Ernst Käsemann and the Specter of Apocalyptic

Christians should courageously defend the truth and right of a biblically apocalyptic worldview. At least in our time they should be and act apocalyptically. ¹

Ernst Käsemann famously claimed that “apocalyptic was the mother of all Christian theology.” ² This claim is more than a merely historical remark about the origins of Christian theology. Indeed, Käsemann’s work pointedly raises the question that animates the theme of this special issue: What theological difference does it make to reclaim apocalyptic, not only as the historical-theological seedbed in which Christian theology was born, but also as the “mother” to which Christian theology today must return? I contend that Käsemann’s retrieval of apocalyptic provides an important corrective—or, more strongly put, a disruption—of what one might call the “ecclesial turn” in contemporary Protestant theology. I propose that the time is ripe for a Christian theology “with an apocalyptic sting.” ³

Much ink has been spilled over the last several decades trying to articulate an adequate definition of this slippery buzzword, “apocalyptic.” When pressed to explain his own use of the word, Käsemann insisted that apocalyptic means “imminent expectation of the parousia.” ⁴ Apocalyptic as imminent expectation is, for Käsemann, a way of articulating the specific urgency characteristic of early Christian hope. It is shorthand for the radical and urgent hope that emerges from the promissory character of the gospel, the hope that one day soon God will make “all things new.” The reverse side of such apocalyptic hope in the present is a soberly realistic recognition that the modern world “come of age” remains a crucifying world, possessed by demonic powers manifesting themselves concretely in the global dominance of capitalism, militarism, and white supremacy. “Mammon is the God of our world,” Käsemann contends, and “the White Man, even in religion and theology,” seeks after “eternal life already on earth at the cost of all other creatures.” ⁵ Käsemann discerns that demonic manifestation of white supremacy is everywhere “tottering all over” and that it can no longer exercise its rule “without conjuring up a cosmic catastrophe.” ⁶ Käsemann insists that such apocalyptic realism about the present should not give way to despair. Instead, it should give rise to bodily resistance against idols, for the gospel hope is rooted in the promise of liberation for the oppressed of the earth. The message of the apocalyptic gospel is the promise of new life, a new future for “the damned of the earth as the God-willed liberation from their anxieties and distresses.” ⁷ In short, for Käsemann, “apocalyptic, Christianly understood, is a theology of liberation and salvation, not of anxiety.” ⁸

As imminent expectation, apocalyptic hope impinges upon the present by the charismatic power of the Holy Spirit in the struggle against the powers and in service to freedom. Faithful Christian witness consists of “exorcism” and “driving out evil spirits,” demystifying and demythologizing the ways in which white Western society, and the Western church in particular, closes its eyes and ears to the cries of the oppressed of the earth. ⁹ Such work is never to be “spiritualized” or “interiorized,” for the demonic possesses the earth and the body through structures of oppression and domination. The work of exorcism involves ideology-critique; it is a call to “battle with the principalities and powers of this age.” As such, the Spirit empowers the church to become the “resistance movement of Jesus Christ on earth,” not standing above the fray of politics, but operating antagonistically and disruptively in relation to demonic powers that wreak havoc upon God’s creation in the present time. ¹⁰ “In this worldwide class war,” Käsemann insists, “because it is on humanity’s side, Christianity must stand solely on the side of the revolutionary. Otherwise it must belong to the exploiters.” ¹¹

The final hope of the struggle is, for Käsemann, nothing short of the liberation of the cosmos from the powers of Sin and Death. Present apocalyptic hope is perhaps best expressed in the urgency of the second petition of the Lord’s prayer: “Thy kingdom come!” Such hope is rooted neither in the present order of things, nor in a locatable salvation-historical process, but strictly in the event of the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ made present and effective by the charismatic power of the Holy Spirit. Thus, Käsemann opposes apocalyptic to any eschatology understood in terms of an idealist doctrine of history, whether conceived theologically as Heilsgeschichte or in Hegelian terms as the unfolding of Absolute Spirit.

Apocalyptic also touches and inflects a range of Christian doctrine: theological anthropology is framed by awareness of how human beings are sites where social and cosmic powers find specific expression; Sin is recast as a power that concretely and materially possesses both human beings and sociopolitical structures; eschatology is rooted in a christology that attends to the ongoing significance of the cross of Christ as the break between and turning of the ages; the operation of grace in the biblical narrative is viewed in a way that eschews idealist and teleological conceptions of salvation-history; and, finally, apocalyptic maintains a dialectical tension between a theologia crucis and a theology of hope.

