1870–1921

Liberal christology and the quest of the historical Jesus: Ritschl, Harnack, Schweitzer, Bultmann

Ritschl (1870–1874) rejected the Chalcedonian two-nature christology as a scientific rather than a religious judgment: the divinity of Jesus is a value judgment of the community about the significance of his life for salvation; Jesus brought the Kingdom of God into the world and is therefore as valuable to Christians as God. Harnack, his follower, reduced Jesus' teaching to three truths – the Kingdom of God, God the Father and the infinite value of the soul, the commandment of love – and presented the history of dogma as Hellenization: "the Gospel speaks exclusively of the Father, not of the Son". Albert Schweitzer (1906), following Weiss (1892), showed that the liberal Jesus of the "lives" was a projection of their authors' wishes, and pointed to the apocalyptic elements of Jesus' teaching. Bultmann, in The History of the Synoptic Tradition (1921), opposed the liberal quest: a reconstruction of Jesus' portrait is impossible, knowledge of him is useless, and interest in him is illegitimate.