The ethics of Jesus on the other hand is “conditional,” in the sense that it stands in indissoluble connection with the expectation of a state of perfection which is to be supernaturally brought about. Thereby its Jewish origin is revealed, and its immediate connection with the Prophetic ethics, in which the moral conduct of the people was conditioned by a definite expectation. Hence, if any parallel at all may be adduced in explanation of the ethics of Jesus, it can be only the Prophetic, never the modern. For in proportion as the latter enters into it the mode of conception becomes unhistorical, Jesus’ ethics being treated as self-sufficient, whereas in fact it is oriented entirely by the expected supernatural consummation. So there has been created the insoluble [pg 101] problem, that a person thoroughly modern so far as his ethics is concerned should incidentally give utterance to eschatological expressions. But if we once perceive the conditional character of Jesus’ ethics, and seriously consider its connection with the ethics of the Prophets, it is immediately clear that all conceptions of the Kingdom as a growth out of small beginnings, all notions about an ethics of the Kingdom, or about the development of it, have been foisted upon Jesus by our modern consciousness—simply because we could not readily familiarise ourselves with the thought that the ethics of Jesus is conditional. We make him conceive of the Kingdom of God as if its historical realisation represented a narrow opening through which it had to squeeze before attaining the full stature which belongs to it. That is a modern conception. For Jesus and the Prophets, however, it was a thing impossible. In the immediateness of their ethical view there is no place for a morality of the Kingdom of God or for a development of the Kingdom—it lies beyond the borders of good and evil; it will be brought about by a cosmic catastrophe through which evil is to be completely [pg 102] overcome. Hence all moral criteria are to be abolished. _The Kingdom of God is super-moral._ To this height of hyper-ethical idealism the modern consciousness is no longer capable of soaring. History has aged us too much for that. But for the historical understanding of the ethics of Jesus it is the indispensable assumption. In addition to this, when we think of the Kingdom, our thought stretches forward to the coming generations which are to realise it in ever increasing measure. Jesus’ glance is directed backward. For him the Kingdom is composed of the generations which have already gone down to the grave and which are now to be awakened unto a state of perfection. How should there be for him any ethics of sexual relations, when he explains to the Sadducees that in the Kingdom of God after the great Resurrection there will be no longer any sexual relations at all, “but they will be like the angels of heaven” (Mk 12:25)?