Johann Gottfried von Herder on Jesus

God's Kingdom into Reality through Jesus

Since it is the basic tenet of Christian faith that Jesus of Nazareth was this messianic figure and as such converted the future kingdom of God into a present reality to be perceived by the faithful, Herder assigned to Jesus’s followers —  disciples, apostles, evangelists (p. 240)


Jesus as Humanistic Teach

presentation of Jesus as a great humanistic teacher for an audience in all parts of the Greco-Roman world.  Hermeneutically, a reader’s attention should again focus on the spirit of the respective works of each individual evangelist. (p. 241)

 Christoph Bultmann, "Herder’s Biblical Studies" in  A Companion to the Works of Johann Gottfried Herder. Edited by Hans Adler and Wulf Koepke. New York: Camden House, 2009. 


Jesus as Historical Truth

To sum up the present subject and move on to the two following sections, a sermon from 1788 illustrates Herder’s systematic construction of the first Trinitarian sequence: by creation man received the gift of “Vernunft,” reason; salvation through Jesus Christ is passed on as a “historische Wahrheit” (historical truth); and sanctification remains a “praktische Wahrheit und Hoffnung” (practical truth and hope) (p. 255)

 


Jesus Ideal in Religious Movement

Christianity, which Herder regards as a spiritual movement toward the purest and most consistent form of religion, passes on elements of Jesus’s personal ideals and puts them in a universal perspective. (p. 255)
 



Jesus Christ as Moral Revelation

Christ reveals to us the moral governance of God in the world as a great, invisible scale of actions and consequences.

Martin Kessler, "Herder’s Theology" in  A Companion to the Works of Johann Gottfried Herder. Edited by Hans Adler and Wulf Koepke. New York: Camden House, 2009. 

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