Word: kerygma
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Instead of the emergence of Christianity, younger theologians nowadays speak knowingly of The Event. Sin, in the person-centered approach of existential theology, becomes estrangement. And no theologian today worth his doctorate would dare talk of preaching or teaching: the fashionable forms are kerygma and didache...
...Know Nothing." During the 1920s, Bultmann sealed the doom of the old quest, as far as Europe was concerned.* He argued that the Gospels were interested not in presenting a dispassionate portrait of Jesus but in expressing the kerygma-the proclamation of the early church's faith in a Risen Christ. This meant that although the New Testament might be a primary source for a study of the early church, it was only a secondary one for a life of Jesus. Since the faith of later generations was really based upon the shining faith of the first Christians...
Bultmann himself later moved a step farther to the theological left and argued that to become credible for modern man, the kerygma must be "de-mythologized"-stripped of such unbelievable elements as its heaven-above, hell-below framework. But demythologizing, Robinson points out, threatened to end up with "the conclusion that the Jesus of the kerygma could well be only a myth." Deprived of its link with the historical Jesus, Christianity might end up as some kind of existentialist philosophy, of which Christ was little more than a mythological symbol...
Inevitably, the reaction set in. In 1953, at the annual seminar of Bultmann's "Marburg Disciples," Dr. Ernst Kasemann argued that it was time for theology to relate the Jesus of history to the proclaimed Christ of the kerygma. The proposal quickly found supporters, largely among Bultmann's students and disciples, who hold many top professorships in Biblical studies: Bornkamm and Erich Dinkier at Heidelberg, Käsemann at Tübingen, Herbert Braun at Mainz, Hans Conzelmann at Göttingen, Gerhard Ebeling at Zürich, Ernst Fuchs at Marburg's Institute of Hermeneutics. Initially...