THE QUEST OF THE HISTORICAL JESUS: A CRITICAL STUDY OF ITS PROGRESS FROM REIMARUS TO WREDE
BY ALBERT SCHWEITZER; Translated by W. Montgomery
1906; First English Edition, 1910; Third Edition, 1954, S. WALTER STEWART LIBRARY 232.9 S; Electronic Edition by Peter Kirby, 2001
http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/schweitzer/
THE MYSTERY OF THE KINGDOM OF GOD: THE SECRET OF JESUS’ MESSIAHSHIP AND PASSION
BY ALBERT SCHWEITZER
1914 [1901] London: Adam and Charles Black, Translated by Walter Lowrie, 275 pages
NORTH YORK LIBRARY 232.9 S
THE PSYCHIATRIC STUDY OF JESUS: EXPOSITION AND CRITICISM
BY ALBERT SCHWEITZER
1948 [1913] Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, Translated by Charles R. Joy, 79 pages
FAIRVIEW LIBRARY 232.9 SCH
A Book Review by Joseph Ng
June 2004
It took the world by surprise when Albert Schweitzer (1875 – 1965), a promising young philosopher, musician, and theologian announced that he was giving up his celebrity options in Europe and going as a medical missionary to the disease-ridden depths of Africa. So serious he was, that he immediately, at the age of 30, began the study of medicine, graduating eight years later and leaving the same year for Lambaréné, Gabon.
Pictures
from Albert Schweitzer (On the edge of the primeval forest & More from
the primeval forest: experiences and observations of a doctor in equatorial
Africa, 1948) show him sitting pensively overlooking a steaming jungle
river, diligently putting in piles for the first hospital in the area, meeting
a newly landed mental patient in chains, and posing with young African children
at his hospital and school complex. Appealing to the New Testament account of
the rich man (“Dives”) and Lazarus, the brilliant thinker became the social
conscience of the European world.[1]
It was during his ministry in Africa that Schweitzer protested the
proliferation of nuclear weapons and advocated “Reverence for Life,” a labour
that was recognised with the Nobel Peace Prize for 1952.
The surprise that awaited Schweitzer, though, was that the missionary agency that had issued the urgent call for missionaries, and for which he prepared a profession in medicine, rejected him. The Paris Missionary Society was concerned about his theological beliefs: “it would only intensify their problem by encouraging intellectuals and freethinkers who could only disrupt the mission enterprise and confuse the natives with their theological improvisations... They were not about to sponsor Schweitzer and open the floodgates to other liberals and radicals.”[2] But nothing could deter Schweitzer, who went on to become an icon in many a gallery of missionaries.
But what possibly could be about Schweitzer’s theology that perturbed the mission board? Was there something about what he believed that should give pause to our hailing him as a Christian missionary?
Schweitzer’s books The Psychiatric Study of Jesus, Mystery of the Kingdom of God, and The Quest of the Historical Jesus provide a glimpse into the heart and mind of a most extraordinary figure of history.
DESCRIPTION
The Quest of the Historical Jesus is undoubtedly Schweitzer’s best-known work. It comprises 20 chapters:
- The Problem
- Hermann Samuel Reimarus
- The Lives of Jesus of the Earlier Rationalism
- The Earliest Fictitious Lives of Jesus
- Fully Developed Rationalism - Paulus
- The Last Phase of Rationalism - Hase and Schleiermacher
- David Friedrich Strauss - The Man and his Fate
- Strauss's First "Life of Jesus"
- Strauss's Opponents and Supporters
- The Marcan Hypothesis
- Bruno Bauer
- Further Imaginative Lives of Jesus
- Renan
- The "Liberal" Lives of Jesus
- The Eschatological Question
- The Struggle against Eschatology
- Questions regarding the Aramaic Language, Rabbinic Parallels, and Buddhistic Influence
- The Position of the Subject at the Close of the Nineteenth Century
- Thoroughgoing Scepticism and Thoroughgoing Eschatology
- Results
In the time of rampant rationalism and theological liberalism in German scholarship, where most scholars rejected the historicity of Jesus as an invention of a zealous or pious imagination, Schweitzer, by looking at historical records, sought to demonstrate that Jesus was a real person. By the end of the book, Schweitzer is convinced at the success of his enterprise and appears a little proud of the achievement:
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 had any existence. He is a figure designed by rationalism, endowed with life by liberalism, and clothed by modern theology in an historical garb.
This image has not been destroyed from without, it has fallen to pieces, cleft and disintegrated by the concrete historical problems which came to the surface one after another, and in spite of all the artifice, art, artificiality, and violence which was applied to them, refused to be planed down to fit the design on which the Jesus of the theology of the last hundred and thirty years had been constructed, and were no sooner covered over than they appeared again in a new form. (p. 398)
The historical foundation of Christianity as built up by rationalistic, by liberal, and by modern theology no longer exists; but that does not mean that Christianity has lost its historical foundation. The work which historical theology thought itself bound to carry out, and which fell to pieces just as it was nearing completion, was only the brick facing of the real immovable historical foundation which is independent of any historical comfirmation or justification.
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. (p. 399)
As the reader would have noticed, Schweitzer does not make easy reading; but perhaps, in his case, the translators of the original German can be faulted. What is clear, however, is the wake of broken icons of liberal scholarship, as Schweitzer swings the ball in turn at Paulus, Hase, Schleiermacher, Strauss, Bauer, and Renan’s Jesus. As much as liberal scholars allege a fertile imagination on the part of the primitive church, they themselves have created a Jesus after their own minds. Schweitzer has shown that Christianity rests on a “real immovable historical foundation” rather than ecclesiastical invention. Yet, the “historical Jesus” that emerges ultimately means little to Schweitzer, who prefers the Jesus that is spiritually encountered by the believer:
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. Not the historical Jesus, but the spirit which goes forth from Him and in the spirits of men strives for new influence and rule, is that which overcomes the world. ... The abiding and eternal in Jesus is absolutely independent of historical knowledge and can only be understood by contact with His spirit which is still at work in the world. In proportion as we have the Spirit of Jesus we have the true knowledge of Jesus. (p. 401)
This “spiritually arisen” Jesus to be encountered is mystical, mysterious, “ineffable.” In Schweitzer’s haunting words:
He comes to us as One unknown, without a name, as of old, by the lake-side, He came to those men who knew Him not. He speaks to us the same word: "Follow thou me!" and sets us to the tasks which He has to fulfil for our time. He commands. And to those who obey Him, whether they be wise or simple, He will reveal Himself in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings which they shall pass through in His fellowship, and, as an ineffable mystery, they shall learn in their own experience Who He is. (p. 403)
So what shall one make of Schweitzer’s dual view of Jesus as historical, yet relevant only when experienced in ineffable mystery? How can one explain his coming to such a mystical view, after so strenuously defending the historical view? A couple of nuggets from his research in earlier chapters will clue us in. While affirming the life and death of Jesus as historical in the strongest terms, Schweitzer was less certain in regard to Jesus’ resurrection, making it a matter of “a pure psychological miracle.”
But leaving psychology aside, let us accept the resurrection experiences of the disciples as a pure psychological miracle. (p. 345)
Jesus seems, to Schweitzer, to believe that as soon as He laid down His life, He would usher in the Kingdom of God and the end of the world in an event known as the Parousia, or Coming. But this Jesus is obviously misguided and pathetically mistaken. Richard N. Longenecker summarises Schweitzer’s view:
Thus the ministry of Jesus, as reconstructed by Schweitzer, is set out in the Gospels in two parts: (1) in the first part, believing himself to be Israel’s Messiah, Jesus tried single-handedly to call Israel to repentance and to turn the people back to God, but the nation was too wicked to respond; (2) then in the second part, beginning at Caesarea Philippi, he purposely began a program of confrontation with the nation’s rulers, believing that at a crucial and strategic moment God would vindicate him and the nation would accept him as its Messiah. So from Caesarea Philippi on he "set his face to go to Jerusalem," and at Jerusalem he confronted the Jewish leaders and arranged his own arrest, trial and crucifixion - expecting at the last moment that God would intervene on his behalf. But on the cross as he was dying he finally realized the folly of it all, and so cried out in the famous cry of dereliction: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"[3]
So Jesus’ resurrection, the glorified body, and the Second Coming were really the same thing—they were an apocalyptic self-consciousness in Jesus’ mind and the minds of his disciples. To them, “The resurrection, the metamorphosis, and the Parousia of the Son of Man take place simultaneously, and are one and the same act” (p. 366). Here is the seed of Neo-Orthodoxy, a movement that cloaks the Liberal rejection of the Bible’s historicity using orthodox terms.[4]
It is sadly ironic that one who insists on historicity for the life and death of Jesus should abandon it with regard to His resurrection. Contrast Paul’s view of the resurrection of Jesus (1 Corinthians 15) with Schweitzer’s. What’s left in the latter’s is but a spiritual encounter with an inspiring and loving visionary—never mind that he was mistaken—whose personal sacrifice has made a profound impact on Western civilisation and the peoples of other lands. So Schweitzer proceeds to throw his lot in with this ineffably mysterious and “spiritually arisen” hero and martyr in a personal way; he with his wife stick it out in medical school and arrive in squalid, humid Africa to share in a tangible way some of the blessings of Western civilisation.
