ama moving toward a climactic denouement that would
shake heaven and earth together in a divine cataclysm. But this
consummation of all history was not a goal progressively to be achieved;
it was a divine invasion of the world expectantly to be awaited, when the
victorious Christ would return and the Day of Judgment dawn.

The development of this apocalyptic phrasing of hope has been traced too
often to require long rehearsal here. If the Greeks were essentially
philosophers and welcomed congenially ideas like endless cosmic cycles,
the Hebrews were essentially practical and dramatic in their thinking and
they welcomed a picture of God's victory capable of being visualized by
the imagination. At first their national hopes had been set on the
restoration of the Davidic kingdom; then the Davidic king himself had
grown in their imagination until, as Messiah in a proper sense, he
gathered to himself supernal attributes; then, as a child of their
desperate national circumstances, the hope was born of their Messiah's
sudden coming on the clouds of heaven for their help. Between the
Testaments this expectation expanded and robed itself with pomp and
glory, so that when the Christians came they found awaiting them a
phrasing of hope which they accepted to body forth their certainty of
God's coming sovereignty over all the earth. This expectation of coming
triumph was not progressive; it was cataclysmic. It did not offer the
prospect of great gains to be worked for over long periods of time; it
offered a divine invasion of history immediately at hand. It was
pictured, not in terms of human betterment to be achieved, but of divine
action to be awaited. The victory would suddenly come like the flood in
Noah's day, like the lightning flashing from one end of the heaven to the
other, like a thief in the night.

To be sure, this eager expectation of a heavenly kingdom immediately to
arrive on earth soon grew dim among the Christians, and the reasons are
obvious. For one thing, the Church herself, moving out from days of
hardship to days of preferment and prosperity, began to allure with her
inviting prospects of growing power the enthusiasms and hopes of the
people, until not the suddenly appearing kingdom from the heavens, but
the expanding Church on earth became the center of Christian interest.
For another thing, Christ meant more to Christians than the inaugurator
of a postponed kingdom which, long awaited with ardent ex