- Future Students - Current Students - Faculty & Staff Semper
Informanda: Prolegomenon "The Light of the Gentiles” This is an
excerpt from Jaroslav Pelikan's "Jesus Through the Centuries:
His Place in the History of Culture" (New Haven, Conn.: Yale,
1985), 34-35. "Nothing is so incredible," Reinhold Niebuhr has
said, "as an answer to an unasked question." He went on to use
that epigram as a basis to divide human cultures into those
"where a Christ is expected" and those "where a Christ is not
expected." But the disciples of Jesus, in their effort to
explain the meaning of his message and work to their work during
the first three or four centuries, carried out their mission on
the growing assumption that there was not culture "where a
Christ is not expected" and that therefore, in his person and in
his teaching, in his life and in his death, Jesus represented
the divine answer to a quest that had in fact been asked
everywhere, the divine fulfillment of an aspiration that was
universal, in short, what one of th