Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

FAITH AND THE HISTORICAL JESUS §6.6
anti-Semitism 125 — a dialogue of criticism which remains something of a barrier
and bewilderment for the Christianity of East and South.
b. The other is what we might call the challenge of faith and to faith to continue
to speak in a forum wider than that of church, or indeed of lecture room.
Whatever may be said now of the Renaissance Christian and the Enlightenment
scholarship of Strauss and Lessing, whatever we may think of the Liberal and
neo-Liberal quest or Bultmann's demythologizing programme, they were all
united by a common concern: that the foundational documents of the Christian
tradition should still be heard to speak meaningfully to the present day, that
Christian education should not be some hole-in-the-corner enterprise hidden
away from the rest of the educational process, that theology should be seen to
have a legitimate position in the academic concourse and still important contributions
to make to human knowledge and well-being. 126
I mention this here because there is a certain danger in the emphases of
such as Fish and Gadamer that the meaningfulness of the Jesus tradition will be
and can be appreciated only within the interpretive community (that is, the
church), within the living tradition (that is, the Christian tradition). The risk is of
locking up the Gospels once again within the churches, with a meaning heard
clearly enough within the worshipping community but unable to speak to the
world outside, unable to dialogue effectively with other forms of knowledge
given to us, and unable to be heard or understood because meaning is thought to
reside (only?) in a reading within the continuum and community of meaning. To
seek thus to escape postmodernism's pluralism and relativity would significantly
diminish the possibility of effective Christian apologetics and evangelism. At the
same time, as we have seen, any attempt to present a Jesus stripped of the garments
of faith is doomed to failure, given the character of the Jesus tradition from
the first. The challenge, then, is whether a Jesus presented by faith and through
faith can still be heard outside the churches, in the forums of the world's discourses.
125. It should, however, be confessed that the historical method as applied in the nineteenth
century did not prevent anti-Judaism in Christian presentation of Jesus; the recognition
of subjectivity in interpretation did not extend sufficiently to take account of anti-Jewish bias
(Heschel, Abraham Geiger 73, 122).
126. 'The historical Jesus helps to keep the church honest through the constant pressure
of having to do with a real human, historic figure' (Keck, Future 127).
136