The Certainty of Faith and the Probabilities of Salvation History

The relation of faith and history is the central issue in theology. This is why nothing should be claimed for theology that is not also history. Since the early apologists in the second century, Christian theology largely assumed the events of biblical history were to be taken at face-value. With the rise of the modern historical con-sciousness theology could no longer be naive about what counts as his-tory. One of the challenges was the application of modern historical criticism to the Bible. Modern theology sought to address this problem largely by assuming a fact-value dichotomy. This dichotomy entailed a sepa-ration between the detection of facts on the one hand, and the meaning of those facts on the other hand, as if one could exist without the other. The result was that modern theology generally assumed a divorce between the real Jesus of history and the Christ of faith. This work examines the main modern theologies which have attempted to reconcile the certainty of faith and the probabilities of historical events.