Claims for the contemporary theological relevance of apocalyptic may seem ludicrous to some, laughable to others, or at best, strange and out of step with the times. In the popular imagination, mere mention of the word conjures up fantastical scenes of the cataclysmic end of the world characterized by a great “rapture.” For many in the USA, apocalyptic has become almost inseparable from an evangelical fundamentalist contingent that has closely identified Christianity with nationalist and militarist neo-conservative politics. One has only to recall the speeches of former President George W. Bush following 9/11 to recall that the ideological dangers of apocalyptic discourse are all too real and powerful, and hardly limited to a sectarian minority. Even as I write these words, apocalyptic discourse is currently being used to characterize the recent election of Donald J. Trump as President of the United States and the white nationalist sentiment he has emboldened. ¹² Moreover, in the modern age apocalyptic imagery has long been invoked by Western colonizing powers and rebel groups alike to justify calls for unending, indiscriminate, and even total war waged against an “evil other” painted in mythical proportions. ¹³ Apocalyptic discourse seems particularly prone to reactionary ideological distortion and violence.

The dominant response to apocalyptic in the academy is scarcely more positive. While the continuation of a popular apocalyptic imagination makes for an intriguing object of anthropological, psycho-sociological, or historical fascination and study, the suggestion that apocalyptic discourse may still hold some contemporary theological relevance, as Cyril O’Regan has opined, meets with “embarrassment for an institution anxious about its disciplinary credentials and concerned about its credibility and standing in the modern world.” ¹⁴ For Christian theologians vying for a place in the academy and a public voice within an increasingly pluralistic and secular university, pursuit of a constructive theological retrieval of biblical apocalyptic is unlikely to appear to be the most promising path. Indeed, Lorenzo DiTommaso reflects a widely held view when he concludes, “Apocalypticism is an unhealthy worldview, particularly in its biblical form. It is inimical to a mature vision of human destiny, or any social order founded on humanistic ideals. It is hostile to life on Earth, especially in light of the nature and needs of contemporary society.” ¹⁵

While apocalyptic language and imagery remain prevalent in contemporary literature, film, poetry, and art, apocalyptic is not commonly viewed as a particularly helpful resource for systematic theology, not to mention theological ethics or political theology. After all, apocalyptic imagery of scenes of global destruction and radical social upheaval is hardly the material from which white Western academic theologians generally construct serviceable accounts of ethical and political life. And while science and studies on global climate change increasingly make an Armageddon-like scenario appear all-too-realistic, in a modern secular age virtually no one, outside a sectarian minority, is looking for answers about the future from theologians who style themselves as apocalypticists. As a consequence of what O’Regan calls “modernity’s sanitizing of religion and extrusion of otherness,” any retrieval of apocalyptic within the modern secular academy will inevitably encounter that sense of embarrassment, no matter what clarifications one offers concerning the meaning of “apocalyptic.” ¹⁶

Such embarrassment at apocalyptic discourse is not, however, merely a symptom of a secular world. The dominant historical trajectory of Christian theology itself has developed in largely “non-apocalyptic directions that variously feature doctrine, institution, spiritual and moral disciplines and practices.” ¹⁷ In other words, not only can apocalyptic theology be considered anti-secular or anti-modern: it has also been viewed as antagonistic to the Christian theological tradition itself. As O’Regan explains, there is a “general recognition that the emergence of catholic Christianity seriously debilitated, even if it did not sign the death warrant of, biblical apocalyptic, already riven by disappointment regarding the parousia.” ¹⁸ The mainstream theological tradition—both Catholic and Protestant—has always maintained a degree of suspicion regarding the place of apocalyptic theology: recall the Lutheran suppression of the revolutionary apocalypticism of Thomas Müntzer in the sixteenth century as well as the repression of many other iconoclastic, apocalyptic Anabaptists. ¹⁹ Thus, with some justification, O’Regan concludes, “the history of theology seems largely to be the history of the marginalization of apocalyptic.” ²⁰

Despite its marginalization and at times active repression in the course of Christian history, and despite the fact that much of contemporary theology has seemingly built a “cordon sanitaire around itself to repel apocalyptic infection,” O’Regan observes that time and again apocalyptic discourse returns to haunt Christian theology and practice. ²¹ Along similar lines, David Tracy has suggested that apocalyptic theology functions as a “corrective genre” characterized most acutely by its penchant for “explosive intensification and negations.” ²² Tracy argues that as a theological genre, apocalyptic surfaces especially in times of crisis, as a challenge and a reminder that the gospel is never merely a private affair, but a matter of political, historical—and even cosmic—significance.

