I mentioned earlier that I have been reading Albert Schweitzer's work, PAUL AND HIS INTERPRETERS, a book of, and about, New Testament scholarship first published in 1912. I write today about a phrase in a footnote. An untranslated German phrase that is here as the title of someone else's scholarly work in the field. Das Judentum in der vorchristlichen griechischen Welt . Feeding it into a translation algorithm, I learn that the monograph cited was titled: "Judaism in the pre-Christian Greek world." Hmmm. I took two years of German in high school. I'm pretty sure (even though I've had plenty of time to forget what I learned there, and have availed myself of the opportunity) that I never learned that "vor" works as the prefix "pre". From now on, I'll know.
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"Since our world conditions have changed, we can do no other than to think our own thoughts about the redemptive significance of the death of Jesus and all that is connected with it, basing our thoughts, so far as possible, on the original and Primitive-Christian doctrine. But if we undertake this task, as we needs must, we ought to make clear to ourselves what we are doing. We ought not to bemuse ourselves with the belief that we are simply taking over the whole of the dogmatic conceptions of Jesus and of Primitive Christianity, seeing that this is, in fact, impossible. And we ought not to regard the obscurities and contradictions, in which we find ourselves involved, as originally attaching to Christian doctrine; we ought to be clearly conscious that they arise from the transformation of the historical and Primitive-Christian concepts into concepts necessary to adapt them to a later situation. Instead of simply being able to take over traditional material as we...
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...
Yes, my vacation went well, thank you. (I'm optimistically assuming it will have gone well and have concluded uneventfully before you read this.) Happy Easter. For the religious Christians among you, some thoughts from Albert Schweitzer for this day. This is from The Mystery of the Kingdom of God . All italics are from the original. "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 bet...
From Albert Schweitzer, The Mystery of the Kingdom of God . All italics in the original. "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 excogitat...
I've recently completed a read of Albert Schweitzer's book on J.S. Bach , and will here offer a brief observation. The Germany of Bach's prime, especially the 1730s and 1740s, had its own music critics. Among these was a fellow named Johann Adolph Scheibe, the son of an organ builder and the kapellneister of the King of Denmark, who edited a magazine called Kritische Musikus. Scheibe saw himself as the literary champion of a distinctively German style of music, one that would break away from the Italian models. The Italian influence was toward artifice and complexity. The German impulse was toward naturalness and simplicity, to Scheibe's way of thinking. This theory made it "impossible for him to do justice to Bach," Schweitzer wrote. Bach was much too complicated, and thus too Italian, for his taste. Although of course acknowledging Bach's talents (because Scheibe was not altogether an idiot) he did conclude that Bach, tragically, had fallen ...
"Mysticism may be either primitive or developed. Primitive mysticism has not yet risen to a conception of the universal, and is still confined to naive views of earthly and super-earthly, temporal and eternal. The entry into the super-earthly and eternal takes place by means of a 'mystery,' a magical act. By means of this the participant enters into communion with a divine being in such a way that he shares the latter's supernatural mode of existence....But when the conception of the universal is reached and a man reflects upon his relation to the totality of being and to Being in itself, the resultant mysticism becomes widened, deepened, and purified." The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle