What did the changed view of early Christianity mean? After the First World War, God’s sending his son

into the world was no longer viewed in Protestant theology as a rational decision by God, but as  a totally free decision of a sovereign deity freed from all historical constraints. In other words, God could have sent Jesus 500 years earlier or 1,000 years later. The necessary rational truth of early Christianity became the random historical truth of Jesus. Protestant research on Jesus “freed” Jesus’ person and message from all conditions of spiritual history and its historical setting.

 

Jesus was suddenly placed as an erratic block in a historical landscape with which he did not communicate. Attempts to understand Jesus from the Jewish point of view can’t really weaken this impression.