Inventing Christic Jesuses: Rules and Warrants for Theology: Volume 2: Christological Recommendations

By Charles A. Wilson

In the first comprehensive proposal for revisionist theology's deployment of historical Jesus research, Inventing Christic Jesuses rejects positions that insulate theology from Jesus research. By setting out theological methods, warrants, and rules, in dialogue with an analysis of the Jesus historians of the Third Quest (c. 1980-2010), the study charts a path toward a quested christology positioned between categorical rejection and uncritical acceptance of historical results on Jesus. Volume 1, Method, analyzes the methods and values of historical research on Jesus and identifies the retrojective activity of value production when historians, in conversation with historical sources, invent images of Jesus.

Volume 2, Christological Recommendations, gathers potential contributions of Jesus research for revisionist theology according to the cataphatic, apophatic, and eminent pattern of classical theology. By attending to the limits and opportunities afforded by historical research, both negative and positive, the argument retrieves for theology the complex way that historians shape same and different, association and dissociation in the production of their Jesuses. Then it analyzes how values shape Jesuses in a pervasive Narcissus project to invent a self (and a community) through imaging Jesus. Proposing that the disciplined invention of Jesuses is highly useful for theology, the book ends with recommendations for a quested christology.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: Nov 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9781532643033

Charles A. Wilson

Charles A. Wilson is Professor of Religion at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota. He is the author of Feuerbach and the Search for Otherness (1989) and the two volumes of Inventing Christic Jesuses (Cascade Books, 2017, 2018).

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Inventing Christic Jesuses

Rules and Warrants for Theology

Volume 2: Christological Recommendations

Charles A. Wilson

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INVENTING CHRISTIC JESUSES:

Rules and Warrants for Theology

Volume 2: Christological Recommendations

Copyright © 2018 Charles A. Wilson. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

Cascade Books

An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3

Eugene, OR 97401

www.wipfandstock.com

paperback isbn: 978-1-5326-4301-9

hardcover isbn: 978-1-5326-4302-6

ebook isbn: 978-1-5326-4303-3

Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

Names: Wilson, Charles A. (Charles Alan), 1947–, author.

Title: Inventing christic Jesuses : rules and warrants, volume 2 : Christological recommendations / Charles A. Wilson.

Description: Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: ISBN: 978-1-5326-4301-9 (paperback). | ISBN: 978-1-5326-4302-6 (hardcover). | ISBN: 978-1-5326-4303-3 (epub).

Subjects: LCSH: Jesus Christ—Historicity. | Jesus Christ—Person and offices. | Bible. Gospels—Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Classification: BT303.2 W55 2018 (print). | BT303.2 (epub).

Manufactured in the U.S.A. November 6, 2018

Table of Contents

Title Page

Chapter 1: Apophatic Limits for Theology

Chapter 2: Apophatic Opportunities for Theology

Chapter 3: Cataphatic Opportunities in Jesus Research

Chapter 4: Cataphatic Christological Recommendations

Chapter 5: Eminence: Inventing Jesuses

Chapter 6: Narcissus Jesus and the Search for the Self

Chapter 7: Conclusions

Appendix: Volume 2 Rules Summary

Bibliography

For Zachary, Eleanor, Liam, Brynn, and Emma

1

Apophatic Limits for Theology

In the strange world of Jesus research the most promising opportunities for christology appear in surprising places. It is as if opportunity lies incognito within historical research on Jesus and within the historical critique of once proud christological claims. Theologians, therefore, have to react to putative historical limits to christology and shift into indirect means to find how Jesus research can advance christological reflection. Indeed, because of the peculiar history of the quest for the historical Jesus, in which critics famously dismantled so many props of the ecclesial Christ, theology naturally notices the negative first. Theologians who reject the questing project close out the critique in a variety of insulating ways, but those who do embrace historical research on Jesus must work with the voice of negation, rather in the tradition of apophatic theologies. Therefore, the first opportunities for christological construction appear in the shade, where historians seem to rule out direct claims.

We begin our work on recommendations for a quested christology with limits. We think of the negations of the history of the quest, that story of challenge to and apparent loss of many traditional christological claims. Theologians have not been able to ignore these historical developments. But there also may be a distinctly theological reason to lead with the negative: namely, that theology must say something of ultimacies that stretch beyond our knowing and our speaking. Christology, after all, has always had the improbable task of talking in worldly terms about what lies beyond its ken. By its very nature Christian theology deals in limits. We have then two layers of the apophatic: the historic one, familiar to classic theology, and an added layer posed by modern historical research. Revisionist theologies, unlike traditional or repristinated theologies, accept the second level, that historical research into the Jesus saga may pose added limits beyond those inherent in the theological task.

