for the question, "Tell us Thy name in our speech and for our day!" But He does bless those who have wrestled with Him, so that, though they cannot take Him with them, yet, like men who have seen God face to face and received strength in their souls, they go on their way with renewed courage, ready to do battle with the world and its powers.
But the historic Jesus and the Germanic spirit cannot be brought together except by an act of historic violence which in the end injures both religion and history. A time will come when our theology, with its pride in its historical character, will get rid of its rationalistic bias. This bias leads it to project back into history what belongs to our own time, the eager struggle of the modern religious spirit with the Spirit of Jesus, and seek in history justification and authority for its beginning. The consequence is that it creates the historical Jesus in its own image, so that it is not the modern spirit influenced by the Spirit of Jesus, but the Jesus of Nazareth constructed by modern historical theology, that is set to work upon our race. ,
Therefore both the theology and its picture of Jesus are poor and weak. Its Jesus, because He has been measured by the petty standard of the modern man, at variance with himself, not to say of the modern candidate in theology who has made shipwreck; the theologians the themselves, because instead of seeking, for themselves and others, hoow they may best bring the Spirit of Jesus in living power into our world, they keep continually forging new portraits of the historical Jesus, and think they have accomplished something great when they have drawn an Oh! of astonishment from the multitude, such as the crowds of a great city emit on catching sight of a new advertisement in coloured lights.
Any one who, admiring the force and authority of genuine rationalism has got rid of the naive self-satisfaction of modern theology, which is in essence only the degenerate offspring of rationalism with a tincture of history, rejoices in the feebleness and smallness of its professedly historical Jesus, rejoices in all those who are beginning to doubt the truth of this portrait, rejoices in the over-severity with which it is attacked, rejoices to take a share in its destruction.
Those who have begun to doubt are many, but most of them only make known their doubts by their silence. There is one, however, who has spoken out, and one of the greatest-Otto Pfleiderer. [1]
In the first edition of his Urchristentum, published in 1887, he still shared the current conceptions and constructions, except that he held the credibility of Mark to be more affected than was
- ↑ Born in 1839 at Stettin. Studied at Tubingen, was appointed Professor in 1870 at Jena and in 1875 at Berlin. (Died 1908.)
