Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

§4.4 The Flight from Dogma
dogmatic accretion, would/must have something to say to modern man, and the
consequential desire to provide a mouthpiece for the restatement of that message.
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And the result? A Jesus portrayed and understood as a teacher of timeless
morality, Jesus as a good example, Jesus as more the first Christian than the
Christ — a flight from the Christ of dogma indeed! At the same time, we should
not decry the Liberal focus on the moral outcome of religion as the test of its
character; such concerns had brought the slave trade to an end and achieved political,
social and industrial reforms, although the Liberal tendency to understand
morality solely in terms of personal and individual responsibility was the
stronger influence, and the laissez-faire economics and imperialist hubris of the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries seem to have been little affected.
Moreover, the reassertion of the importance of feeling in religion, of faith as a
deeply rooted passion, was surely an important correction to a Protestantism
still inclined to be too word-focused and still overly dependent on the Enlightenment
paradigm of science and reason. Not least Liberal scholarship deserves
credit for its concern to speak meaningfully to its own age. Here too the motivating
force in life of Jesus scholarship was not unfaith but desire to speak in
the idioms of the time, desire to be heard. The trouble was, we may say, it allowed
the spirit of the age to dictate not simply the language but also the
agenda.
But the most important achievement of the Liberal quest for Jesus has still
to be noted.
4.4. The Sources for Critical
Reconstruction of the Life of Jesus
All the thrust of historical scholarship from the Renaissance onwards had been to
recover original texts and sources. The Enlightenment had thought to redefine
and sharpen the tools of critical scholarship. The Romantic revival had shifted attention
to the mysterious character of the fact and moment of inspiration. All this
intensified Liberal interest in the Gospels as the only realistic sources for knowledge
of the 'historical Jesus'. Jesus himself, after all, had left no writings, no pronouncements
or reflections in his own hand or dictated by him, which for Liberal
63. 'Liberal scholarship . . . accepted the full burden of historical-critical scholarship
without hesitation and without reserve, believing that the historical core of the gospel narratives,
when reached, would reveal Jesus as he actually was, and that he would then be revealed
as worthy of all honour, respect and imitation, revealed as the founder of a faith which consisted
in following him and his teaching closely and purposefully' (N. Perrin, Rediscovering the
Teaching of Jesus [London: SCM, 1967] 214).
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