The relation between faith and history has been troublesome for Christians and Jews for centuries. It is the problem of the relation of the Exodus, the cross and the empty tomb to us today. The seriousness of the matter is shown in the description of Christian faith as a ‘pious fraud’. Karl Barth has popularized the problem as ‘… Lessing's question concerning the relationship between the contingent truths of history and the necessary truths of reason (Der Beweis des Geistes und der Kraft, 1777). “This, this is the gaping and wide chasm which I cannot cross, however often and seriously I have attempted the leap. If anyone can help me over, let him do so: I implore and entreat him. He deserves from me a divine reward.”’ However, Barth also pinpoints the problem in the final analysis as a particular form of the problem of time.

Though his example is warmly commended in the Epistle of James (5.11), Christian piety has never been altogether comfortable with the Job whose sterling patience in adversity is set forth in the book's first two chapters. The man who is there shown suffering bravely the loss of property and family and the onset of disease of a kind that in these distant days had the sentence of death written over it, yet steadfastly refuses to blame God for such disasters, is certainly admired. But his dauntless sentiments of 1.21, The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord, and of 2.10, What? Shall we receive good at the hand of God, and shall we not receive evil? — the latter in response to his wife who, unable to put up with his agonies any longer, calls on him to curse God and be done with it all — are just too hard to take. A hymn made out of a similarly passive sounding Old Testament text like My times are in thy hand (Ps. 31.15) is one thing. But Job's insistence on implicating God directly in the tragedies that may befall a good man is quite another thing. I doubt, therefore, whether these texts from Job chapters 1 and 2 figure much in the pastoral care of the sick and the bereaved in the modern Church, though in sturdier ages it seems that they did.

Those scholars who have assiduously ignored the quest for the historical Jesus because it was unintelligible, incoherent or just uninteresting must now take notice. With the publication of Jesus and Judaism [SCM, 1985] E. P. Sanders has taken a bold (though not unprecedented) and programmatic step towards making historical Jesus study intelligible, coherent and interesting. My aim here is to explore the program represented by Sanders' work and then to show how this work may actually lead to the demise of the quest of the historical Jesus.

Jesus' discourse at the Last Supper at least in its Johannine form is a thorough-going preparation of the eleven for their imminent bereavement. A preparation not in the sense that they are expected at once to understand all that is to happen to Jesus and to themselves because of him, but in the sense of a frame of reference to clarify their minds and sustain their hearts in the coming crisis. He communicates a perspective which will spring to life for them in the light of subsequent events, the assumption being that it is only through future happenings that the truth of his words at the Supper will come home.

In 1988 the Reformed Church in Bavaria commemorated the life and work of August Ebrard (1818–1888), the first Professor Ordinarius of Reformed Theology in the University of Erlangen. Ebrard is today almost completely forgotten; Karl Barth is reported to have opined that his theology was ‘deader than dead’. Yet he was a remarkable man, successively Professor in Erlangen, Konsistorialrat in Speyer, independent author and lecturer, finally minister of the French Reformed congregation in Erlangen (as his father had been long before). He contributed considerably to the maintenance and strengthening of the Reformed witness in Germany in the nineteenth century, took up the cudgels to defend the faith against D. F. Strauss on the one hand and Haeckel's Darwinism on the other, and published voluminous theological works, from biblical exegesis through church history to dogmatics, apologetics and practical theology, including liturgies, hymnology and sacramentalia. His interests were wider still; he was a kind of nineteenth century ‘renaissance man’, his studies extending inter alia to geology, mineralogy, musical theory and linguistics; learned, cultivated, busily writing up to the day of his death. Alongside his specifically theological works stand historical novels (written under the pen-name Gottfried Flammberg), poems, travel reports, an autobiography of Herculean proportions and such special gems as a System of Musical Acoustics and a Handbook of Middle Gaelic. Ground enough there alone for a Scot occupying Ebrard's chair a century after his death to look more closely at the man and his writings! Ebrard's papers are preserved in the Erlangen City Archives.

Many modern theologians, including Jürgen Moltmann, Wolfhart Pannenberg and Eberhard Jüngel have been influenced by Karl Barth; they also accept Karl Rahner's axiom that the immanent and economic trinity is identical. By accepting this axiom, however, they actually stand opposed to Barth's most basic theological insight, namely, that ‘a deliberate and sharp distinction between the Trinity of God as we may know it in the Word of God revealed, written and proclaimed, and God's immanent Trinity, i.e., between “God in Himself” and “God for us,” between the “eternal history of God and His temporal acts,”’ must be maintained in order to avoid confusing and reversing the role of Creator in relation to creature both theoretically and practically. This article will explore Barth's reasons for neither identifying, separating nor synthesizing the immanent and economic trinity; and will contrast his method with more recent theological approaches. We hope to show that the contemporary tendency to identify the immanent and economic trinity uncritically compromises God's freedom. Barth was concerned that Moltmann had subsumed ‘all theology in eschatology’:

To put it pointedly, does your theology of hope really differ at all from the baptized principle of hope of Mr Bloch? What disturbs me is that for you theology becomes so much a matter of principle (an eschatological principle).… Would it not be wise to accept the doctrine of the immanent trinity of God? Barth hoped that Moltmann would ‘outgrow’ this ‘onesidedness’.