It’s not metaphor - but a different way of looking at the data. Schweitzer was pointing out the anomaly of an apparent expectation by Jesus that the kingdom would come imminently, and the apparent failure of that expectation. Eg Matthew 10:23; 24:34. Schweitzer’s perspective, which included seeing Jesus against the backcloth of Jewish apocalypticism, was left largely untouched and unanaswered until N.T.Wright took up the theme again. There are good grounds for thinking that Jesus’s ‘coming’ was the transfer of power and authority outlined in Daniel, and a ‘coming’ in judgement on Jerusalem and its temple which formed the basis of his prophecy in Matt 24.

The elemental dissolution you refer to is presumably Matt 24:29, which repeats metaphor describing the fall of Babylon in Isaiah 13:10 - apparently a way of describing cataclysmic events, but not literal.

None of this, to me, excludes a future ‘return’ of Jesus, but places it in a very different context from the apocalyptic scenario we have been used to.