In this chapter, we focus on the limiting of christological claims under the influence of historical research, as a putative limit to what can be done theologically. The limit-to aspect of limits presents itself first because historians often hit a wall in their analogical conduct when they meet aporia that defy explanation. For instance, historians frequently struggle to find an appropriate category to name Jesus’ persona and his mission. Similarly, theologians in their incarnational office commonly want to say more about Jesus than fits comfortably in the historical mode. Historians reach a limit to their understanding, yes, but theologians too recognize a sense, overlapping with that of the historians, that they also struggle to make sense of what they wish to speak. The theologian’s sense for a limit may be grounded in what faith believes, to be sure, but it may arise just as well by commonplace historical judgments, troubling to the faith. Both these senses of limit-to limits share a human inability to speak well, or at all, of what stretches beyond their ken.

Theologians are accomplished in dealing with negation. The entire apophatic heritage has armed theology to make positive contributions through thoughtful maneuvering of a limit to our experience, our knowledge, and our language. Theologians, as we know, have advanced our knowledge of God by working our inability to know God on God’s turf. Surprisingly, a limit, a negation, can be constructed as an opportunity for theology. Recall Kant’s insight that, when reason says no to some state of affairs—say, to knowing human nature—the critique does not simply eliminate the matter at hand but clarifies and defines it by posing a limit to the matter.¹ Surprisingly, then, it is possible to find positive value in the work of a limit-to negation.

The limit-to dimension of theological use of historical results requires that theologians begin their dialogue with the results of the quest by studying what is not there, as it were. The negatives in question are meonic, that is, related to positives that they presuppose. In many episodes of the quest, for instance, new historical data purport to undermine something in the christological traditions so far as it is supported by a gospel realism; in each of these episodes scholars suggest that certain historical results negate a familiar item from the gospels or from the doctrinal tradition.² Therefore, the negative depends on the positive it negates. Such negatives are parasitic of the reality of the positive. What is the positive? Indeed, it may take several forms, and therefore the corresponding negatives are several; but generally the negative asserts something different from what is in the gospel narratives. In the latter case, something a historian claims seems to undermine something in the gospel saga of Jesus or in the doctrinal traditions. Occasionally, this thing may be a factual or quasi-factual point (i.e., that Jesus did not exist), but usually some fact appears as an affront to logic or morality (i.e., the doctrine of two full natures).

As we know already, we can proceed theologically without the quest or by rejecting questing. For such theologies the gospel record has a positivity to it that admits no historian’s negation. Or one can be oblivious to the historians’ work on Jesus or reject it benignly or aggressively. Both of these approaches say no to quested Christs. Beyond these two major positions, we face next a whole range of theological options that value various negating choices that historians make in doing their history writing: choices of method, sources, frames, paradigms. For instance, the theologian may have to respond to the choice of a particular Jesus historian to draw from sources not in the Bible. Each one represents a negation of counter or alternative positions. Then on another front, historians and others can say no to faith, to particular theories of the faith/history relationship, to prevailing paradigms, to consensus decisions of the guild, to academic orthodoxies, and the like. Each of these negations is different, though particular ones may overlap with others. In this chapter we will consider negative ones that purport to reduce or destroy christological claims, where a negation poses a limit to what can be said christologically. In the following chapter we will address a set of negations that may pose limits of christology, ones that may correct or clarify what we do in christology, or improve it. In both chapters we will cluster negations according to differing types and focus on each negation as limit (limit-to) and as opportunity (limit-of).³

A. The Apophatic in Jesus Research

Schweitzer’s famous line, that the study of the historical Jesus has been a school of honesty for theology, reminds us of the earliest and most pervasive use of a historical Jesus in christology.⁴ Nothing is more negative, Schweitzer says.⁵ Here we have the critical, limit-to function of Jesus research, with which we are quite familiar by now. Here, constructing a historical Jesus promises to reduce, even negate, christological claims. In the current debate, we think of Robert Funk, for instance, who speaks of Jesus research as a means to liberate Jesus who has been enslaved in the narrow and imposed Christ of Christian creedal pronouncements;⁶ or we think of Paul Hollenbach, who speaks of Jesus research as a means to overthrow the mistake of Christianity.⁷

