| Part 1 The Theory of Faith | Hirohumi Hoshika |
How does Christianity argue for the rightness of its own eudemonistic ethics in the face of Kant's strict ethics? By the end of the next, next section (Reflection), I would have found an answer, and the story of how I found it was as follows.
Conservative New Testament scholar F.F. Bruce has an introductory book on faith called "The New Testament Documents, Are They Reliable?" The main purpose of this book is to show that the New Testament accounts are reliable from a historical perspective. However, the first chapter is titled "Does it Matter? "
As a prelude to saying that "the New Testament is historically reliable", he considers whether "it is important that the New Testament is historically reliable". The chapter is only three pages long, but I would like to quote it because I believe that the argument made by "some people" that Bruce describes here has the power to calm down the spirits of people who feel a certain kind of irritation with religion.
"Does it matter whether the New Testament documents are reliable or not? Is it so very important that we should be able to accept them as truly historical records? Some people will very confidently return a negative answer to both these questions. ... they say ...
'The fundamental principles of Christianity are laid down in the Sermon on the Mount and elsewhere in the New Testament; their validity is not affected by the truth or falsehood of the narrative framework in which they are set. Indeed, it may be that we know nothing certain about the Teacher into whose mouth they are put; the story of Jesus as it has come down to us may be myth or legend, but the teaching ascribed to Him ― whether He was actually responsible for it or not ― has a value all its own, and a man who accepts and follows that teaching can be a true Christian eve if he believes that Christ never lived at all.'
This argument sounds plausible, ..."
There will be many people who feel that the above opinion in 'The fundamental principles of Christianity are...' is "exactly right, so what's wrong with that?" I think that many people outside of religion have this kind of view of Christianity, or religion in general. My own thoughts from the past seem to overlap with the assertions of the "some people" Bruce speaks for here.
Bruce offers a few counterarguments to this assertion. The first point is that the center of Christianity is the "Gospel", but for some reason, at this point, Bruce's presentation is not as clear as when he states his opponent's argument. The meaning of this description is as follows.
― The "gospel" that Christianity preaches is the joyous news that our sins have been forgiven, and this "news" is at the core of Christianity. Therefore, just as news loses its value if it is false report, the crucifixion and death of Jesus and related events that form the content of the Gospels must not be misinformation, so whether the accounts of the Bible can be trusted is an important issue.
The second points out that the oldest articles of Christian faith include historical events.
― The Apostles' Creed and the Nicene Creed contain the passage "Jesus Christ suffered under Pontius Pilate," which indicates that the faith that has been passed down includes the recognition of historical facts. Therefore, the truth of historicity is directly linked to the truth of the content of our faith and must not be denied; in this sense, the reliability of the biblical accounts is important.
Now, is this the end of the problem? If the "some people" are simply those who don't know anything about Christianity, then after hearing Bruce's answer those people might say, "So that's what Christianity is like? We were ignorant."
However, although Bruce does not explicitly say so, this statement by "some people" is a quotation from New Testament scholar R. Bultmann's "Jesus" and is well known.
However, to explain what the gospel is from the standpoint of orthodox theology to Bultmann, the founder of neo-orthodox theology in the early 20th century, would be like "preaching to Buddha". Therefore, it seems necessary to attempt an argument that can be used against Bultmann who knows what the gospel is, an argument that does not preach what orthodox Christian faith is.
No, more than that reason, what displeases me about Bruce's answer is that it turns the claims of "some people" away at the door. I feel that Bruce's answer does not sufficiently capture what "some people" are looking for.