As I noted above under the heading (3) “catastrophic or inner kingdom?”, the modern notion that the early Christians must have been profoundly shaken by the non-arrival of the Messiah is open to challenge. A. Strobel makes a careful study of this “problem” from the standpoint of Jewish understanding of Habakkuk. The not-having-come and the having-come of the Rule of God were both present in the faith of each biblical epoch. The concept of a purely future coming, so firmly dated that at a certain time its failure to arrive becomes a clear disappointment, is foreign to the biblical mind. Thus the concept that the specific character of Jesus’ ethic was conditioned upon the imminence for him of a purely future end of human history is likewise unthinkable. This study confirms that the problem of the delay of the parousia is one that scholars have imported into the New Testament. It is certainly one that did not trouble the early church to any degree, to say nothing of providing motive for theological redefinition in the next century as especially the school of Martin Werner would claim.
Graydon P. Snyder pursued the same theme further in his "Sayings on the Delay of the End,” This concept of the adjustment to the kingdom's nonarrival is inept also in its unspoken assumption about the development of New Testament literature. Reading through the New Testament in narrative sequence, we find first the human-social Jesus, who calls men to follow him about in a real community in a real Palestine; then we move on to Paul’s cosmic Christ, whose risen glory transfigures the cross and dispenses with the earthly career. It is then thinkable that in this movement there was a necessary dehistoricizing, de-Judaizing process, indispensable if the church was to spread beyond Palestine into the Hellenistic World. But this is to forget that Paul wrote before, not after, the Gospel writers. First there was the bare resurrection message; then there was the lordship proclamation; then it was filled out with the body of memories of the Words and works of Jesus of Nazareth. The movement in the formation of the New Testament literature was toward, not away from, filling out the picture of Jesus' humanity. This consideration applies to the point at issue in our present study The sources that make most clear the social-apocalyptic realism of Jesus’ claims are those whose authors or editors had had the most time to know that the end of history had not yet come. Fittingly Titus lifts up the Servanthood episode of John 13 as expressive of the concretization of glorification-Christology with human history.
Of the respected senior scholars in the New Testament field, it is perhaps Amos Wilder who comes closest to holding the door open for the concern of this study. His Eschatology and Ethics in the Teaching of Jesus competently dissects the Schweitzerian argument that the radicality of Jesus’ call can be understood only if one posits a very brief “interim” before the parousia. Yet Wilder does not finish his sketch of a coherent alternative. He retains a conceptual division in Jesus’ teachings between those of general validity and others characterized as “extraordinary” “drastic,” “desperate,” or “hasty” -- that is, as limited to a kairos or a crisis of the “exigencies of his work.” Sometimes this distinction seems to suggest after all the legitimacy of a lower-voltage discipleship for run-of-the-mill believers in noneschatological times or places. If this line of thought were carried through we would have once again what Schweitzer meant by his “interim ethic” concept, namely the priority in our noneschatological context of a nonheroic and nonchristological standard for “normal” Christian ethics.”
The theme of the end’s not having come, noted here as background to the teachings of ]esus in the Gospels, has grown in significance for some modern readers, in the light of the increasing scholarly attention being given to apocalypse as a literary genre and as a worldview. To this we shall return in Chapter 12 below.
