Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

§5.1 The Flight from History
transpose Lessing's language to the terms of the present study, it is impossible
to 'prove' faith from history.
However, it was Ernst Troeltsch who at the end of the nineteenth century
posed the dilemma of the historical-critical method most sharply. 7 Troeltsch identified
three principal characteristics of 'the historical method': probability, analogy
and correlation. 8 By 'probability' he had in view Lessing's chief characterisation
of historical truth (at best probable, never certain), 'the final result being
never more than probably correct'. By 'analogy' he meant the necessary assumption
that the past was analogous to the present, that the laws of nature operated
then as now, that human beings were constituted and interacted in ways that we today
can understand from our own experience; otherwise how could we even begin
to make sense of accounts of events and human actions which have come down to
us? 9 And by 'correlation' he had in mind the interrelatedness of all events and processes
('No man is an island'), which means that no single event could be extracted
from that correlation and explained apart from it — Troeltsch's version of
the Enlightenment's vision of the cosmos as an interlocking machine and closed
system, what he subsequently called 'the web of causality'. 10
The problem is, as Troeltsch well recognized, that since everything in history
is, properly speaking, historical, it becomes impossible to escape the consequent
ravages of the historical method as defined by Troeltsch. 'Once it is applied
to biblical scholarship and church history, (the historical method) is a
leaven which transforms everything and which finally causes the form of all pre-
Ritschl 133-38. O'Neill describes this as 'a move that marks a turning point in the history of
European thought' (Authority 19).
7. E. Troeltsch, 'Über historische und dogmatische Methode in der Theologie',
Gesammelte Schriften 2 (Tübingen: Mohr, 1913) 729-53, ET 'Historical and Dogmatic Method
in Theology', Religion in History: Ernst Troeltsch (Edinburgh: Clark, 1991), reprinted in
Dawes, ed., Historical Jesus Quest 29-53. For the influence of Troeltsch, see, e.g., D. E.
Nineham (discussed by A. C. Thiselton, The Two Horizons [Exeter: Paternoster, 1980] 53-60);
also Nineham's Foreword to Schweitzer's Quest 2 xiv, xxiii, xxix; V. A. Harvey, The Historian
and the Believer (London: SCM, 1966), who takes Troeltsch as his starting point; and
J. Bowden, Jesus: The Unanswered Questions (London: SCM, 1988) 148-60.
8.1 cheat a little: Troeltsch defines his first 'essential aspect' as 'the habituation on principle
to historical criticism', but he immediately makes it clear what that means — that 'in the
realm of history there are only judgments of probability' ('Historical and Dogmatic Method'
32).
9. Agreement with normal, customary, or at least frequently attested happenings and
conditions as we have experienced them is the criterion of probability for all events that historical
criticism can recognize as having actually or possibly happened. The observation of analogies
between similar events in the past provides the possibility of imputing probability to them
and of interpreting what is unknown about the one by reference to what is known about the
other' (Troeltsch, 'Historical and Dogmatic Method' 32-33).
10. Troeltsch, 'Historiography' 717.
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