Religion is metaphysic and nothing else — "Credo quia absurdum" — and this metaphysic is not the metaphysic of knowledge, argument, proof (which is mere philosophy or learnedness), but lived and experienced metaphysic — that is, the unthinkable as a certainty, the supernatural as a fact, life as existence in a world that is non-actual, but true. Jesus never lived one moment in any other world but this. He was no moralizer, and to see in moralizing the final aim of religion is to be ignorant of what religion is. Moralizing is nineteenth-century Enlightenment, humane Philistinism. To ascribe social purposes to Jesus is a blasphemy. His occasional utterances of a social kind, so far as they are authentic and not merely attributed sayings, tend merely to edification. They contain nothing whatever of new doctrine, and they include proverbs of the sort then in general currency. His teaching was the proclamation, nothing but the proclamation, of those Last Things with whose images he was constantly filled, the dawn of the New Age, the advent of heavenly envoys, the last judgment, a new heaven and a new earth.[1] Any other conception of religion was never in Jesus, nor in any truly deep-feeling period of history. Religion is, first and last, metaphysic, other-worldliness (Jenseitigkeit), awareness in a world of which the evidence of the senses merely lights the foreground. It is life in and with the supersensible. And where the capacity for this awareness, or even the capacity for believing in its existence, is wanting, real religion is at an end. "My kingdom is not of this world," and only he who can look into the depths that this flash illumines can comprehend the voices that come out of them. It is the Late, city periods that, no longer capable of seeing into depths, have turned the remnants of religiousness upon the external world and replaced religion by humanities, and metaphysic by moralization and social ethics.
In Jesus we have the direct opposite. "Give unto Cæsar the things that are Cæsar's" means: "Fit yourselves to the powers of the fact-world, be patient, suffer, and ask it not whether they are 'just.'" What alone matters is the salvation of the soul. "Consider the lilies" means: "Give no heed to riches and poverty, for both fetter the soul to cares of this world." "Man cannot serve both God and Mammon" — by Mammon is meant the whole of actuality. It is shallow, and it is cowardly, to argue away the grand significance of this demand. Between working for the increase of one's own riches, and working for the social ease of everyone, he would have felt no difference whatever. When wealth affrighted him, when the primitive community in Jerusalem —
- ↑ Hence Mark xiii, taken from an older document, is perhaps the purest example of his usual daily discourse. Paul (1 Thess. iv, 15-17) quotes another, which is missing in the Gospels. With these, we have the priceless — but, by commentators dominated by the Gospel tone, misunderstood — contributions of Papias, who about 100 was still in a position to collect much oral tradition. The little that we have of his work suffices amply to show us the apocalyptic character of Jesus's daily discourses. It is Mark xiii and not the Sermon on the Mount that reproduces the real note of them. But as his teaching became modified into a teaching of Him, this material likewise was transformed and the record of his utterances became the narrative of his manifestation. In this one respect the picture given by the Gospels is inevitably false.
