; Jesus pushed it over to the end. He had no taste for that part of the Messianic program. In short, apocalypticism was part of the environment in which he began his thinking; it was not his personal product; he was emancipating himself from it. This is essential.

The intellect of Jesus was religious and prophetic; it was not constructed for apocalypticism. It had too many windows. Paul's ethical teaching got its orientation from his eschatology. The ethics of Jesus would have remained the same if the range of time had lengthened before him. His mind did push impetuously forward, but not toward a scheme of distant events, but toward the immediate saving acts of God. To him the Kingdom of God was both future and present. Whoever can harbour that antimony has risen above apocalypticism.