R.C. Sproul

And what he meant by Haus Geschichte was something that took place not on the horizontal plane of world history, but something that took place above history in sort of some supra-temporal realm.

Bultmann, you know, embracing an existential form of philosophy, believed that salvation is not something that happens on this level, but it happens vertically, or what he said, punctiliously, , immediately and directly from above, sort of a mystical thing when a person has a crisis experience of faith.

At the same time, he said that the Bible is filled with both mythology and real history.

But in order for the Bible to have any meaning for us today, it must be demythologized, to tear off the husk that holds that kernel of historical truth.

And so anything that's smacked of the supernatural, like the virgin birth, the miracles of Jesus, the resurrection, that sort of thing, belongs to the realm of myth, not to the realm of history.

But that's okay.

See, because the whole point of that kind of existential thinking and theology that drove the German theologians in the 20th century was that salvation doesn't have to be rooted and grounded in history for it to be real.

You can still have the Christ event, which is kind of an existential moment that people have, a moment of crisis and so on.

But that is so far removed.

from the biblical concept of redemption.

Oskar Kuhlmann, the Swiss theologian and New Testament scholar, wrote a trilogy of books in the middle of the 20th century concerned with this matter of redemptive history.

His first book was called Christ and Time, Christus und der Zeit, Christ and Time, in which he examined the timeframe references of the Bible, like years, days, hours, and so on.

And his second book was on the person of Christ, the Christology of the New Testament.

But his third book was entitled Salvation in History.

which was a comprehensive rebuttal to Rudolf Bultmann, arguing that the Scripture itself sees God's revelation as inexorably tied and bound up with real history.

And he said, there is such a thing as salvation history because the Bible does give us the history of redemption, the history of salvation.

And he was seconded on that motion by the Dutch New Testament scholar Herman Ritterbos, who made this observation.

Yes, the Bible is not written like an ordinary history book.

It's not simply a chronology of the actions of the Hebrew people.

It's more than that.