The problem of kerygma and didache

The dawn of modern, kerygmatic theology broke upon the slumbering world in 1892 with the publication of a work by Martin Kāhler which decisively challenged the historical relativism of the nineteenth-century ‘lives of Jesus’ and redirected attention to the Christ of the apostolic preaching. ‘The real Christ is the preached Christ, and the preached Christ is the Christ of faith.’ The high noon of the movement was marked by the ascendancy of Barth and Bultmann, blood brothers of the form-geschichtliche Schule but diverging sharply, as brothers sometimes do, in the very manner in which they developed their inheritance. The post-Bultmannians still walk in the afternoon sunlight of kerygmatic theology, even if the lengthening shadows suggest that the darkness of the night will not be postponed indefinitely. The twentieth-century day, thus illumined by the sunlight of the kerygma, has had its own share of diurnal difficulties, many of them still unresolved as the working day draws towards its close, but it has always claimed the advantage of locating clearly the genuine source of light and power: the kerygma, the preaching which has characterised and enshrined the Christian faith from the beginning. Yet this basic nuclear concept presents a concatenation of problems, a further examination of which is essential to any appreciation in depth of the nature of Christian utterance.