The legacy of modernity and its challenges toward historical theology has brought a sense of relief and clarity as to the developments that have come about as a result. The pernicious and corrosive effect of subjective liberal thought that developed into a flawed intellectual ethos proved chaotic. It yielded no meaningful substance as it concerned significant themes about the essence of Christianity in the 19th-century.
Increasingly, by the impetus of Kant’s call for “autonomy,” individual reason and conscience became the arbiters of religious truth. Romans rejected but shifted to religious experience (pg. 2). Tradition emerged from the working of the “Divine Spirit” or religious experience of the Christian community. Others relied upon authority from antiquity (i.e., the early Church fathers) as they regarded the doctrine of apostolic succession as the guarantor of tradition of the ancient and undivided Church. Roman Catholicism fell back to Papal infallibility (1870) to secure the Church against modern rationalism, subjectivism, ecclesial chaos, and schism (as supported by John Henry Newman).
Albert Ritschl (Protestant scholar) rejected Schleiermacher’s appeal to the authority of religious feeling and experience and the orthodox rationalists’ appeal to reason and rational “proofs” as mediated through the Christian community (i.e., “consensus fidelium” or the collective mind of the people of God). Where authority is concentrated correlates to power and the source of it. Therefore, it is of interest to people and spiritual principalities who do not want the authority of the biblical authors (i.e., revelation by Scripture inspired by the Holy Spirit) over their preferences around tradition or social feelings and imaginations.
Church Doctrine was a point of unification for the Church and, more broadly, Christianity. Eventually, the spectacle of doctrinal pluralism became an issue due to differences or disagreements about interpreting, understanding, and applying Scripture. As immutable truths were sought that theists could agree upon, a search for commonality was diluted to such an extent that orthodox unity around doctrine could be achieved. As matters grew worse, particularly during the unstable time of Zeitgeist, some began to insist that there were no immutable, unchanging, or normative doctrines. An inability to arrive at a consensus about the authority of doctrinal beliefs was a source of significant attention in the Church during the 19th-century.
Over the span of decades, Friedrich Schleiermacher (Protestant) and John Henry Newman (Catholic), among other Catholics, separately sought to find common ground about doctrinal belief in the face of significant differentiation and a plurality of traditions or faith practices. Schleiermacher drew his attention toward the affections and doctrines of expression to support a common interest as illuminated in the life of the Church. Livingston points out that the same “illumination” was present upon the early Church as given by the exegetical analysis of the New Testament. However, Livingston does not refer to the social or communal leanings of Schleiermacher concerning authority that rests upon the subjective nature of people and their interests (i.e., rather than Scripture). Conversely, with Newman, the Catholic Church places significant attention on the historical development of dogma in an effort to understand and define the essence of the Church. The rationale between both the Protestants and Catholics was that God’s truth could not be divided against itself (Livingston, 4) even when Protestants and Catholics remain separate within the body of Christendom (notwithstanding Eastern Orthodoxy).
Both Liberal Protestants and Catholics refused to return to the Bible as the source of authority to understand Christian essence. It was Newman’s view that “the essential Christian idea” was formative over the centuries and Scripture was a corruption of the apostolic witness from the first century Church. The opposition of immutable dogma from Liberal Protestants and Catholics focused on the rejection of Scripture. In contrast, Scripture held primacy, but not sole authority, to define the essence of Christianity and its expression within the Church. As propagated through centuries, preeminent tradition itself came in the form of Scripture testimony, Church doctrines, liturgy, worship, and the priestly organization. To John Henry Newman and Johann Adam Mohler, Christianity tradition carried equal distributed weight to define Christian essence.
Later in the 19th-century, further efforts were made to consolidate human reason and philosophical rationale around Christianity’s historical development. From pervasively errant understanding about the corruption of early canonical writings, it was of the utmost interest to spread the notion that authority was in revelation of Scripture, historical traditions, and Christian philosophy attending to human feeling and action. It was the role of the will and conscience to cultivate a knowledge of God.
Human intuition, experience, and feeling were prominent features of Liberal theology. These were the primary route to God as recorded by Schleiermacher and poets of the time. Natural expression through people and creation were in witness to God, and human understanding about Him was revealed primarily through those means. Kant and Albrecht Ritschl highlighted another route to belief in God to involve the demands of moral obligation, reason human freedom, and the world of Spirit. From “the will to power” (Nietzsche) to “will to believe” (William James), the philosophical views of Kant, Bergson (vitalism), and Blondel’s (L’Action), there was inevitable push-back against idealism and subjectivism. Princeton Theology (Protestant) and Neo-Thomism (Catholic) directed their counterarguments against agnostic, fideistic, and pragmatic thought as they both traced the chaotic intellectual ethos to Immanuel Kant and his influence. Both Protestants and Catholics drew much attention to both faith and reason, where each was complimentary and not in contradiction. Both schools of theology made substantial inroads with the support of Aristotle’s inductive and scientific realism and Scottish empiricist philosophy. Today, debates concerning faith and reason about the existence and authority of God and His revelatory work continues.
As the search for historical Christianity developed over the last two centuries, numerous challenges and competing interests were at the forefront of theological debate within the modern context of scientific and historical disciplines. From first-century A.D. Christianity, there was substantial and eternal value among the claims of testimony, early witness, tradition, and Scripture. Those claims were contested because of the anthropomorphic language of Scripture and the miracles espoused by historical accounts among theologians and philosophical leaders. Even simply, the historicity of the life of Christ and the Christian life were countered as probative questions were posed about modern Christianity while adapted to the Enlightenment period. It was questioned, as it is now, whether Christianity today is the same as the religion founded by Jesus and the apostles.
