What did Lessing mean when he spoke of a 'ugly great ditch' between faith and history?

Lessing's comment grew out of his conviction that rationalism could be the only universally acceptable mode of understanding the world, coupled with his familiarity with Reimarius' biblical studies and conclusions (pp 175, 387). From Reimarius' work, Lessing was convinced that the bible could not be trusted as a source of description of any truth, let alone the truth of God. In this sense, Lessing's 'scandal of particularity' acknowledged that humans, and human error, make up history and this contingent fact needs to be accounted for in any understanding of the meaning of an event. The bible was another example, even if a very good example, of a human product. From his rationalistic commitments he was convinced, following Hume (p 381), that human reason alone could lead humanity into a new golden age, safe from religious war and bigotry. In two strokes, Lessing denied the historical veracity of the New Testament and its claim as the revelation of God. Instead, what Christians believed and what was certain, via historical method and reason itself, remained apart to such an extent that the former must give way to the latter. Underscoring this are three difficulties raised by Lessing in regard to faith and history. These are the chronological, metaphysical and existential problem of the 'Christ of faith and the Jesus of history'.

Lessing understood history as homogenous, meaning that the same things we experience and know constitute a universal norm across all time and place. Of course, Lessing is not advocating that each culture think and act the same, but rather that the same types of motivations, reasons and so forth remain constant throughout human history. Lessing's 'theory of homogeneity' did not deny the fact that history is a series of particular events, but tries to account for the particularity of history in the application of our understanding. History is the manifestation of human activity and therein, being a human activity, must lay the commonality. The historian of the present and the culture of the past share something that enables a 'link' between disparate times and place. For Lessing this was reified as 'reason', the ability to reason is the common human link across all time and place. As such, that which was unique and not accessible to reason, such as a miracle or the resurrection, must categorically be dismissed as history and called 'faith'. However, in being 'faith' it is subjective, my faith or your faith, and no longer universal across all time and place. For Lessing this alone was enough to dismiss claims of the bible to super-natural information. Lessing took it one step further. He began to question the bible itself on the grounds of its history. Finding evidence of redaction and inconsistency, and an awareness of the Jewish-Hellenistic influences in the bible, he concluded that the bible must not be any more than a corrupted example of a necessary paradigm in Jesus. Lessing does not give up Jesus or Christianity or positive religions - he is not an atheist. What he does want to do is to reconstruct Jesus on grounds that are not prone to human imposition or historical contingency, prone to being based on false interpretations whether Jewish, Greek or even modern. Lessing did believe that religion had value, and that positive historical faiths reflected that value, but also that none could claim to be pure truth alone because they were ultimately infected with human circumstances. Lessing's own 'leap' to reason as the evaluator of universal truths seems to ignore his own particularity and sense of teleological development of religion in which he stands at the end of a long process of developing humankind.

Lessing identified three difficulties with the bible and Jesus. The chronological difficulty is the broadest in that it provides the foundation for his thought. The gap of time, between two events and understanding of those events, unless one is willing to be subjectivist (and therefore relativistic) means that a principle of unity must be assumed else no historical knowledge is possible. The certainty of historical knowledge, such as it can be, must be based on the homogeneity of history as that created by reasoning humans. The events of history are particular and contingent but they are done by agents who share a universal essence - in Lessing's case that of rationality. To explain this, consider how one studies any historical event. The causes of the Holocaust are not thought of as the random acts of demon possessed persons, but historians look to socio-political and ideological factors to explain it. In doing so, any historian is hoping that, even in the case of the greatest act of senseless violence in our century, they can detect commonalities or connections which we can understand. At one level, Lessing's understanding of a principle of unity is still present in our approach to history. What does seem to be lost is his equally affirmed sense that he, or the rationalist project, stands at the end of the series and therefore provides the norm. Modern history and the philosophy of history operate with a much more pronounced sense of a 'hermeneutic of suspicion' in thier supposition of unity - but they remain nonetheless.

