Two ways of making it viable which have been explored turn out upon examination to be ultimately unsatisfactory. The first, which brings together thinkers from Lessing in the eighteenth century to Bultmann in the twentieth, follows the line indicated above, of doing the historical work in order to move beyond it to an ultimate truth which is beyond space and time, outside history altogether. What then emerges is a timeless message, a timeless truth, or a timeless call to decision. This is the thing we can use today. Such a ‘timeless theology’ is then the real object of the historical quest.
