No.35 Referenced from ~ Part1 - Chapter 4 - Review

Analogy between the modern man without Jesus and the apostle who lost Jesus

It was only after losing Jesus that the apostles finally came to the apostolic faith. The two-stage faith, a vestige of the apostles' struggle to establish their faith, seems to have been intended to serve as a guide for the establishment of the faith in later generations.

If the apostles' "apostolic faith" was directly guided by Jesus, there would be a huge difference between the apostles and us later generations who do not have Jesus in the circumstances under which our faith was established. As a result, we may have given up on the apostolic faith that the apostles finally reached, viewing it as an impossible task.

However, the fact that the apostles attained certainty of faith after Jesus' death makes it possible for us in later generations, who, like them, do not have Jesus in front of us, to take the same path to the perfection of faith through two-stage faith, and encourages us to acquire apostolic faith.

In other words, the apostolic faith is possible today not because we have somehow obtained a certain historical Jesus, but because the apostles established the apostolic faith without having Jesus.