Inventing Christic Jesuses, Volume 1

Rules and Warrants for Theology: Method

Charles A. Wilson

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781532631467
• eBook ISBN: 9781532631450
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Inventing Christic Jesuses is the first comprehensive proposal for how revisionist theology can deploy historical Jesus research in a methodologically sophisticated way. Rejecting positions that insulate theology from Jesus research, the proposal sets out warrants and rules for a quested Christology in dialogue with an analysis of the conduct of historians of Jesus from the period of the Third Quest (c. 1980-2010).The volume Method analyzes for theology the methods and values of historical research on Jesus. It argues that the methodic construction of historical images of Jesus in conversation with sources is simultaneously a retrojective activity of value production. First, in defining the terms of the inquiry, Wilson locates a middle ground between hostility to questing and a too-ready application of historical results to Christology. He then identifies rules and warrants for the deployment of Jesus research in theology and reconstructs the notion of the retrojection of value in the production of a historical Jesus. The volume ends with a case study of retrojective Jesus production, an analysis and assessment of the new notion that Jesus is a sage in the tradition of wisdom.

1

Orientation to the Inquiry

A. Introduction

This meta-study attempts to make theological sense of the bewildering world of Jesus scholarship. It will offer a primer on the deployment of a historical Jesus1 in christology. The anticipated audience is of theologians and other serious Christian interpreters who may not have patience for the explosion of big books on Jesus but who may want some signposts through the research. The book aims to describe the terrain theology might traverse if its christology were to take seriously historical research on Jesus of Nazareth. How shall it proceed? Why should it proceed at all? What protocol should it set, what rules and warrants for itself, so far as it were to draw upon the historians’ work on Jesus? Specifically, the study will sketch the formal elements present in a christology that attends properly and critically to modern study of Jesus of Nazareth, done by professional historians. Materially, it will draw heavily upon contemporary Jesus research, the historical work of the last thirty years or so, often called the Third Quest for the historical Jesus.2 This burst of intense research, now seemingly ended, proposes some sweeping methodological developments and a possible paradigm shift; indeed, the first order assessments of the accomplishments of this phase for history writing have already begun to appear. This study aims to go beyond the accomplishments and failures of the Third Quest to an assessment of the usefulness of contemporary Jesus research for theology: to what extent can such research contribute to a christology? Our main interest will be to employ contemporary Jesus research more generally to think through how theology can use historical research on Jesus.

How shall theology deploy contemporary Jesus research? How indeed? So far, when some theologians have begun to analyze the achievement of contemporary Jesus research, they have employed analogies to earlier paradigms in Jesus research: for instance, what is the theological consequence of the shift to the liberal Jesuses of the nineteenth century or of the subsequent shift to the apocalyptic Jesus of the twentieth century? To be sure, the current interest in the historical Jesus may prove to be short-lived and historically insignificant, and it is possible that it is much historical energy without christological usefulness at all. But it is equally possible that contemporary Jesus research is inventing Jesuses for a forthcoming new era of christology, rather in the way that Johannes Weiss and Albert Schweitzer formulated the twentieth-century apocalyptic prophet Jesus.3 Of course, when they proposed their new Jesus at the end of the nineteenth century, that Jesus threatened established (liberal) christologies. Recall that Johannes Weiss figured out that the real, historical Jesus was a prophet of the end of time, but at the same time Weiss could not find anything about that prophet that was christologically interesting. After all, how could theology use a sack-cloth-and-ashes world-denier, whom history had refuted? Understandably, Weiss retreated dogmatically into a liberal christology.4 And Schweitzer, thematizing the self-reflexive character of Jesus research for the first time,5 could be confident that he had glimpsed the real Jesus only when he stood before the apocalyptic oddball.6 In Schweitzer’s vision, only the ever-alien prophet of the end of time resisted the domestication endemic to Jesus research.7

Indeed, Schweitzer made a virtue of necessity by hinting at a permanent christological opportunity: he was confident that he had found the real Jesus when he discovered the one who was so weird and otherworldly that he could stubbornly resist being tamed by Jesus researchers’ self-projects.8 Schweitzer, in fact, imagined such an untamed Jesus could revitalize a decadent Europe.9 Despite this final, (negatively) normative christological hint, Schweitzer did not pursue a christology in dialogue with the apocalyptic wild man. Instead he made a mystical turn, and theologically “retreated to Africa” and formulated an early, post-Christian theology. Like Weiss, he too could not discover anything christologically promising in an apocalyptic Jesus. The story might have ended there, had twentieth-century theologians not recognized a wealth of christological possibilities inspired by Schweitz-er’s discovery of the alien criterion.10

