SCM Studyguide: Theology in the Contemporary World

Pugh

• Editore: SCM Press
• Anno: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780334055761
• Argomento: Theology & Religion
• Categoria: Christian Theology

No sooner have they mastered the basics than students of theology can quickly find themselves in over their heads. They are bombarded with claim and counter-claim as soon as they want to tackle anything topical. The contentious subjects tend to be the historical Jesus, gender and sexuality, or the atonement. Other subjects might be less contentious but attract an astonishing excess of literature. Take the vast literature tackling the subject of the Church, for instance, or the bloated body of tomes on various aspects of Pneumatology. This book tries to provide the bewildered and intimidated student with a primer that is at once introductory and incisive; approachable and informative. It will help those training for ministry to recover their fascination for the subject of theology and how it could apply to their future ministry.

1. The Quests for the Historical Jesus

Chapter Outline 1 Introduction 2 The First Quest and the ‘No Quest’ for the Historical Jesus 3 The New Quest and the Third Quest 4 The Current State of Play: Three Examples 5 Assessing what is Useful

1 Introduction

The relationship of Jesus Christ to history became an issue almost from the dawn of modernity. It was during the early modern period that Europe saw the beginnings of what we would later look back on as the collapse of Christendom: the slow decay of a religious and uneasy peace held in place by the pope. Christendom was a Europe-wide project that had, for over a millennium, successfully filled the power vacuum created by the fall of the Roman Empire. It was a kind of a proto-EU but based on religion instead of economics. The steady collapse of it was precipitated by the Reformation, which was like Brexit but with Germany splitting away first: a Gerparture, a Gergone. This resulted in the subsequent splitting off of countless Protestant groups from each other, as well as from the Catholics. This helped to produce a crisis over how we are to be certain of anyone’s definition of reality. Just how are we to be sure that anyone is right any more? Very soon the free thinkers of Europe were on a quest for more certain, epistemological1 foundations. They were seeking a view of life that did not depend on revelation or religious authority at all, but on natural philosophy: what we would later call science.

A highly influential religious response to the new mood was deism, as espoused by John Locke, Matthew Tindal and Thomas Chubb. Deism was born out of a desire to articulate what faith in God might look like devoid of any particular religious commitment and imbued with the emerging verities of the scientific age. It was an easy-going, all-embracing kind of monotheism. Its God was what is sometimes referred to as the Watchmaker: he winds up the universe and leaves it ticking all by itself, not intervening at all unless he absolutely must. He is the Absentee Landlord. Emerging from deism came the beginnings of the historical-critical interpretation of the Bible. This was a way of scientifically interpreting the Bible free from any prior religious commitments, and the use of this method to explain away the supernatural elements in the Gospel narratives. This new style of interpretation was practised with the implicit purpose of undermining the specifically Christian way of being religious in favour of the deistic, non-specific kind that was conformable with the rational temper of educated Europeans. The First Quest for the historical Jesus was born.

This First Quest, then, was actually quite theologically loaded. It was a quest that set out to sever the historical links that made present-day faith in Christ plausible. It was informed by the growing assumption that nature operates according to laws that exclude the possibility of miracle and that history is homogenous: nothing can happen that doesn’t happen now. However, this quest ran into difficulties owing to the fact that, once you have emptied the Jesus of the Gospels of all theological and supernatural content, you tend to end up with someone who happens to look remarkably like the kinds of scholars who were interested in doing this to him: a rationalistic moral teacher. Thankfully, by the mid twentieth century a new quest was underway. This too was theologically loaded but in an apparently more positive way. It was driven by the desire to avoid docetism: belief in a Christ who has been strangely severed from his real earthly historical life in the flesh. Lingering scepticism about our ability to reconstruct with accuracy the real historical Jesus made the results of this new quest disappointingly small. The present quest, which is called the Third Quest, is the one that lays the most defensible claim to theological disinterestedness, yet this is also the quest that has been giving us a filled-out – rather than slimmed-down – picture of Jesus. At its best, the Third Quest is interested in what we may include by way of a context for the life of Jesus rather than constrained by what a given method compels us to exclude. There is also, thankfully, much more willingness among scholars today to disclose their particular confessional positions and motive for research. Nowadays, if historical Jesus researchers have an agenda that is likely to be unhelpful to faith, they often tell us about it rather than pretending to have a view from nowhere.