Schweitzer delves further into the life of this strange visionary called Jesus in his next book.
The Mystery of the Kingdom of God comprises 10 chapters:
1. The Modern “Historical” Solution
2. The “Development” of Jesus
3. The Preaching of the Kingdom of God
4. The Secret of the Kingdom of God
5. The Secret of the Kingdom of God in the Thought of the Passion
6. The Character Ascribed to Jesus on the Ground of Public Ministry
7. After the Mission of the Twelve Literary and Historical Problems
8. The Secret of Messiahship
9. The Secret of the Passion
10. Summary of the Life of Jesus
When one rejects the historicity of Jesus’ resurrection, they are “to be pitied more than all men” (1 Corinthians 15:19). The cracks in the rest of Schweitzer’s life of Christ begin to show in his treatment of the Transfiguration:
This revelation to the Three is handed down to us in the form of a miracle-tale. It has undergone the same transformation as have all the incidents of that voyage along the north coast. The scene on the mountain ... bears evident marks of the intense eschatological excitement of the moment. For this reason the historical facts are no longer clear in detail. There appear to them Moses and Elijah .... To what extent might ecstatic conditions, and perhaps glossolalia, have contributed to this experience? The present form of the story permits us to infer something of that sort (Mark 9:2-6). Does the voice out of the cloud ... repeat in some sort Jesus’ experience at his baptism? (p. 181)
So much is sure, that in a dazed condition, out of which they awake only at the end of the scene (Mark 9:8), the figure of Jesus appears to them illuminated by a supernatural light and glory, and a voice intimates that he is the Son of God. The occurrence can be explained only as the outcome of great eschatological excitement. (p. 182)
It is not easy to dismiss the eyewitnesses present in this “miracle-tale”; so Schweitzer posits some “ecstatic conditions, and perhaps glossolalia” on the part of the disciples. It appears, furthermore, by his use of glossolalia that Schweitzer confuses the disciples’ experience at Jesus’ Transfiguration and the spiritual gift of tongues (unlearned languages/dialects) at Pentecost:
At Pentecost, when Peter openly proclaimed Jesus as the Christ, we have an example of glossolalia. (p. 182)
Not only does he seem affected by Neo-Orthodox ideas of Jesus’ resurrection and miracles, but he is also perhaps confused with a Pentecostalist understanding of glossolalia (a word that never appears in the New Testament) as something of an experience of psychological release and ecstasy. But Schweitzer does return to his notion of an unresurrected—“spiritually arisen”—Christ who gets a rude reality check at his death:
This Jesus is far greater than the one conceived in modern terms: he is really a superhuman personality. With his death he destroyed the form of his “Weltanschauung,” [or, worldview] rendering his own eschatology impossible. Thereby he gives to all peoples and to all times the right to apprehend him in terms of their thoughts and conceptions, in order that his spirit may pervade their “Weltanschauung” as it quickened and transfigured Jewish eschatology. (p. 251)
“Blow wind, come wrack! At least we die with harness on our back!” Like Shakespeare’s hero, Schweitzer’s Jesus is totally consumed by a fatalistic consciousness of his mission:
About Jesus’ earlier development we know nothing. All lies in the dark. Only this is sure: at his baptism the secret of his existence was disclosed to him,--namely, that he was the one whom God had destined to be the Messiah. With this revelation he was complete, and underwent no further development. For now he is assured that, until the near coming of the messianic age which was to reveal his glorious dignity, he was to labour for the Kingdom as the unrecognised and hidden Messiah, and must approve and purify himself together with his friends in the final Affliction. (p. 254)
Our job as Christ-ians is to get in touch with the spirit of this messianic Macbeth somehow:
We must go back to the point where we can feel again the heroic in Jesus. Before that mysterious Person, who, in the form of his time, knew that he was creating upon the foundation of his life and death a moral world which bears his name, we must be forced to lay our faces in the dust, without daring to wish to understand his nature. Only then can the heroic in our Christianity and in our “Weltanschauung” be again revived. (Postscript, p. 274-75)
The Psychiatric Study of Jesus is a 43-page treatise submitted as Albert Schweitzer’s doctoral thesis (in medicine). The contents of the little volume comprise the following:
1. Prefatory Note (by the translator)
2. Foreword (1948, by Winfred Overholser, President, American Psychiatric Association)
3. Introduction: Schweitzer’s Conception of Jesus (by the translator)
4. Preface to the 13th Edition (by Schweitzer)
5. The Psychiatric Study of Jesus
6. Index
Schweitzer reviews the prevailing views of leading psychiatrists of his day and, based on his own examination of the Evangelists’ witness, concludes that Jesus is basically sane. His actions, no matter how extreme, can be accounted for by His self-consciousness as the eschatological Son of Man:
