The significance of the historical Jesus for Christian faith in the thought of Rudolf Bultman, Ernst Fuchs, and Karl Barth

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Boston UniversityIn the consequential thought of Ernst Troeltsch, who brought nineteenth-century Protestant theology to a critical conclusion, the necessary and essential relationship of contemporary Christian faith to a contingent event in history is destroyed. Bultmann attempts to overcome the historical relativism of the Religionsgeschichtliche Schule with his exposition of kerygma. The kerygma proclaims an event in history as God's eschatological act, which, by being proclaimed in the present, qualifies contemporary human existence. The ground of faith is not the history of Jesus as such, but the proclaimed meaning of this history. There is no essential continuity between the historical Jesus and the kerygma. Because there is an implicit split in Bultmann's ontology between "objective" history and the "meaning" of history, one must doubt whether Bultmann really has grounded Christian faith in history or only in an interpretation of history [TRUNCATED