PLAN OPERATIVO INSTITUCIONAL 2015

(i) Liberalism as Ethical Religion

A ‘liberal stance’ towards religion has been characterised by one contemporary philosopher as placing ‘the ethics of religion before its doctrines and historical myths.’1 There is surely more to liberal conceptions of religion than this, not least a commitment to the use of reason, an openness to scientific discovery, freedom of religious conscience, a rejection of theological absolutism (whether institutional or scriptural), and the acceptance of fluidity in the interpretation of texts and traditional doctrines. Nevertheless, it seems correct to say that an emphasis on ethics (or moral theology) over against other doctrinal preoccupations is a common feature of the religion of writers who either define themselves as liberal,2 _{or who have tended to be defined as such by} intellectual historians.3 _{Perhaps the most distinguished and influential Enlightenment} thinker to adopt this liberal/ethical stance was Immanuel Kant, who characterised God as a postulate of practical reason in his Kritik der praktischen Vernunft (1788),4 _and continued his moral emphasis in Religion innerhalb der Grenzen (1793), where the figure of Jesus comes to the fore as the moral exemplar par excellence.5 _{Although it should be} noted that Jean-Jacques Rousseau had already adopted a comparable position on Jesus,

1 _{Peter Byrne, The Moral Interpretation of Religion, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998, p. 1.} 2 _{The work of the philosopher-theologian Keith Ward embodies all the features I identified; writing from a} more explicitly Christian theological perspective than Byrne, he gives a broader view: ‘If the heart of liberalism lies in not accepting the authority of humans or of scriptural texts as unquestionably binding, a liberal must have some account of revelation which is not propositional (consisting in divine provision of inerrant sentences). An account in terms of a unique type of faith discernments closely associated with personal value commitment and with a tradition of such discernments preserved in a distinctive community. And that is precisely what the classical liberal theologians provided’: Ward, ‘The Importance of Liberal Theology’, in Mark D Chapman (ed.) The Future of Liberal Theology, Aldershot: Ashgate 2002, pp. 39 – 53: 49.

3 _{Ethics was certainly central to the concerns of many of those thinkers in the German liberal theological} tradition of H. J. Holtzmann and Albert Ritschl.

4 _{See Kant, The Critique of Practical Reason, Mary Gregor (ed. & trans.), Andrews Reath, Cambridge:} Cambridge University Press, 1997, pt i, bk 1, chap. 2.

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and Kant’s moral thought owed much to the Swiss philosopher.6 _{Kant undoubtedly} exerted influence on many of those New Testament scholars reviewed by Albert Schweitzer in Reimarus zu Wrede, who are celebrated examples of Christian liberalism and its associated moral focus.7 _{But there is a problem with any exclusive identification} between this liberal tradition and the philosophy of Kant.

A commitment to the historical enterprise was never one of the Prussian moralist’s priorities, and Kant’s relative indifference to history in matters of religious truth is taken to be a virtue by some of those who understand their approach to religion as continuous with his. In his preliminary remarks to his Kantian inspired study, Peter Byrne writes, ‘The modern writers who will be the focus of the bulk of this book are heirs to a rejection of history and historical beliefs as the locus for making sense of God and God’s relation to the world.’8 _{But thinking of history as a way of ‘making sense of God and God’s} relationship to the world’ was not rejected by most of those nineteenth and early twentieth-century New Testament writers identified with the liberal tradition;9 _{on the} contrary, some of the best scholars in this tradition emphatically affirmed the historical method as a way of investigating, refining and clarifying the character of the Christian revelation.10 _{And because of this long and continuing tradition of liberal theology’s} attachment to history as a fitting focus for theological reflection, it is understandable that some scholars are inclined to see the origins of liberal theology in the work of Frederick

6 _{See Vincent A McCarthy, Quest for a Philosophical Jesus: Christianity and Philosophy in Rousseau, Kant,}

Hegel and Schelling, Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press, 1986, especially chaps. 1 – 2.

7 _{The pervasive influence of Kant and his contested legacy among liberal theologians is discussed in} Chapman, Ernst Troeltsch and Liberal Theology: Religion and Cultural Synthesis in Wilhelmine Germany, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

8 _{Byrne, Moral Interpretation, p. 2. This rejection is said to arise because as a result of, ‘Historical criticism} of the Biblical narratives’, which ‘fuels scepticism about the certainty of any beliefs about divine action in history’ (p. 2); more generally, there is the recognition that ‘revelation in history is, by definition, historically and geographically situated’ (p.2), whereas the idea of ‘divine perfection would preclude the divine from being more closely related to one portion of the world and its history than another’ (p. 3).

