Jesus vis-à-vis Paul, Luther, and Schweitzer
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The problem of happiness is scarcely considered in the Old Testament. Man is destined to be free. Whether liberty will make him happy is somehow beside the point. What matters is God’s will, God’s challenge.
In the New Testament, each man’s overruling concern with his eternal happiness—his salvation—is central and defines the whole milieu. A similar concern had earlier found expression in Buddhism, also in the Orphic religion that probably influenced Plato’s later thought. The change in the climate of opinion in the Near East between the age of the prophets and the time of Jesus has been noted above (§§ 39–40). Nation upon nation had lost its independence and its cultural initiative. Otherworldliness had spread, and millions had come to accept this world with resignation, hoping for the next. The era that, reeling from climax to climax, had witnessed Genesis and Deuteronomy, Hebrew prophecy and Attic tragedy, Greek temples and Thucydides, was long since drowned in Alexander’s conquests and unprecedented syncretism. All kinds of mystery religions merged their dreams of supernatural salvation. Large masses of people felt that in this world nothing was left to live for.
Jesus did not have to persuade his listeners that they ought to be concerned about salvation, any more than the Buddha did. They came to hear him because he was offering a way. Conversely, when most men do not worry about salvation, Jesus’ message is not easily made relevant to them.
According to the Gospels, Jesus’ conception of salvation was radically otherworldly, and opposed to any this-worldly messianic hopes—not only to chauvinistic dreams of glory but also to swords beaten into plowshares and liberty and justice for all. The “kingdom is not of this world” (John 18:36). The perspective of the prophets is reversed. They, too, had taught humility and love, but not this preoccupation with oneself. The accent had been on the neighbor and the stranger, the orphan, the widow, and the poor. Social injustice cried out to be rectified and was no less real because it meant a lack of love and a corruption of the heart. Man was told to love others and to treat them justly—for their sake, not for his own, to escape damnation. To the Jesus of the Gospels, social injustice as such is of no concern. Heaven and hell-fire have been moved into the center.
But does not Jesus give a central place to the commandment “Love your neighbor as yourself”? It has often been said that this is the essential difference between the New Testament and the Old. Yet this commandment is taken from the Law of Moses, and the New Testament itself designates this as the ground that Jesus and the Pharisees had in common. Consider what may well be the most famous parable in the Gospels—the Good Samaritan (Luke 10). “Behold a lawyer stood up to put him to the test, saying: Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life? He said to him: What is written in the Law? How do you read? And he answered; You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself. And he said to him: You have answered right; do this, and you will live.” Nor is there any disagreement about the point of the parable. Having related the different conduct of priest, Levite, and Samaritan, Jesus asks his interrogator: “Which of these three, do you think, proved neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers? He said: The one who showed mercy on him.”
One may doubt the authenticity of this parable. If Jesus had really told it, why should three of the evangelists have omitted it entirely? But if Jesus never told it, it would be easy to understand why, in time, it should have been attributed to him. This consideration is certainly not conclusive; and what matters here is that, in telling the story, the third Gospel underlines the fact that, in questions of this sort, Jesus did not differ with the Pharisees; certainly they did not uphold the conduct of the priest and the Levite in the parable.
“Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” The concern with the life to come was by then characteristic of much Jewish thinking. But the Jesus of the Gospels went much further in his otherworldliness than the Pharisees did, not to speak of the Sadducees. Salvation became with him the central motive for loving one’s neighbor.
Consider the rich man who, according to Luke (18:18 ff.), asked Jesus the identical question. To him, Jesus cites five of the Ten Commandments before adding: “One thing you still lack. Sell all you have and distribute it to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.” It is no longer the poor that require love and justice; it is the giver who is to accumulate treasure in heaven. The social order, with which Moses and the prophets were centrally concerned, counts for nothing; the life to come is everything. If what truly matters is treasure in heaven, what do the poor gain from what they are given?
If, to gain salvation, we must give up all property and follow Jesus, then either salvation requires the complete disintegration of the social order, or salvation is denied to the vast majority of men and restricted to a few. The Jesus of the Gospels was clearly prepared to accept both consequences: he was willing to countenance the disappearance of any social framework and resigned to see only a few saved.
To begin with the last point, Jesus, according to all three Synoptic Gospels, actually reassured his disciples: “If any one will not receive you or listen to your words, shake off the dust from your feet as you leave that house or town. Truly, I say to you, it shall be more tolerable on the day of judgment for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah than for that town” (Matthew 10:14 f.; cf. 11:24; Mark 6:11; Luke 10:10 ff.). Far from being an isolated dictum, the prospect of damnation is one of the central motifs of the Gospels.
Returning once more to the story of the rich man: at the end, those who heard Jesus’ words ask him, understandably: “Then who can be saved? But he said: What is impossible with men is possible with God.” Here it is suggested that salvation is a gift of divine grace. Inequality is instituted by God: some are chosen, others rejected.
Indifference to the social order is expressed in Jesus’ next words: “Truly, I say to you, there is no man who has left house or wife or brothers or parents or children, for the sake of the kingdom of God, who will not receive manifold more in this time, and in the world to come eternal life.” If one wants a briefer formulation for this rigorous indifference to the social and political realm, there is the famous “Render to Caesar what is Caesar’s” (Matthew 22:21; Mark 12:17; Luke 20:25).
This phrase should be understood in its historic context. The question is one of subordination or resistance to a foreign oppressor—a perennial issue. And the answer is: oppression is unimportant; “render to God what is God’s”; the social sphere is not God’s and merits no concern.
Jesus’ association with the publicans illustrates this point, too. The publicans, who collected taxes for the Roman conquerors, were the quislings of their day. To Jesus, this was utterly irrelevant. The one thing needful was salvation.
Only an age in which salvation had all but lost meaning could misconstrue Jesus’ moral teachings the way liberal Protestantism did. The morality of the Sermon on the Mount, too, is centered not in the neighbor but in salvation. Each of the nine Beatitudes in the beginning announces a reward, and they conclude with the promise: “Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven.” In the Sermon itself, promises and threats alternate continually: “shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven”; “will never enter the kingdom of heaven”; “judgment”; “hell fire”; “your whole body should be cast into hell”; “if you love those who love you, what reward have you?”; “will reward you”; “have their reward”; “will reward you”; “your heavenly Father also will forgive you”; “neither will your Father forgive your trespasses”; “they have their reward”; “will reward you”; and more in the same vein.
The point is clearly stated both in the middle and at the end. “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume, and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal.” At the conclusion, those who do as told are called “wise,” and those who do not are called “foolish.” Actually, phronimos might be translated as “prudent” and moros as “moronic.”
Moses and the prophets had also often referred to the future, though categorical demands were more characteristic of their style and pathos. But the future they envisaged was a social future; for Micah and Isaiah it even involved the whole of humanity. The Jesus of the Gospels appeals to each man’s self-interest.
This may strike some modern readers as paradoxical because liberal Protestantism has persuaded millions that the essence of Christianity is altruism and self-sacrifice. But our analysis may help to explain why so many people take it for granted that morality depends on the belief in God and immortality. It is not uncommon to hear people admit that if they lost their belief in a life after death, no reason would remain for them to be moral. In fact, they cannot see why anyone lacking this belief should be moral; and this accounts in large measure for the widespread horror of atheism.
In the Gospels, one is to lose oneself only to find oneself. Sacrifices are demanded, but only of what moth and rust consume. We are taught to give up what is of no account. In what truly matters, we are expected to see to our own interest. The “reward” is always my reward. Really sacrificing oneself for the sake of others, for the chance, uncertain as such matters are in this world, that our neighbor or society might benefit—or foregoing one’s own salvation for the salvation of others, as Mahayana Buddhism says its saints do—the Gospels do not ask of man.
There are, therefore, no grounds for differing with the formulations of by far the best, most comprehensive, and most careful study of “The Social Teachings of the Christian Churches”—that of Ernst Troeltsch. He does not overstate the case when he calls Jesus’ moral teachings, as recorded in the Gospels, “unlimited and unconditional individualism”; when he remarks that “of an ideal for humanity there is no thought”; or when he claims that “any program of social renovation is lacking” (39, 41, 48).
The relation of the Gospels to the prophets has often been presented in a false light by those lacking either Troeltsch’s scrupulous scholarship or his forthright honesty. The claim that the great innovation of the Gospels lies in a reputed distillation of the older moral teachings is practically a cliché. It is nonetheless false, bars any real understanding of the history of social thought in the past 2000 years, and leads to countless further errors in historical interpretation. As we have seen, there is a crass discontinuity, best summarized in the word otherworldliness.
Much has been made of the Golden Rule; and when it was found that Hillel, the Pharisee, an older contemporary of Jesus, had condensed the morality of Moses and the prophets into the so-called negative formulation of the Golden Rule, which is also encountered, 500 years earlier, in Confucius, Protestant theologians were quick to call this the Silver Rule and to claim that Jesus’ formula was far superior.1 In reply to that, three things need to be said.
