are to be found in Kant and the illuminist theology," [1] introduced the last decisive phase of the process of separation between historical and "modern" theology. Before the advent of eschatology, critical theology was, in the last resort, without a principle of discrimination, since it possessed no reagent capable of infallibly separating out modern ideas on the one hand and genuinely ancient New Testament ideas on the other. The application of the criterion has now begun. What will be the issue, the future alone can show.
But even now we can recognise that the separation was not only of advantage to historical theology; for modern theology, the manifestation of the modern spirit as it really is, was still more important. Only when it became conscious of its own inmost essence and of its right to exist, only when it freed itself from its illegitimate historical justification, which, leaping over the centuries, appealed directly to an historical exposition of the New Testament, only then could it unfold its full wealth of ideas, which had been hitherto root-bound by a false historicity. It was not by chance that in Bousset's reply a certain affirmation of life, something expressive of the genius of Protestantism, cries aloud as never before in any theological work of this generation, or that in Haupt's work German mysticism interweaves its mysterious harmonies with the Johannine motif. The contribution of Protestantism to the interpretation of the world had never been made so manifest in any work prior to Weiss's. The modern spirit is here breaking in wreaths of foam upon the sharp cliffs of the rock-bound eschatological world-view of Jesus. To put it more prosaically, modern theology is at last about to become sincere. But this is so far only a prophecy of the future.
If we are to speak of the present it must be fully admitted that even historical science, when it desires to continue the history of Christianity beyond the life of Jesus, cannot help protesting against the one-sidedness of the eschatological world of thought of the "Founder." It finds itself obliged to distinguish in the thought of Jesus "permanent elements and transitory elements" which, being interpreted, means eschatological and not essentially eschatological materials; otherwise it can get no farther. For if Jesus' world of thought was wholly and exclusively eschatological, there can only have arisen out of it, as Reimarus long ago maintained, an exclusively eschatological primitive Christianity. But how a community of that kind could give birth to the Greek non-eschatological theology no Church history and no history of dogma has so far shown. Instead of that they all-Harnack, with the most consummate historical ability-lay down from the very first, alongside
- ↑ Cf. the preface to the 2nd ed. of Job. Weiss's Die Predigt Jesu vom Reiche Gottes. Gottingen, 1900.