The apophatic tradition in Jesus research applies the results of historical investigation to christology and typically and eagerly works these results as an antichristology. A more modest version of the destructive type uses Jesus to reduce elements in christology. The surprising feature of the critical function is that some interpreters claim that some new fact about Jesus or an entirely new historical portrait of Jesus can not just correct an old historical picture of Jesus, but can cross into alien territory and propose notions to faith and theology. Historical scholars sometimes assume the results of history writing pertain immediately to faith and theology in a reductive way. In other words, a historical portrait of Jesus functions christologically, even when it is determined to wreck christology. Here it functions as an antichristological christology, posing to faith what it can or cannot believe according to its quested results.⁸

Of course, we have to remember that any historical results, including apparently critical ones, could also have positive consequences for theology, depending on how a historical item were applied to the Christs of tradition, scripture, and church. Against the pattern of the history of the quest, historical research could claim to shore up elements in a christology as easily as it purports to undermine them.⁹ Therefore, we distinguish between negative and positive applications of the negative (or critical) mode.¹⁰ Admittedly, we move into fairly spooky territory here, since we must distinguish a negative application of a negating critique from a positive application of the same, and under the mode of suspicion, we must recognize that the christologies and the antichristologies are submerged in a Jesus research that commonly claims to be strictly historical. The negative use of the negative, of course, presses on faith and theology the suggestion that it may no longer be acceptable to hold this or that view: for instance, today Christians may have to rethink the culpability of the Jews in Jesus’ death. The positive use of a negative finds Christian virtue for theology and faith in positions pressed on them by historical research. For instance, historical research on Jesus may suggest a critique of certain doctrines, such as virgin birth, for their (unintended?) docetic flavor.

Of course, when historians insist their historical results reshape christology directly, they no longer speak in their historical office. They leave their historical home base and play an away game on the turf of faith and theology with opinions that allege to reduce (or uphold) christological claims.¹¹ In both applications we are not talking of the typical revisionism of continuing historical research but of historians, stepping into a category error actually to claim to do something with what believers believe and what theologians can say. The former, critical applications can be rough going for traditional theology, and in the history of the quests, they have been deeply troubling, but even the latter ones pose a potential revision of christology some would find unnerving.¹² We should note, however, that even a negative application of critique, to reduce or cancel the house of traditional christology, does not disqualify it from making important christological recommendations: it could be that Funk is right and that sometimes a Jesus must subvert the churchly Christ.¹³

A.1. Applying the Apophatic

Not all negations are the same. Not all exercises of historically generated apophaticism within christology are alike. To clarify how historical negation can have an impact on christology, we must distinguish three sorts of applications where historical research can reshape faith and theology: (1) The first is the familiar one just identified above, where a scholar presses results of questing to undermine traditional, classical, or popular christologies. The changes can range from complete abandonment of christological claims to various forms of qualifying or reducing certain claims. Often those who walk with this negation end with skepticism about Christian faith, and many of the most famous in their reaction become Christian alums. Typically, it is this kind of negation, apparently the most destructive, which the Kählerians fear most. Such historical apophaticism they reject categorically, as we have seen.¹⁴

(2) A second kind of application appears within theologies open to the impact of questing. Once christology opens the door to change because of historical research, it faces new challenges. a. Of course, theology must think about internally warranted ways it can craft a reaction to historical research on Jesus. We have already argued that theology’s reaction must be crafted carefully and not haphazardly; specifically we have argued that the best reactions flow out of the center of Christian theological activity. We have also foreshadowed the notion that there might be several authentic theological responses, even as we have rejected the Kählerian refusal. While theology can and should use Jesus research in its many apologetic and faith-seeking-understanding tasks, the deployment of these insights must be consonant with central theological warrants, those that flow directly out of theological and christological warrants (see volume 1, chapter 3).

Also in volume 1, we argued against the direct theological applications of historians’ results: such applications are category errors which permit historians to hold the trump card on articles of faith or, contrariwise, allow theologians to interfere with historical research. Here we add to this rule two sharpened iterations: a. (Theological) Rule 88: Theology must dictate whether and how theology will deploy historical insights. Never will theology simply take them over, whole hog, without walking them through the faith and understandings of the Christian faith. b. Then, (Theological) Rule 89: If the best uses of historical research flow from central theological warrants, theological applications, explanations, and apologies of the Christian faith must, therefore, take secondary, though important, significance. Indeed, the best deployments of historians’ insights express central themes of the faith.¹⁵