Lessing's commitment to rationalism makes a stronger case for the determinant of this universal essence. For him, what allows us to cross from event to interpretation and understanding is human reason. Lessing's understanding of reason mirrors the confidence which natural and physical scientists were finding in Euclidian geometry in which the laws of physics predicted events - such as how far a ball could be shot etc. If a similar method of inferences could be found within human thinking, then all human behaviour could be explained and predicted. The tool for this task was Lessing's rationalism, a belief in the omnicomptence of reason in determining truth. The 'universal truths of reason' then could be turned to evaluate the 'contingent truths of history', or Christianity and its resurrection must be judged against what reason can know. The value of Christianity is this evaluation by reason, the elimination of super-nature and certainly of superstition in Judeo-Hellenistic terms. This is the metaphysical difficulty of history, that history must be judged by a universal criteria which is outside the circle of history's particulars. One must remember that Lessing does not want to dismiss the particular, but rather to give a way in which it can be interpreted and therefore be of value.

This last move of Lessing's 'ugly ditch' leads to the existential difficulty. The real preoccupation of Lessing involves meaning or on interpretation. Aware that the bible was a document of the first century (and earlier) Lessing wondered what could be the relevance of it (or any historical artifact) to the modern mind - why do we learn from it? As we saw earlier, in Lessing's teleological understanding, in order that the bible (and religion) mean anything it must accommodate itself to the contemporary mind. This meant being scrutinized by the parameters set by the modern mind. This is where Lessing goes against other 'neologists' such as Reimarius. Reimarius thought that if the bible were historically unreliable or mere inventions of superstition, then it must invalidate it altogether. Lessing accounts for possible historical artifacts by thinking they, such as belief in the resurrection, must be explained in a new manner acceptable in meaning to the modern mind so as to remove offense.

Suppose, for the sake of argument, that the New Testament gets the facts about Jesus wrong. How could we correct it?

This question perhaps unpacks the entire effort of much of the liberal Protestant movement. Often the movement is portrayed as antagonistic to Christianity, bent on destroying the faith of the simple minded. However, this is a caricature of the movement that in fact was trying to 'correct' Christianity in light of what was thought to be overwhelming evidence of misguided religious intent, both implicit and explicit. The liberal project tried to retrieve Christianity by refiguring it in a way that made it acceptable to the modern mind or general sentiment. Usually this move was spurred by two factors. The first was the rise of historical criticism of the bible, coupled with the rise of historicism in general. By treating the bible as a historical document and as a piece of ancient literature, scholars were free to be 'critical' of the text and began to denature the supernatural or religious from the text in order to find the 'germ' of commonality with which we could understand Christian origins. Usually this involved, as in Schweitzer (p 368), a retrieval of Jesus as a Jewish person (contextualized in his age) and subsequently an interpretation of his moral teachings and example as the paradigm. The usual classical Christian stress of the soteriological Christ, the resurrection and ascension of Christ is not of importance. Of course, there were some variations. The second aspect in the liberal tradition, and highly criticized, is the un-critical manner by which their cultural norms were imposed on to the bible and Christianity. The vacuum created by the removal of the supernatural or faith in Christianity was replaced by Eurocentric values and concepts of personhood etc. Jesus, in this case, as some commentators noted, became a 'German professor' in his moral and ascetic teachings, and the bible became a document put together in the study of a 'German professor' with clear and distinct understandings of symbolic representations.

To sum, the 'correction' of Christianity by the liberal Protestantism movement was an attempt to salvage the value of Christianity, not to destroy it. The typical direction of its movement was to found in socio-political or anthropological abstraction a reference point of commonality between the life and times of Jesus the Nazarene and the present context of Christians. The value of Jesus resides in either his teachings or what he symbolized about human destiny, essence or relation to God. This is denuded of any unique ontological relation to God, or non-Trinitarian being 'degree Christology'. An example in Ritschl covered earlier (p 102) is a good example of the attempt to refound Christianity on abstract ethical anthropological terms. The example in some liberation theologies is an excellent example of the attempt to refound Christianity in terms of socio-political theory such as Marxism (Gutierrez) or philosophical notions such as Buberian personalism (Levinás). The methodological issue of prescription versus description resurfaces in theological method.

