Its attempts to create a new dogma hardly need historical description; they are alive in us. It is certainly interesting to see how modern thought has found a way to penetrate ancient dogmatic systems and, on the basis of the eternal ideas contained therein, has formed new constructions… But the real truth about what we mean by history in this case, we comprehend from our own inner experience… We have not yet reached a complete reconciliation between history and We do not know what will be the ultimate goal towards which we are moving, and what will give new life and new regulatory principles to the coming centuries. We can only dimly foresee that this will be the great work of some all-powerful original genius, whose truth and rightness will be proved by the fact that we, doing insignificant things, will do our best to prevent him – we who imagine-that nothing is so ardently desired as the appearance of a sufficiently powerful genius, who has the Supreme power to show the world a new

For this reason, the history of the critical study of the life of Jesus has a higher intrinsic value than the history of the study of an ancient doctrine or the attempt to create a new one. It must describe the most terrible thing that the religious consciousness has ever ventured to do and put it into practice. In studying the history of Christian dogma, German theology took into account the past; in its attempt to create a new dogma, it sought to preserve a place for religious life in modern thought; in studying the life of Jesus, she worked for the future, for she held a pure faith in the truth, not realizing where the study might lead.

Moreover, in this case we are dealing with the very vital phenomenon in world history. Man has come to rule the world; he has, as history shows, ruled not only for good but also for destruction; he has destroyed the world in which he was born; the spiritual life of our time seems to be perishing in His hands, for he is fighting against our thinking, which contains a host of dead ideas with the help of spiritual forces over That He continues, in spite of everything, to rule as the only Great and only True one in the world whose existence He denied, is a Prime example of the antithesis between spiritual and natural truths, which underlies all life and all events, and through It manifests itself in the realm of history»