First, the negative version can be put into practice while the positive version cannot; and anyone who tried to live up to Jesus’ rule would become an insufferable nuisance.
Second: no such formula should be overestimated in any case; try, for example, to derive a sexual ethic from Jesus’ rule. This example also illustrates the first point.
Finally, there are the wonderful words with which Thomas Hobbes concluded Part III of his Leviathan: “It is not the bare Words, but the Scope of the writer that giveth the true light, by which any writing is to bee interpreted; and they that insist upon single Texts, without considering the main Designe, can derive no thing from them cleerly; but rather by casting atomes of Scripture, as dust before mens eyes, make every thing more obscure than it is; an ordinary artifice of those that seek not the truth, but their own advantage.”
When we consider the main design, it appears that the Gospels reject all concern with social justice and reduce morality to a prudent concern for one’s own salvation; indeed, that morality itself becomes equivocal. No agreement can be had on where Jesus stood on moral questions—not only on pacifism, the courts, and other concrete issues: most of his formulations do not seem to have been meant literally. Parable and hyperbole define his style. Specific contents are disparaged.
Superficially, of course, a very different view suggests itself. The Pharisees had tried to build what they themselves called “a fence around the Law”—for example, by demanding that the observation of the Sabbath should begin a little before sunset, to guard against trespasses. It might seem that Jesus, in the Sermon on the Mount, was similarly erecting a fence around morality. For he introduces his most extreme demands: “Till heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the law until all is accomplished. Whoever then relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches men so, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven…. Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” Then Jesus goes on to say that it is not enough not to kill: “Whoever says, ‘You fool!’ shall be liable to hell fire.” It is not sufficient not to commit adultery, nor—the omission of any reference to the Tenth Commandment is surprising—not to covet one’s neighbor’s wife, but “every one who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to sin, pluck it out and throw it away.” (We shall return to this saying later in this chapter.)
On reflection, the old morality is not protected but undermined, not extended but dissolved; and no new morality is put in its place. Where murder is not considered importantly different from calling a man a fool, nor adultery from a lustful look, the very basis of morality is denied: the crucial distinction between impulse and action. If one is unfortunate enough to have the impulse, no reason is left for not acting on it.
Again, it might well be asked: “Then who can be saved? But he said: What is impossible with men is possible with God.” At this point one can understand Luther’s suggestion that the moral commandments in the Bible were “ordained solely that man might thus realize his incapacity for good and learn to despair of himself” (see § 31 above).
Jesus’ few remarks about the Jewish ceremonial laws have to be placed in this context. He speaks not as a reform Jew or a liberal Protestant; he does not, like the prophets, unequivocally reject specific rituals to insist instead on social justice; rather, he depreciates rules and commandments as such, moral as well as ceremonial. What ultimately matters is the other world.
As was shown in Chapter VI, it is not only in time that the Gospels are closer to Ezekiel and Daniel than to the pre-exilic prophets. Jesus and the evangelists lived in an age in which apocalypses flourished, and the atmosphere was apocalyptic. In the oldest Gospel, Mark’s, “he said to them: Truly, I say to you, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the kingdom of God come with power” (9:1; cf. 13:30; Matthew 10:23). The end is at hand, and Jesus himself is understood in the Gospels as an intrusion of the other world into this world. It was not morality or ceremonial law that became the central issue between Jesus and the Pharisees, but the person of Jesus.
Almost all scholars agree that the Sermon on the Mount is not a sermon Jesus delivered in that form, but Matthew’s compilation of some of the most striking dicta. (Luke constructed all kinds of situations to frame some of the same dicta.) It is doubly revealing that Matthew should have said, right after the end of the Sermon: “The people were astonished at his teaching”—why?—“for he taught them as one who had authority, and not as their scribes.” Moral questions could be argued; one was used to different opinions. Matters of ceremonial law were debated too much, if anything, with a vast variety of views. It was Jesus’ conception of his own person that caused astonishment; and if he said half the things about himself that the Gospels relate, it must have seemed the most shocking blasphemy to the Pharisees. The three Synoptics agree that the scribes condemned Jesus not for being too liberal but for blasphemy—for what he said about himself. They relate that he not only called himself the Messiah, or—to use the familiar Greek translation of that term—the Christ, but that he went on to say, alluding to Daniel: “You will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of Power, and coming with the clouds of heaven.”2 Then, they say, the high priest tore his mantle, said, “You have heard his blasphemy,” and they condemned him.
Whether this is how it actually happened, we have no way of knowing for sure; but this is the Christian story, as related in the Gospels. It was only in recent times, when salvation had ceased to be meaningful for large numbers of liberal Protestants, that men who did not believe any more in “the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of Power, and coming with the clouds of heaven” began to see Jesus as primarily a moral teacher. The apocalyptic tradition suggested by these words, derived from Daniel and Ezekiel, seemed dated. Neither the Catholic church nor the Greek Orthodox church, nor the overwhelming majority of Protestant denominations have ever accepted this liberal view; but it is still popular with a large public that knows what it likes—without knowing what it likes.
Let us return once more to the parable of the Good Samaritan. Asked, “What shall I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus retorts, “What is written in the law?” and receives the reply: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.” Although Luke has Jesus agree with this, this is not the teaching of the Gospels. On occasion we are given the impression, noted at the beginning of this chapter, that this constituted an area of agreement between Jesus and the Pharisees. But the fourth Gospel denounces this idea constantly:
“Unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God” (3:5). “He who does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God” (3:18). “He who does not honor the Son does not honor the Father who sent him” (5:23). “He who believes has eternal life” (6:47). “I am the living bread which came down from heaven; if any one eats of this bread, he will live for ever” (6:51). “No one comes to the Father, but by me” (14:6).
This list could easily be lengthened. In the other Gospels these themes are not nearly so prominent; but, according to Matthew, Jesus said: “Every one who acknowledges me before men, I also will acknowledge before my Father who is in Heaven; but who ever denies me before men, I also will deny before my Father who is in heaven” (10:32 f.). Luke 12:8 f. agrees almost literally, and there is a parallel passage in Mark (8:38).
It is exceedingly doubtful that Jesus himself said all these things, especially those ascribed to him in the Gospel according to John. Enslin remarks, in The Literature of the Christian Movement, that the Jesus of the fourth Gospel is really not very attractive, and that if it were not for the other three Gospels and the fact that most readers create for themselves “a conflate,” the Jesus of St. John would lose most of his charm. Surely, the same consideration applies to all four Gospels. Most Christians gerrymander the Gospels and carve an idealized self-portrait out of the texts: Pierre van Paassen’s Jesus is a socialist, Fosdick’s a liberal, while the ethic of Reinhold Niebuhr’s Jesus agrees, not surprisingly, with Niebuhr’s own.3
The problem these men confront is not of their making. The Jesus of the Gospels confronts the serious Christian less as a challenge than as a stumbling block, to use Paul’s word. It should be fruitful to consider how three of the most eminent and earnest Christians of all time have sought to solve this problem—three men of very different background and temperament, one in the first century, one in the sixteenth, and one in the twentieth: Paul, Luther, and Schweitzer.
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Those who see Jesus as essentially a moral teacher often see Paul as the real Judas. Clearly, Paul’s letters bear the stamp of his personality; and since they were written earlier than any of our Gospels, they may well have influenced the Gospels, especially that according to John.
Jesus had spoken Aramaic, to Jews; Paul wrote Greek, to Gentiles. Jesus had grown up in Nazareth and taught in Galilee and Jerusalem; Paul grew up in a town where Hellenism flourished, and he traveled widely in the Hellenistic world and became a Roman citizen. Jesus had spoken elusively and, according to the Gospels, did not mind puzzling his listeners; Paul preached a doctrine and tried to back it up with arguments—which, to be sure, have to be understood in their contemporary climate of opinion.
Paul had not known Jesus, had not listened to his stories, had not heard his commandments. Jesus appeared to him as the Lord had appeared to the ancient prophets. Paul knew that such an appearance meant a call to go and bear witness of the Lord’s revelation; but the Lord now is “Jesus Christ our Lord.” Is this a betrayal of Jesus of Nazareth?
To justify an affirmative reply, one must reject as apocryphal all the manifold indications in the Gospels that Jesus did not consider himself an ordinary human being. Yet we have already tried to show that this seems to have been the crucial issue between Jesus and the Sadducees and Pharisees; and presumably it was this, too, that led to the ironic inscription on the cross: King of the Jews. It is the unequivocal centrality of this idea in Paul that is new, also the doctrinal formulations. With this further development, Christianity as a separate religion was born.
