Philip Arthur Bence PhD Thesis - Research@StAndrews:FullText

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incarnation.
First, preaching is the only means by which modern
man (initially, at least) interacts with Christ.
Christ.
The fact of salvation is not such without the
preaching. There is no way of going behind the
preaching to a saving fact separable from the
preaching--whether to a 'historical Jesus' or
to a cosmic drama. Access to Jesus Christ
exists only in the preaching.1°2.
Second, true Christian preaching always does offer
The eschatological now of the death and
resurrection of Jesus is . . . not a past
moment in the vanishing sequence of time; it is
marked out as the eschatological now by being
always contemporary wherever the preaching
sounds. '°'
Thus, only preaching offers Christ; preaching always
offers Christ. This conjunction led Bultmann to the
further step of identifying Christ and preaching.
If the proclamation of the Word is a
continuation of the Christ event, and if Christ
is present in the word of the church, then the
conception as a whole, leads to the affirmation
that Christ is himself the Word.1"
Because Bultmann saw no means of accurate knowledge
of God beyond present experience, no access "to a
'historical Jesus' or to a cosmic drama," preaching moved
to the forefront of Bultmann's theology. For him, it is
in preaching (without doubt, primarily in preaching, if
not in preaching alone), Christ is present.
A view of preaching as incarnation is not, however,
tied to a Bultmannian hermeneutic. For example, Barth,
as noted above, also believed that God speaks his Word in
preaching. (But Barth also proposed that God's Word