(3) In a third point, Jesus research can help theology to face, receive, and sort through the sheer fact of the plurality of Jesuses crafted in waves of questing. Even with the most critical eye the theologian stands before so many options for Jesus. The Jesus industry is busy. Every new book catalog provides another six hundred page volume, not to be missed and promising the revelation of the real Jesus. The many Jesuses, moreover, are diversely constructed and increasingly incommensurable. Which Jesus is right? Whose Jesus is somehow more accurate? Theologians and lay people are particularly overwhelmed, especially as they look into such a gnostic research activity beyond their expertise. Even if theologians have the capacity to sort through historical results for themselves, they will still be unnerved by the wealth of approaches and conclusions about the figure of Jesus. After all, each Jesus comes from the hand of the historian with such clarity and certainty, each with stinging criticisms of the last Jesus, the other Jesuses. It is not simply that the historians set before theology plural and incommensurable Jesuses; it is that there are no agreements on sources, on technical methods, even on the fundamental definitional elements of the task. How shall theologians judge between the Jesuses of Burton Mack and N.T. Wright? How shall they settle the apocalyptic question or referee the battle over sources and methods? What shall the sermon be on the Sermon on the Mount?

Here we promise no relief from the complexities of judgment: historically interested theologians will have to tough it out, and pick and choose among plausible Jesuses. But what we can register is the effect of having so many, so diverse Jesuses dumped onto the plate of christology: theology has to draw back in caution and relativize its appropriation of any historical insight, any particular Jesus. While we have seen independent warrants for christology to dive into the work of historians, we have to recognize that christology cannot simply hitch its wagon to this or that historical conclusion about Jesus. It can and should employ historical conclusions, but rest lightly on them. Even the most assured results of historical research, i.e., that of the alleged apocalyptic worldview of Jesus, may be subject to reversals in subsequent research. Consequently, christology sensitive to historical research on Jesus must internalize a cautious negation, prompted both by the plurality of Jesuses and the changing character of them. Here we have an apophatic moment in every theological appropriation of Jesus research, one that permanently reminds theology not to absolutize any historians’ item or even all of them. Just as the historical search for a Jesus ought to prompt modesty in historians, so the theological deployment of Jesus research must relativize its own constructions.

Then quickly we realize that we face a second apophatic moment: historical and theological modesty is not the only negation. Instead, we notice that both historians and theologians internalize negation when they say no to a particular Jesus and yes to another. Each Jesus negates another Jesus for historians, and each Christ inspired by a particular Jesus negates other Christs and their Jesuses. More often than not, historians treat the many other Jesuses as mistaken, as failures of evidence, source, and method, since historical research seems to continue with a metamethodic objectivism. Other Jesuses have the facts wrong or have used the wrong sources or employed a method wrongly. Of course, historians today know they must be more hermeneutically sophisticated, and in their introspective moments they admit that a Jesus emerges with the choices and worldview of a historian. Theologians today go further and suspect that each and every Jesus reflects the image of the artist, and that every Christ Christians imagine has a come-from quality. We have explored the retrojective consciousness thoroughly in volume 1; here we accent the internalized negation implied in every choice for a particular Jesus construction. For instance, in this era of Jesus research, no historian or theologian can proceed to a Jesus, much less a Christ, without a stance toward the Jesus as a sage in the wisdom tradition. So also they must go further and internalize the critique of Jesus as an apocalyptic prophet.

(4) A fourth apophatic moment confronts those christologies that are historically responsive. The moment appears simply as the inalterable hostility of theologians who are categorically opposed to questing. Theologians interested in the quest and a quested christology receive barrages of criticism and dire warnings from thoughtful scholars who judge the cost of entertaining historical research in the rooms of christology as too great a risk for Christian faith. Over and over these critics see in the quest a compromise of theological integrity, or worse, a sellout of the faith. Over and over, they recognize contemporary values in the historians’ Jesuses, and they judge Jesus research as manipulating the figure of Jesus.

Their illumining complaints, in the spirit of Kähler, can teach quested christologies much. Their suspicion roots out retrojected value; they effectively locate value locales and pin down the genesis of values that have given birth to each historical Jesus. Indeed they relativize the contributions of the quest. And revisionist theologians must internalize their criticism and learn to anticipate their scowling skepticism. Their concern for compromise with fashionable values, for sellout on the nature of faith, for giving historians trump, and for the procedural failures of the quest—all of these relativize, not just the historian’s quest, but also the very nature of theology. Just as the quest has reacted and must react to the critics’ complaints, so too revisionist theologies must react to theological criticism from theological positions that insist on being insulated from the Jesus research. Theologians must receive the criticism and do a genetic check on the critiques themselves: from where do the values come? What understanding of faith and theology does the way of insulation represent? And toward what vision of the Christian life does insulation tend?

