Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

FAITH AND THE HISTORICAL JESUS §4.5
for his later philanthropy in his philosophy of 'reverence for life'. 104 And others
found that the old Liberal individualism still provided a satisfactory exegesis of
Jesus' kingdom preaching. 105
More to the point is the observation made by Schweitzer a few pages earlier
that 'the historical Jesus will be to our time a stranger and an enigma'. 106 It is
this which best sums up the impact of Weiss's and Schweitzer's eschatological or
apocalyptic Jesus. In their desire to find a Jesus who spoke to nineteenth-century
man, the nineteenth-century questers had largely succumbed to the temptation to
find a nineteenth-century Jesus, a Jesus who represented their own views and expressed
their own priorities. 107 They had made the 'historical Jesus' in their own
image. 108 They had modernized Jesus. 109 In this one observation, then,
Schweitzer provided an acid test of historical responsibility. As had been recognized
half a millennium earlier, history is bound to be distant and different from
the present. Confrontation with a figure across the historical gulf of culture and
will learn who he is. . . .' (Quest 1 487; Quest 1 401). Similarly two pages earlier in the first edition:
'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' (Quest 1 399). The passage was also omitted in later revisions; but in the Preface to
the 1950 edition Schweitzer writes: 'It was Jesus who began to spiritualize the ideas of the
kingdom of God and the Messiah. He introduced into the late-Jewish (sic) conception of the
kingdom his strong ethical emphasis on love. . . . As the spiritual ruler of the spiritual kingdom
of God on earth he is the Lord who wills to rule in our hearts' (Quest 2 xliv). Schweitzer's resort
to a form of mysticism to bridge the gulf he had opened up is also evident in his study of Paul,
The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle (London: Black, 1931).
104. See, e.g., 'Schweitzer, Albert', ODCC 1470.
105. See n. 96 above.
106. Schweitzer, Quest 1 397 = Quest 2 478.
107. J. Jeremias, Das Problem des historischen Jesus (Stuttgart: Calwer, 1960), ET The
Problem of the Historical Jesus (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1964), summed it up rather cavalierly:
'The rationalists pictured Jesus as a preacher of morality, the idealists as the Ideal Man; the aesthetes
extolled him as the master of words and the socialists as the friend of the poor and as the
social reformer, while the innumerable pseudo-scholars made of him a fictional character. Jesus
was modernized. These lives of Jesus are mere products of wishful thinking. The final outcome
was that every epoch and every theology found in the personality of Jesus the reflection of its
own ideals, and every author the reflection of his own views' (5-6).
108. Much quoted is the comment of George Tyrrell, Christianity at the Crossroads
(London: Longmans Green, 1909): 'The Christ that Harnack sees, looking back through nineteen
centuries of Catholic darkness, is only the reflection of a liberal Protestant face, seen at the
bottom of a deep well' (49).
109. As Schweitzer himself observed; see Quest 1 4, 308-11 = Quest 2 6, 275-78: 'He is
himself only a phantom created by the Germanic mind in pursuit of a religious will-o'the wisp'
(Quest 1 309 = Quest 2 276). See also H. J. Cadbury, The Peril of Modernizing Jesus (London:
Macmillan, 1937; SPCK, 1962).
48