The
Historical Jesus
and the Question of Religious Authority
By Gregory W. Dawes
Senior Lecture in Religious Studies
University of
Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand
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As I
noted in a recent article, our own age has witnessed a
proliferation of books on the subject of the historical Jesus. Many of
these books are of considerable interest, as works of first-century
history. But practically none of these studies grapples with the issue
which underlies this debate, an issue which was very familiar to the
thinkers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For the
historical Jesus question is merely the most obvious expression of a
deeper shift in religious attitudes, expressed in the subtitle to my most
recent book, The Historical Jesus Question: The Challenge of History to
Religious Authority. Behind the historical Jesus debate, there lurks a
rarely discussed crisis of religious authority. My book attempts to
highlight that crisis.
It is hard to know why this matter is so studiously ignored by New
Testament scholars. It may be because the field of biblical studies has
in recent decades become increasingly autonomous. It no longer sees
itself as part of the wider field of Christian theology. More than 20
years ago, James Barr delivered an inaugural lecture on the subject "Does
biblical study still belong to theology?" There would be all the more
reason to pose that question today. Alternatively, this neglect may be
due to the fact that New Testament scholars are unaware of the historic
shifts in human thinking which underlie the emergence of their own
discipline. Before about 1650, no one in Christian Europe could have
thought of asking about "the historical Jesus." This is not only because
our modern discipline of history had not yet developed. It is also
because to ask about the historical Jesus is to suggest that the figure
who emerges from historical research may be different from "the Christ of
faith," the figure in whom Christians have believed for almost two
millennia. To make this suggestion was to call into question, not just
the authority of the Church (which the Protestant Reformers had done all
too successfully), but the authority of the Bible itself.
This questioning of biblical authority first occurred, in a
widespread and influential way, in the seventeenth century. Many factors
contributed to this process. One thinks, for instance, of the new
astronomy of Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) and of Galileo Galilei
(1564-1642), which undermined the marriage between Ptolemaic astronomy
and Christian faith that had served medieval Christians so well. (When
the late medieval poet Dante Alighieri refers to God as "the love that
moves the sun and other stars," he is not just using a pretty metaphor;
he speaking quite literally of the moving force of the cosmos, in terms
drawn from Aristotelian physics.) One thinks, also, of the voyages of
discovery, which opened up the intellectual world of educated Europeans
and made them aware of other ancient cultures, each with their venerable
religious traditions. (Indeed, our modern notion of "a religion" only
seems to emerge at about this time.) In any case, during the seventeenth
century a critical change occurred. The theologian Hans Frei has
described this change as "the great reversal." At the beginning of the
seventeenth century, the biblical story still formed the framework into
which could be fitted (with a little ingenuity) the whole of human
knowledge, both sacred and secular. By the end of the seventeenth
century, the framework of human knowledge was provided by secular
disciplines the natural sciences and history and the Bible had to
find its place within this sometimes hostile environment.
This great reversal had at least three notable consequences. Firstly,
Christianity came to be seen as merely one religion among others. Its
status as the product of a divine revelation could no longer be assumed,
given the existence of other ancient religious traditions making
comparable claims to authority. Secondly, the message of Christianity
came to be seen as the product of a particular time and place. Just as
other religions were clearly the work of human beings, who wove together
a set of beliefs from elements found in their cultural environment, so
Christianity too could be seen as the product of a particular human
history. Thirdly, the Bible's account of the origins of Christianity lost
its taken-for-granted status. Since the Bible had now to find its place
within a framework of knowledge derived from elsewhere, that knowledge
could be used to judge the accuracy of the biblical narrative. These
developments found expression in the work of Benedict Spinoza (163277),
whose Tractatus theologico-politicus lays down the programme for a
historical interpretation of the Bible, a programme which has endured to
our own day.
Many eighteenth and nineteenth-century thinkers were well aware of
the magnitude of this change. David Friedrich Strauss, for example, the
author of the famous Life of Jesus Critically Examined (1835), at first
tried to redeem the significance of the Christian story by reinterpreting
it in terms of the philosophy of G. W. F. Hegel (17701831). This allowed
him to see the Christian story as an allegory of the gradual
"incarnation" of Mind, which was the way in which Hegel interpreted
history as a whole. However, after becoming disillusioned with
Hegelianism, and after reading the work of Charles Darwin (180982),
Strauss realized that history could no longer be interpreted in this
purposeful manner. The result was Strauss's open and forthright
abandonment of the Christian faith. By way of contrast, the philosopher
and theologian Ernst Troeltsch (18651923), while distancing himself from
Hegel's philosophy, still believed that human history could be understood
as the gradual self-revelation of the divine Spirit. In this context, he
tried to defend Christianity in the context of other religions as the
highest product of the human spirit to have emerged to date. However, in
his later years Troeltsch was unsure about the universality of this
claim. Perhaps Christianity could claim authority only for the peoples of
the Mediterranean and European worlds, whose histories were the matrix
out of which it had arisen.
