Justified True Belief

(●) The New Testament scholar who concluded that Jesus expected the world to end, and then spent half a century as a doctor in the African forest because of him. + On a Friday in October 1905 a thirty-year-old lecturer at Strasbourg dropped a bundle of letters into a postbox in Paris. They told his parents and his closest friends that he meant to lay down his teaching, his pulpit, and his concert career in order to begin six years of medical school, after which he intended to practise somewhere in equatorial Africa. Most of the people who opened those letters thought he had lost his mind, and several of them wrote back to say so. He had already done enough for three lifetimes. Albert Schweitzer held a doctorate in philosophy and a licentiate in theology, ran a theological college, preached most Sundays at a Strasbourg church, and was one of the finest organists in Europe. Within a year he would publish the book that closed a whole century of scholarship on the life of Jesus. Eight years after posting those letters he was treating sleeping sickness, the fever carried by the tsetse fly, in a converted henhouse on the Ogowé river, and except for a wartime internment in France and the long journeys home to raise money, that is where he stayed until he died, aged ninety, in 1965. The odd thing about him, and he never pretended otherwise, is that the two halves do not fit. His scholarship concluded that Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet who expected the end of the age inside his own generation and was mistaken about it. His life concluded that this same Jesus was worth obeying at any cost whatever. Christians have argued with the first half ever since. Very few of them have found much to say against the second.

(●) 1875 AD: Born in Alsace to a village pastor, and standing in for the church organist at nine. + He was born on 14 January 1875 at Kaysersberg in Upper Alsace, in a small house with a turret at the top of the town, where his father Louis served the little Protestant congregation in a town that was mostly Catholic. When the baby was six months old the family moved up the valley to Günsbach in the Münstertal, his mother’s home district, and there he grew up in a parsonage, a village school shared with the sons of peasants, and a church shared with everybody else. The Günsbach church was what Alsace calls a simultaneum: one building used by Catholics and Protestants alike, the chancel, the end of the church around the altar, given to the Catholics, and the nave, the long part where the congregation sits, to the Protestants. Two communions, one roof, and a boy in the middle of it. He said later that this arrangement taught him religious tolerance before he had any idea what the word meant, and that the divisions between churches struck him even as a boy as things destined one day to go away. The music came early and stayed. His grandfather Schillinger had been an organ enthusiast, the sort of man who went to look at the instrument first in any new town, and the grandson inherited it. By his own account, the village organist was glad enough of a substitute that Albert was playing Günsbach’s services at the age of nine. At fifteen he was learning the pedals properly at Saint Stephen’s in Mulhouse, on an organ of three keyboards and sixty-two stops, a stop being one rank of pipes that the player can switch in or leave silent, so that sixty-two of them is an instrument with a great many voices to choose among. At sixteen he was deputising at services there, and soon after that he sat down in front of a choir and orchestra to accompany the Brahms Requiem. One incident from those years he never stopped telling. He was seven or eight, and a friend called Henry Brasch proposed that they take their home-made catapults up the Rebberg and shoot birds. Schweitzer did not dare refuse and be laughed at. They crept up on a bare spring tree full of birds singing at the morning, and he laid a stone in the leather with, he says, terrible twinges of conscience, meaning to shoot the moment his friend did. Just then the church bells began to ring the half-hour warning before the peal. He heard it as a voice from heaven, shooed the birds out of range, and ran home.

(●) 1893 AD: Strasbourg gave him three careers at once, philosophy, theology and the organ, and he refused to choose between them. + He entered the University of Strasbourg in 1893 and then simply never stopped collecting qualifications. The doctorate in philosophy came first, in 1899, for a study of Kant’s philosophy of religion, and a licentiate in theology followed in 1900, the licentiate being the degree the German faculties then awarded for research in theology. Alongside the degrees ran the pulpit, since he had begun preaching at the church of Saint Nicholas in Strasbourg in that same year of 1899, and the study and the preaching went on side by side from then on. In 1902 he became a Privatdozent, which is an unsalaried university lecturer paid directly out of his students’ fees, and by 1903 he was principal of the Theological College of Saint Thomas, the college he had attended himself. He was twenty-eight. The third career began as a conversation. In the autumn of 1893 he had presented himself to Charles-Marie Widor, the organist of Saint-Sulpice in Paris and the most celebrated organ teacher in France, and asked whether he might play him something. "Play what?" Widor asked. "Bach, of course." He came back for lessons year after year, and one day in 1899 the two of them were working through Bach’s chorale preludes, the short organ pieces Bach built on the tunes of hymns his congregation already knew by heart. Widor confessed that he found them baffling. The fugues, those tightly argued pieces where one tune chases itself through every voice, were clear as daylight; the chorales went cloudy, full of abrupt changes of mood and countermelodies that seemed to have nothing to do with the tune. The pupil answered that the puzzle solves itself the moment you know the words: those pieces can only be understood through the hymn texts that go with them. He translated the German verses into French from memory, and the mysteries dissolved one after another. Bach, it turned out, had been painting the words. Widor asked for a short essay on the chorale preludes for the benefit of French organists. The essay grew, as essays do when the subject keeps opening outward, because the cantatas, the sung pieces Bach turned out week by week for the services at Leipzig, explained the chorales and the chorales explained the cantatas. Six years later the short essay was a book: J. S. Bach, le musicien-poète, published in French in 1905 with Widor’s preface, rewritten at twice the length in German in 1908, and translated into English by Ernest Newman in 1911. A separate essay of 1906 attacked the factory-built organs then replacing the old ones. The royalties and the concert fees mattered more to him than the reviews did, and for a reason that only became clear later. Years afterwards Schweitzer wrote that the old cantor of Leipzig, meaning Bach himself, had helped him pay for a hospital in the forest.

