The God of the Apocalypse can hardly be recognized as the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, nor has the fierce Messiah, whose warriors ride in blood up to their horses» bridles, many traits that could recall Him of whom the primitive
kerygma proclaimed that He went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, because God was with Him.
Thus
the kerygma proclaims the death in which resides life (Mark 8.35), a kerygma incarnated in Jesus and therefore shifting terminologically from Jesus» own eschatological message into the Church's christological kerygma: this death in which life resides is Jesus» death, and becomes available only in dying and rising with him.
To understand the «new hermeneutic» it helps to recognize that it grew out of the exploration of the continuity between the historical Jesus and the kerygmatic Christ, which, of course, in view of form criticism, is necessarily a question of the continuity between the message of Jesus, to the limited extent that we know it, and
the kerygma proclaiming the Christ.
Not exact matches
It is this eschatological action of God in history which Jesus
proclaimed, and which reached its final formulation in the
kerygma.
It is therefore quite significant that a recent article by Bultmann seems to be by implication a defence of Ksemarm's position against an initial criticism by the Barthian Hermann Diem: Diem had maintained that when all is said and done Käsemann has presented Jesus as only
proclaiming «general religious and moral truths» about «the freedom of the children of God», rather than a message in continuity with the Church's
kerygma.
Paul's transcendent existence is one with the selfhood of Jesus
proclaimed by the
kerygma.
I have been saying this to anyone who will listen and I have been
proclaiming the odd
kerygma «It's the Theology, Stupid» to anyone liberal or conservative who will give me the time of day.
Apart from faith in the resurrection no
kerygma would have been
proclaimed and no Gospel would have been written.
So far, then, from running away from Historie and taking refuge in Geschichte, I am deliberately renouncing any form of encounter with a phenomenon of past history, including an encounter with the Christ after the flesh, in order to encounter the Christ
proclaimed in the
kerygma, which confronts me in my historic situation.
The significance of the
kerygma, which
proclaims the redemptive work of God in Christ, lies in its opening up in a universally relevant fashion the manner of God's dealing with the whole created order in carrying out his saving purpose.
This emphasis in the
kerygma upon the historicity of Jesus is existentially indispensable, precisely because the
kerygma, while freeing us from a life «according to the flesh»,
proclaims the meaningfulness of life «in the flesh».
If current research upon the New Testament
kerygma serves to draw attention to the historicity of the
proclaimed word of God, as treasure in such earthen vessels as Jewish or Hellenistic thought patterns, research upon Jesus» message would serve formally to draw attention to the flesh of the incarnation.
Theologically speaking, this saving event
proclaimed by the
kerygma shows itself to be eschatological precisely by recurring in the proclamation of the
kerygma itself: the act of
proclaiming Jesus» death and resurrection becomes God's act calling upon me to accept my death and receive resurrected life.»
It is interesting that in Romans 10:17 Paul seems to think) of Christ himself as speaking through his messengers, who
proclaim the
kerygma: «So faith comes from what is heard, and what is heard comes through the word of Christ.»
What arose was the apostles» faith, which impelled them to
proclaim the
kerygma.
The responsibility of Christians today is to
proclaim the
kerygma in our situation, but `... we must nevertheless implement the
kerygma's claim to be
proclaiming a Lord who is at one with Jesus, and we must do this by critical participation in the discussion of the Jesus - tradition of our day».
This is a question of peculiar force in America, where the tradition is to «believe in Jesus» and where there are a multitude of conflicting and competing kerygmata; where everything from radical right racism to revolutionary Christian humanism is
proclaimed as
kerygma, and as Christian.
Indeed, we would go further than Käsemann, who against Bultmann still wants to explore the question of continuity between historical Jesus and kerygmatic Christ, for we would limit the question of continuity to the question of whether the Christ
proclaimed in a form of the
kerygma is consistent with the historical Jesus.
That identification by the early Church requires at least that the Christ
proclaimed by the
kerygma be consistent with what we come to know of the historical Jesus.
Again, the historical Jesus
proclaimed the future eschatological event, whereas the kerygmatic Christ is the eschatological event as he confronts the man addressed by the
kerygma.