What else was Jesus’ legacy? If individual salvation counts for everything and is conceived as otherworldly; if action is deprived of its significance and the distinction between deed and impulse is dissolved, what remains but faith in the person around whom the lines were drawn, faith that he was the Messiah, the Christ? Now one could wait for the kingdom to come with power, and meanwhile recall his life and his stories and sayings; or one could accept in all seriousness, with all its implications, as Paul did, the idea that the Messiah had come, and that this must be the clue to salvation.
At this point Paul transformed Jesus’ preaching and assimilated the crucified and resurrected Savior to the mystery religions that were prevalent throughout the Roman world. The pagan sacraments found their way into the new religion. Around A.D. 200, when it was still obvious to many educated people where the sacraments had come from, Tertullian said boldly that Satan had counterfeited the Christian sacraments in advance. In our time, Toynbee, once again aware of scores of borrowings from Hellenistic folklore in our Gospels, concludes that God chose to reveal himself in folklore (A Study of History, Vol. VI, Annex).
Understandably, many Protestants feel that these Hellenistic elements were merely features of the age that are dispensable today, and that we must go back to original pre-Hellenic, pre-Pauline Christianity. Toynbee, in An Historian’s Approach to Religion, asks in this vein: “In what sense did Christians, in those very early days before the statement of Christian beliefs began to be Hellenized, mean that Jesus was the Son of God, that He rose from the dead, that He ascended into heaven?” It is widely felt that this is the right question. In fact, however, these “very early days” are a figment of the imagination, and the question is unfair to Paul.
Even some of the later books of the Old Testament are by no means pre-Hellenistic; Jewish literature of the period between the Testaments (the Apocrypha, for example) shows strong Hellenistic influence; and the hopes, beliefs, and expectations of the Jews of Jesus’ time owed a great deal to Hellenistic thought. Some recent studies have tried to show how deeply Jewish Paul was, notably, W. D. Davies’ Paul and Rabbinic Judaism: Some Rabbinic Elements in Pauline Theology. And the literature about the Dead Sea scrolls has made it a commonplace that Hellenistic elements—which, it was previously supposed, Paul might have introduced into Christianity—were well established in at least some Jewish circles in the time of Jesus. Some people put this last point rather oddly, saying: These things, which we considered Hellenistic, were really Jewish. It would be more accurate to say that the Judaism of Jesus’ time was no longer pre-Hellenistic.
Still, some circles had resisted syncretism more than others, and one need only read the Book of Acts in the New Testament to see that the Jerusalem group, dominated by Peter and James, was inclined to resist more than Paul was. But how could one possibly go back to the religion of this group? They lived in the expectation that they would soon see Jesus return “sitting at the right hand of Power, and coming with the clouds of heaven.” They believed that Jesus had assured them that some of them would “not taste death before they [would] see the kingdom of God come with power.” Meanwhile, they were willing to preach and make converts, but few Jews were converted, and practically no Gentiles. Was Jesus’ legacy, then, a hope that proved vain?
A Jew might say so; a heretic might: but Paul, far from wishing to betray his Lord, refused to see it that way. Never having heard the preaching of Jesus, he felt free to develop a new teaching about Jesus; and he transformed a message of parables and hyperboles into a theological religion. What he said was clearly different from what Jesus had said; but Jesus’ teaching had been so utterly elusive that neither Peter nor James, the brother of Jesus,4 nor the other disciples who had listened to him day after day were able to point to anything clear or definite to combat Paul. That they wanted to fight Paul’s new doctrines, the Book of Acts makes very clear; but the truly extraordinary fact is that these men, whose authority seemed clearly established because they had known Jesus and heard his teaching, had to capitulate to the strong convictions of Paul—himself a recent convert, discredited by his anti-Christian past—because they could not pit any notion of Jesus’ legacy against his.
I can see no good reasons for supposing that this was their fault. Indeed, it is not at all uncommon for a teacher to exert a strange and strong fascination on his students—by the force of his personality, his way of speaking, gestures, metaphors, intensity—although they cannot say just what he taught them. It is hardly reasonable in such cases to insist: But he must have taught them something—indeed, something of crucial significance—that we, by painstaking reflection, should be able to recover. It is even less reasonable to assume this when the whole climate was thoroughly authoritarian, when the master was surrounded by an air of mystery and constant reports of miracles that could not possibly be questioned, and when there were occasional suggestions that everything would become clear soon—when the world would end. The four evangelists agree in ascribing to Jesus evasive and equivocal answers to plain questions; some of the parables are so ambiguous that different evangelists interpret them differently; and it was evidently unthinkable for a disciple to ask searching questions and persist.
Paul did not villainously overturn the purest teaching that the world had ever heard: he filled a vacuum. Had it not been for him, there would not have been far-flung churches that required Gospels, cherished, and preserved them; there would have been no large-scale conversion of Gentiles; there would have been no Christianity, only a short-lived Jewish sect.
What is ironical, though there are parallels, is that Jesus’ dissatisfaction with all formulas and rules should have given way within one generation to an attempt, not yet concluded, to define the most precise dogmas. It is doubly ironical because, according to the Gospels, Jesus constantly inveighed against hypocrisy: indeed, the Gospels have made Pharisee and hypocrite synonymous. Yet the hypocrisy possible within a legalism that prominently emphasizes love and justice is as a mote compared to the beam of the hypocrisy made possible where dogma and sacraments have become central. If “he who eats me will live because of me” (John 6:57), why worry about loving one’s enemies?
According to Micah, God demands “only to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God”; according to John, “This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent” (6:29). Since the Reformation, in spite of the Reformers who pitted their doctrine of justification by faith alone against the Catholic doctrine of justification by faith and works, the prophetic ethic has been so widely accepted, however far one falls short of it, that the contrast of these two quotations may strike some readers as almost black and white. But those who study the Documents of the Christian Church, selected and edited by Henry Bettenson for the Oxford University Press, will find that neither the church councils nor the Reformers would have been likely to question this juxtaposition. The body of Bettenson’s book happily belies the misleading singular in the title; but one finds that the documents of the various Christian churches agree in rejecting the supremacy of Micah’s imperatives, that there is scarcely a reference to love, justice, mercy, or humility, and that what mattered most throughout was right belief about Christ and the sacraments. To this day, it is dogma that keeps the churches apart—different beliefs, creeds, and sacraments—not morality, not the Sermon on the Mount. Only one motif from the Sermon on the Mount was echoed constantly: the threat of hell. As dogma upon dogma was carefully defined, in an effort to determine what precisely one had to believe in order to be saved, the refrain was always: if anyone believes otherwise, “let him be anathema”—let him be damned, let him go to hell!
The Rule of Saint Francis represents a notable exception. Without taking issue with the doctrines and dogmas of the Catholic church, and while fully subordinating his judgment to the church’s, he tried to create an island of love in an unloving world. He lived to see corruption and hatred in his order, and soon after his death the Franciscans came to vie with the Dominicans in implementing the Inquisition.
For Paul, as for Jesus, social justice and political arrangements seemed irrelevant. He accepted the prevailing order, sometimes with contempt because it was merely secular, sometimes with respect because it was ordained by God.
Jesus’ “render to Caesar what is Caesar’s” is elaborated in Paul’s fateful Letter to the Romans: “The powers that be are ordained by God. Whoever therefore resists these powers, resists the ordinance of God; and whoever resists shall incur damnation” (13:1 f.). That had not been the view of Elijah and the preexilic prophets. But now moral courage before royal thrones and despots gives way to resignation and submission—not from lack of courage (neither Paul nor Luther, who echoed Paul’s injunctions, was timid), but because this world has ceased to matter.
The ancient notion of the equality and brotherhood of men is reinterpreted in a purely otherworldly sense; even coupled with a Platonizing, anti-egalitarian, organic metaphor: “As the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For by one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and all were made to drink of one Spirit…. Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it. And God has appointed in the church first apostles, second prophets, third teachers, then workers of miracles…. Are all apostles? Are all prophets? Are all teachers? Do all work miracles?” (I Corinthians 12). The foundation is laid for an elaborate hierarchy and for radical inequalities even within the church, while in the social order outside it inequality and injustice are accepted as fated. “Every one should remain in the state in which he was called. Were you a slave when called? Never mind” (I Corinthians 7). If you can become a free man, fine; if not, it does not really matter.5
In the same spirit, Paul says in the same chapter: “But because of fornication, each man should have his own wife, and each woman her own husband…. To the unmarried and the widows I say that it is well for them to remain single as I do. But if they cannot exercise self-control, they should marry. For it is better to marry than to burn.” Later, in the same chapter, Paul explains: “I want you to be free from care. The unmarried man cares for the things of the Lord, how to please the Lord; but the married man cares about the things of this world, how to please his wife.” It is the importance of the social order, it is this whole world that is rejected here. Paul, like Plato, believes that marriage would distract the elite from that other world on which they should concentrate. At least by implication, Paul, too, introduces the conception of an elite. Henceforth, there are, as it were, first- and second-class Christians. “He who marries his betrothed does well; and he who refrains from marriage will do better.”
