Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

§5.2 The Flight from History
5.2. The Search for an Invulnerable Area for Faith
However we may now evaluate the fundamental statements about historical
method by Lessing and Troeltsch, the fact is that the strict application of historical
method became a major problem for those who wished to maintain some sort
of faith standpoint. The response was a flight from history, less trumpeted than
the Enlightenment's flight from dogma, but just as critical for the understanding
and expression of faith.
Lessing's (or the Enlightenment) solution, as we have seen, was to postulate
an area for faith ('necessary truths of reason') 16 incapable of historical investigation,
to maintain that religious truth is of a different order from historical
truth, and that the former in no way needs or depends on the latter. But the theory
of innate ideas ('necessary truths of reason') could not last; 17 the truths selfevident
to all 'men of reason' soon proved to be neither self-evident nor necessary.
Nor have either Reimarus's rationalist Jesus or Strauss's idea of Godmanhood
commanded lasting assent. Historical method had proved merely
reductive of faith; even the much diminished faith that remained had not escaped
its withering power after all.
As the epistemological debate moved on, the nineteenth-century Protestant
Liberals attempted to locate the safe area for faith in Schleiermacher's religious
consciousness, which is not in the end amenable to historical analysis, or in
Kant's sense of moral obligation, from which a religious ethic could be derived
independently of the NT. The climactic result was in effect the stripping away of
all historical accidentals from the eternal verities taught (as it happened!) by Jesus.
The urge to find an area for faith invulnerable to historical questioning (in
Kähler's phrase, a sturmfreies Gebiet, a 'storm-free area') was a major motivating
factor particularly for one of Bultmann's teachers in the late nineteenth century,
Wilhelm Herrmann, and for Kähler himself.
In his influential study, Herrmann claimed to recognize the force of
Lessing's caveats on the weight attachable to historical judgment, 18 but argued
that a secure base can nonetheless be found in religious experience, the experience
of faith: the power of Jesus' inner life reaches across the centuries; 'Jesus
Himself and His power over the heart is actually the vital principal [sic] of our religion'.
19 This emphasis on the reality and power of religious experience, over
16. I note again that 'faith' is my term.
17. It had already been heavily criticized by Locke in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding
(1690) and was about to be subjected to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (1781).
18. Herrmann, Communion 72.
19. Herrmann, Communion 109; '. .. whenever we come to see the Person of Jesus, then,
under the impress of that inner life that breaks through all the veils of the story, we ask no more
questions as to the trustworthiness of the Evangelists' (75); 'When we speak of the historical
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