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In earlier writings I've sometimes distinguished the original revisionary strategy of "double rapprochement," as I've called it, from "fundamentalist preservation," on the one side, and "modernist accommodation," on the other. What Sumner makes clear, however unintentionally, is that these two extreme alternative strategies are, in fact, mirror images of one another – -- precisely because each, in its way, allows the "situation" to dominate the "message." Of course, it is the mark of the "orthodox" to focus so sharply on the mote in the "revisionary's" eye as to miss the beam in her or his own. But, as Willi Marxsen so often stressed, whenever one holds that some particular interpretation of the Christian witness in the past is the sole adequate interpretation, one allows the past situation in whose terms the interpretation perforce was cast to become lord over the Christian witness, instead of remaining always only its servant, by providing concepts/terms for more or less adequately interpreting that witness in and for that particular situation. To this extent, Karl Barth is exactly right to insist that theology must always be done anew and ab ovo – -- as a direct response to the apostolic kerygma itself, rather than as a reiteration of some later response to it.

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