For Paul, the otherworldly equality in Christ has a vivid meaning that was soon to be lost. His advice seems to hinge on his conviction that the end is at hand: “I think that in view of the present distress it is well for a person to remain as he is…. I mean, brethren, the appointed time has grown very short; those who have wives shall be as though they had none, and those who mourn as though they were not mourning, and those who rejoice as though they were not rejoicing, and those who buy as though they had nothing, and those who deal with the world as though they had no dealings with it. For the form of this world is passing away.”
Equality has its place only as this world passes away and all distinctions are lost. Equality is not the final triumph of love and justice, presented to man as a challenge and a task; it is what remains after the diversity of the phenomenal world drops away. But this event is for Paul not so distant that it is almost void of meaning; on the contrary, “the appointed time has grown very short.”
In this context, the preceding chapter is readily understood, too: “To have lawsuits at all with one another is defeat for you. Why not rather suffer wrong? Why not rather be defrauded?” This is a significant variation on the theme, “I want you to be free from care.” One should not become involved in this world and take it seriously. The end of this world is at hand, and the other world alone matters.
Even in the other world, however, inequality appears, as it does in the Gospels. Men are not equal even in the eyes of God. Not only are there first- and second-class Christians; not only are some called to be free and some to be slaves; there are the elect and the damned. Once convinced of a truth, Paul, like the rabbis, looks to Scripture, to the Old Testament, to find it there. “When Rebecca had conceived children by one man, our forefather Isaac, though they were not yet born and had done nothing either good or bad, in order that God’s purpose of election might continue, not because of works but because of his call, she was told, ‘The elder will serve the younger’” (Romans 9). The story is found in Genesis, as is the story of the Garden of Eden; but the doctrines Paul derives from them are alien to the mainstream of Old Testament religion and opposed to the very core of Hebrew prophecy.
The prophets do not predict disaster; they threaten disasters that are bound to happen if the people persist in their ways, but the hope is always that they will not persist in their ways and thus avoid the disaster. Jonah, annoyed that his prophecy will remain unfulfilled, tells God that this was why he fled in the first place to avoid making the prophecy: “Is not this what I said when I was yet in my country? That is why I made haste to flee to Tarsus; for I knew that thou art a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and repentest of evil.” But part of the point of the Book of Jonah is clearly that the prophet who has led men to repentance, who has made them change their ways to avoid imminent disaster, has done his job and should be glad when his prophecies are not fulfilled.
Paul from Tarsus is the great anti-Jonah. Like the Pharisees and millions of rabbis, ministers, and theologians ever since, he finds verses to corroborate his doctrines. Since the Old Testament is a collection of history and poetry, laws and wisdom, folklore and traditions, verses can always be found for every situation. But there is no want of central ideas, of great currents that flow through this great garden and water it—no want of backbone. And it is one of these central conceptions and the very backbone of Hebrew prophecy that Paul ignores: the idea of t’shuvah, return, repentance.
Paul’s whole argument for the impossibility of finding salvation under “the Law” and for the necessity of Christ’s redemptive death depends on this. If, as the rabbis were still teaching in Paul’s day, God could at any time freely forgive repentant sinners, Paul’s theology collapsed and, in his own words, “then Christ died in vain” (Galatians 2:21). If God could forgive the men of Nineveh simply because they repented of their wicked ways, though they had not been converted, circumcised, or baptized—and this is the teaching of the Book of Jonah, which is also implicit in many other books of the Old Testament—then Paul’s doctrines, which have become the very core of Christianity, lose their point and plausibility and come to look bizarre.
Consider the Christian story the way it looks to an outsider. God causes a virgin, betrothed to Joseph, to conceive his own son, and this son had to be betrayed, crucified, and resurrected in order that those, and only those, might be saved who should both believe this story and be baptized and eat and drink on regular occasions what they themselves believe to be the flesh and blood of this son (or, in some denominations, merely the symbols of his flesh and blood); meanwhile, all, or most, of the rest of mankind suffer some kind of eternal torment, and according to many Christian creeds and teachers they were actually predestined for damnation by God from the very beginning.
Paul did not contribute all the elements of this story—not, for example, the virgin birth, of which most scholars find no trace in his letters. But he did contribute the central ideas of Christ’s redemptive death and justification by faith. Protestants and Catholics may argue whether Paul taught justification by faith alone or justification by faith and works; it is plain and undisputed that he did not allow for justification by works alone. It is no longer enough “only to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God.”
In a long note on Paul, in the third volume of his classical work on Judaism, George Foot Moore declared himself utterly unable to understand how a Jew of Paul’s background could ignore such a central idea as that of repentance and forgiveness. But the history of religions abounds in parallels. The great religious leaders of humanity have generally been richer in passion than in justice or fairness; their standards of honesty have been far from exemplary; and with an occasionally magnificent one-sidedness, they have been so obsessed by some features of the positions they opposed that they thoroughly misunderstood and misrepresented the religion they denounced. If they deserve blame for this, how much more blameworthy are those who use them as historical authorities, turning to Luther for a portrait of Catholicism, or to the New Testament to be informed about Judaism!
When Paul turned his back on the old notion of forgiveness for the repentant sinner and embraced the doctrine of predestination, he gave up the idea of the equality and fraternity of all men. To cite Troeltsch once more: “The idea of predestination breaks the nerve of the idea of absolute and abstract equality”; and henceforth “inequalities are accepted into the basic sociological scheme of the value of personality” (64, 66).
I am rejecting two clichés: that of the Judaeo-Christian tradition as well as the claim that Western civilization is a synthesis of Greek and Christian elements. Against the former, I stress the discontinuity between Jesus and the pre-exilic prophets: one might as well speak of the Judaeo-Islamic tradition or of the Greco-Christian tradition. Against the latter, I point to the fact that Christianity itself was a child of Greek and Hebrew parents; that the Gospels are a product of Jewish Hellenism; and that Paul, though he claimed to have sat at the feet of Gamaliel, was in important respects closer to Plato and to Gnosticism than to Micah or Jonah.
Paul’s decisions have occasionally been explained as highly expedient. When the Jews did not accept the Gospel, the new teaching could survive only by turning to the Gentiles, by abrogating circumcision and the dietary laws, which stood in the way of mass conversions, and by emphasizing faith and preaching obedience to the powers that be. But expediency in this case did not involve any compromise of principle or any sacrifice of Paul’s convictions. His innovations make sense in the context of his profound otherworldliness: this was the meeting ground of the Gospel and the mysteries, of Jesus and Gnosticism. Jesus, who had stood in the apocalyptic tradition, was readily assimilated to Hellenistic ideas about salvation. Twelve centuries before St. Thomas wrought the so-called medieval synthesis, Paul fashioned an impressive synthesis of two great heritages. He even found a place for that curious equation of virtue, happiness, and knowledge which we find in Plato: but by knowledge Paul meant the knowledge of faith; by happiness, salvation; and his virtues were not the virtues of Plato.
Paul was not the first to attempt such a synthesis: Philo of Alexandria had fused Plato and the Hebrew Scriptures in an intricate philosophy at least a generation earlier. Nor was Paul’s synthesis entirely deliberate: it grew out of the Hellenistic Judaism of that age. But its historic effect has been staggering. No doubt, it would have astonished and distressed Paul himself.
From his letters one gathers that he placed the primary emphasis on faith when he made converts, and that he was shocked when the new congregations took him by his word and did not live up to the moral standards that he had simply taken for granted. In his letters he frequently gives expression to his exasperation. It was therefore in a sense in keeping with Paul’s spirit that the new church should have made the Old Testament part of its canon, along with the New. Paul, like the other early Christians who had been raised as Jews, lived in the Hebrew Scriptures, constantly citing them, understanding contemporary events in terms of them, and looking to them for guidance and truth. One cannot read the Gospels or Epistles without being aware of this. The Old Testament was the authors’ canon, and much of what they said was meant to be understood against the background of the Hebrew Scriptures—or their Greek translation, the Septuagint. This was so plain that those who later canonized their works retained what they then called the Old Testament to distinguish it from the New Testament.
Eventually, the message of the prophets came to life again. For over a thousand years it slept quietly in the midst of Christendom. Then, early in the sixteenth century, their voice was suddenly heard again, and a new era began. It is customary to date the Modern Age from 1453, when the Turks took Constantinople; or from 1492, when Columbus discovered America; or from the day in 1517 when young Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses on the cathedral door in Wittenberg. But if a striking symbol is wanted, one could also reckon the end of the Middle Ages from the day when Michelangelo placed above the pope’s most holy altar in Rome, the capital of Nero and the Inquisition, not the Mother of God, nor the Christ, nor the expulsion from Paradise, but Jonah.
