The quest of the historical Jesus : $b a critical study of its progress from Reimarus to WredeSchweitzer, Albert
Religion
The quest of the historical Jesus : $b a critical study of its progress from Reimarus to Wrede
Schweitzer, Albert
Jesus Christ -- Biography -- History and criticism; Jesus Christ -- Historicity
eschatology of the Christian Gospel as being historically the eschatology
of Jesus, help us at the same time to retain a real meaning and use for
the ancient phrases of the Te Deum, and for the mediaeval strain of
__“__Jerusalem the Golden.__”_
_F. C. Burkitt._
_Cambridge, 1910._
I. THE PROBLEM
When, at some future day, our period of civilisation shall lie, closed and
completed, before the eyes of later generations, German theology will
stand out as a great, a unique phenomenon in the mental and spiritual life
of our time. For nowhere save in the German temperament can there be found
in the same perfection the living complex of conditions and factors—of
philosophic thought, critical acumen, historical insight, and religious
feeling—without which no deep theology is possible.
And the greatest achievement of German theology is the critical
investigation of the life of Jesus. What it has accomplished here has laid
down the conditions and determined the course of the religious thinking of
the future.
In the history of doctrine its work has been negative; it has, so to
speak, cleared the site for a new edifice of religious thought. In
describing how the ideas of Jesus were taken possession of by the Greek
spirit, it was tracing the growth of that which must necessarily become
strange to us, and, as a matter of fact, has become strange to us.
Of its efforts to create a new dogmatic we scarcely need to have the
history written; it is alive within us. It is no doubt interesting to
trace how modern thoughts have found their way into the ancient dogmatic
system, there to combine with eternal ideas to form new constructions; it
is interesting to penetrate into the mind of the thinker in which this
process is at work; but the real truth of that which here meets us as
history we experience within ourselves. As in the monad of Leibnitz the
whole universe is reflected, so we intuitively experience within us, even
apart from any clear historical knowledge, the successive stages of the
progress of modern dogma, from rationalism to Ritschl. This experience is
true knowledge, all the truer because we are conscious of the whole as
something indefinite, a slow and difficult movement towards a goal which
is still shrouded in obscurity. We have not yet arrived at any
reconciliation between history and modern thought—only between half‐way
history and half‐way thought. What the ultimate goal towards which we are
moving will be, what this something is which shall bring new life and new
regulative principles to coming centuries, we do not know. We can only
dimly divine that it will be the mighty deed of some mighty original
genius, whose truth and rightness will be proved by the fact that we,
working at our poor half thing, will oppose him might and main—we who
imagine we long for nothing more eagerly than a genius powerful enough to
open up with authority a new path for the world, seeing that we cannot
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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