The literature on New Testament eschatology is vast and daily vaster, and I make no pretence to have mastered it. All that I venture to offer in this paper is the suggestion that, in some of the learned discussions, an obvious but important fact is overlooked. This is the fact that, in all that they wrote about what we call eschatology, St Paul and the others were confronted – always, and not at one time any more than another – by a complex situation. That situation, from first to last, was invariably held within the tension of the incarnation itself – a tension which, by definition, can never be resolved in this life and is never amenable to progressive adjustments. The situation, therefore, always, from the very first, presented a wide variety of needs and a diversity of questions which were potentially simultaneous. It is, I suggest, when this constant fact is forgotten that theories of successive phases of thought and even of evolutionary stages of development gain more plausibility than they deserve. In an article in the J.T.S. not long ago, I tried to show that christological formulations were dominated first by one emphasis, then by another, not always according to chronological sequence but rather according to their particular purposes, whether it was worship and adoration, explanation and defence, or, perhaps, even attack. What I shall try to do now is to apply the same kind of considerations to eschatological formulations, by asking: What particular conviction did this one and that one aim to safeguard?