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Human history cannot boast of a more vivid, valiant, and vindictive character than Luther. He performed three apparently unrelated feats, each of which would have sufficed to make him one of the outstanding figures of all time: he smashed the unity of Western Christendom; he translated the Bible and put it into every household that his influence could reach; and he developed a new Weltanschauung.
With nothing to begin with but passion and the power of his language, this simple monk dealt the papacy a blow compared to which the drawn-out efforts of generations of German emperors with huge armies and vast resources seem as nothing: he surpassed the very imagination of the supple scheming of Henry IV and the refined hatred of Frederick II.
Then he put his genius at the disposal or the Bible and, translating it, created a new language: modern German. Though he found God’s revelation above all in Paul, particularly in the Letters to the Romans and Galatians, his heart caught fire as he read the Hebrew Scriptures; and, far more than the King James Version almost a century later, he communicated much of their austere simplicity, laconic majesty, and the immediacy of the experience with which so much of the original is still alive. Though it was the New Testament—and really only a very small part of this—that became the center of his new religion, he not only left the Old Testament in the Protestant Bible, he helped it to a popularity it had never before had in the Western world.
Finally, the reformer and translator fashioned a new religious and political world view, based on the Bible and his break with Rome. It, too, bears the distinctive stamp of his unique personality. Luther thought he was offering a return to Paul. He felt that he was fighting corruption and re-establishing the ancient and pure doctrine. Yet his message was a reflection and projection of his own genius, not the Gospel according to Paul but a characteristically Lutheran piety.
A sincere Christian could scarcely differ more from the mild and milk-faced Jesus of Hofman’s popular paintings than Luther did. Not even Calvin outdoes him in this respect. Fanatical from beginning to end, as monk, Reformer, and politician, Luther did whatever he did with all his heart, all his soul, and all his power: fiery, fierce, with the force of a bull rhinoceros—but thoroughly devoted to Christianity, which was the one constant in his life. Monk or married, preaching rebellion or obedience, it was Christianity that he had at heart. And moderation was not for him. Even apart from his doctrinal differences with the followers of Aquinas, Aristotelianism with its subtleties, its praise of wisdom and philosophy, was antithetical to Luther’s vision of Christianity: radical through and through, and opposed alike to wisdom, reason, and subtlety.
He was thirty-three when he nailed his 95 Theses to the cathedral door in Wittenberg. Before this, he had tried to gain salvation through works. For salvation was still central for him as it had been for Jesus’ and Paul’s original audience. “Works” had not meant to Luther middle-class decency or a respectable regard for convention. Being a Christian meant something extraordinary, extreme, exalted. Works led to no conclusion; there is no end to works, no final salvation. Striving for salvation through works is like struggling against quicksand.
Luther believed in the devil and in hell, as Jesus and Paul had done. A life devoted to the quest for salvation through works became intolerable for him: one could never cease without perishing. And cease one must, if only sometimes. There are moments of weariness, discouragement, temptation, disgust. Not only moments. Hamlet’s famous advice to his mother, how continence breeds more continence and virtue makes virtue ever easier, is surely one of those half-truths which owe their popularity to wishful thinking, as does much glib talk about sublimation. Luther knew through the torture of his own experience how continence bred the half-crazed desire for incontinence, and virtue like a cancer could corrode the soul with the obsession to do evil. There is a peace of mind born of transgression which is sweeter than that of good conscience: the peace that attends virtue is a guarded joy, dependent on past triumphs and continued perseverance; relative to these, not absolute—not extraordinary, extreme, exalted. But still finding oneself in and after evil, knowing all the joy of sin and feeling that sin is not the great power virtue thinks it, not the menace against which we must at all times be on our guard, but a foe to whom one can concede a battle and survive—this sense of peace which comes of saturation and the new experience of a deadness to desire is indeed a peace surpassing unreflective understanding. Hence, not only must salvation through works be abandoned but a place must be found for sin. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that for Luther the Gospel, the glad tidings, was that one could sin and yet be saved, and that sin need not even be rationed.
Paul and Luther notwithstanding, salvation through works never was the doctrine of the Jews or the Catholics. The Old Testament was, for the most part, not at all concerned with individual salvation in another world or life; and the Pharisees who did believe in immortality never failed to supplement their teaching of the Law with the prophetic doctrine of repentance and forgiveness. They did not believe that salvation required unexceptional fulfillment of all laws, moral and ceremonial, or that they, and only they, could point to perfect records and hence were entitled to salvation while the rest of mankind was less fortunate. Nor did the Catholic church, prior to Luther, teach that only the perfect ascetic could win redemption while the rest of mankind would be damned. Paul and Luther passionately, but erroneously, projected their own frantic efforts on two great religions within which they had failed to realize their self-imposed conception of salvation.
At no time had the church accepted Jesus’ hyperbolic counsels. How could it? How could an institution which expects to outlast centuries take as its motto, “Take no thought for the morrow”? How could it reach men with the teaching, “Whoever then relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches men so, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven”? How could it discipline men if it accepted the command, “Resist not evil”? How could it possibly accept the Sermon on the Mount and its eloquent conclusion: “Every one who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house upon the sand; and the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell; and great was the fall of it”? Organized Christianity could be defined as the ever renewed effort to get around these sayings without repudiating Jesus. This is what the Roman Catholic and the Greek Orthodox church, Luther and Calvin, Barth and Schweitzer have in common.
Luther and the church against which he rebelled agreed that there must be some dispensation from the stern demands of Jesus, and that sin must not be considered a bar to salvation.
Their difference? A joke may crystallize it. A hostess offers a guest some canapés. Says the guest: “Thank you. I have already had three.” Says the hostess: “Had three? You’ve had five; but who counts?” What enraged Luther was that the church counted.
Lutheran children are often brought up on Luther’s protests against the sale of indulgences and are appalled to learn how freely people sinned with the assurance that a small formality would soon restore them to their former state of grace—or even how a man planning a robbery might obtain indulgence in advance. They are less likely to be told how Luther, on the Wartburg, wrote his friend Melanchthon on August 1, 1521: “If you are a preacher of grace, do not preach a fictitious, but a true, grace; and if the grace is true, carry a true, and not a fictitious sin. God does not work salvation for fictitious sinners. Be a sinner and sin vigorously [esto peccator et pecca fortiter]; but even more vigorously believe and delight in Christ who is victor over sin, death, and the world.” And later on in the same letter he writes: “It is sufficient that we recognize through the wealth of God’s glory, the lamb who bears the sin of the world; from this, sin does not sever us, even if thousands, thousands of times in one day we should fornicate or murder.”
Luther and the church agreed on the compatibility of sin and salvation; but Luther insisted on justification by faith alone, sola fide. Not by works and not through any mediator other than Christ. Works are by their nature inconclusive: even if one should persist in works, all one’s accomplishments are dwarfed by what one might have done. If salvation involves, as both Jesus and Paul taught, an assurance even now, a conviction, a triumphant sense of ultimate redemption, it cannot be found in works. But faith is ultimate; faith is conclusive; faith is final. A verse in the Book of Habakkuk (2:4), cited in the first chapter of Paul’s Letter to the Romans, becomes the cornerstone of Luther’s religion: “The just shall live by faith.”
Faith for Luther is not merely assent to certain propositions, though this is a necessary element of faith: it is a liberating experience which suffuses a whole life with bliss. Care is dead, also worry about sin. One is saved in spite of being a wretched and incorrigible sinner. It is like knowing that one is loved—loved unconditionally with all one’s faults. And the Catholic church would still keep count of faults and impose penances or sell indulgences! As if the glad tidings were not that our sins no longer matter.
What is wrong with the indulgences is not that they make sin compatible with ultimate salvation, but that they are incompatible with the glad tidings of salvation by faith alone. What is wrong with all the preaching of pleasing God by works is that the Gospel can be understood only when we have experienced the impossibility of pleasing God by works. What is wrong with the church’s assumption of the role of mediator between God and man, wrong with the hierarchy and faith in intervention by the saints, is once again that all this stands opposed to the glad tidings. Christ loves us! That means that his love need not be earned by works. In fact, we brazenly exclude ourselves from the redeeming power of his love if we insist that we deserve it or must, by some future works, still earn it.
The glad tidings that Christ loves us permeate Luther’s prose; and more than 400 years later we can still experience their intoxicating power. But if, instead of trying to re-experience Luther’s faith, we step back to look at it with some detachment, we find that Luther’s version of Christianity falls within our previous definition: it gets around the Sermon on the Mount without repudiating Jesus.