Tracy observes that apocalyptic emerges theologically as a radical voice “from below,” prophetically confronting all forms of established political and ecclesial power. ²³ He helpfully points out the ways in which apocalyptic uniquely brings together a theology of the cross and a theology of liberation. On the one hand, apocalyptic theology confronts us with the “pain of the negative” in the proclamation of Christ crucified, recalling the ongoing reality of “untransformable” suffering in history and the “not yet” of the kingdom of God. ²⁴ On the other hand, apocalyptic theology burns with expectancy and hope for redemption in Jesus Christ and the advent of an unprecedented new creation. Against every idealistic conception of history as a dialectical synthesis of immanent processes, apocalyptic theology sets the God revealed in the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, that is, the God who identifies unreservedly with all those who are laid to waste by the march of history. In the face of the greatest despair, then, apocalyptic theology points to the divine promise of the imminence of the kingdom of God that will soon upend the world, the parousia of the crucified Son of Man, who does not make deals with the devil, but unmasks all demonic powers and sets free the oppressed, the enslaved, and the possessed.

In light of this, Tracy insists that apocalyptic “is not adequately described as simply the ‘context’ for the New Testament or as merely one of its major [literary] genres.” ²⁵ Rather, he asserts, “apocalyptic pervades the entire [New] Testament.” ²⁶ Yet another very different theological genre also pervades the New Testament: what Tracy characterizes as the “phenomenon known as ‘early Catholicism,’” that “discloses an entirely different world” from that of apocalyptic and stands in tension with it. ²⁷

The transition from early Christian apocalyptic to so-called “early Catholicism” involves a relaxing of tensions, a movement from upheaval to order and stability, a movement from “the tensive logic of superabundance” in Paul to the “more relaxed analogical language” of the Pastoral Epistles. ²⁸ Much of Tracy’s description reflects his close reading of Käsemann’s historical reconstruction of the theological tensions within the New Testament canon. In Tracy’s analysis, this development is not only historically inevitable it is also fundamentally positive—perhaps even providential—for it demonstrates that the gospel does not only encounter human subjects in the mode of apocalyptic crisis but is also to be translated and “mediated to the more ordinary reality of the everyday situation in which Christians must also live.” ²⁹

Tracy worries that a one-sided emphasis on apocalyptic leads one to “despise the ordinary,” ³⁰ while “early Catholicism” demonstrates that the “extraordinary” event of God’s self-revelation in Jesus Christ is properly mediated through “ordinary” realities, such as doctrine, analogy, and institutions. Apocalyptic serves as a necessary corrective to any reduction of the gospel to a tradition, institution, or set of doctrines; but the theological genre of “early Catholicism” in turn corrects for a one-sided emphasis on apocalyptic. Early Catholicism attempts to show the significance of the event of Jesus Christ to and for the ordinary—that is, the sense in which the Christ event is mediated in ongoing history—“in the everyday, the stable, the measured, the ordered, the nontensive, nonchaotic world of the ordinary.” ³¹

In significant ways, Tracy grasps the central features of Käsemann’s understanding of apocalyptic: its mood, its motives, its orientation, and its basic challenge to dominant forms of Christian theology and practice. Yet, although a sympathetic interpreter of apocalyptic, Tracy finally domesticates apocalyptic by situating it within a balanced and broader theological vision consistent with the mainline theological tradition of “early Catholicism.” ³² A dose of apocalyptic may be necessary at times, and may even serve an important therapeutic function—to call the church to greater self-reflection and self-criticism, and to recall the eschatological “not yet,” for example—but constructive theology and ethics can hardly be carried out and sustained in a wholly apocalyptic key.

But the challenge posed by apocalyptic theology is much more radical than Tracy perceives or wants to admit. For Käsemann, the two theological visions—the two worlds of apocalyptic and “early Catholicism”—cannot be united in a dialectical whole. Indeed, Käsemann emphasizes the fundamental incompatibility of these two different visions of the truth of the gospel, especially highlighting the extent to which the apocalyptic gospel has been consistently thwarted in the history of Christian theology in the name of the “great church,” beginning with theological developments within the New Testament itself.

