Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

FAITH AND THE HISTORICAL JESUS §4.5
motivated by love), and was already present in the community of disciples. So far
as Ritschl was concerned, the historical mission of Jesus was to 'bring in' or establish
the kingdom of God on earth, the task of his disciples to extend it. 96
This optimistic complacency was shattered by Johannes Weiss, ironically
Ritschl's own son-in-law. 97 Weiss insisted that Jesus' talk of the kingdom had to
be understood against the background of the intertestamental Jewish apocalypses,
a primary feature of which is the sharp discontinuity perceived between
the present age and the age to come. In particular, this signified to Weiss that the
kingdom was other-worldly; not something brought about by human means, but
wholly dependent on an act of divine intervention. It was eschatological — not a
developing ethically pure society but that which brings the present order to an
end. And it was, future — not yet, and not yet in the society of the disciples. 98 In
short, Jesus proclaimed the kingdom of God as an event, which God would bring
about in the near future."
Schweitzer himself pushed the eschatological emphasis further. For him
eschatology was the key to the whole public ministry of Jesus, not just his
teaching. 100 According to Schweitzer, Jesus was a man obsessed with eschatology,
fanatically convinced that the end was at hand, the kingdom of God at the
threshold. As his ministry progressed, Jesus came to believe that he himself
was the agent of the end, whose death would trigger the final intervention of
God. The superb quality of Schweitzer's writing (though here he was carried
away by his rhetoric), but also the shock which his thesis brought to the quest,
96. This essentially Liberal concept of the kingdom lingered long into the twentieth century
— e.g., in T. W. Manson, The Teaching of Jesus (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1931)
130-36 ('The Kingdom of God in its essence is ... a personal relation between God and the individual'
— 135) — and still in the dedications of church collections which pray that the offerings
may be used 'for the extension (or establishment) of thy kingdom'.
97. J. Weiss, Die Predigt Jesu vom Reiche Gottes (Göttingen, 1892); ET ed. R. H. Hiers
and D. L. Holland, Jesus' Proclamation of the Kingdom of God (Philadelphia: Fortress/London:
SCM, not till 1971). The second edition of 1900 was much fuller, but the impact of the first edition
was all the greater by its brevity (see Hiers and Holland's 'Introduction' 49-53; Kümmel,
New Testament 439 n. 295).
98. 'As Jesus conceived it, the Kingdom of God is a radically superworldly entity which
stands in diametric opposition to this world. . . . there can be no talk of an innerworldly development
of the Kingdom of God in the mind of Jesus!' (Weiss, Jesus' Proclamation 114; see
also, e.g., 73-75, 78, 82, 91, 102-103, and his summary on 129-30).
99. Harnack defended his essentially Ritschlian view of the kingdom in Jesus' preaching
by dismissing the Jewish apocalyptic expectancy to which Weiss drew attention as 'a religion
of miserabilism', 'a miserabilism which clings to the expectation of a miraculous interference
on God's part, and in the meantime, as it were, wallows in wretchedness' (WhatIs Christianity?
16-17, 45). This was typical of Liberal disparagement of the idea that Jesus could have expected
imminent divine intervention.
100. Schweitzer, Quest 1 348-49; as a new chapter Quest 2 315.
46