Last weekend was, for Christians, Easter Weekend. I let it pass unnoticed here.
I come so tardy to the fair because I started work on a Good Friday post on related subject matter, but it got out of hand. I went with some thoughts on Auden and love, instead.
Today, though, I would like to talk a bit about The Mystery of the Kingdom of God, a 'golden age' book by Albert Schweitzer, 1914, precisely about the life, ministry and death of Jesus.
Consider this my effort at a fair paraphrase of Schweitzer's deep and complicated book.
Schweitzer, best remembered as the medical missionary of his later years after he had put his academic career behind him, was intellectually a remarkable figure who both was and was not a believing Christian. He understanding of the mission of Jesus, Jesus' own self-understanding, is one on which people of entirely secular turns of mind could agree without sacrifice of that secularism. Indeed, Jesus comes off as a compelling charismatic and, frankly, deluded individual. Schweitzer did not believe in his resurrection much less in trinitarian doctrines about God.
Nonetheless, in Schweitzer's view, Jesus life and teaching, and Paul's following it, are inspirational and should lead us on the right path, not a path of reverence for Jesus as Christ but a path of reverence for life itself. Hence, the medical missionary years.
In his earlier capacity as academic historian: Schweitzer contended that Jesus began his Evangelical career preaching the imminent (within months) end of history. In this, Jesus had many analogs, then as now. Indeed, the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, subsequent of Schweitzer's work, is a striking confirmation, vividly demonstrating the prevalence of apocalypticism among the Jews of his day.
Schweitzer is distinct from other historians and exegetical writings in his emphasis on Jesus' disappointment. He contended that Jesus' understanding of his own role changed as the apocalypse failed to happen. Jesus first thought he would spark a moral renovation that in turn would produce the divine intervention.
A direct quote from Schweitzer: "Jesus, however, reached back after the fundamental conception of the prophetic period, and it is only the form in which he conceives of the emergence of the final event which bears the stamp of later Judaism. He no longer conceives of it as an intervention of God in the history of the nations, as did the Prophets; but rather as a final cosmical catastrophe. His eschatology is the apocalyptic of the book of Daniel, since the Kingdom is to be brought about by the Son of Man when he appears upon the clouds of heaven (Mark 8:38 - 9:1).
"The secret of the Kingdom of God is therefore the synthesis effected by a sovereign spirit between the early prophetic ethics and the apocalyptic of the book of Daniel. Hence it is that Jesus' eschatology was rooted in his age and yet stands so high above it. For his contemporaries it was a question of waiting for the Kingdom, or excogitating and depicting every incident of the great catastrophe, and of preparing for the same; while for Jesus it was a question of bringing to pass the expected event through the moral renovation."
But the moral-renovation stuff didn't work. The world kept going on in the same way. A disappointed Jesus came to believe that his own sacrifice would be required to make it happen. The final event of his mission was his defiance of the Roman authorities that was aimed at getting them to do precisely what they did, in the expectation that his crucifixion would bring about that world-shaking salvation. Jesus threw himself upon the wheel of history that then crushed him: because he had to make it move. That, at any rate, is Schweitzer's account.
I mentioned Paul, aka Saul of Tarsus, briefly above. Schweitzer has a fascinating take on him, too. A certain sort of liberal-Christian theologian makes Paul the bad guy. It's logic goes: before Paul there was a primitive Christian Church that taught the gospel of Jesus. Then Paul came along and stressed a gospel ABOUT Jesus, an entirely different thing. Let us ignore him.
To this Schweitzer replied, "Let's not." Paul revised the gospel of Jesus to make it suitable for a world that was lasting oddly long. He revised it to steer it away from apocalypticism. Christians of subsequent centuries owe him thanks for that.
Schweitzer's words again, "It is not Jesus as historically known, but Jesus as spiritually arisen within men, who is significant for our time and can help it. Not the historical Jesus, but the spirit which goes forth from him and in the spirits of men strives for new influence and rule, is that which overcomes the world." It is to Paul's credit that he helps introduce us to the later Jesus at the expense of the former.
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