While Käsemann admits a certain historical inevitability to the transition from apocalyptic to “early Catholicism,” he is not convinced that such a development—in which the apocalyptic rendering of the truth of the gospel undergoes drastic transformation and revision—is theologically benign. For Käsemann, the effects of these transformations are clear: ecclesiology and anthropology displace the apocalyptic priority of christology; a theology of the resurrection displaces the apocalyptic priority of the theology of the cross; pneumatology as Christian virtue displaces the apocalyptic priority of charismata as the eschatological power of the Holy Spirit; sacramentology displaces the apocalyptic priority on the secularity and “this-worldliness” of discipleship; salvation-history displaces the apocalyptic priority of the freedom of divine action and the interruptive character of grace; a theology that supports dominant conceptions of law and order displaces the apocalyptic priority of the poor, the oppressed, the outcasts, the rebels, the ungodly, and sinners. Consequently, contemporary scriptural interpretation and theology are confronted not so much with the task of unifying the worlds of apocalyptic and “early Catholicism” but with a host of significant material theological decisions.

Käsemann puts a further and fundamental question to any privileging of “early Catholicism” as a perspective that best does justice to the “ordinary” and “everyday”: namely, from whose perspective is the world “non-chaotic” and “non-tensive”? At what and whose cost? The gospel undoubtedly calls disciples into “everyday life,” but Käsemann insists that ordinary life is far from stable and non-chaotic. Ordinary life is rather better compared to a battleground of competing powers in relation to which no one can remain neutral. In Käsemann’s view, the call of discipleship in everyday life invariably leads one into a kind of militant revolutionary action in solidarity with the damned of the earth, action that is simultaneously politically antagonistic and contravenes all anti-God powers that seek to enslave the world. In short, Käsemann’s apocalyptic theology opens out onto a theology of liberation because the chaos of the world is only distant from those who “no longer allow themselves to be reminded, who in any case will not open their eyes and ears to the misery of Lazarus before their own door, or of those dying in distant lands.” ³³ In other words, Tracy’s description of “ordinary life” as the conditions under which the gospel is to be translated and mediated in a non-apocalyptic key betrays, from Käsemann’s viewpoint, a fundamentally white bourgeois perspective. Indeed, just this critique of white bourgeois stability consistently motivates Käsemann’s own constructive apocalyptic theology of liberation.

To raise the question of a constructive retrieval of apocalyptic is to invoke a certain kind of revenance, a return, a specter, and a haunting. ³⁴ Speaking directly into a contemporary theological climate in which theological ethics and politics has taken a sharp ecclesial turn, Käsemann’s theology invokes the specter of apocalyptic disruption. Indeed, a constructive retrieval of apocalyptic today will cut across certain recent movements within contemporary Protestant theology that have been preoccupied with the question of the survival of the church’s identity vis-à-vis modern political formations.

Over the past several decades concern for the preservation of the church’s distinctive identity—specifically its moral and sociopolitical identity—has taken center stage in many ecclesiological and theo-political conversations. Such concerns are perhaps most evident in the work of Stanley Hauerwas, John Milbank, and their students. The dominant consensus in this conversation has been that the old ways of thinking about the relationship of church and culture owed too much to Troeltsch and the liberal Protestant establishment. Against this comes a reassertion of the church’s visible distinctiveness and difference from the modern world and its leading political formations.

The resurgence of “political theology”—often developed under the guise of “ecclesiology”—exemplifies this preoccupation with the question of the church’s distinctive political identity. Its proponents articulate the doctrine of the church politically and to do so with particular—if not exclusive—attention to the unique theo-political significance of the church and its collection of core “practices.” ³⁵ Milbank, Cavanaugh, Bell, Smith, and Long, among others, labor to shift or recenter Christianity’s distinctive political vision away from the nation-state and back to its “proper” place, namely, the church and its practices. ³⁶

To insist, with Käsemann, that the Spirit’s work in the church does not operate according to the logic of identity preservation, but that it transgresses the “sacred” boundaries set up by the church, is inevitably to call into question programs oriented around the preservation of a specifically Christian culture, a polis, a “community of character,” a given Christian ontology or metaphysic, or the (re)establishment of a political identity or public. Such accounts are articulated today to combat the ostensible privatization of Christianity, that is to say, its depoliticization, its psychologization, and the evident loss of those categories by which Christianity formally understood its institutional life as a visible, public reality. Indeed, it has become something of a truism among postliberal and Radical Orthodox theologians that Christianity has become simply another option among many in an all-expansive global capitalist market, and to mourn, in this context, the perceived reduction of the church to a voluntary association that one may—or may not—join recreationally in one’s free time. To be sure, the concern for self-preservation and identity is not especially new in the history of Christian theological discourse, but it arises in especially problematic ways in the cultural and political climate of disestablishment in which Western mainline Christianity now finds itself.

