Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

§4.8 The Flight from Dogma
reminder that the tension, or perhaps better, confrontation between faith and history
is still strong and that the flight from dogma continues to be a motivating
force in attempts to reconstruct the historical Jesus.
4.8. Conclusion
To sum up, the flight from dogma has left us a number of markers for future consideration:
the importance of the gap between Jesus and his followers, Paul in
particular (Reimarus, Harnack); the problem of miracle and the importance of
taking the intention of the miracle narratives seriously (Strauss); the necessity to
check tradition against its original sources and therefore to recover these sources
(Liberals and neo-Liberals); the importance of some experiential rapport between
the interpreter and the text (Schleiermacher) and of taking seriously the
ethical outcome of beliefs (Liberals); the danger of modernizing Jesus and of
failing to recognize his otherness, with particular reference to his eschatological
preaching (Schweitzer); the importance of recognizing that faith played an important
part in shaping the tradition from its earliest stages (Kahler); the need to
take account of the social context of Jesus and of the movement he initiated
(Theissen, Horsley); the necessity to extend our search for sources of Jesus'
teaching beyond the boundaries of the canon (Koester, Crossan). Other items
could be added, but these certainly provide a substantial agenda to be going on
with.
And all this is still only one side of the story.
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