Through a collection of materials that were marketed, published, and renumerated, the "New Apologetic" would give a reckoning for Christian Faith in speech with the modern World : in short, the first evangelical Work Academy was established.
Due to the founding of the Deutsche Kirchen in the course of the year 1933, especially the meeting at the Berlin Sports Palace, the book addressed the themes posed by National Socialism: Führer-headship, obedience-principle, Jewdom, and the Race Question.
Along with the pastor of Dahlemer, Martin Niemöller, and the (at that time) General Secretary of the DCSV (Deutschen Christlichen Studentenvereinigung) Hanns Lilje, Künneth had founded in May 1933 the Young Reformation Movement (Jungreformatorische Bewegung), which opposed the co-opting of the Lutheran Evangelical Church by the Nazi state.
In the spring of '35, he circulated a 200-page reply to the standard work on Nazi race theory, Alfred Rosenberg's Mythus des 20 Jahrhunderts.
Based on its large success (36000 copies in three months) the Gestapo replied by questioning him, closing the Apologetischen Centrale, and banning his works.
Unfavorably for his memory, Künneth had during the early Reich period spoken of (limited) cooperation with the Gestapo in the matter of information sharing concerning religious minorities like Jehovah's Witnesses.
Künneth interpreted Bultmann's challenge to mythologized Christianity as a second Confessional fight, and became the leading member of the group of "No Other Gospel", along with Peter Beyerhaus, Paul Deitenbeck, Rudolf Baumer, Gerhard Bergmann, and Wilhelm Busch.
He is able to achieve much the same end by adopting something' like Barth's insistence that though the event of the resurrection truly occurred in our world, it "transcends" historical causality and thus is (fortunately or unfortunately) undetectable by the historian's methods.
This, in fact, is just what Adolf Harnack had done in Germany, as Arnold was writing in England : Dogma was interpreted, via Higher Criticism, to be a Greek addition to the pure New Testament.
Künneth's reply to Harnack's cultured successors is to explain Aberglaube neither in pietistic terms of a natural Jesus, nor in Bultmann's existential manner of essential myth.
His apologetic for the Resurrection, then, is dogmatic and historical at once : he appeals to the Jewish materialistic understanding of the totality of death in judgement, as well as the philosophical inadequacy of ethic-moral explanations that presume upon the immortality of the soul.
Künneth would have accepted few of the modern Church's efforts to defend the Resurrection, whether in Van Til's presuppositions, retreatist Pietism that avoids debating the central fact of the religion, or liberal accommodations to the spirit of free inquiry.
Theologie der Auferstehung is tightly argued, copiously footnoted, and conceived with vision : it is no accident that he shares an affinity with Eastern theology on this point (regardless of their emphasis on the Incarnation), noting that the Evangelical Churches in Russia have "a profound grasp of the Easter Act of Jesus Christ" (p. 19).
Moltmann may have emphasized the cross, and the Catholic Church the Incarnation, but it is true to assert that for Künneth, the Resurrection is the Archimedean point of eschatology, the meaning of time, history, miracles, dogma, and all else beside.
This reprinted "monograph" on the Resurrection was also a reaction to Paul Althaus' doctrines, which he partly agreed with, but who had criticized the original edition, and to whom Künneth respectfully responded.
Arguing from (for him) the reliable witness of Scripture, dogmatically defended, the decisive question for Künneth becomes whether or not the Resurrection appearances of the Risen One were basically of the same nature as the prophetic visions of the Spirit in the Old Testament, which he defined as "an emerging reality which lays hold of man, and is accompanied at the same time by adutions which communicate new knowledge."
In the place of Yahweh, walking and eating, appears the risen Lord, bearing in his veiled garb, "the marks of the Pilgrim God" (citing E. Fascher, Deus Invisibilis, 1931).
However, noting that the early Church did not place the visions of martyrs on a par with the appearances to the disciples, and insisting that the Resurrection is sui generis among the miracles of God, he cites his old teacher Schlatter: If the disciples had considered their faith in Jesus to be the product of movements within their own souls, then instead of the Church there would have been a body of mystics busy creating in themselves the ecstatic state by means of which the Christ becomes visible also to them.
Geschichte des Christus, 520/523 Building his case he continues: "The Risen One is neither a fantasy, nor a theophany, but the appearance of a new, living mode of existence.
Künneth argues that this was the reason the Church attached importance enough to the receivers of the appearances to make them eligible to be Apostles, especially proven in the case of Saint Paul.
An Apostle had to have eaten and broken bread with the Risen One, or in Paul's case, been confronted on the road to Damascus, an ophthe secondarily attested by supporting visions to other Christians (as requiring a second witness, being an exception that proved the rule).
Künneth rejects the classic Lutheran commentator Quenstadt's definition of Christ's new body: "reproductio sive reparatio of precisely the same body as was destroyed by death, ex atomis sue particulis illius corporis hinc inde disiectis atque dissipatis"(p. 88), just as he rejects Bultmann's mythical Christ.
In this, he concurs with Bultmann, although he disagrees with Emil Brunner that one cannot make dogmatic, plausible, and adequate statements about what happened in the Resurrection Ur-Wunder.
Nor does he believe that the new, paradox Christology of his day does anything more than restate the problem more eloquently: "it does not take us beyond the balanced static relationship between the historic man and the reigning Christ, beyond the basic starting point of the two-nature doctrine" (p116).
Künneth goes so far as to say "we have to consider whether the post-Easter situation may not have led Paul to a profounder and more universal Christological knowledge than was possible to Jesus before his resurrection" (p120 - John 1:1, 8:58, 17:5,24; Phil 2:5ff).
Pre-existence refers to the Sonship, not the archonic majesty of the Father [one might rightly note, in this, a sympathy towards the Orthodox rejection of Filioque in the Creed].
15:45–47: "The second man is from heaven", noting that he disagrees with his contemporary, Paul Althaus on precisely this point : Jesus receives majesty in Matthew 28:18, not before.
In separating the issue from the Eucharist, and in essentially coming down on the side of Calvin's principle, Künneth has driven a wedge into dogmatic discussions of God that would prohibit such discussions apart from the doctrine and the historical reality of the Resurrection : in fact, he has conjoined them in the person and work of the Son, the bearer of both the infinite (in latent, pre-existent, and divinely right form) and the finite, through the vehicle of servanthood to both God and man.
It is important to remember that for Künneth, Christ assumes our mortality in more than the fashion of "putting on the clothes of our flesh" (the Gnostic view of appearances), but that he is not half-human, nor is Jesus subordinated to "time-bound humanity" : he is the transcendent Son.
If we accept Placher's "post-liberal" reasoning on the subject, the answer as to how he does this is that he returns to the issue of the extra-Calvinisticum : that is, he returns to a wrestling with Christology that accepts the Nicene Creed, but that (unlike Logos Christianity), is unwilling to interpret the difficult Pauline passages about the Recapitulation and the relationship between the Father and the Son solely in light of a simplistic and literal reading of the first chapter of John.