Description
The relation of faith and history is the central issue in theology. This is why nothing should be claimed for theology that is not also history. Since the early apologists in the second century, Christian theology largely assumed the events of biblical history were to be taken at face-value. With the rise of the modern historical consciousness theology could no longer be naive about what counts as history. One of the challenges was the application of modern historical criticism to the Bible. Modern theology sought to address this problem largely by assuming a fact-value dichotomy. This dichotomy entailed a separation between the detection of facts on the one hand, and the meaning of those facts on the other hand, as if one could exist without the other. The result was that modern theology generally assumed a divorce between the real Jesus of history and the Christ of faith. This work examines the main modern theologies which have attempted to reconcile the certainty of faith and the probabilities of historical events.
Wolfhart Pannenberg –
This book gives a comprehensive and fascinating account of the development of the idea of history in correspondence to changing conceptions of the divine reality, from its origin in Ancient Israel and in Greece all the way to the contemporary discussion. It focuses on the rise of critical historical investigation in modern times and on the struggle of modern theology to come to terms with it. It is an important contribution to this discussion. The split between fact and meaning is persuasively identified as a main obstacle and it is shown to be overcome in the reconstruction of history in the light of the eschatological future. Also very helpful is the final chapter on time (space-time) and eternity with its emphasis on Boethius and with its critical remarks on nontrinitarian theistic notions of a personal God.