Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

FAITH AND THE HISTORICAL JESUS §5.1
vious theological methods to disintegrate'; 'it relativizes everything'. 11 In other
words, anything and everything in history cannot avoid being subjected to the
scrutiny of the historical-critical method, and therefore falls prey to the loss of
that certainty which faith so much prizes. To change the metaphor, the acids
which the historical method uses to clean away the surface varnish and later
reworkings of the original painting eat not only into such later accretions but into
the original painting and the very canvas itself.
Of course, in one sense, Troeltsch was simply restating the problem of all
historical inquiry and underscoring the humility and tentativeness which all attempts
at historical reconstruction should exercise. Here undoubtedly the observations
and arguments of Lessing and Troeltsch need to be taken seriously if historical
statements regarding Jesus are to carry any weight. So too with
Troeltsch's second characteristic, the principle of analogy. In fact it was a standard
principle in nineteenth-century Romantic historiography: the conviction
that understanding is only possible because of the homogeneity of human nature,
that throughout history 'all men think, feel, will as we ourselves would in a like
situation'. 12 In the words of the great nineteenth-century historian J. G. Droysen,
'With respect to men, human utterances, and forms, we are, and feel ourselves to
be, essentially similar and in a condition of mutuality'. 13 The third principle
found its fullest exposition in the history-of-religions method, which set the investigation
and evaluation of Christianity within the framework of the history of
religion and culture and sought to understand its emergence, including Jesus, as
part of a general historical process. 14 Yet one cannot help wondering whether the
last two principles (analogy and correlation) are not inevitably too restrictive. In
particular, can they recognize the novum, the genuinely new? 15 And anyway, are
they not too much bound up with a nineteenth-century Newtonian view of the
world and of causation which the twentieth century was soon to leave behind? To
such questions we will have to return.
11. 'Historical and Dogmatic Method' 31, 37 (the first following the translation of
Bowden, Jesus 153).
12. The quotation is from H. N. Tuttle's analysis of Dilthey, quoted by Thiselton, Two
Horizons 69.
13. Cited by H.-G. Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Crossroad, 2 1989) 217.
14. Riches cites Otto Pfleiderer in particular (Century of New Testament Study 7-8, 11).
15. 'At every point there do indeed emerge unique and autonomous historical forces
that, by virtue of our capacity for empathy, we perceive to be related to our common humanity.
At the same time, however, these unique forces also stand in a current and context comprehending
the totality of events, where we see everything conditioned by everything else so that there
is no point within history which is beyond this correlative involvement and mutual influence'
(Troeltsch, 'Historical and Dogmatic Method' 33); see also 'Historiography' 719b-720a.
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