Schweitzer: The Quest For The Historical Jesus

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Albert Schweitzer

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Albert Schweitzer, (1875 – 1965)

Schweitzer, a Lutheran, challenged both the secular view of Jesus as depicted by historical-critical methodology current at his time in certain academic circles, as well as the traditional Christian view.

He depicted Jesus as one who literally believed the end of the world was coming in his own lifetime and believed himself to be a world savior.

He received the 1952 Nobel Peace Prize for his philosophy of "Reverence for Life", expressed in many ways, but most famously in founding and sustaining the Albert Schweitzer Hospital in Africa.

As a music scholar and organist, he studied the music of German composer Johann Sebastian Bach and influenced the Organ reform movement

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The Quest ends the First Quest

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S. reviewed all former work on the "historical Jesus" back to the late 18th century. He showed that the image of Jesus had changed with the times and outlooks of the various authors.

He loved the beauty of writings that dessimate the Christ of Christianity while making progres in critical interpretation.

S. holds that "The Jesus of Nazareth who came forward publicly as the Messiah, who preached the ethic of the kingdom of God, who founded the kingdom of heaven upon earth and died to give his work its final consecration never existed."

His work effectively ended the first quest, saying that scholars had accomplished much of the needed work and were just repeating each other.

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The Problem of Historical-Critical Research on Jesus

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To put it briefly: Does the difficulty of explaining the historical personality of Jesus lie in the history itself, or only in the way in which it is represented in the sources ? (17)

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Assumptions:

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- Naturalistic perspective, miracles are myth or literary constructs, never reality. (everywhere)

- Synoptic Gospels as interdependent (Griesbach). 13.

- Markian priority "The desire to escape in some way from the alternative between the Synoptists and John was native to the Marcan hypothesis." (200) "In the course of time Weizsäcker, like Holtzmann, advanced to the rejection of any possibility of reconciliation, and gave up tbe Fourth Gospel as an historical source." (218)

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Harnack Influence:

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The supra-mundane Christ and the historical Jesus of Nazareth had to be brought together into a single personality at once historical and raised above time. That was accomplished by Gnosticism and the Logos Christology. (3)

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Hates Chalcedon, loves those who also hate it

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We must leave behind what we leamed in our catechism regarding the metaphysical Divine Sonship, the Trinity, and similar dogmatic conceptions, and go out into a wholly Jewish world of thought (17)

For hâte as well as love can write a Life of Jesus, and the greatest of them are written with hâte: that of Reimarus, the Wolfenbüttel Fragmentist, and that of David Friedrich Strauss. (4)

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Hates: Schleiermacher's dialectic

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He cornes to the facts with a ready-made dialectic apparatus and sets his puppets in lively action. Schleier- macher's dialectic is not a dialectic which générâtes reality, like that of Hegel of which Strauss availed himself, but merely a dialectic of exposition. In this literary dialectic he is the greatest master that ever lived. (62)

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Loves

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1. Considered as a literary work, Strauss's first Life of Jesus is one of the most perfect things in the whole range of leamed literature. (78).

2. Keim who argued for Jesus developing ideas of his role. "Nothing deeper or more beautiful has since been written about the development of Jesus." (214)

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Progress in Critical Studies = distinction and separation

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Progress always consiste in taking one or other of two alternatives, in abandoning the attempt to combine them

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Three main alternatives

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1. Strauss: Either purely historical or purely super-natural

2. Tübingen school and Holtzmann: Either Synoptic or Johannine

3. Weiss: Either eschatological or non-eschatological

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Results:

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The Jesus of Nazareth who came forward publicly as the Messiah, who preached the ethic of the Kingdom of God, who founded the Kingdom of Heaven upon earth, and died to give His work its final consécration, never had any existence. He is a figure designed by rationalism, endowed with life by liberalism, and clothed by modern theology in an historical garb.

But the truth is, it is not Jesus as historically known, but Jesus as spiritually arisen within men, who is significant for our time and can help it (399)