Facs
Transcript
Question: If Christianity is the message that b is the Christ, why would it not destroy Christianity if it could be proven there was no Jesus?
d: ... These two questions are difficult, but point to the same reality. It is a little difficult that I have to go into theological problems which belong to the system of theology, in order to answer these questions in a lecture on religion and culture generally, but I will try to do my best because I have been asked these questions for twenty-two years without interruption [laughter], and never was able to answer them—but nobody else was able [to] either! [laughter], so we are all in the same boat.
There are only two answers which are unambiguous. The one is that you accept what the Bible says—and that is that there is no problem except that there are some hidden problems to know what the Bible really says [laughter], but these problems I will not take too seriously at this moment— there is certainly an assurance about innumerable facts about the life of Jesus. The other unambiguous answer is that faith is a kind of belief, beliefs are always in the realm of probability, and if the existence of Jesus, or any other statement of religion, is a matter of very questionable belief, then faith also is questionable. Now these are two unambiguous answers; both, in my opinion, are either meaningless (the latter one, for instance) because then we would not have faith at all; we would have only belief. The other is dependent on the relationship of research to faith, and if you define faith as being-ultimately-concerned, then you must take historical research seriously. So the two unambiguous answers are very simple answers and very wrong answers, as simple answers very often are.