| Part 1 The Theory of Faith | Hirohumi Hoshika |
Until the mid-20th century, theology had come to accept the basic understanding that "Jesus cannot be recognized," and so it began to take two approaches to overcoming this.
One is a study by the Bultmannians called "the second quest of the historical Jesus". This study will attempt to once again explore the historical Jesus, focusing on the "kerygma", a formulaic confession of faith that is repeatedly found in Acts and the Epistles of the New Testament, and which is considered to be the most reliable historical source.
Another important direction is research centered on the relationship between historical facts and faith, based on neo-orthodoxy, which takes the view that faith does not necessarily require recognition of the historical Jesus.
This school had such a wide theological range that it later became separated into two groups: R. Bultmann, who emphasized the doctrine of faith (whose primary concern was how one can believe), and K. Barth, who advocated the primacy of dogmatics (whose primary concern was what kind of faith one should have).
However, neo-orthodoxy revived in theology the emphasis on a certain universality in faith expressed by 18th-century G. Lessing and 19th-century S. Kierkegaard, and shared the motto, "Historical facts do not give faith."
"Absolute faith cannot be based on relative historiography."
In other words, while the Bultmann's School attempted to overcome the "inability to know Jesus" by further pursuing historicism through the elaboration of historical facts, Neo-orthodoxy attempted to achieve the possibility of faith through existentialism (the subjectivity of the believer).
It is the concept of the "Christ of Faith" proposed by theologian Martin Kähler about half a century earlier which Neo-orthodox theology relies on.
In response to the growing view that the historical Jesus presented in theology at the time (late 19th century) was far removed from the divine image and that it was difficult to reach historical facts, Kähler expressed the view that what is important for Christian faith is not Jesus himself, but the "Christ of faith" who has been believed in and passed down by believers throughout history.
"Biographical accounts of the life and personality of Jesus are not part of the essence of Christian faith, but rather have no bearing on true Christian faith."
Three prominent neo-orthodox theologians, R. Bultmann, E. Brunner, and K. Barth, do not abandon the historical Jesus because it is methodologically difficult to know the historical Jesus or because it reveals facts that are undesirable for faith, but rather state that "it is advantageous for faith that historical facts are unknowable."
"For faith, in principle, it doesn't matter when or in what era Christ lived. Evidence is actually an obstacle to faith."
He describes this situation as a crisis that shows the limits of speculative reason as described by Kant, and continues as follows:
"In this crisis—and I would dare say from this crisis—faith is born. ... Truth now becomes the word of revelation and enters time in an entirely different way."
This argument, which dialectically reverses the crisis of faith brought about by historicism, is symbolic of his position, which is known as "crisis theology" or "dialectical theology". This is related to Kähler's concept of the "Christ of Faith" in that it holds that the true opportunity for faith is given separately from the search for the historical Jesus.
When neo-orthodox theology proposes that "it is not necessary to recognize Jesus" as a solution to Vrede and others' argument that "it is not possible to recognize Jesus," a natural question arises as to whether this is a solution at all. However, it is worth noting that they have developed the issue of the historical Jesus from a structurally simple issue of "historical fact" to the more complex issue of "historical fact and faith".
As long as the historical Jesus is treated merely as a subject of historical inquiry, we will inevitably encounter the limitations of the New Testament as a historical source, as with other historical writings. However, this issue has been raised in the first place in relation to interest in the emergence of faith in Jesus and the formation of the church. These questions include: what was the crucial reason why people believed in him as the Christ; and exactly what connection existed between Jesus' teachings and the formation of the apostles' faith.
Faced with the impossibility of investigating historical facts, neo-orthodox theology returned to this initial motivation and began to view the issue of the historical Jesus not as a question of historical fact, but as a question of the relationship between historical facts and faith. In other words, they viewed the issue not as a historical inquiry into Jesus himself, but as an inquiry into the relationship between Jesus and those who believed in him.
When the historical Jesus is considered solely as a matter of historical fact, there is an implicit assumption of a relationship of "the historical fact of Jesus gives faith" between historical fact and faith. The assumption is that if the divine Jesus is found, the formation of faith can be explained as spontaneous, but if not, the emergence of the faith and church that we have today must be concluded to be artificial.
In other words, in this case, the "yes/no of the acquisition of historical facts" and the "yes/no of the establishment of faith" are linked, and the two are seen to have a fixed relationship. For this reason, whether or not the historical facts of Jesus can be established means whether or not faith and the church can be established, and therefore has been considered a very important matter.
