When ACM releases a book it makes every effort to make it accessible to modern readers, usually including an index for more scholarly analysis. This is the case with Schweitzer’s book, too. However, in some cases, the book in question contains ideas and reasoning that undermine Christianity. ACM believes that people should be well informed, and that Christians in particular should know about arguments and beliefs that are in opposition to Christianity. That said, it seems prudent in some cases to offer some kind of statement within the book that addresses such concerns. The purpose is not to answer all objections raised by the book but to put the book into perspective and hopefully guide even the skeptical reader into a more nuanced understanding of what they are reading. Below is the foreword that is included in ACM’s (Suzeteo Enterprises) edition of Albert Schweitzer’s The Quest of the Historical Jesus.
FOREWORD
By Anthony Horvath
In his 1992 book on the historical Jesus, Dr. Dominic Crossan wrote, “It is impossible to avoid the suspicion that historical Jesus research is a very safe place to do theology and call it history, to do autobiography and call it biography.”
The book you presently hold in your hands now will do more than arouse that suspicion, it will confirm it. Dr. Albert Schweitzer originally published this book in German in 1905, systematically giving an overview of ‘historical Jesus’ research from the previous 150 years. As you read his accounts of the attempts to detail who, finally, the historical Jesus, was, you will notice that most often it is the private beliefs of the researcher that seem to surface in the descriptions of the ‘historical Jesus.” Indeed, Schweitzer himself refers to many of these accounts as the “fictitious lives of Jesus.”
As he closes his review he further observes that, “The vast numbers of imaginative Lives of Jesus shrink into remarkably small compass on a close examination. When one knows two or three of them, one knows them all [pg 342].”
A survey of historical Jesus research since then reveals essentially the same two phenomena: The ‘historical’ Jesus so often turns out to be a Jesus the researcher can bear having actually existed and there aren’t as many Jesuses that are bearable as we may suppose.
Several indisputable realities stand in the way from unbridled speculations. In the first place, there is no question that the Christian Church sprung up at a definite point in time with such force that its violent suppressors were overthrown; Rome capitulated to Christ before it capitulated to the Barbarians, and the Church contains billions of people to this day. This meteoric rise requires explanation. An itinerant, but insightful goat-herder, who happened through Palestine on his way to death doesn’t really provide a satisfactory explanation for anyone. Attention is then turned to the nature of the insight this peasant Jewish Cynic might have preached. Surely something about it must have been so inspirational that it called men to renounce all they believed and risk dying painful deaths.
Surely there is something… if we could just put our finger on it…
Unfortunately, one of the realities that these researchers take as indisputable is that Jesus cannot be as the Church has understood him to be from the beginning. He cannot have healed the sick. He cannot have raised the dead. He cannot have fed the masses. He cannot have walked on the water. He cannot have been God—any insinuation that Jesus made such a claim must have been put into his mouth by later Christians. He cannot have died a thief’s death. He did not rise from the dead and he certainly did not appear to his followers alive, intact, and glorified.
Such a scenario as described in the previous paragraph more than adequately explains the growth of the Christian Church in all its force and velocity but if this scenario is off the table, one labors in vain for something in the message and life of Jesus, stripped of the miraculous and supernatural, that is up to the task.
In solution to this problem, it is natural then that people would turn to their own experience of reality in search of that which fires their being. What is it in the life of Jesus that makes them resonate so deeply that perhaps they might be driven to order their lives around this man, Jesus?
We cannot avoid the fact that the period that Schweitzer is surveying is one in which God had been officially and thoroughly debunked. The Enlightenment had done its worst, and in the eyes of many, there wasn’t much left of traditional Christianity that had any basis in objective, empirical, scientific, historical fact. This does not mean that spirituality had been jettisoned. It does mean that this spirituality needed a new expression, a new source, a new context, and new theological underpinnings. Deriving a theology without a God is no mean feat, but many of the writers of the “Lives of Jesus” attempted to do just that. Schweitzer takes aim at some of these efforts directly while only alluding to others. His evaluation of the theosophists are in the former category and the socialists and communists in the latter. Darwin had provided some answers but they weren’t wholly satisfying. One might say that they weren’t satisfying at all.
Schweitzer touches on this in his treatment of one of the writings of David Straus:
His last work, “The Old Faith and the New,” appeared in 1872. Once more, as in the work on theology published in 1840-1841, he puts to himself the question. What is there of permanence in this artificial compound of theology and philosophy, faith and thought? But he puts the question with a certain bitterness, and shows himself too much under the influence of Darwinism, by which his mind was at that time dominated. The Hegelian system of thought, which served as a firm basis for the work of 1840, has fallen in ruins. Strauss is alone with his own thoughts, endeavouring to raise himself above the new scientific worldview. His powers of thought, never, for all his critical acumen, strong on the creative side, and now impaired by age, were unequal to the task. There is no force and no greatness in the book.
