I have been away from this blog for a while, due mostly to difficult life circumstances, but now I return to it. I have received some emails regarding previous posts; I try to respond as quickly as I can.
Of all the questers I've read, Schweitzer stands as the most poignant. This book in particular is probably essential reading for theologians, pastors, serious Christians, and skeptics. Since it was published in 1911, it has stood as a landmark book. In the study of Jesus, no scholar can completely ignore Schweitzer. He writes:
“The critical study of the life of Jesus has been for theology a school of honesty. The world had never seen before, and will never see again, a struggle for truth so full of pain and renunciation as that of which the lives of Jesus of the last hundred years contain the cryptic record…
Schweitzer begins his critique with an astounding survey of all of the German scholarship on Jesus, taking us through the Eschatology focus of Reimarus, the early rationalists, the fictitious lives, Paulus, Strauss, Bauer, Renan, and finally Wrede.
N.T. Wright, and other so-called “third questers” are often credited for comprehending Jesus in his Jewish context. Yet many of them owe their views to Schweitzer who was among the first to try to place Jesus in his Jewish surroundings.
Schweitzer, more than anyone else at the time, summed up the basic point of German scholarship, and concluded that the Jesus of history was quite alien to the Jesus of faith. Like almost all scholars, he wrestles with the enigma of Jesus as presented in the book of Mark, and concludes that Jesus—and thus Christianity was shaped more by the failure of the Parousia (the second coming) to take place. Jesus in his own lifetime expected a dramatic eschatological occurrence of redemption and salvation for Israel, which failed to come. His disciples chose to see the redemption in his death, and later his resurrection.
The whole history of “Christianity” down to the present day, that is to say, the real inner history of it, is based on the delay of the Parousia, the non-occurrence of the Parousia, the abandonment of eschatology, the progress and completion of the ‘de-eschatological’ of religion, which has been connected therewith. (p.358)
Schweitzer was among the first to recognize and historically trace a dramatic disappointment in Christianity, underneath its message of universal triumph.
There is nothing more negative than the result of the critical study of the life of Jesus….the historical Jesus will be to our time a stranger and an enigma. The study of the Life of Jesus…set out in quest of the historical Jesus, believing that when it had found Him, it could bring Him straight into our time as a Teacher and Saviour. It loosed the bands by which He had been riveted for centuries to the stony rocks of ecclesiastical doctrine, and rejoiced to see life and movement coming into the figure once more, and the historical Jesus advancing, as it seemed, to meet it. But He does not stay; He passes by our time and returns to His own. What surprised and dismayed the theology of the last forty years was that despite, all forced and arbitrary interpretations, it could not keep Him in our time, but had to let him go.
Schweitzer the historian realizes that it is not the study of History that can discover Jesus, he writes:
“History can destroy the present; it can reconcile the present with the past; can even to a certain extent transport the present into the past; but to contribute to the making of the present is not given unto it.”
Schweitzer at spiritual odds with his historical conclusions recognizes a kind of sincerity, which feels to him like truth.
Jesus means something to our world because a mighty spiritual force streams forth from Him and flows through our time also. This fact can neither be shaken nor confirmed by any historical discovery. It is the solid foundation of Christianity.
With a kind of anguish, Schweitzer recognizes the temptation for the reader to read himself into Jesus’ life.
It is nothing less than a misfortune for modern theology that it mixes history with everything and ends by being proud of the skill with which it finds its own thoughts.
Many of Schweitzer’s views have been disproved, by modern scholarship. He did not have access to the Dead Sea Scrolls, and one wonders what he would make of their cryptic resemblances to the New Testament. Yet, he stands as the most important Jesus scholar of the 20th century. Schweitzer was a great man, a wonderful musician, a missionary, and a winner of the Nobel Prize. It was as if he thought of St. Paul in First Corinthians 13, and the moving poem he quotes of love, hope, and faith, but the greatest of these is love. After an incredibly vigorous and poignant historical survey, Schweitzer had no faith, no hope. But he retained love.
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