Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

FAITH AND THE HISTORICAL JESUS §4.3
the embarrassment which typical Enlightenment believers now experienced in
regard to the miracles of the Gospels. It is little surprise that the reports of Jesus'
miracles featured so little in the next hundred years of the critical quest. Strauss
had effectively knocked them out of the ring. (3) In their flight from the Christ of
dogma, both Reimarus and Strauss had not escaped into anything that might be
called objective history, but simply into a different ideology, the ideology of rationalism
on the one hand and the ideology of idealism on the other. They therefore
stand as cautionary reminders that critical scholarship is never critical
enough unless and until it is also self-critical and with equal vigour.
It is also important, finally, to recognize that despite their radical criticism,
Reimarus and Strauss have remained part of the tradition of scholarly inquiry regarding
the Gospels. Such questioning and challenge is inherently healthy and
helps keep the scholarly inquiry honest: there are hard questions in all this which
cannot and must not be avoided. Reimarus and Strauss should be compulsory
texts for any course on Jesus of Nazareth, not simply as part of the story of the
quest itself, but because the issues they pose remain issues to this day, and it is
good not least for those coming from the faith side of the faith/history dialogue to
experience again something of the shock which these texts caused when they
were first published. Moreover, dialogue with the heirs of Reimarus and Strauss
is one of the activities which helps theology to maintain a place within the public
forum of university-level search for knowledge and debate about truth. 38 If theology
wants to continue to make any kind of truth claims of relevance beyond the
confines of the churches, then it has to make them within that public forum. The
alternative is to settle back into an internal ecclesiastical discourse which cannot
be understood or effectively communicated outside the ekklesia.
4.3. The Liberal Jesus
The heavy emphasis on reason in Enlightenment rationalism was bound to create
a reaction. The debate about epistemology (how we know things) had been
primarily between the respective roles (and reliability) of reason and sense perception.
But there is also the knowing of personal engagement with and relationship
with, the knowing of the heart. As Pascal put it early in the Enlightenment's
heyday: 'The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of'. 39 In
church circles, German pietism 40 and the evangelical awakening in England led
38. Cf. Riches, Century of New Testament Study 4.
39. Pascal, Pensees 4.277.
40. Well illustrated by the pietistic warmth which J. A. Bengel added to the technical
skills of textual criticism in the Preface to his Gnomon Novi Testamenti (1752).
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