[161] to guide you here, with my radical statements, to the boundary line of historical possibilities. Nothing else than this. But this must be done. And in academic work we ALWAYS must exhaust the possibilities of a problem to its bitter and---and it is a bitter end to which I brought it, at this moment. But that, we must do! Now I continue. Faith^a can assert its own foundation: for the Jews, the Mosaic Law, in which they are living; for the Christians, the picture of Jesus as the Christ^b, by which they are transformed into a new reality; in Mohammedanism, the words of the Prophet; in Buddha, the illumination of the man who was called the Buddha^c. But faith cannot assert the historical conditions which made it possible that these men became matters of ultimate concern for large sections of humanity. Faith includes certainty about its own foundation, for instance, about an event in history^d which has transformed and is continuously transforming life and history for the faithful. But faith does NOT include historical knowledge about the way in which this event took place. Therefore faith cannot be shaken by historical research. And that is the main point to which I wanted to guide you. After we have reached the boundary line and its bitterness of ultimate possibilities, we can now go back and can enjoy the fact that we are living in the reality of an ultimate concern and that this cannot be taken away from us by any historical skepticism which we ourselves must have if historical events are subject to critical analysis. Therefore the 200 years of historical criticism, and the criticism of all other religions with respect to the historical validity of the events which have created these religions, are not able