[154] The general answer to this question is that there is no necessary conflict between historical research and truth of faith. There was actually as much conflict as there was in the scientific realm, but, as I said, and tried to show, this conflict is not necessary, so I will try to show now, that the conflict between historical truth and religious truth is not necessary either. The reality of these conflicts is based on concepts of faith which confuse faith with belief, or which define faith as acceptance of statements which have a small amount of evidence, but all this is not faith. As we have seen, faith^a must be defined in its innermost center as the state of being ultimately concerned. Now if this is the case, then the dimension of faith and the dimension of historical truth are not the same. Historical research toward the biblical literature, both of the Old and the New Testament, has been done now for more than 200 years. And I believe that this historical research belongs to the greatest things that have ever happened in the history of religion and Christianity. It was something unheard of, that historical method was applied in the same way to the history of the Greek tribes, their cities, their government, their literature, and to the Jewish tribes and their literature, and to the early church and its literature. The fact that Protestantism dared to apply the same method to the one and to the other, has never happened before; it was not possible and is still not possible, in its radical form, on Catholic soil; it is impossible even in the slightest form on lslamic soil, where even the question whether the present text of the Koran is the original text, dictated by Mohammed, can lead to the death of somebody who publicly asks such a question! Therefore we must say: It is one of the great events, which we should always look at with astonishment and with one of the very few justified expressions of pride, if we look at the whole history of Protestantism. Here, a justified pride is in place! Now this, in the consequence of this tremendous act of historical research into the biblical writings: it has been shown that both the Old and New Testament include three elements of a different stylistic character: 1) Historical reports, in the sense in which I defined the work of the historian.