“We were in danger, too, of presenting to [pg 031] them a Jesus that was too little, because we had forced him into man’s measure and into the mould of average human psychology. Read through the ‘lives of Jesus’ since the sixties and behold what they have made of the imperial words of our Lord, what a weak and ambiguous sense they have put upon his peremptory, other-worldly requisitions, in order that he might not clash with our ideals of civilisation and his other-worldliness might be brought to terms with our this-worldliness. Many of his greatest words one finds lying in a corner, a heap of discharged spring-bolts. We make Jesus speak with our time another language than that which passed his lips. “Thereby we ourselves became impotent and deprived our own thoughts of their proper energy by transposing them into history and making them speak to us out of antiquity. It is nothing less than a tragedy for modern theology that it confounds with history everything it attempts to expound, and is actually proud of the virtuosity with which it contrives to discover its own thoughts in the past. “Therefore there is hopeful significance in the fact that modern theology with its study of the life of Jesus, however long it may resist [pg 032] by the invention of fresh shifts and expedients, must in the end find itself deluded in its manufactured history, overcome by real history and by the facts—which according to Wrede’s fine saying are often more radical than theories. “What is the historical Jesus to us when we keep him clear of any admixture of the present with the past? We have the immediate impression that his person, in spite of all that is strange and enigmatical, has something great to say to all ages, as long as the world endures, may views and knowledge change never so much, and that it means therefore to our religion also a far-reaching enrichment. It behooves us to bring this elementary feeling to a clear expression, so that it may not soar away in dogmatic assertions and phrases and beguile historical science ever anew into the hopeless undertaking of modernising Jesus by diluting or explaining away what is historically conditioned in his preaching, as though he would become more to us thereby.