So then, we have moved from loading the quest with our cultural baggage to loading it with his,2 and have passed many interesting places along the way. We will shortly take a closer look.

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Reflection

In your church tradition, what do you think is the kind of cultural baggage that tends to get loaded on to the historical Jesus?

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2 The First Quest and the ‘No Quest’ for the Historical Jesus

Here we take our cue from Albert Schweitzer and his famous book, The Quest of the Historical Jesus of 1906. This was a critique of a quest that had been going on within nineteenth-century liberalism, and that had begun in the eighteenth century. It consisted of trying to look past the Christ of religious faith to the original historical figure of Jesus, on the assumption that faith had distorted our understanding of the original Jesus.

The Beginnings of the First Quest

If a beginning point were to be identified it would be 1774–78,3 when some highly controversial fragments of Hermann Reimarus’ (1694–1768) work were published bit by bit,4 some years after his death, courtesy of his friend and playwright Gotthold Lessing. Lessing is himself famous for his assertion that Christian faith cannot be based on historically uncertain miracles, stating: ‘That, then, is the ugly great ditch which I cannot cross, however often and however earnestly I have tried to make that leap.’5 Many of the comments made in the Reimarus fragments have set the agenda of Jesus research down to the present day, especially with the return now of the Jewish emphasis favoured so much by Reimarus. And this desire to retrieve the original Jesus from the doctrine of the apostles was the main factor that gave rise to an emphasis on the Jewishness of Jesus, Christianity being felt by Reimarus to have severed itself from its parent religion to become an entirely new thing created by the apostles.

Among his pithiest comments are these:

Jesus left us nothing in writing; everything we know of his teaching and deeds is contained in the writings of his disciples … I find great cause to separate completely what the apostles say in their own writings from that which Jesus himself actually said and taught … he was born a Jew and intended to remain one … there is no other way for us to find out what Jesus’ intention was concerning the kingdom of heaven than to concern ourselves with the usual meaning of this phrase among the Jews of the time.6

On the basis of this last assertion, Reimarus gave a portrayal of Jesus that was of someone trying to be exactly the kind of political Messiah the Jews were looking for. When he failed, his disciples concocted a resurrection story in order to prolong his glory and bask in a little of it themselves. The predictions of a resurrection were apparently inserted into the mouth of Jesus by later tradition, since it seems so surprising that every one of the disciples was completely taken aback by the resurrection and seemed completely unaware of any predicted resurrection. Christianity, it seemed, was founded on ‘apostolic fraud rather than divine revelation’.7

The three main ways the Reimarus Fragments set the tone for the future quests for the historical Jesus are summarized by Beilby and Eddy as follows:

1. The Jesus of history and the Christ of the Gospels are clearly differentiated.
2. The relationship between the Jesus of history and present-day Christian faith was queried.
3. Jesus was placed within first-century Jewish apocalyptic expectations.8

Ever since Reimarus, a preoccupation with these three lines of inquiry has coloured much historical Jesus research, determining the questions to be answered before research even begins. We could even say that questions around New Testament faith versus history, present-day faith versus history, and the apocalyptic-sounding prediction in Mark 9.1 (that there would be some standing there who would not face death till they see the kingdom come), have become fetishes within Jesus research that have pull...

Indice dei contenuti

• Copyright information
• Contents
• Dedication
• Introduction
• 1. The Quests for the Historical Jesus
• 2. The Holy Spirit: Theologies of the Third Article and Third Article Theology
• 3. The Missional Church
• 4. Liberation Theology
• 5. Feminist Theology
• 6. Theology and Sexuality: LGBT Issues and Queer Approaches
• 7. Postmodern Faith
• 8. Nonviolent Atonement
• Conclusion
• Select Bibliography