However, if we return to the Gospels, we learn that Jesus' disciples ultimately hesitated to believe in Jesus even though they had him in their sight for over three years.
As Reimars and Vrede have already pointed out, there is a gap between the faith of the disciples in the Gospels and that of the apostles in the Epistles. In this respect, Christian faith has something that cannot be explained simply by understanding it as having arisen spontaneously from the actions of Jesus, even if he was a divine being as portrayed in the Gospels.
"Jesus is divine. → The apostles' faith would be established."
or
"Jesus is not divine. → The apostles' faith is fabricated."
The historicist view, which is based on the fixed "yes/no of the acquisition of historical facts" and "yes/no of the establishment of faith", as described above, is based on the assumption that "faith arises spontaneously". However, as we will see later, the New Testament tells us the history of the establishment of the church as follows:
"Jesus is divine. → An unsure Apostle. → Establishment of the Apostolic Faith."
If this is true, then we must assume a more complicated history behind the establishment of Christian faith than simply being brought about by Jesus during his lifetime.
In other words, the fixed connection between "historical fact" and "faith" assumed by historicism must be disentangled. At this point, it can be said that accurate knowledge about the historical Jesus is no longer necessarily necessary. For in this sequence of events, Jesus do not directly impart faith to the apostles.
If the classical view since Reimars that there is a significant difference between the faith of the disciples in the Gospel era and the faith of the apostles after Acts is correct, then the apostolic faith of the disciples was not guided by Jesus' divine works. This is because, although they had experienced Jesus' divine works, the faith of the Gospel era was destroyed at the time of Jesus' crucifixion.
This does not in any way justify the "no need to recognize Jesus", but it does show that the issue of the historical Jesus is one that must be examined from the perspective that "historical facts do not give faith".
While liberal theology takes the position of "denying the acquisition of historical facts and denying orthodox faith" and conservative theology takes the position of "affirming the acquisition of historical facts and affirming orthodox faith", neo-orthodox theology has approached the issue from the unique position of "denying the acquisition of historical facts and affirming orthodox faith". For this reason, their theology carries the name "orthodox," but it cannot be denied that in reality it is a deviation from orthodoxy.
The Kantian idea adopted by neo-orthodox theology that "knowledge of God is possible only in the non-rational realm" has been carried over to mainline theology today, giving rise to a variety of theologies that incorporate personalism and holy spiritualism as the locus of revelation, as well as eschatology and narratology.
On the other hand, the goal of neo-orthodox theology, "denying historical fact and affirming faith", that is, "establishing faith while the definite historical facts of Jesus cannot be obtained," has been abandoned in the subsequent history of theology. H. Zahrnt, a prominent Christian commentator in the mid-20th century, stated the following, indicating that this issue was already stagnating and being abandoned in the 1960s:
"On the whole, it must be said that theology has not yet made a decisive step beyond Bultmann."
"The theological problem that remains unresolved today concerns the correct relationship between history and existence."
Subsequent research into the historical Jesus was motivated by the successive discoveries of new materials in the 20th century, such as the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Nag Hammadi Library, and the Gospel according to Thomas, as well as developments in ancient sociology and religious studies, advances in archaeology, and advances in computer-based word analysis. This led to research known as the "third quest for the historical Jesus," which began in the 1980s and continues to the present day.
However, as a result, the issue of the historical Jesus is now treated even more purely as a issue of "historical fact" than before, and most of the research is now conducted by general universities, so that the historical Jesus is rarely questioned from a theological perspective.
As a result, the problem of the relationship between historical facts and faith, which neo-orthodox theology attempted to resolve, remains unresolved to this day, and can be summarized for the time being in the following two points.
１．Given the "reliance on facts" of Christian faith, a historical Jesus is necessary for our faith, but it is possible that accurate historical facts have not been given to us. How is faith possible in this situation?
２．Even if it were possible to obtain an accurate historical picture of Jesus through research into Jesus, the establishment of faith would then depend on the results of academic study. In that case, faith is only certain to the extent of the knowledge acquired. However, this undermines the qualities of faith that have long been sought and recognized in Christianity, such as universality and absoluteness. How should we understand the relationship between faith and scholarship?
The neo-orthodox theology's idea that the historical Jesus is unnecessary was one way of overcoming the above two points, but it was only Bultmann and the more left-wing H. Brown who asserted this idea thoroughly. Other theologians of the same era, including those within the same school, recognized the abnormality of the solution based on the "Christ of faith" in the absence of the historical Jesus. This is evident from the fact that researchers who were taught by Bultmann did not follow their master, but instead formed the Bultmann School, a group that placed importance on historical facts and engaged in the "second quest of the historical Jesus".
