Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

§4.3 The Flight from Dogma
Tightness of higher and lower orders in society. The attitude is nicely caught in
Coue's famous self-help prescription: 'Every day, in every way, I am getting
better and better' , 53
In terms of 'Life of Jesus' research, the most luscious fruit of the Romantic
spirit was Ernest Renan's Life (1863). 54 Not only was it the first of the Liberal
lives to be published, 55 but it was the first thorough Catholic treatment, 56 and the
first of the histories of Christianity's beginnings to engage fully in the 'quest of
the historical Jesus'. The book went through an unprecedented sixty-one editions
in France and was quickly translated into all the major European languages. 57 In
prose designed to charm and win rather than to argue and persuade, Renan
painted a picture of Jesus in classic Liberal terms. 'The highest consciousness of
God which has existed in the bosom of humanity was that of Jesus'. Jesus' 'great
act of originality' was that, probably from the first, 'he regarded his relationship
with God as that of a son with his father'. 'Boldly raising himself above the prejudices
of his nation, he established the universal fatherhood of God'. 'The morality
of the Gospels remains . . . the highest creation of human conscience — the
most beautiful code of perfect life that any moralist has traced'. 'A pure worship,
a religion without priests and external observances, resting entirely on the feelings
of the heart, on the imitation of God, on the direct relation of the conscience
with the heavenly Father . . .'. 'An absolutely new idea, the idea of worship
founded on purity of heart, and on human brotherhood, through him entered the
world'. 58
Towards the end of Liberalism's heyday came the contribution of the doyen
of NT Liberal scholars, equally famous but more enduring in influence. These
were the lectures on Christianity, delivered by Adolf Harnack without manuscript
or notes, to some six hundred students from all the faculties in the University of
Berlin at the turn of the century, at the height of his own powers and at the self-
53. E. Coue, De la suggestion et de ses applications (1915), to be said fifteen to twenty
times, morning and evening (p. 17).
54. E. Renan, La vie de Jesus (1863), ET The Life of Jesus (London: Trübner, 1864).
55. Schleiermacher's lectures were not published till 1864 (n. 47 above).
56. B. Reardon, Liberalism and Tradition: Aspects of Catholic Thought in Nineteenth-
Century France (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1975), described the publication as 'one
of the events of the century' (296). The Pope placed it on the Index.
57. In his 1864 Life Strauss hailed Renan as a kindred spirit and 'shook hands with him
across the Rhine' (Quest 1 191 = Quest 2 167). Schweitzer described it as 'an event in world literature'
(Quest 2 159).
58. Renan, Life 82-83, 87-88, 90. For D. Georgi, Renan illustrates the tendency of the
nineteenth-century quest to portray Jesus as a rural romantic hero 'full of unspoiled naivete but
at the same time full of dignity and wisdom, the ideal image of bourgeois nostalgia' ('The Interest
in Life of Jesus Theology as a Paradigm for the Social History of Biblical Criticism', HTR
85 [1992] 51-83 [here 78]).
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