With the radical power of his language, Luther himself expressed this again and again. “The law is fulfilled not insofar as we satisfy it, but insofar as we are forgiven for not being able to do anything” (XII, 377*). “The hearts that are filled with God’s bliss do not fulfill the Ten Commandments; but Christ has brought about such a violent salvation that he deprives the Ten Commandments, too, of all their claims” (VII, 1516*). And in a letter to his young friend Jerome Weller: “You must believe that this temptation of yours is of the devil, who vexes you so because you believe in Christ. You see how contented and happy he permits the worst enemies of the gospel to be. Just think of Eck, Zwingli, and others. It is necessary for all of us who are Christians to have the devil as an adversary and enemy; as Saint Peter says, ‘Your adversary, the devil, walks about’ [I Peter 5:8]…. Whenever the devil pesters you with these thoughts, at once seek out the company of men, drink more, joke and jest, or engage in some other form of merriment. Sometimes it is necessary to drink a little more, play, jest, or even commit some sin in defiance and contempt of the devil in order not to give him an opportunity to make us scrupulous about trifles. We shall be overcome if we worry too much about falling into some sin. So, if the devil should say, ‘Do not drink,’ you should reply to him, ‘On this very account, because you forbid it, I shall drink, and what is more, I shall drink a generous amount.’ Thus one must always do the opposite of that which Satan prohibits. What do you think is my reason for drinking wine undiluted, talking freely, and eating more often, if it is not to torment and vex the devil who made up his mind to torment and vex me? … When the devil attacks and torments us, we must completely set aside the Ten Commandments. When the devil throws our sins up to us and declares that we deserve death and hell, we ought to speak thus: ‘I admit that I deserve death and hell. What of it? Does this mean that I shall be sentenced to eternal damnation? By no means. For I know One who suffered and made satisfaction in my behalf. His name is Jesus Christ, the Son of God. Where he is, there I shall be also’” (July [?], 1530).
Many will say, no doubt: Luther was terrible, but the Sermon on the Mount shows Jesus to have been the greatest moral teacher of all time. This facile view lacks that impassioned seriousness which commands respect for Luther. It is fashionable to pay lip service to the Sermon on the Mount even if one works for, or constantly patronizes, million-dollar industries that involve systematic efforts to increase the frequency of lustful looks. Luther had tried with all his might to eradicate all lustful thoughts from his tormented mind: as a monk he had denied himself food and sleep, scourged himself, prayed, done penance—all to no avail.
He was not the kind of man that practices law while avowing belief in Jesus’ ethic; not one to extol the Sermon on the Mount as the best rule of conduct, while making elaborate plans for the future; not one to hail Jesus as a moral genius while thinking nothing of calling another man a fool. When he arrived at the conclusion that one could not live by Jesus’ moral teachings, he said so outright.
A number of conclusions are open to us at this point. We can say that Hillel, the Pharisee, was a greater moral genius when he said a generation earlier: “Do not judge your neighbor till you have seen yourself in his position” (Mishnah Avoth, 2:5). For this is an attainable ideal, not moral utopianism; and as one approximates it, one becomes a better man. Or one could become a Buddhist. Or, convinced of the futility of good works and the liberating force of sin, one might adopt a pagan ethic depriving “even the Ten Commandments of all their justice.” But Luther had the unshakable conviction that the Bible was the word of God, that all religious and all moral truth was to be found in it, and that Christ was the Truth—if not in one sense, then in another.
The problem here, unlike the solution, was not a function of Luther’s personality or outlook. As long as we do not realize this, we cannot hope to understand either Luther or Christianity. The same problem confronts everybody who takes Christianity seriously. This is perhaps best shown by considering a man whose Christianity is in some ways antithetical to Luther’s: Albert Schweitzer.
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Schweitzer, organist, Bach scholar, and New Testament scholar, who at thirty turned his back on his manifold achievements to practice medicine among the natives in Central Africa, is to many minds the one true Christian of our time—the one outstanding personality whose scholarly and thorough study of the Gospels led him to realize their ethic in his life. This view depends on ignorance of Schweitzer’s writings. For Schweitzer, like Luther, takes the Sermon on the Mount too seriously to claim that he accepts it. Like Luther, he repudiates it without repudiating Jesus.
His study of the texts and his definitive work on outstanding previous interpretations led him to the conclusion that Jesus’ moral teachings must be understood as a mere “interim ethic”—designed and appropriate only for the interim, which Jesus firmly believed to be quite brief, before the kingdom of God would come with power. Schweitzer’s result implies not only that Jesus’ ethic is inapplicable today but that it has never been applicable and that Jesus’ most central conviction was wrong.
With this, one might expect Schweitzer to give up Christianity—unless he accepts traditional Christian solutions of this problem. He does neither. He disagrees with the early Christians and the medieval church, and repudiates Luther’s belief that he was returning to the ancient teaching—and yet Schweitzer considers himself a Christian and a Protestant.
Let us concentrate on two major issues: otherworldliness and remission of sins. Far from denying the essential otherworldliness of Jesus’ outlook, Schweitzer has used his vast scholarship to establish its importance against the entrenched preconceptions of liberal Protestants. Jesus’ otherworldliness is, to Schweitzer’s mind inseparable from Jesus’ firm conviction that this world was about to come to an end. When this expectation was not realized, belief in the beginning of the kingdom did not all at once evaporate, but the event was moved into the future; and as generation after generation passed, it was gradually projected into an infinite distance. As this happened, otherworldliness changed its character.
Paul, according to Schweitzer, had retained the belief in the impending end of this world, even after most other Christians had become resigned to the vague prospect of an indefinite future. Paul believed that the kingdom had come with Christ’s death and resurrection, and that this would soon become manifest through a transformation of the natural world. But Paul was wrong, and the indefinite postponement of the expectation of the kingdom became universal.
In the perspective of this infinitely distant hope, the Christian negation of this world acquired a new and, Schweitzer feels, unfortunate importance. Originally, the negation had been almost void of content: this world was depreciated as something that was about to pass away, and one concentrated on the other world because it was about to be the only one. But now this world is negated even though it is assumed to have duration; and—though Schweitzer himself does not sharpen the contrast in this manner—it is the affirmation that is almost void of content now: an essentially positive outlook is converted into a primarily negative one.
The triumphant conviction that the kingdom was about to come—or had come, as Paul believed—is gone beyond recall; and the conviction that the affairs of this world do not matter any more is no longer a mere corollary, but broadens out into pervasive resignation. In Schweitzer’s words: “By their negation of this world as well as by the conception that the kingdom will eventually come all by itself, the believers are sentenced not to undertake anything to improve the present. Because Christianity must pursue this course, it cannot be to the Greco-Roman world in which it appears what it ought to have been to it. The ethical energies contained in Christianity cannot regenerate the world empire and its peoples. Christianity triumphs over paganism: it becomes the state religion. But in accordance with its nature, it must leave the world empire to its fate.”
Thus Schweitzer stands opposed to Christian otherworldliness, both in its hopeful, eschatological form, which he associates with Jesus and Paul and considers inseparable from clearly erroneous beliefs, and in its subsequent negativistic form which he considers a moral disaster. Judged by his moral standards, which are shared by millions who do not care to press the point, Christianity did not do what it ought to have done; and Schweitzer has the rare honesty to insist that Christianity failed morally not because Christians have not been Christian enough, but because of the very nature of Christianity.
Discussions of Christianity and liberty are full of such phrases as the following, from a recent book by R. M. Thompson: “The Christian Ethic, which reverences personality and recognizes the individual’s right to a full and free life in cooperation with his fellows, is the only hope for a world that subordinates man to collective materialism.” In line with these glib generalities, it is often supposed that Christianity spread the idea of liberty in the West: the suffering of the Christian slave is stressed, the problem of the Christian slaveholders ignored; the Christian martyrs of the early pagan persecutions are emphasized; the martyrs, Christian and non-Christian, of subsequent Christian persecutions overlooked; and it is scarcely ever doubted that, in principle, Christianity was always on the “right” side, regrettable lapses notwithstanding.
In fact, neither Jesus and Paul nor the early church, nor medieval Christianity, nor Luther recognized “the individual’s right to a full and free life.” Nor need one think only of Jesus’ saying that it is better to live “maimed” and go to heaven “than with two hands to go to hell, to the unquenchable fire” (Mark 9:43); or of Paul’s view of marriage. Take the article on slavery in the Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, which is written from a distinctly Christian point of view.
“The abolitionist could point to no one text in the Gospels in defence of his position.” The church “tended to make slavery milder, though not to abolish it, and, owing to its excessive care for the rights of the masters, even to perpetuate what would otherwise have passed away.” “Legislation forbade Christian slaves to be sold to pagans or Jews, but otherwise tended to recognize slavery as a normal institution.” “The general tone of this legislation can hardly be said to favor the slave.” “In Spain slavery was a prominent feature of medieval society…. Here, as elsewhere, the Church was a slave-owner.”6
If Schweitzer is scrupulously correct up to this point, his transition to his own this-worldly ethic gives us pause: both for his history and for his logic. In the Renaissance he finds a turning point: the Christian negation of this world is finally opposed by a new attitude of affirmation; and this new positive outlook is blended with the ethic of late Stoicism, as we find it in the writings of Cicero, Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius. “From this originates, as something absolutely new in the cultural history of Europe a Weltanschauung characterized by an ethical affirmation of world and life. This constitutes the fundamental difference between the Europeans of classical antiquity and those of modern times. The modern European has a different spirit because he has achieved faith in progress, a will to progress, the conception of a further and higher development, and the idea of universal love of man,” The similarity between the ethic of Jesus and that of late Stoicism made it possible for modern Protestantism to adopt these new attitudes. “Thus the transition of Christianity from an ethical negation of life and world to an ethical affirmation of life and world takes place in modern times, quietly and without a struggle.”