D.F. Strauss’s book, Life of Jesus in 1835, explored the historicity of Jesus against the theological presuppositions of early Jewish messianic traditions and preconceptions of the later and more modern interest in His life. The historical Jesus of the New Testament is distinguished from records of the antiquity of Him as early Jews looked back upon his identity as a legendary figure within Hebrew literature. Krauss also demonstrated that our view of Jesus is from a modern consciousness that the earliest Christians did not have. Their recognition and interest in Jesus were from a pre-scientific point of view as they interpreted Jesus from a mythopoetic standpoint. As a further interest to validate the historicity of Christianity developed, a new standard pursuit emerged where The historical Jesus must withstand the theological Jesus who produced signs and miracles. The same was true, vice versa. Strauss found that the historical Jesus was left untouched by harsh criticism and inquiry, especially concerning the supernatural Christ of Scripture.
In a further effort to find authority and validate New Testament claims about Jesus, later advancements were made by research through Form criticism. As this led to new doubts about the use of the Gospel records and getting a historical understanding of Jesus’s inner life, there remained a highly desirable understanding of Jesus’s personality and inner psychological life. This was the desideratum of the Life of Christ at about the turn of the 19th century. The life of Jesus from a historical context to recover details about His character, personality, and life from outside the New Testament was the desideratum for theologians of later years of the 19th-century and well into the 20th.
There were four pronounced efforts to pursue the historical Jesus and challenge theological and religious claims. Each effort was distinct in its way as they all had different objectives.
- Comparative Religions (Religionswissenschaft)
“History of Religions” is a science to explore religion’s origin, growth, and commonalities to include Christianity. Exhaustive development of methods and materials to understand what themes or similarities existed to explain the historical value and merit of faith and follower claims of any given religion.
- Eschatological Interpretation
The notion that Jesus could be properly understood within the apocalyptic framework of ancient Jewish traditions and expectations. As Jesus recognized an imminent catastrophic end to the present age, He gave Himself up to death in desperation to usher in the new supernatural Kingdom of God to which He would more immediately return.
- History of Religions School (Religionsgeschichtliche Schule)
As a new generation of Jesus critics arose to explore the historicity of Christianity, a new crop of historians sought to interpret Jesus through its beliefs, Judaism, and Hellenism. As new scientific tools (e.g., textual criticism) were applied to historical research of Jesus, derived observations and comparisons were made to the social and cultural conditions of His time. Namely, a complex mixture of Jewish apocalyptic eschatology, Hellenistic Judaism, Greek and Eastern Mysticism, Stoicism, Gnosticism was formulated to arrive at a Jesus beyond the reach of meaningful historical analysis about His inner person. Instead, He was viewed as Jesus the Kyrios, or Christ the divine Lord and Savior.
- Form Criticism (Formgeschichtliche Schule)
While prior pursuits of organized research came up empty to understand and recognize the historical Jesus, further work was undertaken to develop a critical method around a Framework of the Story of Jesus (K.L. Schmidt (1891-1956), Der Rahmen der Geschichte Jesu). Schmidt concluded that the traditions of Christianity were arbitrary and artificial while there was considerable geographical detail within the gospel of Mark. Time and place weren’t so much of a synchronized historical account of the life of Jesus but more of a story to support tradition.
Another approach to Form criticism involved the work of Martin Dibelius (1883-1947) entitled From Tradition to Gospel (Die Formgeschichte des Evangeliums, 1934). Here Dibelius traced the different forms of oral traditions to include paradigm, novelle (tales), legend, parenthesis, and myth. From among the five forms, Dibelius found that paradigms to illuminate the sayings of Jesus were the clearest way to understand the historical Jesus.
Form criticism further advanced through the efforts of Rudolf Bultmann (1884-1966), who wrote History of the Synoptic Tradition (Die Geschichte der Synoptischen Tradition, 1921). This was a radical approach to Form criticism. Bultmann observed that there were traditions in the Gospels written to meet the needs of the early Church. This meant that the written synoptic text wasn’t a collection of historical documents as such, but a compilation of writings to satisfy a spiritual need as confessions and instructions for life and worship. It was clear that Jesus to know was through the apostolic witness, proclamations, and traditions given in the Gospels of the New Testament. This was the kerygmatic theology that neutralized pursuits of the historical Jesus that was out of reach. The kerygma was unquestionable, and it served as the bedrock for Dialectical theology in the years to follow.
When it comes to Ernst Troeltsch (1865-1923), during this era of historicism, and research, about historical Jesus, the essence of Christianity, the absoluteness of Christianity (among other religions), Christology, and theological rationale, his pursuits and ideas appeared detached from Scripture. As he relentlessly pursued the historical Jesus, it doesn’t appear that he placed authoritative weight on Scripture. He did not concern himself with the historicity of Jesus much farther than comparisons among other religions, sociopsychological influences, traditions, and other means outside of the revelatory discourse of Scripture. Karl Barth was right; Troeltsch’s efforts were a “dead-end street” in the absence of what facts were revealed in Scripture to attain clarity about the identity of Jesus. Through various methods of Christological understanding from Scripture, there is much to explore as it concerns Jewish ideas of messianic rule, kingly accession, ceremonial customs, familial relationships, economic status, refugee trials, and other hardships in Scripture to develop a portrait of Jesus. History is simply the backdrop or canvas by which events occurred across time. In contrast, the social, geographical, and historical conditions were subordinate and in service of the theological intent and meaning of Christ’s work. Christ’s identity and historical significance are best placed upon the kerygmatic interpretation of divine revelation.
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