higher truth." Jesus' own hope, in all its clearness and complete originality, is recorded in the parables of the seed growing secretly and the grain of mustard seed, and in the saying about the immortality of His words. Nothing beyond this is in any way certain, however remarkable the saying in Mark ix. 1 may be, that the looked-for consummation is to take place during the lifetime of the existing generation.
"It is only the fact that Mark is preceded by 'the book of the Birth (and History) of Christ according to Matthew'-not only in the Scriptures, but also in men's minds, which were dominated by it as the 'first Gospel'-which has caused it to be taken as self-evident that Jesus, knowing Himself from the first to be the Messiah, expected His Parousia solely from heaven, and therefore with, or in, the clouds of heaven. . . . But since He who was thought of as by birth the Son of God, is now thought of as the Son of Man, born an Israelite, and becoming the Son of God after the spirit only at His baptism, the hope that looks to the clouds of heaven cannot be, or at least ought not to be, any longer explained otherwise than as an enthusiastic dream."
If, even at the beginning of the 'eighties, a so extreme theory on the other side could, without opposition, occupy all the points of vantage, it is evident that the theory which gave eschatology its due place was making but slow progress. It was not that any one had been disputing the ground with it, but that all its operations were characterised by a nervous timidity. And these hesitations are not to be laid to the account of those who did not perceive the approach of the decisive conflict, or refused to accept battle, like the followers of Reuss, for instance, who were satisfied with the hypothesis that thoughts about the Last Judgment had forced their way into the authentic discourses of Jesus about the destruction of the city; [1] even those who like Weiffenbach are fully convinced that "the eschatological question, and in particular the question of the Second Coming, which in many quarters has up to the present been treated as a noli me tangere, must sooner or later become the battle-ground of the greatest and most decisive of theological controversies"-even those who shared this conviction stopped half-way on the road on which they had entered.
Weiffenbach's [2] work, "Jesus' Conception of His Second Coming," published in 1873, sums up the results of the previous discussions of the saliect. He names as among those who ascribe the
- ↑ Kiemen. "Die eschatologische Rede Jesu Matt. xxiv. cum Parall." (Tha Eschatological Discourse of Jesus in Matt. xxiv. with the parallel passages), fahrbuch fur die Theologie, 1869, pp. 706-709. Analysis of other attempts directed to the same end in Weiffenbach, Der Wiederkunftsgedanke, p. 31 ff.
- ↑ Wilhelm Weiffenbach, Director of the Seminary for Theological Students at Freidherg, was born in 1842 at Bornheim in Rhenish Hesse.
