Second Munich Lecture

To understand this mystery of Golgotha better and better will be the task of progressive spiritual development. Some things that play a major role in present-day culture will indeed have to be overcome. We are currently facing a crisis in our understanding of Christianity, a real crisis. Of course, I am not talking about what can be said about Christianity by this or that popular theology. I would just like to draw attention to elementary events of incomprehension in the present. At one of those meetings in 1910, where the historical Christ was discussed, a much-talked-about theologian spoke to emphasize that the words of Christ Jesus' teaching were only summarized teachings that had existed before: “I will be grateful to you if I can be shown just one sentence among the sayings of Jesus Christ that was not already there in some form or other.” If a liberal theological investigator can prove today what that person claimed, he is a great man for our contemporaries, because how convincing it must be if one can really prove that all of Christ's sayings were said earlier by others, that they were therefore nothing new. To the one who sees things through, such a saying appears in a different light. Imagine that Goethe had made a poem, not yet written it down, only spoken it, and a child who was listening had shouted: These are all words that I have already heard. The theologian who hears nothing but what he already knows and does not realize what is important, because that stands above the sayings that were there before, as a Goethean poem stands above the individual words that the child has already heard. If one does not know what to consider the main thing, and believes that one is doing real theology today by adhering to words in this way, adhering to what is true, that the sayings have already “been there,” it is implied that we are in a deep crisis with regard to the understanding of Christianity, from which one can already understand that a real understanding of Christ can only come into the world when today's theology, which has the public office of watching over the understanding of Christ, first dies. That is what matters: that one learns to sense the full magnitude of the facts that took place around Golgotha.