Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

FAITH AND THE HISTORICAL JESUS §4.3
work on The Christian Faith (1821-22) he expounded Christianity in terms of
the 'feeling of absolute dependence'. 46 Not surprisingly, he proceeds to characterize
Jesus as the historical actualization of the ideal, distinguished from the
rest of men only by 'the constant potency of his God-consciousness, which
was a veritable existence of God in him'. 47 And in the phase of the 'quest of
the historical Jesus' which took its lead from Schleiermacher, usually known as
Liberal Protestantism in view of its continued reaction against traditional
dogma, a major focus was on Jesus' own religious feelings, on Jesus as a 'religious
personality'. Back from the religion about Jesus to the religion o/Jesus!
This was characteristically expressed in Wilhelm Herrmann's confidence in
being able to speak meaningfully about 'the inner life of Jesus' as the basis for
the communion of the Christian with God, 48 and in the sustained interest in the
'messianic consciousness' of the 'historical Jesus' as a basis for subsequent
Christology. 49
The other major influence on Liberal Protestantism was Immanuel Kant's
shift of focus from faith to moral consciousness, man's sense of moral obligation
(the categorical imperative). 50 For Kant the proper sphere for religion was not so
much metaphysics as morality; it was man's awareness of a moral law that enabled
him to postulate a Being who will rectify all in the end. 51 The influence of
Kant is evident in the description of the work of the leading Liberal Protestant
theologian (Albrecht Ritschl) as 'the theology of moral values'. 52
This tendency was strengthened in the latter half of the nineteenth century
by the influence of Darwin's theory of evolution. Allied to the self-confidence in
European civilisation of the period, the general assumption was that evolution is
always to 'higher forms' of life, and the corollary was too often uncritically
drawn that moral evolution is a natural continuation of the biological process.
Hence the laissez-faire policies of liberal economics, the sense of moral superiority
among the European imperialist powers, and the easy assumption of the
46. 2 183O; ET Edinburgh: Clark, 1928, 12-18. Brown prefers to translate das
schlechthinnige Abhängigkeitsgefühl as 'awareness, sense or consciousness of absolute, utter
or ultimate dependence' (Jesus 116).
47. Christian Faith 377-89. In his lectures on The Life of Jesus in 1832 (1864; ET Philadelphia:
Fortress, 1975) see 88-104, 263-76.
48. W. Herrmann, The Communion of the Christian with God ( 2 1892; ET 1906, ed. R. T.
Voelkel, Philadelphia: Fortress, 1971/London: SCM, 1972).
49. See particularly W. Baldensperger, Das Selbstbewusstsein Jesu im Lichte der
messianischen Hoffnungen seiner Zeit (Strassburg: Heitz, 1888).
50. The categorical imperative: 'Act only according to that maxim by which you can at
the same time will that it should become a universal law' (documented by Brown, Jesus 60).
51. See further Brown, Jesus 58-67.
52. The phrase used by H. R. Mackintosh, Types of Modern Theology: Schleiermacher
to Barth (Edinburgh: Clark, 1937) for his chapter on Ritschl (138-80).
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