When Bultmann clarified his problem statement as "denying historical fact and affirming faith", the issue of "historical fact and faith" seemed to gain new perspective. However, what they actually did, whether it was Bultmann's existentialism, Barth's Christocentrism, or Buber's personalism, was simply a strategy of prioritizing faith. There, concepts such as "superhistory," which was distinguished from history in the usual sense, and "Geschichte," which was distinguished from historié, which also means ordinary history, were rampant, and the relationship between "historical fact and faith" in the original sense was never addressed.
The main reason why these attempts at neo-orthodox theology ended in failure was due to M. Kähler's concept of the "Christ of faith" on which they relied.
The "Christ of faith" that Kähler refers to is "the Jesus that the biblical writers believed in so and passed on to us". This Jesus was real to the Bible writers, but for later believers, he became the form in which they received "the Christ in whom the Bible writers believed." For this reason, the faith of later generations is not one inspired by Jesus himself, as was the case with the disciples, but rather, in a sense, have the flavor of a faith that inherited the faith of its predecessors, like traditional performing arts.
Therefore, as has already been pointed out several times,
Kant taught that empirical objects should be understood in terms of their dual nature: phenomenon and thing-in-itself. In contrast, Hegel abandoned thing-in-itself, which Kant considered unknowable, and considered only recognizable phenomenon as the object of thought. Hegelian philosophy is a monistic worldview that attributes absolute qualities such as reality and transcendence, which were previously possessed by thing-in-itself, to phenomenon as the wholeness of the world and the purpose of history. The idea is that if thing-in-itself is unknowable, there is no need to take them into account.
In Kähler's theology, a similar approach is taken.
For Kant, empirical object is a "phenomenon" that passes through our cognitive subjectivity, but in this case, phenomenon was thought to have a "thing-in-itself" that lie behind it. Similarly, the "Jesus of the Gospels" recorded in the Gospels, which are the object of our experience, can be said to be a "phenomenon" that became recognizable to us through the author's communicative manipulation, but originally the existence of a "historical Jesus" is assumed to lie behind it.
In Kähler, however, the "Jesus of the Gospels" conveyed by the biblical writers is all we need to know, and the "historical Jesus", who was deemed unknowable by Vrede and others, is abandoned.
This idea holds that because our Christian faith is a response to the apostles' missionary work, we simply need to know the concept of Christ that the apostles had, which can be found in the kerygma, a historical collection of creeds, and there is no longer any need for the historical Jesus.
This idea that "Jesus of the Gospels" is everything may appear to be a biblical and evangelical act, but it leads to a faith that lacks any demand for the historical reality of Jesus. For this reason, mainline theology since neo-orthodoxy which regards the "Christ of Faith" as the foundation for the stability of Christian faith, has continued to outsource the acquisition of historical facts to a field outside of faith, namely, to the academic discipline of "Jesus studies".
Some neo-orthodox theologies such as those of Barth are sometimes (mistakenly) called "evangelical". We feel uncomfortable about this. With Jesus absent from "Christ of Faith" their theology relying on Jesus studies as a compensation. This is the separation of faith and scholarship. This "faith and sometimes scholarship" structure is what makes us distrust their theology.
In this way, in order to avoid these two inconveniences, namely the inability to attain the "historical Jesus" and the resulting dependence of faith on academics even if it could be attained, neo-orthodox theology adopted the concept of the "Christ of faith" and took a new approach in treating the issue of the historical Jesus as a question of "historical fact and faith", but this did not lead to a solution. After that, the problem that was left unresolved, eventually the problem itself was almost abandoned.
However, it is still important that neo-orthodox theology emphasized the differences in the faith of the disciples as seen in the Gospels and the Epistles, as well as the differences between Jesus' teaching that God is the Father and the disciples' preaching that Jesus is the Christ, and saw in these the key to resolving the issue of "historical facts and faith". This perspective makes it clear that the faith of the apostles as handed down to us is of a nature that does not stem from mere spontaneous faith.
On the other hand, conservative theology has not placed much importance on this difference, and to this day has remained stuck with a spontaneous understanding of the formation of faith, namely, that Christianity arose through new teachings and messianic miracles by Jesus.
For this reason, it can be said that conservatives' understanding of faith remains shallow. Because conservative theology has overlooked the above points and the importance of Kant's idea of the "separation of phenomenon and the thing-in-itself", while it is sensitive to the unorthodoxy of liberal theology, neo-orthodox theology, and mainline theology, it has not yet reached the point of understanding and criticizing them.