Sean the Baptist

This is Ernst Käsemann in his wonderful polemic Jesus Means Freedom: A Polemical Survey of the New Testament, trans. Frank Clarke (London: SCM, 1969) reflecting on the question "Was Jesus a Liberal?" and attacking on the wrong kind of orthodoxy which:

"...has neither humour in the face of the necessarily tentative nature of our search for truth, nor the essential theological perception of the fact that no one can ever get the measure of the Lord.  It takes its stand against history and the historical spirit, without suspecting that one is thereby opposing the creator of history.  It claims revelation, not realizing that revelation is new every day, even if it takes the form of heretical distortions, which non the less rediscover new country or old truth in their own, inevitably human, way. ... The church sings 'Thou who breakest every fetter' but nothing is so alien to it as  the One who breaks all fetters, even devout and orthodox ones." (pp.29-30)

"The sum total of dogmatics is much too difficult for all of us, and Jesus never asked anyone whether he believed in the virgin birth, the resurrection of the dead, and the descent into hell.  But co-humanity is something that he actually lived, gave, and demanded.  If I knew nothing else about him, I should still know about him.  If I had no other faith to live by, I should yet live and believe with him, and one single beam of his light in our existence seems to me more important than the full sun of orthodoxy." (p.35)

I love the oblique reference to Romans 11.33-36 in the first quotation.  Not much theological writing is done in polemical vein these days (the recent example that springs to mind is Jüngel's Justification) but what Käsemann lacks in precision he more than makes up for in passionate and prophetic insight.