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 [1] the reader feels like an explorer who after wsary 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," [2] 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 Tubingen 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,
- ↑ Johannes Weiss, now Professor at Marburg, was born at Kiel in 1863.
- ↑ It may be mentioned that this work had been preceded (in 1891) by two Leiden prize dissertations, Uber die Lehre vom Reich Gottes im Neuen Testament (Concerning the Kingdom of God in the New Testament), one of them by Issel, the other, which lays especially strong emphasis upon the eschatology, by Schmoller.