Once theologians have conducted the genealogy of values, they can judge the entire approach of insulation, to be sure, but more importantly they can learn from points of criticism and judge whether each point has viability. Naturally, they must learn modesty in claim and in deployment of results of historical research, a negation by itself. Totalizing and absolutized claims are suspect; rigid certainty on particular claims seems blind, especially in an era of research that lacks consensus and may be in transition. Then lively points of criticism can be taken up: some extreme positions merit being discarded and ignored; some important points will have to be on hold until the research advances in another new quest; some can be honored within quested christologies as critical checks, as qualifications, and as maybes. The strategy is to internalize the point within theological construction as explicit revisionings of the theological use of Jesus research.

For instance, in the matter of Jesus’ relationship to Torah, we find striking differences among the historians. Left and center scholars tend to set out a Jesus who is softly critical or affirming of Torah, while more conservative see a Jesus who is more critical of the Law. In the midst of this difference are scholars who specialize in Jesus/Judaism topics and who insist that in Jesus there is no substantial criticism of Torah, much less an abrogation of Law.¹⁶ Probably the issue has not been settled and will need further research. But at least we can be clear about two points for constructive theologies: (1) theology must be suspicious of the historical effort to absolve Jesus of any hostility to the Law (the holocaust criterion); the coincidence of absolving Jesus of hostility to the Law and of the delicacy of writing theology after the Holocaust is simply too remarkable not to notice critically. (2) And clearly, virtually all Jesus historians have departed from the traditional abrogation of the Law in the Pauline tradition. The rest of the issue seems inconclusive at this moment and swings between a Jesus with no substantive criticism of Torah to a Jesus whose charisma and sense of occasion requires him to challenge or rethink certain requirements of the Law. Possibly, he challenges the Pharisaic interpretation of oral Torah.

B. Limits as Negation

From Reimarus himself to Jesus Seminar guru Robert W. Funk, the most identifiable motive in Jesus research has been to use critique negatively, to criticize central christological claims of the church.¹⁷ Here historians submit the gospel tradition to what Sanders calls rough handling,¹⁸ and a historical Jesus functions to criticize the dogmatic Christs of tradition. Of course, the question remains whether christology can and should undergo such rough handling under the press of historical research. Some, the children of Martin Kähler, will never open christology to modern historical research: they find the procedure of Jesus research to be misguided, methodologically flawed, and dangerous to faith.¹⁹ But quest-interested christologies are not convinced by the move to seal christology hermetically from historical research. Why are they not convinced? Why would such christologies risk critique and negation? The widest rationale is the obverse of the warrants we identified in volume 1, chapter 3: namely, were there no historical basis in fact to the saga about Jesus, then some things, if not everything, in Christian faith would be falsified. As antichristologist Hollenbach recognizes: if there is no historical basis for Christian faith, then Christian claims are either misunderstandings of the evidence or fanciful constructions.²⁰

Undoubtedly, some things a historian could claim about Jesus would undercut or even demolish the christological project of the Christians. One thinks immediately of the extreme case, argued in this era again by G. A. Wells, that there never was a human named Jesus of Nazareth.²¹ But subtler forms of critique actually present more difficulties for the christologist. What disruptions in popular and traditional assumptions about Jesus could we judge to be harmless? Presumably, it bothers few Christians today if a historian declares that Jesus of Nazareth assumes the world is flat. But what about the notion that he thinks that history is ending presently in a great, divine conflagration? Would such a fact damage christology? What if one knew for certain that his wonders are unhistorical or that Jesus stumbles into his dying by mistake? Do any of these items of historical knowing make christology difficult or impossible?

At this point we are not supporting any particular claim about the effects of historical research on theology. Rather we are observing that the middle moments of the spectrum (namely, between historical knowledge that flatly would eliminate christology and historical results that would be almost incidental to christological claims) present the most difficulty for theology. Scholars and believers will make different judgments where to draw the line and why, and stronger judgments will be the articulated, warranted, and critically defended ones. Some will find ways to spin certain historical conclusions so that they present no profound challenge to christology: one thinks of the exorcisms, for instance, which have been understood within the psychology of a prescientific worldview. But in the end most who entertain historical inquiry would have to be open to the notion that historical conclusions could affect Christian christologies. If that door is open, then historical research can be the critique of christology. In its most destructive moments, it is high-risk for christology: can theology, on occasion or at all, risk the reduction of the Christ of tradition and doctrine to a silhouette of itself?²² Once we admit to this possibility, we recognize that a Jesus is a limit for a Christ and a Jesus can negate a Christ.