To the question, “Are we still Christians?” he answers, “No.” But to his second question, “Have we still a religion?” he is prepared to give an affirmative answer, if the assumption is granted that the feeling of dependence, of self-surrender, of inner freedom, which has sprung from the pantheistic world-view, can be called religion. [page 80]
Schweitzer observes a further problem in the attempts to extract from the New Testament documents something of substance to hang one’s hopeful spirit on: consistency.
When one has found a method for removing the embarrassing accretions of miracles and myth, there is no good reason why the method shouldn’t be extended completely. Schweitzer devotes an entire chapter to this line of thinking, “Thoroughgoing Scepticism and Thoroughgoing Eschatology.”
He set the stage for extending rationalist principles to their logical conclusion and the consequences of such an act in the chapter immediately preceding where he details the situation at the end of the nineteenth century. In one example, he takes issues with one such attempt to reconcile the lasting power of the man Jesus with the rationalization of the texts by saying:
They propose to find experiences of the Christian community and Pauline teaching reflected in the Gospel of Mark; Bruno Bauer asserted the same. The only difference is that he was consistent, and extended his criticism to those portions of the Gospel which do not present the stumbling-block of the supernatural. Why should these not also contain the theology and the experiences of the community transformed into history? Is it only because they remain within the limits of the natural?
The real difficulty consists in the fact that all the passages which von Soden ascribes to the redactor stand, in spite of their mythical colouring, in a closely-knit historical connexion; in fact, the historical connexion is nowhere so close. How can any one cut out the feeding of the multitudes and the transfiguration as narratives of secondary origin without destroying the whole of the historical fabric of the Gospel of Mark? [page 321]
In other words, the operation of stripping out the ‘stumbling-block of the supernatural’ by means of invoking a later redactor eliminates the material that von Soden (in this case) found compelling: it is all part of the same “closely-knit historical connexion.”
In short, Schweitzer argues that such an operation, applied consistently, kills the patient. Any quest for the historical Jesus that does not take Jesus just as he stands as the texts present him destroys the man, just as the researcher believes he has found him. Whether or not Schweitzer himself is able to produce a solution where others have failed is a question for you the reader to ascertain.
The reader may consider another approach, however. Perhaps the solution is not to assume that science and history has so thoroughly dispatched with God as we have been led to believe. Perhaps the very fact that so many people who ostensibly have done away with God still spend so much time mining the Gospels for the truth about Jesus shows that they really ‘doth protest too much.’ Their actions betray them… even they, the scholars and historians entrenched in their confirmed naturalism, cannot escape the reach of God through Jesus. The fact that wherever and whenever they write—whether in the 1800s or in 1905 or in 1992—they still express sentiments pining for an explanation for their own spiritual nature and hoping that the (God-)man Jesus speaks to that explanation shows that they do not buy their own secularist accounts.
I am writing this foreword as a Christian apologist. Knowing this, you may expect me now to put forward evidences and arguments for the veracity and reliability of the texts. You might anticipate that I will now proceed to show why I believe that Jesus is exactly as the Church has always understood him to be, that is, how the Scriptures portray him, quite apart from our own personal idiosyncrasies and values.
I shall not do this. I mean only to raise “reasonable doubt.” The ‘thoroughgoing skepticism’ that Schweitzer calls for has been tried and found wanting—by skeptics. After another hundred years of intense scrutiny, there remain only a handful of basic options in the quest for the historical Jesus. One option accounts for all the facts but unfortunately for some it requires dispensing with the presupposition of naturalism. That is, this option requires one at least begin their quest with an open mind. I do not ask you to assume that there is a God before making your inquiries, I only ask that you do not assume there isn’t one. This seems a fair and reasonable request on my part. If you disagree, you will find in this volume a good example of what follows in consequence: one ridiculous ad hoc supposition after another passing itself off as history. If you can do better, I commend you, for you will be the first.
The problem essentially remains just as presented by C.S. Lewis in his book Mere Christianity:
Yet (and this is the strange, significant thing) even [Jesus’] enemies, when they read the Gospels, do not usually get the impression of silliness and conceit. Still less do unprejudiced readers. Christ says that He is ‘humble and meek’ and we believe him; not noticing that, if He were merely a man, humility and meekness are the very last characteristics we could attribute to some of His sayings.
I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: ‘I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claims to be God.’ That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic- on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.
