The Eschatology of the Synoptic Gospels: Its Fidelity to Religious Experience

Abstract

After the critical proving as by fire to which the Bible has been subjected during recent years, Protestant apologists have succeeded in re-establishing its claim to a position of central importance in our religion. They have achieved this end by abandoning Calvin's vicious logical circle, which based the authority of Scripture upon the approving testimony of the Spirit and tested the Spirit by the standards of Scripture, and by adopting the more powerful lines of argument deduced from the accepted canons of general literary criticism. “I know that the Bible is true because it finds me,” said Coleridge, and thus he achieved in a single sentence what the labored casuistry of centuries had failed to establish. The Bible is true, we say in this generation, because it presents persistent types of profound religious experience which may be verified, “always, everywhere, by all men.”In particular the critic asserts, and for Christianity at large this is the most reassuring dictum of contemporary scholarship, that the teaching of Jesus, as recorded in the Synoptic Gospels, constitutes a body of truth quite untrammelled by the narrowing circumstances of time and place. In the Sermon on the Mount we stand in a “celestial everywhere and forever.” Occasional dissenting voices have not destroyed the wide-spread conviction that modern scholarship in thus vindicating the universal validity of Jesus' words has achieved, if not its perfect work, at least a signal contribution to contemporary faith.