Liberalism and the Quest for Jesus ‘What would Jesus do?’ is an evangelical Christian gilluraces members to consider how Jesus vada react and what he would then do, if he were in the situation that confronts them, and then to act accordingly themselves. This seems to be both simple ‘the e questions is historical. To _— ye know what Jesus did, let alone what he ( when we are effectively dependent opinions and he did two thousand years ago? In short, should a Christian focus on the cosmic Christ or the historical Jesus?
The question of the relation between Jesus’ humanity and divinity is one that movement was Albrecht Ritschl (1822-1889), indeed so prominent that early commentators referred to theological Liberalism as Ritschlian Theology.
Ritschl was keen to distinguish between theology and natural science, believing the former to be involved with judgement of value and the latter with the judgement of fact. He did not see this split as a simple division between subject and object, but argued instead that value judgements offered the subject a way of approaching the objective world. He further believed that it was in this moral value that a _ human being could come to know God. _ For Ritschl, the conundrum of the human condition was that man was a product of nature and the world, as a physical being, but had moral capacity, as a spiritual being. The resolution to the contradiction of human existence lay in religion, or more exactly, in Christianity.
The sustained focus on morality as the true function of religion, and the way to God, effectively eliminated other contemporary avenues of exploration.
Mysticism was rejected as being unprotestant and non-moral. Doctrinal theology was also disregarded, as Ritschl considered these to be the result of a has always been an issue in Christianity.
But in the 19th century, these questions were asked in theological circles against a background of Liberalism. Liberalism emphasised the rights of the individual, freedom of thought and social tolerance that gave birth to modern democratic culture. Theological Liberalism reflected these values and began a search for the historical Jesus. It also looked to establish the Kingdom of God on Earth.
These values are reflected in the WWJD movement, which claims to find its inspiration from a late nineteenth century novel in which the Christian community of a small American town endeavour to live their lives doing what Jesus would do.
Prominent in the development of the Liberal Albrecht Ritschl misguided Hellenistic fascination with metaphysical speculation. This had resulted in the development of a dogma, effectively covering over the essence of Christianity, which was to be found in the life and teaching of Jesus.
Ritschl wanted to focus on Jesus, rather than the Church and its dogma. He was confident that the historical method could get back to the real Jesus and his ethical teaching. Central to Ritschl’s theology was the notion of the Kingdom of God. During his early ministry, Jesus had acted as the ethical exemplar for humankind and begun the process of the establishment of the Kingdom of God on Earth. It was, then, the mission of each individual Christian to strive towards the moral perfection of Jesus and also sof 60 june 2003 to bring about the Kingdom, ‘the intention of which is the moral organisation of mankind’.
Adolf Von Harnack (1851-1930) followed Ritschl’s dismissal of incarnational theology and summed up the doctrine of the Church as the ‘classic Hellenisation of Christianity’.
Like Ritschl, he also attempted to get back to Jesus the man and his original message. This message he incorporated in a body of lectures entitled ‘The Essence of faces". The historical Jesus looked remarkably like a nineteenth-century Liberal.
Schweitzer’s thesis and the theological developments it generated revealed not Jesus, but an understanding of his cultural remoteness. Jesus’ message was an eschatological one fashioned by and pertaining to his own time. If we really could meet the historical Jesus, we would at best find him quaint and at worst neither understand him nor even like him very much. Indeed, as Dennis Nineham has famously observed; ‘If Jesus were to walk into the room...the first disturbing Adolf von : p . :
Aa «impression might be not so much of his were his ideas on the Fatherhood of God, AdolfVon Harnack &teatness as of his strangeness’. of the ultimate worth of the human soul In academic circles, the attempt to and the individual nature of the relationship between uncover and in some meaningful sense understand each human being and their relationship to God. The the real Jesus of Nazareth lives on in projects such as culmination of this relationship was expressed in a the Jesus Seminar. As an aspect of faith, however, it form of ‘higher righteousness’ based on the Sermon remains only on the agenda of those who choose an on the Mount and the commandment to uncritical approach to the New Testament love. The true human endeavour was and the story of Jesus. Liberalism in its found in striving for moral perfection, time was a radical force that attempted to impossible though it is to attain. As Von shift the Christian gaze from the Harnack observed, 'Jesus combined speculative to the real, from the religion and morality and religion may be metaphysical to the physical, from the called the soul of morality and morality ecclesiastical to the political. As such it the body of religion’. might be seen as a precursor to the As it transpired, the foundations of political theologies of the late twentieth Liberalism were none too strong. Its focus century that traded the gospels for guns on the historical Jesus and his moral and salvation for liberation. Liberalism message was only a strength as long as failed, because it had nowhere else to go. both man and message remained It rejected all but the historical Jesus, only unimpeachable. Eventually, the optimism to find that the historical Jesus and his in the belief that the historical Jesus could be message ultimately proved too remote to offer either recovered, in order for it to be held as an objective moral direction or spiritual redemption. ideal for humanity, was questioned and found suspect. Literary criticism and redactional analysis of the Gospels provided evidence that the New Testament was not quite what Liberalism had presumed it to be. The original belief that the synoptic gospels were historical gave way to the realisation that none were biographical, but were theological.
At the beginning of the twentieth century Albert _ Schweitzer’s (1875-1965) studies led him to see the problems in this approach. In a ground-breaking book, "The Quest for the Historical Jesus" (1906), he showed theologians’ attempts to get back to the historical Jesus were themselves historically contingent. Their efforts, Schweitzer contended, invariably resulted in a portrayal not of an authentic first-century Jew, but rather of a man contextualised and made relevant to the theologians’ own society. In — short, the historical reconstruction of Jesus fails because the endeavours do not escape the ' theologians’ own cultural dispositions and assumptions. Biographers of Jesus, as George Tyrrell (1861-1909) expressed it, "looked deep into the well of history, and saw there only a reflection of theirown Christianity’. His primary concern was with the coming of the Kingdom of God on Earth, understood as the historical development of what he described as an ethical commonwealth. Linked to this Albert Schweitzer Trevor Greenfield is an Associate Lecturer in Religious Studies, Open University, with research interests in Radical Theology. (For WWID see - http://www.wwjd.com & www.whatwouldjesusdo.com/) sof 60 June 2003 18 Andy Kemp reviews Inventing God: a novel by Nicholas Mosley Seeker & Warburg 2003 pp.296 hb.£16.99 ISBN 0436210118 The television news report is playing like one of the labyrinthine plot-strands of Nicholas Mosley’s Inventing God. The camera peers into a smoking crater, then pans past blocks of flats with shrapnelpoked facades; the door to a basement cell is flung open to reveal manacles on heating pipes and bloodstains on the floor. It could be Beirut in the 1980s, but it's Baghdad, Good Friday, 2003. As the camera shot draws past some ventilation ducts in an underpass, a journalist's vehicle is surrounded by frantic Iraqis. The crowd is united in its mistaken belief that Saddam's ‘disappeared’ are entombed in secret underground prisons nearby.