But the minute we admit the limiting to christology by a historical Jesus, we simultaneously open the door, not only that a Jesus could support a Christ, but more to the point here, that the negative in a historical Jesus can have positive consequences for christology. Precisely by posing a needed limit or a critical correction to something in the christological tradition, the much-maligned negative function of questing flips over and works for christological strength, not destruction. Kählerian critics of the quest fail to honor this inverted contribution. Nonetheless, they probably endorse or presuppose its validity. For instance, critique can clarify what is at stake historically in the traditions of the signs and wonders. And when Bible scholars define what is a wonder for the first century, they implicitly and explicitly negate the understanding of miracle generated by the rise of modern science. Here the negation serves faith and theology by directing it away from confused, inaccurate, or anachronistic conceptions. Or good historical criticism can purge christology of tensions; for instance, a tradition-historical treatment of the genesis of the sources of the Jesus saga can interpret the tensions within the portraits of Jesus in a developmental way. Or good historical criticism can recall images of Jesus to their best intuitions. Examples of this emphasis might be the recovery of Jesus’ relationship to women or his redefinition of family, two themes very powerful in the Third Quest. Or good historical criticism can bring out squelched voices. For instance, Jesus research conducted in the modes of a postcolonial hermeneutic can accent the themes of oppression and liberation deemphasized in an otherworldly model of salvation. In short, when historical research on Jesus can be drawn into christology, the moments of christological apophaticism, while certainly posing dangers, can have salutary properties by reducing, by abstracting, and by essentializing features of a full christology. Then the negative can be used positively!

B.1. The Road Not Taken: Preliminaries

As we have indicated above, we begin our exploration of the negative with negations that purport to limit what christology can do. Here we will have to be prepared for a surprise—that christologically interesting things may take shadowy shape in the plausible Jesuses historians reject: whether they reject a holistic paradigm for understanding Jesus or exclude or deemphasize some item in a historical picture. The road not taken instructs in historiography, to be sure, but becomes a value lesson for theology. Theology wakes up when historians face forks in the road of Jesus research. Whether historians are debating what sources to employ, what methods to use, whether this or that reconstruction of the historical context is pertinent, the weighty decisions founding historical decisions are never simply transparent and never simply evidentiary.²³ Possibly metadecisions are not transparent in any historical work, but certainly they are not evident in Jesus research. Meta-historical conditions always give birth to historical forks in the road, and the metadecisions themselves press historical research to a particular direction on the road and not another. Neither comes from the evidence itself.

Obviously, suggesting that theology needs to pay attention to things historians are not doing urges it to attend to a strange kind of evidence and to methods not deployed. Just as historians must say an articulate no to positions within the spectrum of views, so theologians must study the value locales and the source and method decisions in the production of a particular Jesus. This recommendation presupposes that theologians have a working sense for New Testament research and the quest so that they can consider changes in historical construction and deliberate decisions as value-laden choices, somewhat independent from their historical merit. Theologians must learn to see through historical choices to the values that present christological opportunity. While this technique of reading is a hermeneutic of suspicion applied to historical research, it need not be reductive. It need not collapse historical decision simply into a value impulse, as some of the critics of the quest insist. Their criticism, the inverse of historical positivism, assumes that a genuine historical move is immaculately conceived independent of value, and that the discovery of value renders a historical position compromised, useless. The revisionist position advocated here proposes that every position in historical research is coterminously launched by evidence, historical methods, and issues of value. Discerning value in and within sound historical judgment is a vocation for theology.

In this point we focus on smaller choices, not the global ones, that a historian makes in his/her daily work. For instance, why does one scholar opt only for canonical sources while another gets excited about noncanonical sources? Why is one researcher impressed with some version of the criterion of dissimilarity and another almost offended by it? Why does one researcher press for a politics in Jesus while another’s Jesus is apolitical? This Jesus is religiously defined while that one is defined by sociopolitical categories. Historians’ approaches to these and a hundred similar questions emerge in their predispositions as they work methodically through the evidence: neither predisposition alone nor evidence alone but only predisposition confronting material drawn from evidence mediated through method. Choosing from predisposition alone, of course, risks bias and manipulation; choosing from evidence alone reveals hermeneutical naiveté on the part of a historian.