In the knowledge that he is the coming son of man, Jesus lays hold of the wheel of the world to set it moving on that last revolution which is to bring all ordinary history to a close. It refuses to turn, and he throws himself upon it. Then it does turn and crushes him. Instead of bringing in the eschatological conditions, he has destroyed them. The wheel rolls onward, and the mangled body of the one immeasurably great man who was strong enough to think of himself as the spiritual ruler of mankind and to bend history to his purpose, is hanging upon it still. That is his victory and his reign. (Schweitzer’s opening quote, p. 5)
Schweitzer accuses the three leading psychiatrists of not knowing the Scriptures:
De Loosten, Hirsch and Binet-Sanglé busy themselves with the psychopathology of Jesus without becoming familiar with the study of the historical life of Jesus. ... Let us, then, set forth in brief the results achieved by the criticism of the sources and by the scientific study of the life of Jesus. (pp. 44-45)
Yet he himself appears willfully ignorant by positing an altered state of experience on the part of Peter, James, and John on the Mount of Transfiguration:
In the story of the transfiguration on the mount we have to do not at all with Jesus’ hallucinations but with the hallucinations of the three close disciples who are with him, as is clearly shown in the account (Mark 9:2-8). (p. 66)
While he might have spared Jesus from the charge of hallucination at His Transfiguration, no such courtesy is applied at the Baptism:
It is also doubtful if the hallucinations at the baptism are historical. We must again and again make it clear to ourselves that the Nazarene comes into the light of history for the first time on that day when he appears as a preacher in Galilee and that everything that comes before that belongs to dark and uncertain tradition. It is possible that Old Testament reasons account for the origin of the story of the baptism. The voice from heaven sounds remarkably like the seventh verse of the second Psalm which is usually interpreted in a Messianic sense. It is extraordinary also that Jesus when he makes known to his disciples his Messiahship (Mark 28:27-30) does not mention that he was called to this place of honor at the time of his baptism, and that Paul also does not refer to the baptism of Jesus at all.
Assuming that the hallucination at the Jordan is authentic, one may say from the standpoint of psychiatry so much, that it has to do with coherent hallucinations in both the visual and auditory sphere, that the content of the hallucinatory language is highly colored and that it reminds us in its style of words from a Psalm which is usually explained as Messianic. (p. 67)
While ostensibly saving Jesus from the charge of general mental illness, Schweitzer is powerless to deliver him from that of megalomania and hallucination:
The criticism of the psychological writings which we are considering yields, then, the following results:
1. The material which is in agreement with these books is for the most part unhistorical.
2. Out of the material which is certainly historical, a number of acts and utterances of Jesus impress the authors as pathological because the latter are too little acquainted with the contemporary thought of the time to be able to do justice to it. A series of wrong deductions springs also from the fact that they have not the least understanding of the peculiar problems inherent in the course of the public ministry.
3. From these false preconceptions and with the help of entirely hypothetical symptoms, they construct pictures of sickness which are themselves artifacts and which, moreover, cannot be made to conform exactly with the clinical forms of sickness diagnosed by the authors.
4. The only symptoms to be accepted as historical and possibly to be discussed from the psychiatric point of view—the high estimate which Jesus has of himself and perhaps also the hallucination at the baptism—fall far short of proving the existence of mental illness. (p. 72)
CRITIQUE
Whereas many mainline Evangelicals hail Albert Schweitzer’s ministry as “evangelical movement's best examples of holistic ministry,”[5] it is left to avowed infidels to notice that Schweitzer preached a different gospel, a different Jesus.[6] In our scramble for new heroes that are politically correct, we fall all over ourselves with dubious icons like Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Albert Schweitzer. The biggest casualty in all of this is biblical discernment. Certain floodgates are opened, and faith, formerly placed in biblical truth, is supplanted by one in political correctness and popular acclaim. When this happens, our notions of truth, the gospel, and Christ are altered. Perhaps Paul has such a situation in mind when he condemns those that sell out to an unhistorical Jesus (Galatians 1):
6I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you by the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel-- 7which is really no gospel at all. Evidently some people are throwing you into confusion and are trying to pervert the gospel of Christ. 8But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach a gospel other than the one we preached to you, let him be eternally condemned! 9As we have already said, so now I say again: If anybody is preaching to you a gospel other than what you accepted, let him be eternally condemned!
10Am I now trying to win the approval of men, or of God? Or am I trying to please men? If I were still trying to please men, I would not be a servant of Christ.
ADDITIONAL REFERENCES
Albert Schweitzer Association, http://www.schweitzer.org/english/aseind.htm
Monergism.org. Index of Liberal & Neo-Orthodox Theology. http://www.monergism.com/thethreshold/articles/topic/liberaltheology.html