9 _{Byrne may want to distinguish between ‘liberal religion’ (his philosophical concern) and ‘liberal theology’} (a tendency among some Christian intellectuals), but among moral interpreters of religion, there is so much engagement with the Christian tradition, and by some avowedly Christian intellectuals, that any sharp distinction seems untenable: Kant is Byrne’s preferred (but not only) point of departure for the moral interpretation of religion (see ibid, p. 1- 2), and the great philosopher’s relationship to Christian theology is complex, but he revises rather than dismisses a variety of Christian theological doctrines in Religion with the

Boundaries, reserves a unique place for Christ, and does not seem to countenance truth in any other religion.

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Schleiermacher:11 _{in addition to having a strong emphasis on the ethical, Schleiermacher} was also immersed in the historical study of scripture.12

(ii) The Ethical Christ: From Schweitzer to Reimarus

Schweitzer seems to have had an ambivalent relationship to liberalism: on the one hand, ethics was at the heart of his own religious thought and practice;13 _{on the other hand,} with the exception of Karl Bath, he is perhaps the most famous critic of liberal thinkers in German theology.14 _{Perhaps this ambivalence is only apparent, however. In Reimarus zu} Wrede, Schweitzer is critical of the liberal stance whenever it manifests itself in interpretations of the historical Jesus. Schweitzer regarded this as an instance of modern theology intruding into the domain of ancient history:

The study of the Life of Jesus has had a curious history…It loosed the bands by which He had been riveted for centuries to the stony rocks of ecclesiastical doctrine, and rejoiced to see life and movement coming into the figure once more, and the historical Jesus advancing, as it seemed, to meet it. But He does not stay; He passes by our time and returns to His own.15

Schweitzer’s Jesus ‘was not a teacher, not a casuist’,16 _{and the Jesus of any serious} historical criticism in the future will ‘not be a Jesus Christ to whom the religion of the

11 _{See James M Byrne, ‘A Reasonable Passion: The Revival of Liberal Theology’ (review of}

Chapman [ed.], The Future of Liberal Theology; and Michael J Langford, A Liberal Theology for the Twenty-

First Century: A Passion for Reason, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), Reviews in Religion and Theology, vol. 10,

issue 1, Feb. 2003, pp. 6 – 13: 10.

12 _{Byrne argues that ‘from Scleiermacher [sic] onwards modern liberal theology, while indebted to Kant, has} attempted to overcome the Kantian critique by deepening what we understand by reason; that which is rationally defensible is not merely that which can be accepted on a narrow rationalist agenda’ (‘A Reasonable Passion’, p. 10). And however flawed Schleiermacher’s methodological assumptions in Das

Leben Jesu, there can be no doubt about his commitment to history, and especially biography, as source of

theological insight.

13 _{Schweitzer’s intellectual commitment to ethical concerns are found in Philosophy of Civilisation, and his} collection of sermons Reverence for Life, Reginald H Fuller (trans.), New York: Harper & Row, 1969; while the relationship between this and his practical commitment is illuminated in his autobiographical writings, most notably Life and Thought, as well as and in the secondary material: see Mike W Martin, Albert

Schweitzer's Reverence for Life: Ethical Idealism and Self-Realization. Aldershot: Ashgate. 2007; and David

C Miller and James Pouilliard, The Relevance of Albert Schweitzer at the Dawn of the 21st Century, Lanham, MD: University Press of America. 1992.

14 _{Karl Barth saw in theological liberalism a dangerous readiness to accommodate Christian faith to the} world, and thus to become a servant of the world before Christ: a seminal moment for Barth was the support of a number of liberal-theologians for the German war effort in the early phase of hostilities in 1914, most notably (or notoriously) the September Manifesto of the Ninety Three Intellectuals, which identified the conflict with the preservation of the magnificent culture of Goethe, Kant and Beethoven. One of the

signatories to this document was Barth’s former teacher, Harnack. Barth’s insistence on a commitment to God as ‘wholly other’, a reality which could never be captured by any human culture, was given vivid expression in his famous commentary Der Römerbrief (1919): see The Epistle to the Romans (6th _edn), Edwyn C Hoskyns (trans.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968.