Through three formal means a theologian can discover what the historian is not doing, and not doing in a telling way: (1) judge the historian’s reconstruction of an item against what is in the Jesus saga itself, or (2) judge the historian’s proposal against the history of Jesuses; or (3) judge an item against the spectrum of the guild’s views or the consensus of opinions. For instance, let us take as our litmus test the issue of the so-called miracles of Jesus. Even a casual reading of the canonical Gospels alerts us to the extent to which the miracles should be at play in a history of Jesus. Yet if we find miracle not thematized and dealt with by a historian, then we have an oddity of value in the historian’s account. If we add historical insight, we may ask when in the history of Jesuses do the so-called miracle stories begin to have christological significance, and when do theologians begin to struggle interpretively with them, when are they reduced, and so on. When is miracle invented, when does miracle become christologically interesting, what kinds of miracle do we notice or value, and why do some (e.g., the exorcisms vs. the fig tree) seem richer for christological purpose? When we probe such questions in relation to a historian’s historical choices, we can be clearer about what a historian brings to the signs and wonders of the Jesus saga.

Historical points of choice become ciphers to value and of great interest to christology particularly when we can see the road not taken. Since Schweitzer, modern Jesus researchers have been aware of the value dialogue that happens in particular historical choices; indeed, many have learned under the suspicion of Schweitzer’s analysis to recognize and make explicit how their fundamental predispositions shape their historical choices. They have learned to be more forthcoming about their own stances and to recognize perspective in other Jesus researchers. But for the most part historians struggle to articulate the metaconditions that shape how they make particular historical decisions and, as historians, they tend to argue predispositional difference on the basis of evidence.

The road not taken. Decisions in Jesus research can be explained in the way we have come to learn from the retrojection theory. A position or choice means at least in part a value from the historian’s world. Now, we can proceed with the reduction typical of the antiquest position, but if we judge the reduction of history to the historian’s world construction as a failed and incoherent position, we begin to use retrojective explanation as a way of identifying a valuable conversation of the historian with the evidence. Once we have reworked retrojection, we see in each road not taken by the historian a richer picture of the valuation happening in the historian’s conversation with the Jesus saga. For instance, we can reduce the choice of an apocalyptic Jesus to the deep cultural crisis of Victorian and liberal Europe: Schweitzer’s style of Jesus represents a Europe yearning for a differently transcendent Christ. There is some truth in the reduction, but it is an incomplete explanation, for Schweitzer succeeds in teaching a whole century about the apocalyptic in the Jesus saga. But when we put the choice of the apocalyptic prophet next to wisdom’s sage, theologians have a whole menu of value in front of them: rival and perhaps overlapping conversations that can feed christology. Which one or ones to actuate, of course, depends on the comprehensive christological endeavor a theologian elects. Part of that comprehensive theological project asks the theologian to identify what kind of conversations with the Jesus saga does faith and theology require today. Some such conversations are perennial: for example, what do we do about war, and what do we say about the poor? Some appear to be distinctly new ones (i.e., what do Christians say about world religious revival, about indifference to religion in major parts of the world, about global violence, about the destruction of the world as a livable creation?).

B.2. Paradigm Shift as Limit

There are plenty of histories of the quest for the historical Jesus, including quite a few that pick up the story since Schweitzer’s immensely significant study. They tell the story of twentieth-century Jesus research as an effort to make sense of the apocalyptic figure that Weiss and Schweitzer name as the real, historical Jesus. Scholars struggled historically first to confirm Jesus as apocalyptic and then to figure out what sort of apocalypticism Jesus represents vis-à-vis Jewish options of the day. Even more challenging was the theological effort to make christological sense of such a Jesus. Recall where the twentieth century of Jesus research began: in Weiss’s proclamation that an apocalyptic Jesus could have no dogmatic import, and that Weiss must retreat into the dominant liberal christology; or in Schweitzer’s freakish apocalypticist who both fascinated him and drove him to Africa—that is, to post-Christian identity.

Schweitzer and Weiss launched an overturning of the liberal paradigm in Jesus research and unwittingly established the apocalyptic prophet paradigm of the twentieth century. New Testament scholars came to agree with the two about the apocalyptic framing for the ministry of Jesus, even as most rejected their theological reaction to their discovery. And twentieth-century theologians did not pursue either the option of Weiss or of Schweitzer, and thereby minimized the christologically threatening character of the apocalyptic. Rather, as we know, they found inventive ways to generate christologies informed by the apocalyptic Jesus. These differed, of course. But something like an eschatological paradigm (Marcus Borg’s phrase) dominated the theology of the twentieth century. For a century no critical New Testament scholar disputed that Jesus was some kind of an apocalyptic figure; the debates concerned only the nature of the eschatology in question and how to reencode the apocalyptic in Jesus into christological possibility. And virtually every twentieth-century christology was written with an eye on the apocalyptic Jesus. That Jesus authored a Christ of crisis, of existential decision, of kairos, of prolepsis, of liberation, and so on. The canonical Jesus of the twentieth century, then, was the apocalyptic prophet and the mainstream christologies of the century dealt with Jesus’ eschatology.