In a sense, by translating the apocalyptic into an analogous, but universalizable, christic principle of critique, twentieth-century theologians followed the formal lead of Schweitzer’s christological hint, but without the material retreat of Weiss and Schweitzer. The prophet of endgame could be translated into a permanent critical cipher against legitimating self-aggrandizement, and the theologies of the century invented a host of critical tasks for a historical Jesus. One day he would be the prophet of crisis, or, again, the one who called people to existential decision; on a later day he would become the one who enacted proleptic hope, and the next he would author various projects of liberation, and so on. It was always the apocalyptic prophet behind those critical Christs. If one were to compare, say, Bultmann’s kerygmatic Christ, suitably demythologized of Jesus’ eschatology, with a typical liberationist’s political Jesus, or with virtually any major twentieth-century Christ, the difference among them amounted to a difference in hermeneutical self-consciousness, not in their confidence that they had translated the real Jesus into an appropriately modern form. Some were hermeneutically less circumspect and some had a deeper sense of the interpreter’s role in converting the apocalyptic prophet into something christologically useful. But all focused on the apocalyptic figure with which they had to deal christologically.

Since the emergence of modern historical work on Jesus, the reigning Jesus paradigm has lived in dialogue with christologies of the era. The six or eight types of twentieth-century christologies, for instance, developed in direct or indirect dialogue with the apocalyptic paradigm: applications, extensions, modifications, even repudiations of the apocalyptic foundation. As such, these christologies can be termed christologies of the apocalyptic Jesus. For some the of is a possessive genitive, as if they were direct re-presentations of Jesus’ own self-consciousness and sense of mission; others took the preposition more as an objective genitive: namely, as the sort of Christs generated by an era in which the apocalyptic paradigm dominated historical research on Jesus. Interestingly, even twentieth-century christologies that claim to be christologically immune to or indifferent to historical research on Jesus seem to have in mind exactly the apocalyptic prophet over-against whom they would be indifferent or immune. Arguably, had historians discovered a more palatable Jesus in their historical work, theologians hostile to questing might have warmed up to the historical Jesus. Had historians discovered, for instance, a historical Jesus who matched the narratives of the gospels, or a supernaturalist one similar to that of popular piety, or to the metaphysical constructions of the creeds and councils (whatever this might mean historically), would so many theologians be hostile to questing? I suspect not. If this suspicion is true, it indicates the extent to which the reigning apocalyptic paradigm dominated twentieth-century christology, even where questing had been categorically rejected.

After a hundred years contemporary Jesus research seems to have moved away from the “eschatological consensus,”11 that is, away from the certainty that Weiss and Schweitzer got it right about Jesus. Whether we are headed to a new paradigm, say, to a sapiential one, is unclear yet.12 Some reject the older paradigm completely (i.e., Borg13), some reassert it (i.e., Meier14), while others save the apocalyptic but so attenuate the prophet’s eschatology that it is not clear Schweitzer would recognize it (i.e., Wright15). In any case, in this era of the quest, the new Jesus researchers have been relatively gun-shy about claiming christological consequences for their emerging Jesuses. Some explicitly reject interest in a theological discussion generated by their historical researches (i.e., Sanders16); others seem to embrace some theological applications, either of a negative17 or positive18 sort, even as they insist that their historical work cannot be colored by any theological agenda. Undoubtedly, one of the most characteristic features of the contemporary Jesus research is its degree of methodological self-consciousness: questers today know well the lesson of Schweitzer concerning self-retrojections onto the figure of Jesus and go to great pains to guard against theology parading as history.19 Nonetheless, several important researchers do move from historical reconstructions of Jesus to christological suggestions (again, either negative or positive ones), as if they believe Jesus research can bear on christological construction. And further, the whole era of research on Jesus, collectively known as the Third Quest, seems to explode with tantalizing christological hints; these opportunities, whether foreseen or unforeseen by the researchers themselves, beg to be drawn out.

This book will consider the christological opportunities of this new histor...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Chapter 1: Orientation to the Inquiry
• Chapter 2: The Terms of the Conversation
• Chapter 3: Warrants: Why Should Theology Care about Historical Jesuses?
• Chapter 4: Retrojection
• Chapter 5: Case Study in Retrojection: The Invention of Jesus-Sage
• Appendix: Rules and Warrants Summary
• Bibliography