Jesus as the Eschatological Event

Jesus as the Eschatological Event

By Rudolf Bultmann

[The Christian] message knows itself to be legitimated by the revelation of the grace of God in Jesus Christ. According to the New Testament, Jesus Christ is the eschatological event, the action of God by which God has set an end to the old world. In the preaching of the Christian Church the eschatological event will ever again become present and does become present ever and again in faith. The old world has reached its end for the believer; he is “a new creature in Christ.” For the old world has reached its end with the fact that he himself as “the old man” has reached his end and is now “a new man,” a free man.

It is the paradox of the Christian message that the eschatological event, according to Paul and John, is not to be understood as a dramatic cosmic catastrophe but as happening within history, beginning with the appearance of Jesus Christ and in continuity with this occurring again and again in history, but not as the kind of historical development which can be confirmed by any historian. It becomes an event repeatedly in preaching and faith. Jesus Christ is the eschatological event not as an established fact of past time but as repeatedly present, as addressing you and me here and now in preaching.

Preaching is address, and as address it demands answer, decision. This decision is obviously something other than the decisions in responsibility over against the future which are demanded in every present moment. For in the decision of faith I do not decide on a responsible action, but on a new understanding of myself as free from myself by the grace of God and as endowed with my new self, and this is at the same time the decision to accept a new life grounded in the grace of God. In making this decision I also decide on a new understanding of my responsible acting. This does not mean that the responsible decision demanded by the historical moment is taken away from me by faith, but it does mean that all responsible decisions are born of love. For love consists in unreservedly being for one’s neighbor, and this is possible only for the man who has become free from himself.

It is the paradox of Christian being that the believer is taken out of the world and exists, so to speak, as unworldly and that at the same time he remains within the world, within his historicity. To be historical means to live from the future. The believer too lives from the future; first because his faith and his freedom can never be possession; as belonging to the eschatological event they can never become facts of past time but are reality only over and over again as event; secondly because the believer remains within history. In principle, the future always offers to man the gift of freedom; Christian faith is the power to grasp this gift. The freedom of man from himself is always realized in the freedom of historical decisions.

The paradox of Christ as the historical Jesus and the ever-present Lord and the paradox of the Christian as an eschatological and historical being is excellently described by Erich Frank: “… to the Christians the advent of Christ was not an event in that temporal process which we mean by history today. It was an event in the history of salvation, in the realm of eternity, an eschatological moment in which rather this profane history of the world came to its end. And in an analogous way, history comes to its end in the religious experience of any Christian ‘who is in Christ.’ In his faith he is already above time and history. For although the advent of Christ is an historical event which happened ‘once’ in the past, it is, at the same time, an eternal event which occurs again and again in the soul of any Christian in whose soul Christ is born, suffers, dies and is raised up to eternal life. In his faith the Christian is a contemporary of Christ, and time and the world’s history are overcome. The advent of Christ is an event in the realm of eternity which is incommensurable with historical time. But it is the trial of the Christian that although in the spirit he is above time and world, in the flesh he remains in this world, subject to time; and the evils of history, in which he is engulfed, go on.… But the process of history has gained a new meaning as the pressure and friction operate under which the Christian has to refine his soul and under which, alone, he can fulfill his true destiny. History and the world do not change, but man’s attitude to the world changes.”

In the New Testament the eschatological character of the Christian existence is sometimes called “sonship.” F. Gogarten says: “Sonship is not something like an habitus or a quality, but it must be grasped ever and again in the decisions of life. For it is that towards which the present temporal history tends, and therefore it happens within this history and nowhere else.” Christian faith just “by reason of the radical eschatological character of the salvation believed in never takes man out of his concrete worldly existence. On the contrary, faith calls him into it with unique sobriety.… For the salvation of man happens only within it and nowhere else.”

We have no time to describe how Reinhold Niebuhr in his stimulating book Faith and History (1949) endeavors to explain the relation between faith and history in a similar way. Nor have we time to dispute with H. Butterfield’s thought, developed in his book Christianity and History. Although I do not think he has clearly seen the problem of historicism and the nature of historicity, his book contains many important statements. And I agree with him when he says: “Every instant is eschatological.” I would prefer, however, to say: every instant has the possibility of being an eschatological instant and in Christian faith this possibility is realized.

The paradox that Christian existence is at the same time an eschatological unworldly being and an historical being is analogous with the Lutheran statement simul iustus, simul peccator. In faith the Christian has the standpoint above history which Jaspers like many others has endeavored to find, but without losing his historicity. His unworldliness is not a quality, but it may be called aliena (foreign), as his righteousness, his iustitia is called by Luther aliena.

We started our lectures with the question of meaning in history, raised by the problem of historicism. We have seen that man cannot answer this question as the question of the meaning in history in its totality. For man does not stand outside history. But now we can say: the meaning in history lies always in the present, and when the present is conceived as the eschatological present by Christian faith the meaning in history is realized. Man who complains: “I cannot see meaning in history, and therefore my life, interwoven in history, is meaningless,” is to be admonished: do not look around yourself into universal history, you must look into your own personal history. Always in your present lies the meaning in history, and you cannot see it as a spectator, but only in your responsible decisions. In every moment slumbers the possibility of being the eschatological moment. You must awaken it.

Source: Rudolf Bultmann, History and Eschatology, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1957), pp. 151–55. These were the Gifford Lectures delivered in 1955.