Abstract

The four books under consideration in this article exemplify the impact of historical thinking on Christian thought. Friedrich Gogarten's essay on Demythologizing and History, while it is ostensibly intended to clarify some of the problems of the controversy between Rudolf Bultmann and his critics, is actually an analysis of the significance for Christian theology of two quite different ways of understanding the nature of history. Similarly, John Baillie's Idea of Revelation in Recent Thought makes very clear, particularly in the first two chapters, that the whole conception of how God makes himself known to man has become radically different in the past generation or so from the views of centuries preceding: the dominant contemporary view holds that God reveals himself in and through the events of sacred history, not that he reveals eternal truths through the words of the Bible or the creeds of the church. Even the two French Roman Catholic symposia on mysticism and asceticism, though not explicitly concerned with the problem of history at all, nevertheless show the impact of the historical point of view. A central contention of the one is that all mystical experience must be mediated through the historical Christ if it is to be regarded as Christian, and the other is critical of any form of asceticism which involves a repudiation of historical life simply for its own sake: Christian asceticism must always culminate in a concrete historical love for one's concrete historical neighbor.