Jesus is a Liberal...

So says a bumper sticker on a random car I saw on my way to work recently. I never tire of watching people try to slot Jesus into some contemporary political or ideological category. Beyond the impossibility of naively trying to transpose today's rather unstable understandings of 'liberal' or 'conservative' onto the social world of 1st century Palestine a la Dibelius, there is also the matter of the discredited mentality behind such attempts, and the lack of intellectual awareness that often fuels it.

Beginning with Reimarus at the dawn of the Enlightenment, and extending through Bultmann and the Jesus Seminar in the 20th century, one of the great projects of theological liberalism (yes, 'theological liberalism' is an accepted technical term to refer to a once dominant strain of biblical scholarship) has been the search or quest for the historical Jesus. Inherent in this pursuit was the belief that there is a disconnect between the real Jesus of history and the more ecclesio-mythical Jesus of faith that is given to us in the Bible and upon which the faith of the church rests. For 200 years, various strains of theological liberalism attempted to find the real Jesus. Some, like Strauss, claimed the Gospel accounts were complete myth. Others, like Harnack and Ritschl, believed there were kernels of truth to be found amidst the husk of the Bible that could tell us something truthful about the real Jesus.

Then Schweitzer came along and devastated the entire project of the quest for the historical Jesus that had become a mainstay of theological liberalism. In his The Quest of the Historical Jesus, Schweitzer systematically argued that the real mythmaking was being undertaken by liberal scholars. In their pursuit of the historical Jesus, Schweitzer argued that scholars had constructed totally unhistorical Jesuses to fit their own prejudices. Therefore, such scholars never really returned to the historical Jesus, but came up with a Jesus that looked a lot like who they saw in the mirror every morning. It was a devastating critique.

Unfortunately, not only did Schweitzer himself not heed his own critique of the historical Jesus project, his critique continues to be quite valid today 100 years later. From Reimarus's 'four question' criteria for determining supposed historicity to the rigged authenticity criteria of the Jesus Seminar, the fool's errand of trying to reconstruct a historical Jesus by applying methodological doubt to the very documents that purport to tell us about the historical Jesus continues. The fact that these same proponents conveniently exempt subjecting the employment of methodological doubt to methodological doubt reveals rather sadly the half-baked intellectual basis upon which such quests are undertaken.

How is this brief synopsis of the failure of theological liberalism regarding the quest for the historical Jesus relevant today? Consult my next blog entry.