Such accounts function as a kind of a theological defense reflex triggered by the disruption of Christianity’s power—political, economic, cultural, and social—over secular history and even over its own members. The consequence of Christianity’s disestablishment, it is argued, is the gradual erosion of shared moral norms and corrosion of commitment to common goods. One can see this concern, for instance, in the work of Alasdair MacIntyre. It is also present in the defense of natural law in the recent literature of the so-called “new natural law theorists,” such as Robert George. ³⁷ Moreover, many of today’s theologians worry that far from ushering in an “empty shrine” that respects “the diversity of human consciences,” ³⁸ Christianity’s disestablishment comes at the cost of a pernicious imperial expansion of global capitalism and the liberal nation-state’s own interests. Religion—the “holy”—has not so much been “subtracted” ³⁹ from public life as it has, in William Cavanaugh’s words, “migrated to a new realm defined by the nation-state” or the global free market. ⁴⁰

The problem is not so much that these contemporary theologians overstate the Christian case against liberal political and economic regimes. ⁴¹ Rather, it lies in fact that in such accounts, the pressing theological task is fundamentally and primarily a matter of the maintenance of the church and its institutions and traditional practices. Correlatively, theological reflection on the church and its political witness fixes upon the ways in which these institutions and practices provide resources for rethinking a properly “theo-political” vision. However, as the Dutch missiologist J.C. Hoekendijk once observed, within such a “concentric” view of the church, the call to mission is “often little else than a call to restore ‘Christendom,’ the Corpus Christianum, as a solid, well-integrated cultural complex, directed and dominated by the church.” ⁴² Furthermore, as Donald MacKinnon warned long ago, the sense of urgency that is palpably present in such accounts is “often nothing but a nervous feeling of insecurity, with the established church endangered; a flurried activity to save the remnants of a time now irrevocably past.” ⁴³ What is perhaps most necessary today is to heed the calls of figures such as Käsemann, Hoekendijk, and MacKinnon for the church to live an “exposed life” that is “stripped” of all security previously bestowed by accrued institutional and sociopolitical power. ⁴⁴

To invoke the specter of apocalyptic is to pose the challenge of a return to the roots of early Christian theology against the “early Catholicism” of this contemporary ecclesial turn, but not by way of a naïve appeal to a kind of principled primitivism—as if theological priority must always be granted to what happened “in the beginning,” so to speak. Rather, to reclaim apocalyptic for theology today is to pose the challenge of what is, in actuality, a perennial problem for Christian theology, namely, the “delay of the parousia.” ⁴⁵ Käsemann’s famous claim—“apocalyptic was the mother of all theology”—becomes relevant precisely at this point: for this claim puts the critical question of the theological implications of the vanquishing of apocalyptic expectation within the history of Christian theology and practice. ⁴⁶ Christian theology has sought in various ways to vanquish apocalyptic from its line of sight, and yet as Käsemann so poignantly warned, “One does not conquer apocalyptic and escape scot-free.” ⁴⁷

Käsemann’s polemical voice is desperately needed today, especially in relation to the variety of problems raised by the ecclesial turn in contemporary theology. For the ecclesial turn, when taken to its natural conclusion, enables an idealist vision of the church that subsumes the lordship of Jesus Christ within its own walls as a function of a nostalgic longing for security and stability, in what Willie Jennings has recently called “white masculine longing” for the stability of tradition. ⁴⁸ Against such a view, Käsemann’s apocalyptic theology insists that the church does not possess the gospel because Jesus Christ as the Crucified Nazarene remains Lord of his Body; neither can the Spirit be domesticated sacramentally or guaranteed institutionally through the continuity of tradition.