By way of reaction, the dialectical theologians of the early and
mid-twentieth century found ways of trying to shelter Christian faith
from the cold winds of historical relativity. Karl Barth (18861968) did
so by drawing from his own Calvinist tradition resources which enabled
him to distinguish sharply between the "history" which was the scene of
divine revelation and the "history" which was accessible to the
historian. In this context, he could declare Christian faith to be
entirely other than "a religion" in the modern sense. Rather than a
product of human history, Christian faith could be seen as a response to
a divine revelation, a revelation which did not need to be subjected to
historical scrutiny. If one asked, "What evidence is there that Christian
faith is indeed a response to divine revelation?", Barth's reply was that
the authority of the Bible is "self-authenticating." While John Calvin
(150964) had pointed not just to "the internal testimony of the Holy
Spirit" but also to "external evidences" for biblical authority, Barth
swept the external evidences away, insisting that the Bible be subjected
to no criteria outside of its own. Rudolf Bultmann (18841976) achieved a
similar result, drawing not only on Lutheran theology but on the
neo-Kantian and existentialist philosophies of his time. These enabled
Bultmann to dismiss historical knowledge as merely "objectifying"
knowledge. It is a false and misleading form of knowledge, insofar as it
tries to understand human existence "objectively," in a way which ignores
my involvement as a subject in that which I am attempting to understand.
Such knowledge merely enables me to escape the demand for decision and
commitment which I encounter in my lived experience. Religion, on the
other hand, deals not with "facts" which can be understood objectively;
it deals with the realm of decision and commitment, a realm inaccessible
to objectifying knowledge.
Barth and Bultmann were major thinkers, who recognised the enormity
of the crisis facing Christian faith by the radical ways in which they
tried to respond to it. But many of their followers came to see their
responses as inadequate. Barth's bold defiance of historical relativity
was bought at the price of an act of faith which seemed to be, in the
end, entirely arbitrary. It is true that, once one learned (as Barth
said) to think "from God out," the challenge of history disappeared. But
what grounds could be offered for embracing this biblical perspective?
Having rejected Calvin's appeal to "external evidences," Barth was left
with no publicly accessible grounds at all. At this point, Christian
theology seemed destined for the ghetto. Bultmann's thought was at first
sight more open to philosophical scrutiny, but it too ran into
irresolvable contradictions. Christian faith could not in the end divorce
itself from the merely "objectifying" knowledge of the historian, if it
was to be true to its traditional claim that God had become incarnate in
human history. Indeed, it was one of Bultmann's former students, Ernst
Kδsemann, who in 1953 reintroduced the question of history into the
theological debate. That question has been taken up with some vigour in
our own time by Wolfhart Pannenberg (b.1928).
Insofar as all these thinkers are dealing with the questions first
raised in the seventeenth century, they may be regarded as forming a
single research tradition, although unlike a scientific research
tradition, it deals with conceptual rather than empirical matters. The
question with which my book ends is a simple one, but one rarely asked by
either biblical scholars or theologians. At what point should one judge
that this particular research tradition ought to be abandoned, that it
has failed to achieve its object and is unlikely to make further
progress? In the history of science, there are moments which grand
research traditions were rightly abandoned. The most famous, as we have
seen, occurred in the seventeenth century, when all attempts to shore up
the tottering framework of Ptolemaic astronomy were finally shown to have
been in vain. At what point should one make a similar judgment about this
tradition of Christian theology?
Philosophers of science argue that a research tradition is still
"alive," that it is making progress, when it is able to resolve an
increasing number of problems without creating further problems or
anomalies. Is this true of the tradition I have outlined? It appears not.
The dialectical theologians attempted to reverse the pattern of thought
established by thinkers such as Troeltsch, which they saw as incompatible
with Christian faith. But the problems raised by the "great reversal" of
the seventeenth century could not be so easily evaded. The theology of
Pannenberg at the beginning of the twenty-first century effectively
brings us back to the position occupied by Troeltsch at the beginning of
the twentieth, with (I would argue) no greater degree of success. If this
represents a progressive research tradition, then one is entitled to ask
what a degenerating tradition would look like. The most obvious
conclusion would seem to be a simple one. Christian theology has been
unable to survive the intellectual challenges raised by the onset of
modernity. Like any decision to abandon a major research tradition, this
is, of course, a matter of judgment. There will no doubt be many whose
judgment will be different from mine, but I will be interested to see on
what grounds they feel able to disagree.
Gregory W. Dawes is a Senior Lecturer in Religious Studies at the
University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand.
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