In what ways does the 'quest of the historical Jesus' reflect the agenda of the Enlightenment?

The 'quest for the historical Jesus', still very present in biblical and theological studies, reflected the agenda of the Enlightenment in that it shared the supposition that what must be universal in scope is the omnicompetence of the human mind in all matters, including morality. This has two implications. First, any referral to Jesus Christ must a referral to his humanity alone; it must preclude any conception of divinity lest one weaken the postulate that the human mind is sufficient in all things. Second, the authority of Christianity must reside in its clearly acceptable moral teachings and not in any claim of revelation. What Jesus taught is more important than who Jesus was as checked against reasoned norms of morality.

The effect of this shared assumption that the 'proper study of humanity is humanity' (Pope), even in the case of the so-called God-man is in the rationalist paradigm of what constitutes explanatory power or persuasion. Persuasion is not to be found in quasi-mystical terms hindered by subjectivity such as faith but in the open market of inscrutable evidence, logical inference and even pragmatic effect. That Christianity was true was found in either its historicity, its paradigmatic explication of rationalistic truths, and in its manifestation of moral persons. This corresponds to the challenge of deism and variants of English evidentialist apologists focused on the truth of the resurrection from history; with the reconfigured theology of D F Strauss (pp 398-399) and the 'proof of God' foundationalists such as W Paley (p 250); and the work of the paradigmatic liberal Protestants such as Ritschl. In the first case, the focus is to prove Christianity via 'marks of authenticity' from history and text; in the second, from acceptable terms of contemporary culture whether in philosophy or in natural and physical science; and, finally, in the last instance because Christianity works as the best example of what moral people should look and act like. Jesus the Nazarene becomes the best example of the dominant paradigm of humanity activity or process, his influence restricted to his example and his creation of a community that shares those similar values or teachings. It is this 'effect' of Jesus, often obscured by history and dogma, with which we have communion - his humanity resonating with ours, overcoming the 'great ugly ditch' of Lessing.

Assess the contribution of either Martin Kähler or Albert Schweitzer to the failure of the 'quest of the historical Jesus.'

Albert Schweitzer:
Albert Schweitzer, operating with the newly emerging field of form criticism in the New Testament and the work of Johannes Weiss, undercut the neo-Kantian moral edifice of liberal Protestantism with the re-introduction of Jewish apocalyptic teaching as the dominant stress of Jesus' teaching and self-understanding. The liberal Protestant project, such as in Ritschl, conceived Christianity in terms of an ethical community (the kingdom of God), which shared its foundation on the twin notions of the fatherhood of God and the 'brotherhood of man'. The 'golden rule' became the purpose and example of Jesus' teaching and life, and the achievement of the 'kingdom of God' was to live according to this teaching, which also mirrored the intrinsic moral maxim of Kant's practical philosophy. Weiss argued in his Jesus' Proclamation of the Kingdom of God that this missed the eschatological thrust of the synoptic Gospels in which the kingdom of God was not a subjective state of adherence to an internal moral maxim but rather was understood in spatio-temporal terms. Kant has rejected such an interpretation of the kingdom of God and reward because he felt that morality that was coerced was not true morality, being merely the form of morality. To be moral, for Kant, was to act and to will in accordance with the moral maxim generated by reason. Eschatological notions of an outside reward and punishment, a feature of Jesus' teachings noted by Kant, only dealt with action, not with the will to be in conformity with the moral law. One acted in order to win favour or mitigate punishment, not necessarily because it was right. The internal person was unchanged by the force of the moral command, touching only the external acts. Weiss and Schweitzer reverse this by re-introducing the apocalyptic stress of the synoptic gospels. For them, the liberal moral kingdom was directly in opposition to the teaching of Jesus' kingdom of God.

