Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

§4.6 The Flight from Dogma
building on the old Liberal assertion of a major transition (mutation?) from Jesus
the teacher of timeless moral ideals to Paul the proponent of a religion patterned
on the mystery cults of the time. 124 Schweitzer could be said to have shared the
same history-of-religions motivation, in that he set Jesus within the context of
Jewish apocalypticism. But in so doing, as we noted above, he left questers with
a conundrum (how could a failed apocalyptic prophet provide a credible religious
model for the twentieth century?), to which Bultmann's existentialism provided
only temporary solution.
At the same time Liberalism's ethical concern was strengthened by the first
attempts to draw on the emerging social sciences, particularly sociology. 125 The
infant enterprise survived the war, but its new step-father (kerygmatic theology)
was hardly well disposed towards it, and its early flourishing in Marxist
contributions 126 no doubt increased Western scholarly suspicion towards it. It is
true that the early form critics recognized a social dimension to the forms (Sitz im
Leben), but only in a limited way — the life of the forms within the congregations,
not the life of the churches within a wider social context. 127 And although
the older Liberal agenda lived on in the Chicago School into the 1920s and
30s, 128 it did not make any real impact beyond America.
It was only in the mid-1970s that the infant attained full adulthood. This
coming of age was partly the result of the social sciences having become fully established
within expanding university systems in the West, 129 and partly the result
of increasing European disengagement with its colonial past and the con-
124. See chapter 1 above at nn. 16 and 18.
125. Also characteristic of the history-of-religions method was Troeltsch's observation
that 'the Christian idea will never become a powerful reality without community and cult'
('The Significance of the Historical Existence of Jesus' 196). See further Troeltsch's The Social
Teaching of the Christian Churches (1912; ET London: George Allen and Unwin, 1931).
G. Theissen, 'Social Research into the New Testament', Social Reality and the Early Christians
(Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1992/Edinburgh: Clark, 1993) 1-29, notes that
Troeltsch 'wished to supplement the "ideological" view of Christianity carried through in the
history of dogma by a "sociological" way of looking at things. But he restricted himself to the
social doctrines of the churches and sects' (8, n. 8). Theissen also points out that Troeltsch
lived in the same house in Heidelberg as Max Weber and that they influenced each other mutually
(7).
126. Particularly K. Kautsky, Foundations of Christianity (1908, "1921; ET London:
George Allen and Unwin, 1925).
127. Theissen, 'Social Research' 8-13. See further below §8.6a and vol. 2.
128. Most notably S. J. Case, Jesus: A New Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago,
1927), and S. Matthews, Jesus on Social Institutions (New York: Macmillan, 1928); see further
Weaver, Historical Jesus 127-36.
129. The expansion of the British university system in the 1960s was marked by the
transition from 'Theology' or 'Divinity' as the appropriate title for departments or faculties to
'Religious Studies'.
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