1 Foreword

The experience of Christianity does not and cannot claim to be immune to history. It cannot because it has inherited from Israel the principle of the narratability of its past (what the biblical Greek calls λόγος),¹ and that instance of the intelligibility of its unfolding in time has even entered the New Testament canon (Luke’s διήγησις).² It cannot do so moreover because, in the encounter with the cultures of the peoples in which the claim …