Such is the situation with regard to the four pillars of the modern-historical solution. With them the whole structure collapses. It is after all a lifeless thought! The feeble modernity of it is visible in the fact that it does not get beyond a sort of representative significance of Jesus’ death. Jesus effects by his offering of himself nothing absolutely new, since throughout his whole public ministry he assumes that the Kingdom of God is already present as a dispensation of the forgiveness of sin or as the morally developing society. With his very appearance upon earth it is there. The performance of atonement, however, requires a _real_ significance in Jesus’ death. Herein lies the weakness of the modern dogmatic in contrast with the old. Paul, Anselm, and Luther know of an absolutely new situation which follows in time the death of Jesus [pg 083] and results as a consequence of it. Modern theology talks all around the subject; it has nothing specific to say, however, but involves itself in the cloud of its own assumptions. Both accounts, indeed, are unhistorical. Religiously considered, only the modern view is justifiable. The old dogmatic, however, is in this point the more historical, for it postulates at all events a real effect of the death of Jesus, as the Synoptical passages require. In what, however, does this absolutely new thing consist which is there made to depend upon the death of Jesus? The Synoptic sayings give but one answer to this: the eschatological realisation of the Kingdom! The coming of the Kingdom of God with power is dependent upon the atonement which Jesus performs. That is substantially the secret of the Passion. How is that to be understood? Only the history of Jesus can throw light upon it. _In place of the modern-historical solution we advance now the eschatological-historical._ [pg 084] CHAPTER II THE “DEVELOPMENT” OF JESUS 1. The Kingdom of God as an Ethical and as an Eschatological Fact. THE concurrence in Jesus of an ethical with an eschatological line of thought has always constituted one of the most difficult problems of New Testament study. How can two such different views of the world, in part diametrically opposed to one another, be united in _one_ process of thought? The attempt has been made to evade the problem, with the just feeling that the two views cannot be united. Critical spirits like T. Colani _(Jesus-Christ et les croyance messianique de son temps._ 1864, pp. 94 ff., 169 ff.) and G. Volkmar _(Die Evangelien._ 1870, pp. 530 ff.) went to the length of eliminating altogether eschatology from the field of Jesus’ thought. All expressions of that sort were accordingly to be charged to the account of the eschatological expectation of a later time. This procedure is frustrated by the stubbornness of the texts: the eschatological sayings belong precisely to the best attested passages. [pg 085] The excision of them is an act of violence.