Page 24 - Remembering the Future Preview Pages

Introduction
tered or distorted by the Gospels, but it does mean that they are in- terpreted and presented in the light of the encounter with the risen Christ. This applies also to St Paul: his Christology is based on his encounter with the risen Christ, an encounter which was a sine qua non conditio for genuine apostolicity and the apostolic kerygma (Acts 1:22; 1 Cor 9:11; 1 Jn 1:1; etc.).
Oscar Cullmann has pointed out and emphasized the impor- tance of the post-Easter appearances of Christ for the emergence and formation of Christian worship.28 We need not repeat here his argu- ments. Suffice to mention only the trivial use of the appellation “Lord” in our prayers to Christ or even in just our common refer- ences to him. It is normally forgotten that this term was originally used to indicate and proclaim the eschatological subjection of all things, including above all the power of death, to the risen Christ (Phil 2:14; 3:21; 1 Cor 15:2, 7). In other words we worship the historical Christ only because he is the risen one, the eschatological Lord, and we do so on the basis of the apostolic testimony that the risen Christ was encountered by the disciples who had seen, touched (1 Jn 1), and, above all, eaten with him (Acts 10:41; Lk 24:42; Jn 21:16) within his- torical time. It is this intrusion of the eschatological Christ into his- tory that constitutes the source of worshiping him as the Lord to whom every knee shall bow (Phil 2:10), the Lord over evil and death itself. Take away these post-Easter encounters and the entire biblical Christology of Christ’s divinity—indeed the whole content of the Gospels—collapses together with Christian worship as a whole.
Christianity, therefore, in all its basic claims and existential im- plications, depends entirely on the experience of the intrusion of the eschata into history and the interpretation and reception of the tra- dition via its encounter with the future. To employ Hans-Georg Gadamer’s terminology, it is in the fusion of the “horizon” of the past with the “horizon” of the future that the past acquires its true meaning, its hermeneutics. For Christian theology, the past is not understood and interpreted by being placed in the horizon of the present, as it is for Gadamer, but in that of the future. The present emerges from this encounter of the past with the future either as a
28 See Oscar Cullmann, Early Christian Worship, trans. A. S. Todd and J. B. Torrance (London: SCM Press, 1953), pp. 14–20.
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