Käsemann argues that whenever the apocalyptic gospel is heard anew, it marks the “permanent crisis” of the established church. ⁴⁹ In this sense, his apocalyptic theology is unabashedly rebellious and persistently and passionately Protestant. The heart of the apocalyptic gospel, for Käsemann, lies in the proclamation of the offense of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ and the righteousness of God to justify the ungodly and to liberate the enslaved. The apocalyptic expectancy of early Christian theology, especially the apocalyptic theology of Paul, remains the indispensable starting point for a right hearing of the gospel in the here and now.

In Käsemann’s judgment the New Testament is a battleground: far from presenting a unified theological front, it represents a collection of documents that contain glimpses into serial conflicts, quarrelling theological factions, and opposing theological perspectives. Käsemann insisted that all attempts to harmonize the New Testament into some theologically coherent whole or tight doctrinal unity is not only intellectually dishonest but theologically inappropriate and unjustifiable. Käsemann maintained that the New Testament simply does not provide “a set of self-contained assertions so that the whole can be rightly conceived as a fixed number of dicta probantia.” ⁵⁰ Intrinsic to the occasional nature of the documents themselves is concern to address concrete questions, to refute particular errors, and to warn and to console specific individuals and groups. ⁵¹ As such, the canon of the New Testament cannot, Käsemann claimed, “constitute the foundation of the unity of the church”; the diversity of its documents rather provides the basis for a “multiplicity of confessions.” ⁵²

That the canon preserves within itself such radical theological difference among a multiplicity of confessions is not the final word on the matter, however; at least it cannot be for theological reflection. For there are points at which material theological decisions must be made, where mere theological disputes within the New Testament open up doctrinal disagreements and produce rifts in the Christian community. Käsemann reminds the contemporary church that the New Testament sets before the Christian disciple a serious challenge, namely, the ongoing theological task of “discerning the spirits.” ⁵³

To “discern the spirits” is, no doubt, a messy affair. It is an ongoing work, never settled. No tradition is sacrosanct, and no interpretation free from criticism—not even an apocalyptic interpretation. Yet, if the gospel is to take precedence over the biblical canon, if the voice of the Spirit is to take a certain precedence over Scripture, and if Christ is to take precedence over the community given to serve him and be his witnesses, then the work of interpretation—of discerning the word of the gospel in the here and now—is a never-ending theological task for the Christian community on its pilgrimage. ⁵⁴ The gospel does not come neatly packaged in a theological system or in the unity of the biblical canon, neither is theological discernment done by “saints already enjoying the beatific vision.” ⁵⁵ Instead, the theological task of “discerning the spirits” always takes place in the community of those “struggling in via,” perceiving the gospel among the confessional variety of the biblical canon—indeed “in spite of ” its multiplicity—and discovering the truth of the gospel for the world with and even at times over against the biblical canon. ⁵⁶

In both his life and theological work, Käsemann could be described as the twentieth-century apocalyptic Paulinist par excellence. In the name of Paul, Käsemann insisted that the apocalyptic gospel is a threat and crisis to the white bourgeois preoccupation with “law and order,” “stability,” “balance,” and “national security.” To the white bourgeois church existing only for its own self-preservation, closed in upon itself, complicit thereby in worldwide destruction, and possessed by tyrannical powers, Käsemann unwaveringly insisted on the apocalyptic gospel of revolutionary judgment and the call to solidarity and service in the world. To those crushed by the powers that enslave this world—the lost, the hungry, the poor, the widow, the outcast, the imprisoned, and those who suffer under the exploitation of white supremacy, hungering and thirsting for the righteousness and justice of God—Käsemann insisted upon the apocalyptic gospel of freedom and liberation. For the church to subordinate itself to the Word means that it must always remain open to hearing anew the apocalyptic element of the gospel.

The radicality of Käsemann’s theological voice has often been buried in academic historical-critical and exegetical discussion. While it has become commonplace to cite Käsemann as one of the most important figures in the twentieth-century retrieval of apocalyptic theology in New Testament studies, with few exceptions surprisingly little engagement with Käsemann has taken place outside of narrow exegetical discussions within Pauline scholarship. ⁵⁷ Yet, Käsemann is significant today because of the profound urgency of his theological voice and spirit. While no one can doubt that Käsemann took the historical-critical task of interpreting the New Testament very seriously, he was primarily motivated by the theological questions raised by the biblical texts and their pressing contemporary import, especially as it pertains to the task of preaching, questions of lived social and political existence, and the matter of discipleship of Jesus Christ in a world gone mad.