Whereas Weiss saw the apocalyptic stress of Jesus' teaching, the overthrowing of dominant religious values and the real threat of eternal judgment as an important theme, Albert Schweitzer took it to be the prescriptive norm. Schweitzer thought the entire content of Jesus' message and life could be understood in light of his apocalyptic message. Schweitzer's Jesus becomes filtered, especially in his reconfigured understanding of the dogmatic Christ of John's gospel and the Epistles, through the prism of his Jewish apocalypticism. Two subsequent Christs result; the buried 'kernel' of the Jewish Jesus concerned with the coming apocalypticism, and the dogmatic Christ constructed by an embarrassed sect that comes to be increasingly dominated by Hellenistic thought over its Jewish roots. In this last stress, Schweitzer shares the general 'history of dogma' critique of Harnack (p 366). Schweitzer's Jesus is completely a novelty in two senses. He is novel in that he was unique to his period with his apocalyptic understanding. He is novel to us in that he was unique in his period too. To read Jesus in the synoptic gospels is to encounter something new, clearly not anything in common with the realm of liberal moral values and maxims as seen in Ritschl.

Martin Kähler:
Kähler's contribution to the demise of the historical quest for Jesus was the simple assertion that what concerns the bible is the claim that 'Jesus is Lord'. The bible, he thought, was a purposed attempt to explicate that meaning in all its dogmatic glory and weight. In short, the Christ of the bible is the Christ of faith. His argument is complex and pivots on several points. First, Kähler argues that, by definition, the Christ must be suprahistorical, being the unique introduction of God into history. Historical categories, Lessing's homogeneity, fail to account for the introduction of divinity into Christianity as history can only allow an ebionite Christology. More plainly, Jesus differs from us not only in degree but in kind - He alone is the Son of God rendering degree Christology useless. Secondly, Kähler argues that the Jesus we have in the bible is exactly that Christ of faith, written for the purpose of faith by those in faith. Communion with Christ is not the communion of like-effect or moral example between our humanity to his, but the communion of encounter and the communion created by salvation. Faith is based not on seeing in Jesus a like-minded individual or moral teacher but in existentially evoking faith conversion to the claim that 'Christ is the Lord'. The bible, for Kähler, was a document of faith and to treat it as if it were not intended to invoke that response, instead as a piece of literature or history, is a priori decision to ignore the reason of its existence. The Jesus created in such a process is as much an abstraction as any Jesus claimed by the believer as Lord.

In essence, what Kähler begins is a movement of biblical and theological thought that tries to account for the relationship between the Jesus of history and the subsequent Christ of faith without driving the wedge between them that characterizes the first quest for he historical Jesus.

Schweitzer and Kähler today:
The 'second' and 'third' quests for the historical Jesus are refinements of the first quest with its deep division between history and faith. Ernst Käsemann's extension of Bultmann's kerygma theology (see below) and his insistence that the continuity of preaching about (Christ of faith) and of (Jesus of history) is a necessary factor in any conception of Christianity. Käsemann argued that to preach about Christ is to also speak of the historical Jesus in whose life and ministry is the beginning of any conception of the Christ. The kergyma contains historical elements and is discerned in the actions and ministry of Jesus. The question then becomes 'where does one locate this embryonic Christology?' This is where Schweitzer's radical move to the 'Jewish Jesus' becomes important again. Theologians and biblical scholars have located this 'Jewishness' in the later quests in terms of Jesus' eschatological understanding and subsequent critique of existing power structures or religiosity (Käsemann, Crossan, Borg, Mack, and Sanders (pp 395-397). In all the above thinkers what is held in common is that the unique voice of Jesus lies in his context or self-awareness of first century Judaism and apocalyptic understanding. Others have taken more to Kähler's existential aspect, stressing that what was kerygmatic in Jesus' historical ministry was his authoritative 'presence as God' which is not lost in later theological proclamation (Ebeling, Bornkamm). The polarities of Kähler and Schweitzer in the recent quests have been joined, although the two stresses of contextualized understanding especially in terms of Jewish apocalypticism and Christological revelational presence remain the preoccupation.

If the bones of Jesus Christ were to be discovered in Palestine, what would remain of Christianity?

To answer this question, a survey of several theologians illustrate the possible range of answer from 'nothing', to 'little', to remaining 'unchanged'. Wolfhart Pannenberg is an example of a theologian whose Christology would be irretrievably damaged by a denial of the resurrection. D. F. Strauss is an example of a theologian whose theology would be little changed should the resurrection be denied. R. Bultmann, perhaps unfairly, is an example of a theologian whose theology could sustain such a discovery.

