New Testament Eschatology and New Testament Ethics

Extract

The most important contribution of this generation to Biblical interpretation has been made, beyond question, through the appreciation and analysis of New Testament eschatology. Round the teaching of the Gospels, like an atmosphere which even though unconscious of it they breathe, lies, according to this view, a circle of apocalyptic expectation, with its literature, its vocabulary, and its inextinguishable hopes. Though Rabbinical orthodoxy might regard this literature as heretical, it may well have had a peculiar fascination for contemplative or poetic minds. When, therefore, after solitary reflection on his mission, Jesus came into Galilee ‘preaching the gospel of the kingdom of God,’ it might be anticipated that he, like John the Baptist, would apply to that kingdom the language of apocalyptic hope, and would announce its approach as heralded by a catastrophic end of the world-age. This key of interpretation, once in the hands of German learning, has been applied with extraordinary ingenuity to many obscurities and perplexities of the Gospels, and has unlocked some of them with dramatic success. The strange phenomenon, for example, of reserve and privacy in the teaching of Jesus, becomes, in this view, an evidence of his esoteric consciousness of Messiahship, which none but a chosen few were permitted to know. ‘He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.’ The cardinal phrases of the teaching, ‘Kingdom of Heaven,’ ‘Son of God,’ and ‘Son of Man,’ all point, it is urged, not to a normal, human or social regeneration, but to a supernatural, revolutionary, and catastrophic change.