As the sun at midday,—so he appears to us. We know nothing of morning and evening glow; we see only the white brilliance which pervades all. But the fact that the sun now shines for us in such a light does not justify us in conceiving the sunrise also as if it were a brilliant disk of midday brightness emerging above the horizon. Our modern view of Jesus’ death is true, true in its inmost nature, because it reflects his ethical-religious personality in the thoughts of our time. But when we import this into the history [pg 250] of Jesus and of primitive Christianity we commit the same blunder as were we to paint the sunrise without the morning glow. In genuine historical knowledge there is liberating and helping power. Our faith is built upon the personality of Jesus. But between our world-view and that in which he lived and laboured there lies a deep and seemingly unbridgeable gulf. Men therefore saw themselves obliged to detach as it were his personality from his world-view and touch it up with modern colours. This produced a picture of Jesus which was strangely lifeless and vague. One got a hybrid figure, half modern, half antique. With much else that is modern, men transferred to him our modern psychology, without always recognising clearly that it is not applicable to him and necessarily belittles him. For it is derived from mediocre minds which are a patchwork of opinions and apprehend and observe themselves only in a constant flux of development. Jesus, however, is a superhuman personality moulded in one piece. Thus modern theology does violence to history and psychology, inasmuch as it cannot prove what right we have to segregate Jesus from his age, to translate his personality into the terms of our modern thought, and to conceive [pg 251] of him as “Messiah” and “Son of God” outside of the Jewish framework. Genuine historical knowledge, however, restores to theology full freedom of movement! It presents to it the personality of Jesus in an eschatological world-view, yet one which is modern through and through because _His_ mighty spirit pervades it. This Jesus is far greater than the one conceived in modern terms: he is really a superhuman personality. With his death he destroyed the form of his “Weltanschauung,” rendering his own eschatology impossible. Thereby he gives to all peoples and to all times the right to apprehend him in terms of their thoughts and conceptions, in order that his spirit may pervade their “Weltanschauung” as it quickened and transfigured the Jewish eschatology.