Pannenberg's theology is a reaction against the ahistorical or superhistorical school of Barth with its decision of faith (p 401) based on a theology of revelational presence. Pannenberg works to verify the public character of any event as to its testimony that such an event was an act of God. The resurrection must be just such an event, in contrast to the existential event he thinks Barth and Bultmann articulate. Without dismissing the principle of homogeneity or analogy that is necessary for historical judgments to be made, Pannenberg argues that the statement 'Jesus is risen' is a conclusion, not a presupposition (as in Lessing) that needs to be checked against the facts of history. The divinity of Jesus is proved in the resurrection in which God identifies with Jesus in a unique manner. Placed against the general Jewish hope of an end of time resurrection, Jesus' resurrection is the foretaste of what God intends for all in the close of history. Revelation of God in Christ, breaking the future end into the time of Jesus, is the end of history and the fullest revelation of God. Jesus Christ becomes the summative revelation; proven by his resurrection that He was God. This is open to public scrutiny, the empty tomb and proclamation of the disciples of resurrection being the lynchpin. Pannenberg provides an organic link between the resurrection and the self-revelation of God in Jesus Christ. One then can read backwards into Jesus' ministry this understanding so as to see Jesus' ministry as divine self-revelation.

D. F. Strauss is a theologian whose theology could remain little altered where the resurrection proved to be false. Strauss begins to think with a bias that miracles cannot happen or if they do then they can provide no foundation for a universal truth, being 'one-off' events. His preoccupation is 'how did Christians come to believe such a thing as resurrection?' without strict reference to its historical occasioning. His recourse to the notion of myth is the way by which he proceeds to develop his argument. A myth, for Strauss, is an immature approximation of a necessary abstraction needed for some cultural cohesion or benefit. Once a culture 'grows up' it can leave myth aside in favour the more precise abstraction. The abstraction of Jesus that Strauss wished to promulgate is the liberal Protestant paradigm of enlightened moral teacher whose intrinsic spirituality is common to all and became articulated in the early confession of resurrection. What was resurrection to the first Christians was merely memory of the example of Jesus' awareness of God, self and others. It was a way in which this abstraction, our co-identity with Jesus, was primitively understood. Strauss needs the resurrection in the sense that he needs the historical person of Jesus to mean something. Were the resurrection disproved, his theology would still pivot on the recollection of the personality of Jesus without much loss of content.

R. Bultmann is the final theologian to be considered and whose theology can be understood as being untouched by a denial of the resurrection. However, it is not at all clear that this is what Bultmann intended: rather, his theological decisions lead to this conclusion. Bultmann's program is encapsulated in the phrase 'demythologize' (p 563). Unlike Strauss in whose thought a myth is a primitive human abstraction of a necessary truth, Bultmann thinks of myths as stories that point to a higher reality and meaning that lies in God. Myths have meaning, not in abstract terms, but in existential or revelatory presence terms. Like Strauss early Christian articulations have to be put aside or interpreted for modern hearers; but, unlike Strauss, Bultmann thinks the referent is truly God and not merely human abstraction or projections. The Christian proclamation 'Jesus is risen' needs to be interpreted existentially. This removes it from history altogether. It is not important whether the resurrection happened, only that the early Christians believed and preached that it happened. It is this preaching that (das Dass) Jesus was raised, indicating God's judgment and act of salvation, which calls forth faith in the promise of authentic lives (p 433). The kerygma is a call to decision in the immediate, above history that God brings life and hope as experienced by the disciples, and not necessarily tied to the historical Jesus at all. Jesus' resurrection is a resurrection only in the subjective disciple's experience of God through which the teachings of Jesus become laden with greater and ultimate meaning. It is this movement to the subjective experience which raises the possibility that Bultmann's theology could be unaffected by the disproving of the resurrection. Could the disciples have not been mistaken? For Bultmann, the value of the kerygma is its ability to transcend context and contingency as something more than a simple prepositional statement. However, does this mean that the statement must be true?