There were always the disguised enemies of Christianity, from the Gnostics up until today, who wanted to remove its “Old Testament.” A God who would be only Spirit, no longer the Creator who gave his Law to the Jews; a Christ who would be only Christ, no longer Jesus, and a world that would be only still universe whose center would no longer be the Holy Land—these would certainly no longer offer any resistance to deification and idol worship; but there would also be nothing more in them that would call the soul out from the dream of this deification back into unredeemed life; it would not only be lost, no, it would stay lost. . . . The historical Jesus must always take back from the ideal Christ the pedestal under his feet upon which his philosophical or nationalistic worshippers would like to set him, for an “idea” unites in the end with every wisdom and every self-conceit and confers upon them their own halo. But the historical Christ, precisely Jesus the Christ in the sense of the dogma, does not stand on a pedestal; he really walks in the marketplace of life and compels life to keep still under his gaze.