assages not susceptible of that meaning, but
that does not excuse the foolish acrimony with which the less learned,
especially among liberal Protestants, assailed them, nor the attempt to
cut out from the text of the gospels all eschatological reference.

At present the question has apparently reached equilibrium by the
general recognition that it is impossible to excise or to explain away
the passages in the gospels in which the Kingdom of Heaven is clearly
regarded as future, and that it is equally impossible to ignore those
in which it is regarded as a present reality. Probably, however, it
has even now not been sufficiently perceived that the solution of the
problem is not to be found in the literary criticism of the gospels,
but in the history of the phrase, Kingdom of God. This rendered
inevitable the double use of the phrase. Sometimes it was used
strictly, and referred to a present reality within the grasp of all
willing to reach out to it, and accept the conditions imposed on its
attainment, of {25} which Jesus was so frequently speaking. But at
other times, by an entirely natural extension of its meaning, it was
used of the period when the recognition of the sovereignty of God would
be universal. In this sense it was still future. It was at hand, but
not yet present, even though that generation would not entirely pass
away before it was accomplished. There is no exegetical obstacle to
accepting this view, for it is the plain and simple meaning of simple
phrases; but there is the theological difficulty that it represents an
expectation on the part of Jesus which was falsified by history.[13]
That generation has passed away, and many others after it, and the
Kingdom of God has not yet come. Indeed, it is scarcely orthodox any
longer to expect it in the manner in which the gospels represent Jesus
to have foretold its coming.

But even when it is conceded that Jesus in some places in the gospels
did undoubtedly contemplate the coming of the Kingdom in the future, it
remains a problem, which has as yet attracted too little attention,
whether he identified the eschatological phenomena attending its coming
with the reign of the anointed scion of the house of David, or with the
end of this age and the inauguration of the Age to Come. In general it
seems to me far more likely that he looked for the Age to Come rather
than for the reign of the Son of David, though the evidence is {26}
admittedly not very full