15 _{Schweizter, Quest, p. 399.} 16 _{Ibid, p. 399.}

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present can ascribe, according to its long-cherished custom, its own thoughts and ideas’.17

Schweitzer showed that it was possible, however, to reject an overtly moral emphasis in the biographical reconstructions of major figures in religious history while nevertheless insisting that it is, after all, the ethics in religious traditions which are of abiding significance. For Schweitzer, the historical Jesus acted as an ‘imperious ruler’ in a climate of apocalyptic religion,18 _{not as a moral sage offering wisdom for ethical living} throughout the ages. Yet even on Schweitzer’s account, it is because of the historical Jesus, not in spite of him, that Christianity yields to an ethical interpretation and demands an on-going ethical response.19 _{In the second edition of Reimarus zu Wrede, Schweitzer is} explicit in articulating the historical core which shows the liberal stance to be, in some sense, continuous with the mission of the historical Jesus:

Jesus’ action consists in the way in which his natural and profound moral consciousness adopts late Jewish eschatology…[S]o a period can have a real and living relationship with Jesus only to the extent that it thinks ethically and eschatologically with its own categories, and can produce within its own world- view the equivalents of those desires and expectations which hold such a prominent position in his, that is, when it is dominated by ideas which correspond to those that govern Jesus’ conception of the kingdom of God.20

For Schweitzer, Jesus inhabited a mental world where the space-time universe was reaching its divinely ordained conclusion, and, as such, there is an uncommon radicalism in his will to set in motion the transformation of the world. On this reading, the extraordinary will of Jesus constitutes the timeless feature of his historical personality, and Schweitzer believed that this could and should be harnessed by his followers in the modern word, a world which Schweitzer thought had lost confidence in the Enlightenment’s promise of radical progress in human affairs.21

Like the liberal theologians, Schweitzer was preoccupied with the moral and social progress of humanity, but in his desire to capture the energy of one (Jesus) who was dedicated to nothing less than leading humanity out of a fallen world and into a world where the justice of God would reign for eternity, Schweitzer envisaged a rather more

17 _{Ibid, p. 398 – 399.} 18 _{Ibid, p. 403.} 19 _{Ibid, p. 402.}

20 _{Schweitzer, Quest: FCE, p 482 – 483.} 21 _{Ibid, p. 485.}

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radical response to the historical Jesus than many liberal Christians of his time: social propriety, charitable giving or a more redistributive form of government did not exhaust his vision of Christian moral action. Schweitzer’s radical reading of the ethical demand implicit in Jesus’ example manifested itself in his own life choices, which, for long periods, took him away from the comfortable world of European elite society and into the humanitarian work for which he is most famous to many today. It is for this work that he would eventually be awarded the Noble Peace Prize, and become a by word for public virtue on the lips of other illustrious figures of the twentieth century.22

At the close of Reimarus zu Wrede, Schweitzer leaves his reader with the following reflection on the historical subject of his book:

He speaks to us the same word: "Follow thou me!" and sets us to the tasks which He has to fulfil for our time. He commands. And to those who obey Him, whether they be wise or simple, He will reveal Himself in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings which they shall pass through in His fellowship, and, as an ineffable mystery, they shall learn in their own experience Who He is.23

This kind of existential response to Jesus, recommended at the end of one of the most famously hardnosed historical treatments of Jesus, might explain why Schweitzer has been understood as by some commentators as a modern ‘mystic’,24 _{an interpretation he} rather encouraged in his own writings.25 _{But however we conceptualise Schweitzer’s} distinctive approach to religion, it is clear than he thought that the liberal Quest to find in

22 _{Schweitzer won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1952 for his humanitarian work, outstripping his renown as an} intellectual: the 11 July 1949 edition of TIME magazine ran with Schweitzer on the front cover, describing him as ‘one of the world's great humanitarians’, and, having then off a broad brush, but nevertheless impressive, list of his academic and artistic accomplishments, returned to his moral credentials: ‘Above all, he is a man who decided to turn his back on the dazzling rewards the world wanted to give him in order to serve his fellow man’ (TIME on-line archive), accessed 16 May 2012:

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,853820,00.html pp. 1-8: 1). Schweitzer has won praise from the great and the good of twentieth-century history, including fellow Nobel Prize winners President Jimmy Carter and Albert Einstein: ‘He is the only Westerner who has had a moral effect on this generation comparable to Ghandi’s. As in the case of Ghandi, the extent of this is overwhelmingly due to the example he gave by his own life’s work’: The New Quotable Einstein, Alice Calaprice (ed.), Freeman Dyson (fore.), Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press, 2005, p. 97. He has not been without his detractors, however. The same magazine who hailed him in the first half of the twentieth century turned against him as the climate of opinion shifted on the whole subject of the European presence in Africa, however noble the intentions: see John Randal, ‘Albert Schweitzer: An Anachronism’, in TIME (on-line archive), 21 Jun. 1963, accessed 18 Jul. 2012:

http://www.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,874897-1,00.html 23 _{Schweitzer, Quest, p. 403.}

24 _{Baird, Edwards to Bultmann p. 230. And see the analysis in Henry B Clark, The Ethical Mysticism of}

Albert Schweitzer, Boston: Beacon Press, 1962.

