The Divine Revelation vs. Historicism
(This is an excerpt from a University Of Metaphysical Sciences course at www.umsonline.org, please feel free to visit the school website)
In
the latter part of the 19th-century, Christianity concentrated on the
divine revelation around the “historical Jesus.” The reason for this
was to oppose the metaphysical, idealistic and speculative Christology
of the first half of the 19th-century. The teachings concerning the
Kingdom of God became central. This implied a purely historical figure
of Jesus and his teachings according to the Gospel. However, upon a
closer look at this line of thinking and this supposedly historical
picture, it is in reality an invention.
This conception of the Kingdom is not a return to Jesus’ strongly eschatological teachings according to the Gospel. Harnack’s work on the essence of Christianity, found in his famous book What Is Christianity
appearing at the beginning of the 19th century, finds the essence of
Christianity in Jesus’ teachings of the Fatherhood of God, the family
of man and the value of the human soul. The theology of the
Enlightenment is that “God, virtue, and immortality” are all found in
the life of Jesus. With a careful reinterpretation of the historical,
Harnack begins within certain standards by which the historical was
judged, even though it is not clear just what the standard is.
Reference is made to Jesus’ “inner life” at this time rather than to
certain aspects of his teachings. This inner life of the Christ is
idealism. Jesus represents “the moral ideal” as if the idea of moral
goodness was incarnate in Jesus’ “inner life.”
In Faith of the Christian Church (1948), Gustaf Aulen says,
“From the viewpoint of Christian faith there are essentially two
defects in the thought of historicism. In the first place, revelation
is understood as dated and static. When revelation is located at an
isolated point in the past, an imaginary chasm is created between faith
and revelation. Because of its one-sided emphasis upon the ‘historical
Jesus.’
In The True Nature Of The Second Coming (1971), Rudolf Steiner
says, “The will of man must be fired by the divine wisdom, and the most
powerful impulse for this will be to those who have truly prepared
themselves. The sublime ether-form of Christ Jesus becomes perceptible.
To a man in whom natural clairvoyance has developed this will be like a
Second Coming of Christ Jesus, just as the etheric Christ will appear
again to men when they realize that they must use to this end of the
faculties with which evolution itself will equip the human soul…”