Today the dominance of the apocalyptic paradigm has evaporated. Whether Borg is right about the end of the apocalyptic consensus,²⁴ whether the quest is headed into a third, new, sapiential paradigm, remains to be seen. Nonetheless, something interesting is happening with the Jesus of Schweitzer and Weiss. Some Jesus researchers have abandoned the apocalyptic prophet altogether; others remain committed to the paradigm but live defensively with the apocalyptic Jesus. Some have redefined the terms of apocalyptic. Of course, nearly everyone credits the centrality of the Kingdom of God theme, but the kind of radically imminent eschatology of the past seems not to interest many Jesus researchers. What then is the new? It is the absence today among all the Jesuses of our day of the crazed apocalypticism of Schweitzer. Thus, what is absent today is the very thing that led Schweitzer and Weiss to flee theologically from the world-denying, apocalyptic Jesus.

Schweitzer’s Jesus, we remember, could not function in an enduring world. His obsession for the apocalyptic project of his God turned him into a misfit and led him to throw himself recklessly into his own self-destruction. It is this incapacity to function in the world that contemporary Jesus researchers abandon; they have no time for a Jesus who freakishly deconstructs in an effort to call God’s hand into the endgame. If apocalyptic means a world-denying orientation, then most Jesus researchers want nothing to do with it. Even the researchers who hang on to the apocalyptic paradigm do so by emphasizing that Jesus’ eschatology is not otherworldly. Perhaps this motive prompts some Jesus researchers to speak of an eschatology in Jesus that is not apocalyptic. A defining feature, then, of contemporary Jesus research is its certitude that the historical Jesus is a man of the world. Right now we need only to note that many contemporary Jesus researchers typically do not want anything to do with an otherworldly, transcendental, ascetic, or transhistorical Jesus. In rejecting this kind of Jesus, some researchers have announced that they are moving out of the twentieth century and beyond Schweitzer’s Alien.

The twentieth century put together a series of brilliant and surprising Christs informed by the alien Jesus. Recall that during much of the century most historians and theologians were skeptical about the quest. In the canonical view, we cannot know Jesus because the evidence does not support our curiosities; we cannot know Jesus because we see only ourselves when we try to know him; and we cannot know Jesus because he is a world-ending figure. Surprisingly, the historical skepticism serves as the natural partner of the apocalyptic—so much so that we must say that in questing, historical skepticism is an epistemological form of apocalypticism. The twentieth century followed Schweitzer’s lead, followed his skepticism of knowledge about Jesus every bit as much as his apocalypticism. And both at the same time, and both without recognizing quite a tension between honoring the skeptical point and honoring the apocalyptic point. It does not occur to Schweitzer to answer how he knows the real Jesus appears via the alien criterion. And it does not occur to most theologians of that century to affirm that the Jesus we cannot know is an apocalyptic prophet. Schweitzer cannot protect his final reflections on the real Jesus from his own discovery of the reflexive character of Jesus research, as we have seen, just as the century’s theologians could not protect the apocalyptic Jesus secured in their skepticism about historical knowledge of Jesus. How does Schweitzer know that his Jesus escapes the retrojection of Schweitzer’s own values? A similar blindness characterizes so much of twentieth-century christology and Jesus research, which is at once extremely suspicious of any claim for knowledge of Jesus and certain that the Jesus we cannot know is an apocalyptic prophet. The twentieth century, after all, is not only the century of the eschatological paradigm but also of the no quest. Skepticism and apocalypticism, then, go hand in hand.

The mechanism that held together the two themes in an unrecognized yoke was the third Schweitzer theme: the reflexive theme. Because researchers had learned so well from Schweitzer to expect a Jesus picture to be a self-portrait of the Jesus researcher, they knew well that there is little point to pursue questing for the historical Jesus. They would simply fall into Schweitzer’s critique. But they also knew that the real Jesus stood behind self-reflexivity, but only if he were beyond reflexivity, that is, if he were so much the alien