If the disciples had looked for the basis of their faith in Jesus to the internal movements of their soul, the church would have turned into a gathering of mystics who spent their time trying to produce within them the ecstatic condition by which the Christ would become visible also to them.
The idea, however, that it was Christianity's calling to enhance its emotions to such a degree that it would culminate in a vision of Jesus wherein the assurance of salvation was rooted or completed is not interwoven with early Christian history. The disciples always and solely, by a sober use of the idea of truth, understood faith in such a way that what happened showed them what God was and did, so that the objectiveness of an accomplished fact would present the basis for their conviction and the goal for their will.
The Easter account did not create the effort in the disciples to retreat into their inner lives and to seek there the revelation of God that world history denied them. Conversely, their lives rather received its basis and its power from the event that came to them externally.
If the disciples' conviction of having seen Jesus once more subsequent to his death was derived from visionary states of being, the consequences of this process would have had to be revealed in the entire state of piety.
As a result, we would have received in the place of Christianity a religion in which the individual elevated himself to God one way or another.
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Adolf Schlatter (1852 - 1938)
Swiss NT scholar. Born in St. Gall, he studied theology at Basle and Tübingen. His later essay on J.T. Beck* suggests a primary influence on his thought. After a pastorate in Switzerland he taught at Bern (1880- 88) before becoming NT professor successively at Griefswald (1888), Berlin (1893), and Tübingen (1898) where he remained until retirement in 1922. He was allied with no school, ecumenical in outlook, and concerned to mediate between liberals and Pietists.With A.H. Cremer* he edited from 1897 the Beiträge zur Förderung Christlicher Theologie, to which he frequently contributed and on whose origins and importance for his own theological work he bore witness. His theological writing from Der Glaube im Neuen Testament (1885) to his mature Theology of the NT in two volumes-Die Geschichte des Christus (1921) and Die Theologie der Apostel (1922)-puts the emphasis on the importance of Jesus, finding anchorage in the facts of faith rather than in speculative thought. Schlatter stressed that both theology and history must not forget God, and he wrote histories both of Israel from Alexander to Hadrian (1901) and of the early church (1926; ET 1955). His specific studies on NT books displayed similar independence; he was one of the few to break with the trend of his times to continue support for the priority of Matthew.