Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

§6.3 History, Hermeneutics and Faith
cient recognition to rarely paralleled genius? What about the novum, the genuinely
'new' within the historical process? 26 The old proof from miracle argument
for Christianity may have become problematic, but even so we still have to ask,
can the principle of analogy allow for the wholly unusual? 27 Is the range of human
experience, regularly taken to indicate the scope of analogy (Western selfconsciousness),
broad enough? 28 It will hardly need saying that such issues cannot
be ignored when the subject matter is one (Jesus) for whom claims to uniqueness
have been fundamental in assessing the significance of the historical person.
d. The Illusion of Objectivity
As already indicated, a further weakness of Troeltsch's analysis of historical
method is that Troeltsch was still a child of the nineteenth-century scientific paradigm,
which continued to perceive reality in terms of a closed system in which
all laws would eventually be discovered and all causes and effects could be measured.
So long as the scientific method as understood in the nineteenth century
provided the model for the historical method, the idea of historical facts as objective
artefacts, and the goal of historical objectivity could be held up as a viable
aim. 29 But the twentieth century's recognition of indeterminacy in explanation
and of complementary and conflicting explanations possible at both microcosmic
and macrocosmic level has confirmed that Troeltsch's perception of reality
was too restricted. Consequently the definition of historical method expressed
in terms of such a restricted world view is itself too restricted; or rather, the
26. Thiselton appositely cites A. B. Gibson's striking comment that 'on the basis of a
Humean epistemology or a thoroughly empiricist world-view "anything that happens for the
first time is to be discredited'" (Two Horizons 79). See further Thiselton's critique of Troeltsch
(69-84). Troeltsch's attempt to deal with the problem he had posed, in The Absoluteness of
Christianity and the History of Religions (1901; ET Louisville: John Knox, 1971), is characteristic
of European Liberalism in its personalistic individualism, evolutionary optimism, and religious
imperialism.
27. 'For a critical history of Jesus, the principle of analogy is invoked on the basis that
Jesus was a man; it has nothing to say about his being "a mere man'" (Meyer, Aims 17-18).
28. To return to the inverse parallel of Hitler, Ron Rosenbaum takes Schweitzer's Quest
as the model for his review of the many attempts to explain Hitler, noting the unwillingness of
many to accept that Hitler's evil may not be understandable, that it may at the end of the day
simply not be capable of rational explanation (Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of
His Evil [London: Macmillan, 1999] xxiv, xxviii-xxix, xli).
29. '. . . purely objective causal explanation . . . constitutes the distinctive character of
history as a pure theoretical science' (Troeltsch, 'Historiography' 720a). As already noted,
Troeltsch's conception of the 'unique' is held within his conception of scientific causality, albeit
as 'the product of individual causes in their infinite complexity' (720a).
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