In the final chapters of The Lord, Romano Guardini follows Jesus into Jerusalem. His disciples marvel at the greatness of the Temple. Jesus says to him, "do you see all these great buildings? There will not be left one stone upon another that will not be thrown down!" Guardini writes:

The end of the world and Judgment are not to be regarded as myths of a distant future, but as possibilities to God's wrath that keep astride of our own lives. We do not inhabit a safe, biological, historical and spiritual unit that goes its invulnerable way under the canopy of a harmless religious mystery called God, but like Jerusalem, both we as individuals and the world as a whole live under the ever-present possibility of judgment. Only when the protection that direct reality seems to give my obtuse senses has been partially withdrawn and the threat of God has become a personal reality, am I a believer in the full Biblical meaning of the word.