25 _{In Life and Thought, Schwitzer writes, ‘All thinking that penetrates to the bottom arrives at ethical} mysticism. What is rational reaches eventually the nonrational. The ethical mysticism of Reverence for Life is rational thought that derives its power from the spiritual nature of our being’ (p. 204).

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Jesus a kindred spirit—a visionary prophet of civilised, liberal modernity, communicated through a spiritualised conception of the Kingdom of God—had only served to rob him of his moral vitality. And Schweitzer judged that scholars of his own generation had actually lost sight of the radicalism of moral will which was such a striking feature of the historical Jesus: ‘Despite all advances in historical insight, he [Jesus] in fact remained more alien to them than he had been to the rationalism of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, which in its ardent belief in an imminent moral advance of mankind had more in common with him.’26 _{Schweitzer does not specify exactly which thinkers he has in mind} here, but a commitment to the ethical betterment of humanity during the Enlightenment is extremely well documented,27 _{and Schweitzer is right to draw our attention to moral} readings of Jesus in the early history of the Quest. Our point of departure for such readings will be a familiar one: H. S. Reimarus. I have had cause to criticise Schweitzer in this study for overestimating the originality of Reimarus's contribution to the historical study of Jesus, but he is also guilty of largely ignoring Reimarus’s conception of Jesus as a moralist, and, therefore, as a reference for liberal, ethical religion; after all, this reading has proved a much more enduring paradigm for the study of Jesus than Reimarus’s concurrent thesis that Jesus was a failed political claimant to a restored throne of Israel.

(iii) Reimarus on the Religious Significance of Jesus: What is He Good For?

It is rare for Reimarus to be associated with anything other than destructive results with respect to Jesus, but this is due to a rather one dimension reading of his work. Jonathan Israel notes how his ‘belittling depiction of Jesus in fact contrasted dramatically with the moral greatness and universalism Lessing himself, much like Spinoza, Herder, Semler, Eberhard, Goethe, and Bahrdt, attributed to the Christ figure.’28 _{Compared to those} figures, Reimarus does operate with a double edged sword, but it is important not to forget both sides of the blade. We have already seen that by the latter stages of his life, Reimarus had come to hold Christianity in very low regard: his posthumously published writings testify to his judgement that its central doctrines are contrary to reason and to

26 _{Schweitzer, Quest: FCE, p. 483}

27 _{See throughout Gay’s Modern Paganism, pp. 178 – 196, and vol. 2, The Science of Freedom, London:} Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1970, chaps. 8 – 10; Cassirer, Enlightenment, chap. vi; Porter, Creation, chaps. 15, 18 – 19; and Israel’s Radical, chaps. 4, 15, Contested, chaps. 10, 21 – 23, 26, and Democratic, chaps. 4, 9, 18, 23, 34.

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true (rational and natural) religion,29 _{and, in the hands of some, socially pernicious.}30 _But Jesus never bore the brunt of Reimarus's polemic, and for good reason: on his reading, what became orthodox Christianity had very little to do with anything the historical Jesus ever said or did. And although Reimarus tried to expose what he saw as the political- eschatological delusions under which Jesus was living, thereby driving a wedge between Jesus' vision of worldly deliverance and the Christian doctrine of spiritual salvation, Jesus' religious significance is altered (and reduced) rather than extinguished. So what is Jesus’ abiding religious significance?

In his Duldung der Deisten (first Fragment) Reimarus advances an argument which has proven to be remarkably popular in modern European thought. Indeed, it has been present in one form or another from Rousseau’s Émile ou De l'éducation (1762) through to Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979):31 _{the idea is the familiar one that if one traces} Christianity back to Jesus, it begins promisingly (even gloriously), but quickly falls into disrepute and has yet to recover. According to Reimarus, ‘Die reine Lehre Christi’ (the pure teachings of Christ) consists of a ‘vernünftige’ (rational) and ‘praktische’ (practical) religion.32 _{This quickly degenerated, however, when the essential message was distorted} by Jesus’ followers, who subordinated his teachings to the ‘jüdisches System von dem Messias’ (Jewish system of the Messiah),33 _{built on ‘der Schriften Moses und der} Propheten’ (the writings of Moses and the prophets); as such, the original integrity of this