Word: kerygma
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...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...
What, then, is left of Christianity? The saving act of God, answers Bultmann, which is what the New Testament really represents, and for which he uses the theologian's Greek word, kerygma. The problem is to free the kerygma from its encrustation of myth so that modern man can grasp...