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The Historical Jesus and the Origins of Christianity
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 February 2009
Extract
The problems of Christian origins are many and varied. Even an incomplete bibliography of works devoted to the beginnings of Christianity, as M. Goguel remarked, would fill a volume of over five hundred pages. But the central and crucial problem, and certainly one of the liveliest issues in theology in our time, is the question of the relation of the historical Jesus to the Christ of the Church's faith. The twentieth century has been marked by a great shift away from the historical Jesus as the centre of theological interest to the Kerygma, the Church's proclamation, the Christ of faith, to Gemeindetheologie and existentialistische Exegese.
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- Copyright © Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd 1960
References
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One of the principal charges levelled against Bultmann by his German critics, e.g. Helmut Thielicke, and others, is that his existentialist interpretation of the Christ-event makes the event no more than an act of the human consciousness, and that he has revived Schleiermacher's notion of Erlebnis (psychological consciousness), a catch-word of German theology before the First World War. Bultmann has tried to counter this criticism by affirming the actuality of the Christ-event as real past happening. We know and experience human love only in concrete encounter here and now with the beloved who loves us, and the encounter effects a change in our understanding of ourselves. Although this change in our self-understanding is the all-important thing, no one would care to deny that the beloved exists outside of ourselves. In the same way, to Bultmann's mind, the significant thing is the change in the self-understanding produced by encounter with the Word of the Cross in the Church's preaching, but this does not mean that the redemptive act of God in Christ is not an event outside of ourselves. Nevertheless Bultmann's understanding of the Christ-event is so contemporary, so anthropological, so experience-centred, that the event is really bereft of objective reality. Bultmann does seem to have removed the event from the locus of the historical existence of the Person of Jesus of Nazareth. Has he not thus deprived us of the mystery of the God-Man, and left us merely with the Church's message of the Word of the Cross as God's statement of grace and pardon? Many certainly would feel that Bultmann gives us a poor substitute for the ontological reality or for the spiritual presence of that Other One, who in the abiding mystery of His Person companies with us still. Bultmann's anthropological and experience-centred interpretation of the Christ-event stems of course from the understanding of human existence established by his Heideggerian brand of existentialist analytics. For Bultmann, Dasein, human being, is choice, free personal decision. Human being is a series of encounters and decisions in every concrete moment of the ‘here and now’ of existence. In this way Bultmann appears to deny to human existence temporal continuity and participation in all the relativities of history. It is Bultmann's view of encounter with the Word of the Cross in the Church's preaching that is being called in question in the following pages of this paper, as over against the Church's continuous experience of Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ, in the mystery of His Person.
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