Once again the faith in the kingdom of God becomes central—although the kingdom is now no longer conceived as “eschatological, cosmic, and eventually coming all by itself” but as something “uneschatological, spiritual-ethical, for whose realization men, too, must work.” Only after this complete transformation, “the kingdom of God can regain in our faith the importance which it had for Jesus and original Christianity. But it must have this importance if Christianity is to remain, in its inmost nature, what it was in its beginnings: a religion dominated by the idea of the kingdom of God. The role which the kingdom of God plays in the faith constitutes the essence of the faith. The conception of the kingdom and its realization is only of secondary significance. Although modern Protestant Christianity is modern, it is nevertheless also truly in accordance with the Gospel because it is again a religion with a living faith in the kingdom of God” (my italics).
The logical enormity of Schweitzer’s argument is obvious. Few men have done more than he to demonstrate the complete incompatibility of Jesus’ conception of the kingdom with any social or this-worldly aspirations. He has fought the errors of Harnack, who maintained in his famous Berlin lectures on “The Essence of Christianity” that Jesus brought a revolutionary and prophetically modern notion of the Kingdom. Schweitzer denies Jesus all originality at this point: “All evidence is lacking that Jesus had a conception of the kingdom and of the Messiah differing in any way from the late Jewish eschatological one.” And he adds: “It is hard for us to resign ourselves to the fact that Jesus, who possesses the spirit of God in a unique manner and who is for us the highest revelation of religious and spiritual truth, does not stand above his time in a manner appropriate to the significance which he has for all time.”
This is not a passing concession but a central motif of Schweitzer’s thought. Among Jesus’ ideas are some “which we can no longer experience as truth or accept. “Why is Christianity sentenced to this? Is this not a wound for which there is no balm? Should it be impossible to maintain Jesus’ freedom from error in religious matters? Does he not cease, then, to be an authority for us? … I have suffered deeply from having to maintain something out of truthfulness which must give offense to the Christian faith.” And again: “All attempts to escape the admission that Jesus had a conception of the kingdom of God and its impending arrival which remained unfulfilled and cannot be taken over by us, mean trespasses against truthfulness.”
Nevertheless, Schweitzer maintains that his social and ethical conception of the kingdom is “truly in accordance with the Gospel because it is again a religion with a living faith in the kingdom of God”; and “the conception of the kingdom and its realization is only of secondary significance.” Here we are close to the ancient credo quia absurdum. Jesus’ otherworldly kingdom is rejected in favor of an affirmation of this world; his disparagement of social problems is considered most unfortunate and countered with an ethic of social regeneration—and then we are assured that this apparently diametrical opposition “is only of secondary significance” because the new ideal can borrow the ancient name: “kingdom of God.” This phrase, of course, reflects not an artful attempt to deceive, but the believer’s sincere, if entirely subjective, sense of continuity.
Schweitzer’s subjective logic must be seen in the light of his subjective history. The quotes given here have been taken from his important essay on “The Idea of the Kingdom of God in the Course of the Transformation of the Eschatological Faith into an Uneschatological One.” In the whole careful historical account, which is full of names and dates, we find no reference whatever to either the Old Testament or John Calvin. Yet it was in Calvinism rather than in Lutheranism—to which Schweitzer devotes a large part of his essay—that the modem affirmation of this world found its expression. It was here that the idea of refashioning society took hold. And Calvinism was inspired much less by late Stoicism than by the Old Testament. Indeed, Schweitzer’s own conception of the kingdom is far closer to that of the pre-exilic prophets than to that of Jesus.
Schweitzer himself knows how far he stands from traditional Christianity. Almost half of his essay is devoted to developing the proposition: “Christianity ceased to be the religion of faith in the kingdom of God and became the religion of faith in the resurrection and the remission of sins.” Jesus, according to Schweitzer, still believed, like the Jews of his time, that God could freely forgive a repentant sinner without Jesus’ sacrifice or any other intervening mechanism. Schweitzer himself belongs to those “who cannot reconcile it with their conception of God that he should have required a sacrifice to be able to forgive sins.”
Jesus did believe, Schweitzer maintains, that his atonement would cause God not to exact the penance of a pre-messianic time of troubles, “but to let the kingdom of God commence soon without this frightful prelude.” Schweitzer leaves no doubt that he considers Jesus’ view to have been factually mistaken, but he does not say whether he can reconcile Jesus’ conception of God with his own.
That Schweitzer finds Paul’s view of God unacceptable is clear. “Paul creates the conception of justification solely by faith in Jesus Christ.” This faith wins complete remission of sins. “The possibility of further sinning after the attainment of faith is not considered by him.” Only when the kingdom failed to come, and generation after generation was born into a sinful world, did the church become aware of a great problem—and solved it: baptism won forgiveness for all previous sins, including original sin, and subsequent sins had to be forgiven subsequently, by the church. “Augustine (354–430) introduces the principle that forgiveness for all sins committed after baptism is to be found in the church, if only an appropriate penance is performed. Outside the church there is no pardon. And whoever does not believe in the continual remission of sins within the church, commits the sin against the Holy Spirit. Among the new conceptions which had in the course of time developed in connection with the attainment of the continual remission of sins, we encounter in Augustine the notion of purgatory and the idea that prayers, alms, and sacrificial masses of the survivors can help the departed souls to attain remission of sins.” But Augustine still understood the sacrifice of Christ in the mass “only in a spiritual sense. It was under Pope Gregory I (590–604) that the realistic conception prevailed that in the mass Jesus is again and again sacrificed sacramentally in order that the atonement thus provided may profit the living and the dead.”
Luther, finally, breaks with these traditions and understands baptism as effecting not only the remission of sins previously incurred—it assures man of the full benefits of Christ’s atoning death and of continual forgiveness. “He thinks that he is restoring the original simple doctrine from which the Catholic church has deviated. Yet it is not he but the Catholic church that maintains the original conception of baptism. His conception, however, is religiously justified.”
Later, Schweitzer sums up once more: “Historically, both Luther and modern Protestant Christianity are in the wrong; but religiously they are right.” In other words, Luther and modern Protestantism have not only broken with Catholic traditions; they have broken with Jesus’ teaching and early Christianity, too. But they are right because all previous Christianity, including even Jesus’ teaching, has been wrong. And—here comes the leap of faith beyond the bounds of rationality—if modern Protestantism and Albert Schweitzer are right, then their views must after all be “truly in accordance with the Gospel” because Christ was the Truth—if not in one sense, then in another.
Here Luther and Schweitzer face the same problem and resort to the same salto mortale: they not only repudiate the Sermon on the Mount and Jesus’ teaching without repudiating Jesus; they claim that their own convictions are, even if not historically or empirically, in some higher sense the essence of the Gospel. Superficially it often seems that certain doctrines are held to be true because they are encountered in the Gospels; in fact, we are confronted with the postulate that certain views must represent the real meaning of the Gospel because they are so firmly held to be religious truth.
It would add little if we went on to consider some Catholic thinkers. On the whole, Catholics have concerned themselves less with the figure of Jesus than have Protestant writers: it was only after the Reformers’ protest against the church’s assumption of the role of mediator, after their insistence that Christ was the only mediator man required, and after their call for a return to the authority of Scripture, that Jesus was once again moved into the center from which he had disappeared after the first century. And the point of this chapter is not to cover twenty centuries of Christian thought but rather to follow up the chapter on the Old Testament by showing how I see Jesus.
Because most accounts of Jesus are highly subjective, it seemed best to relate my own reading of the Gospels to the views of some of the most eminent Christian interpreters. Whether the choice of Paul, Luther, and Schweitzer was justified depends on how fruitful it has proved to be. As for Calvin, he will be cited in the next chapter in a manner that should indicate how he fits into our picture.
Only one further view will be quoted here. Early in the nineteenth century—about 1818—William Blake said: “There is not one Moral Virtue that Jesus Inculcated but Plato & Cicero did Inculcate before him; what then did Christ Inculcate? Forgiveness of Sins. This alone is the Gospel….” And again:
If Moral Virtue was Christianity,
Christ’s Pretensions were all Vanity….
61
My account of the New Testament is less positive than my analysis of the Old Testament. Even those who might concede that this makes for a wholesome antidote may feel that it is odd in a book that attacks the double standard and pleads for honesty.
