Martin Kessler, "Herder’s Theology" in A Companion to the Works of Johann Gottfried Herder. Edited by Hans Adler and Wulf Koepke. New York: Camden House, 2009.
Since it is the basic tenet of Christian faith that Jesus of Nazareth was this messianic figure and as such converted the future kingdom of God into a present reality to be perceived by the faithful, Herder assigned to Jesus’s followers — disciples, apostles, evangelists (p. 240)
presentation of Jesus as a great humanistic teacher for an audience in all parts of the Greco-Roman world. Hermeneutically, a reader’s attention should again focus on the spirit of the respective works of each individual evangelist. (p. 241)
Christoph Bultmann, "Herder’s Biblical Studies" in A Companion to the Works of Johann Gottfried Herder. Edited by Hans Adler and Wulf Koepke. New York: Camden House, 2009.
To sum up the present subject and move on to the two following sections, a sermon from 1788 illustrates Herder’s systematic construction of the first Trinitarian sequence: by creation man received the gift of “Vernunft,” reason; salvation through Jesus Christ is passed on as a “historische Wahrheit” (historical truth); and sanctification remains a “praktische Wahrheit und Hoffnung” (practical truth and hope) (p. 255)
Christianity, which Herder regards as a spiritual movement toward the purest and most consistent form of religion, passes on elements of Jesus’s personal ideals and puts them in a universal perspective. (p. 255)
Christ reveals to us the moral governance of God in the world as a great, invisible scale of actions and consequences. (???)