they seem to be traceable in their actual contemporary form on the surface of His teaching. He had already, in 1893, in the Christliche Welt clearly expounded, and defended against Weiss, his view of the Kingdom of God as already present for the thought of Jesus.
The effect which Baldensperger and Weiss had upon Weiffenbach [1] was to cause him to bring out in full strength the apologetic aspect which had been somewhat held in check in his work of 1873 by the thoroughness of his exegesis. The apocalyptic of this younger school, which was no longer willing to believe that in the mouth of Jesus the Parousia meant nothing more than an issuing from death clothed with power, is on all grounds to be rejected. It assumes, since this expectation was not fulfilled, an error on the part of Jesus. It is better to rest content with not being able to see quite clearly.
Protected by a similar armour, the successive editions of Bernhard Weiss's Life of Jesus went their way unmolested down to 1902.
Not with an apologetic purpose, but on the basis of an original religious view, Titius, in his work on the New Testament doctrine of blessedness, develops the teaching of Jesus concerning the Kingdom of God as a present good. [2]
In the same year, 1895, appeared E. Haupt's work on "The Eschatological Sayings of Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels." [3] In contradistinction to Bousset he takes as his starting-point the eschatological passages, examining each separately and modulating them back to the Johannine key. It is so delicately and ingeniously done that the reading of the book is an aesthetic pleasure which makes one in the end quits forget the apologetic motif in order to surrender oneself completely to the author's mystical system of religious thought.
It is, indeed, not the least service of the eschatological school that it compels modern theology, which is so much preoccupied with history, to reveal what is its own as its own. Eschatology makes it impossible to attribute modern ideas to Jesus and then by way of "New Testament Theology" take them back from Him as a loan, as even Ritschl not so long ago did with such naivete. Johannes Weiss, in cutting himself loose, as an historian, from Ritschi, and recognising that "the real roots of Ritschl's ideas
- ↑ W. Weiffenbach, Die Frage der Wiederkunft Jesu. (The Question concerning the Second Coming of Jesus.) Friedberg, 1901.
- ↑ A. Titius, Die neutestamentliche Lehre von der Seligkeit und ihre Bedeumng fur die Gegenwart. I. Teil: Jesu Lehre vom Reich Gottes. (The New T�siament Doctrine of Blessedness and its Significance for the Present. Pt. I., Jesus' doctrine of the Kingdom of God.) Arthur Titius, now Professor at Kiel, was born in 1864 at Sensburg.
- ↑ Die eschatologischen Aussagen lesu in den synoptischen Evangelien, 167 pp Erich Haupt, now Professor in Halle, was born in 1841 at Stralsund.