Heresy and polemics inveigh against traditional views, stressing their shortcomings and points that have been widely over looked. As a result, they rarely give a balanced picture. That is true of Jesus’ and Paul’s polemics as well as of Luther’s.
Still, I shall not plead guilty to a charge of gerrymandering the Bible. It is essential to recognize the discontinuity between the prophets and Jesus, also the modern falsification of the New Testament idea of love. If Jesus and Paul believed that the world was about to end, and that “few are chosen” to escape eternal torment, that is not a marginal belief that can be safely ignored. And their praise of love was intimately related to this central conviction. I have tried to show this in the case of Jesus; it is no less obvious in Paul’s.
Consider Paul’s great hymn on love, I Corinthians 13: “If I give away all I have, and if I deliver my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.” Or, as the King James Bible puts it: “It profiteth me nothing.” Long familiarity has dulled the bite of these words. Jesus and Paul teach us to love others—for our own profit.
This analysis does not depend on partiality but on a contextual reading. It is the traditional reading that depends on ignoring what is not considered timely and attractive.
From a scholarly point of view, the fashionable picture of Jesus is fantastic. It disregards Jesus’ concern with the end of the world and his appeal to every man’s interest in his own salvation, and it is derived in very large measure from two sayings that are missing in most ancient manuscripts (a fact duly acknowledged not only in scholarly works but also in the Revised Standard Version of the Bible): “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone” (John 8:7) and “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34).
Even so, something besides gerrymandering has been at work here. These two sayings, as well as a few others, do somehow leap out of their context and haunt the mind. Actually, they have not haunted as many minds as one might wish: historically, they have been staggeringly ineffective. But there are two levels worth distinguishing. Take Shakespeare’s line, “Ripeness is all.” It surely cannot mean much to most readers. But those who after the experience of a lifetime suddenly are ripe for this insight will feel hit by it and note that it says in three words what, but for that, might well have seemed ineffable. It may have taken the experience of well over eighteen centuries of history for men in some parts of the world to be struck in somewhat the same way by some verses in the Gospels and Epistles. The claim that these sayings changed the course of history is false; but a book containing words like these is obviously not merely of historic interest.
One may wonder whether the Gospels did not at least spread sympathy for suffering, if only by moving into the center of a great religion the symbol of Christ crucified. Did this not produce in literature, art, and morality a new preoccupation with man’s misery, a new note of compassion? Such pleasant suggestions conflict with the historic evidence. These concerns were common in the Hellenistic world—the motif of the tormented body and anguished face of a man, for example, is encountered in the sculptured giants of the Pergamon altar and in the Laocoon group—but they vanished with Hellenism and were largely absent during the first twelve centuries of Christianity. When the Gothic developed a taste for such motifs, the crucifixion was available; but in Byzantine and Romanesque art it had not been treated in any such manner. Nor was the age of the Gothic remarkable for compassion. Neither do the Christian fathers, Augustine and Aquinas, Luther or Calvin, impress us with the importance of compassion. These things were undeniably present in the Gospels, and we may find inspiration in them. But they do not issue the unequivocal challenge that the prophets fling at us.
The place of the child in the Gospels affords a parallel example. Many verses reflect the unusual feeling of the Jewish father for his son, which is familiar to us from the Old Testament. We need only to recall David’s attitude toward Absalom, Jacob’s toward Joseph and Benjamin, and Abraham’s toward Isaac, especially the suggestion in Genesis that Abraham made the supreme sacrifice by being willing to sacrifice his son, “the only one, whom you love.” And if some other Near Eastern religion had become the state religion of the Roman empire, we might well have had just as many Madonnas in Western art. The motif of a woman nursing a baby is found in ancient Egyptian art—the Brooklyn Museum owns two examples from around 1800 B.C., one in limestone, the other in copper—and statues of Isis with her mysteriously conceived son, the god Horus, on her lap were common indeed. Some Hellenistic examples might well be taken for Gothic Madonnas by those not familiar with Egyptian art. For all that, these motifs are present in the New Testament and move us.
Regarding social ideas, the matter has been well stated by Troeltsch: “In sum: the egalitarian-socialist-democratic conceptions of natural and divine law, and of Christian liberty founded on such law, never issue from the dialectic of the pure Christian idea, but are brought about in all instances only by political and social revolutions; and even then they are related only to those elements in Patristic ethics which are not derived from the development of Christian ideas. Wherever these ideas are to be realized by force, and a revolution is to be given a Christian basis, it is always, here also, the Old Testament that must help out” (411). For “with the New Testament alone, no social teachings at all can be generated” (254).
Similar considerations apply to Jesus’ denial of the crucial distinction between impulse and action, which we have discussed. It, too, has been misrepresented. Liberals have spread the myth that Jesus protested against Jewish legalism and extolled pure morality. The Gospels do not support either claim. The Jesus of the Gospels was no liberal Protestant. But sayings like, “Every one who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart,” also leap out of the context; and the modern reader happily forgets the following words, which are not so readily assimilated to Freud’s heritage: “If your right eye causes you to sin, pluck it out and throw it away; it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away; it is better that you lose one of your members than that your whole body go into hell.” Indeed, if one interprets this dictum as an exhortation to purge lust from one’s heart, it becomes a counsel of repression and, in practice, self-deception.
“The spirit bloweth where it listeth” (John 3:8), and one man feels addressed by one saying while another man’s heart opens up for another. At different times in his life, the same person may respond to different verses, and interpret the same verses differently. It is one of the marks of the greatest books that they have this power to speak to us in moments of crisis. Unquestionably, the New Testament possesses this power to a rare degree.
Some will say, no doubt, that I am “against” it. But to adopt a simplistic stand “for” or “against” Jesus and Paul, Luther or Schweitzer, would not be in keeping with the aims of this book. According to Matthew and Luke, Jesus said: “He that is not for me is against me.” By that token, I should indeed be against Jesus. But according to the oldest Gospel, that of Mark, Jesus said: “He that is not against us is for us.”
I have tried to determine honestly what the Jesus of the Gospels, Paul, Luther, and Schweitzer say to us. Some of my results are controversial, but they are not prompted by malice. My Luther is neither the democratic milksop of the celebrated motion picture sponsored by the Lutheran churches of America, nor the hateful devil of much anti-German propaganda, but one of the most impressive figures of world history. My Paul is neither the infallible saint of many believers nor the traitor to Jesus that many liberals have found in him. And my Jesus is closely related and indebted to Albert Schweitzer’s.
My heresy is hardly that I go along with such highly regarded scholars as Schweitzer and Troeltsch, but that I refuse to make amends for honesty. It is pretty well known by now that scholarship may lead one to attribute to Jesus views that are not in favor today; and such honesty is forgiven, no less, if only it is coupled immediately with the protestation that facts, if inconvenient, are irrelevant, and that in a higher sense, whatever that may mean, all that was good and true and beautiful was really taught by Jesus. In such contexts, “really” means “not really, but—you know.”
Perhaps it is the essence of organized religion to read current insights into ancient books and rites. But if one does this, disregarding Jesus’ counsel not to do it, one should realize that one could do it with almost any religion. I am not against Jesus but against those who do this with Jesus’ life and teachings, or with anyone else’s. It is well to forgive them; for they know not what they do. But it is also well for us to realize what they do, lest we should do it, too. Perhaps I myself have done this in the case of the Old Testament? I do not think so, but shall return to this question once more in Section 70 in the next chapter.
1 “Once a pagan went to Shammai and said: Accept me as a proselyte, on condition that you teach me the whole Law [Torah] while I stand on one leg. Shammai pushed him away with a measure that he had in his hand. He went to Hillel who accepted him as a proselyte. Hillel said to him: What you don’t like, don’t do to others; that is the whole Law; the rest is commentary; go and learn!” (Talmud Babli, Sabbath 31a). Hillel died about A.D. 10. Other similar formulations, some of them earlier, are listed in Strack’s and Billerbeck’s Kommentar, I, 460. That in the Letter of Aristeas, which is much earlier, combines the positive and negative forms, but I find Hillel’s pithy four-part formulation superlative.
2 For the history of this conception, see Baeck, “The Son of Man” in Judaism and Christianity, translated with an introduction by Walter Kaufmann.
3 For Niebuhr, see my Critique, § 68.
4 See, e.g., Galatians 1:19, 2:11 ff.; Harper’s Bible Dictionary (1959 ed.), 301, “James the Brother of Jesus”; and Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, VIII, 661, “The Position of James the Lord’s Brother at Jerusalem.”
5 The New English Bible offers a footnote to verse 21: “Or but even if a chance of liberty should come, choose rather to make good use of your servitude.” Contrast Exodus 21, discussed in § 49 above.
6 Cf. Troeltsch, 19; Westermarck, I, 693 ff.