Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

§5.3 The Flight from History
the history behind the Gospels. But if the hope was to present a single Christ over
against the multiply diverse reconstructions of the historical Jesus, it ignores the
interpretative problems and hermeneutical reality which confront readers of the
NT and hearers of its message(s). For even in the NT there are several 'Christs of
faith', 25 and if we are talking of the experience of faith in encounter with the
preached Christ, then the diversity of experiences may be as problematical as the
diversity of historical Jesuses. Is the biblical Christ, then, quite such an invulnerable
area for faith? And is history so dispensable as Kähler implies? Kähler's
'Yes' to these questions began to be seriously questioned only in the second half
of the twentieth century. In the meantime the flight from history continued.
5.3. Rudolf Bultmann (1884-1976)
By common consent, Karl Barth (1886-1968) rang the death knell on Liberal
Protestantism. It gave no message for a war-torn Europe; the message of optimistic
moralism was no gospel. In contrast, Paul's letter to the Romans spoke a gospel
of divine sovereignty and transcendence, of human finitude and sinfulness,
and of God's initiative in revelation and grace. The good news is conveyed
through the kerygma about Christ, the proclamation that God has drawn near in
Jesus, not in a Jesus discovered by historical analysis. In his epoch-making Epistle
to the Romans Barth strongly reaffirmed Kähler's position: 'In history as such
there is nothing so far as the eye can see which can provide a basis for faith' . 26
In a famous correspondence between Harnack and Barth (1923), 27
Harnack accused Barth of abandoning scientific theology, and of surrendering
the gains of the previous decades. Barth replied that historical criticism has its
rightful place, but that it also has its limitations: it can deal only with the words
of Paul; it cannot get to the word of God within Paul's words. Harnack claimed
that theology can be defined historically, the simple gospel of Jesus historically
rediscovered as over against the intellectualisation imposed on it through the in-
25. See my Unity and Diversity 216-26.
26. Cited by H. Zahrnt, The Historical Jesus (London: Collins, 1963) 68. Influential also
was the comment of the Danish philosopher S0ren Kierkegaard (1813-1855): 'If the contemporary
generation [of Jesus] had left nothing behind them but these words: "We have believed that
in such and such a year the God appeared among us in the humble form of a servant, that he
lived and taught in our community, and finally died", it would have done all that was necessary'
(Philosophical Fragments [Princeton: Princeton University, 2 1962] 130). See also L. E. Keck,
A Future for the Historical Jesus (Nashville: Abingdon, 1971) 49-50, 84-85.
27. For details see J. M. Robinson, A New Quest of the Historical Jesus (London: SCM,
1959) 45. See further H. M. Rumscheidt, Revelation and Theology: An Analysis of the Barth-
Harnack Correspondence of 1923 (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1972).
73