(●) 1906 AD: He closed a century of Lives of Jesus, and wrote much of the book as a first-year medical student. + The decision came first. He had resolved as a young man that he would give himself to scholarship and music until he was thirty and then spend the rest of his life in direct service to other people, and when the time came he kept the bargain. What settled the form of it was a parable. Reading about the physical misery of people in the tropics, and hearing about it from missionaries, he found that the story of the rich man and Lazarus at his gate seemed to have been spoken directly about Europeans (Luke 16:19–31). Modern medicine had made the West rich in exactly the way the parable means, he thought, and the poor man was sitting at the gate. So on 13 October 1905 he posted the letters, and enrolled as a medical student in the university where he was already a member of faculty. While he did his first year of anatomy he finished the book that made his name. Von Reimarus zu Wrede appeared in 1906, and in 1910 in English as The Quest of the Historical Jesus, translated by W. Montgomery. The German title simply names the two scholars who stand at either end of the story it tells, Hermann Samuel Reimarus at the beginning and William Wrede at the end, and what lies between them is the history of an entire scholarly enterprise: every attempt to write a Life of Jesus. A Life, in the sense the nineteenth century meant it, was a biography built out of the Gospels by a scholar sifting them for what a modern reader could accept, and the story starts with Reimarus, whose devastating manuscript was published after his death in the 1770s. Schweitzer read them all, several hundred of them, and told the story as one long argument with a destination. An expanded second German edition followed in 1913. All the while the old life went on beside the new one, and he gave up none of it. He kept lecturing, kept preaching, kept giving concerts, and somewhere in the middle of all that he sat his medical examinations in 1911 and took his M.D. in 1913. The thesis was called Die psychiatrische Beurteilung Jesu, a medical examination of the claim, then fashionable among a few psychiatrists, that Jesus had suffered from paranoid delusions. Schweitzer, who had just argued that Jesus expected the world to end, concluded that the diagnosis rested on a misreading of what a first-century Jewish prophet would ordinarily have believed.

(●) 1913 AD: He sailed on Good Friday for the Ogowé, and his first hospital was a henhouse. + On 18 June 1912 he married Helene Bresslau, a historian’s daughter from Strasbourg who had worked in orphan care and who now trained as a nurse so that she could go with him. The Paris Evangelical Mission Society, a French Protestant society with stations in the colonies, offered them a house at its station at Lambaréné, on the Ogowé river in what was then French Equatorial Africa, and permission to build a hospital in its grounds. What it did not offer was money. The mission paid nothing towards the hospital at all, and so the Bach book and the organ recitals paid for it instead. They left on Good Friday 1913. The bells of Günsbach had just stopped ringing for the afternoon service, he wrote, when the train came round the corner of the wood, and they waved from the platform of the last coach and watched the church spire disappear among the trees. On Easter Sunday they heard Widor play at Saint-Sulpice one more time; at two o’clock the Bordeaux train pulled out of the Quai d’Orsay through a France in its holiday clothes. They reached Lambaréné in April. For the first weeks he treated patients in the open air in front of the house, and when the evening storm came everything had to be carried onto the verandah at a run. So he promoted his predecessor’s fowlhouse to the rank of hospital: shelves fixed to the walls, an old camp bed installed, whitewash over the worst of the dirt. The room was windowless and horribly close, and the roof leaked so badly that he wore his sun helmet indoors all day, but the first time he heard rain rattling overhead and went on quietly with his bandaging he felt proud of the place. His interpreter and surgical assistant was a patient who turned up speaking excellent French and said he was a cook by trade. His name was Joseph, and having learned his anatomy in a kitchen he used kitchen words in the surgery: this man’s right leg of mutton hurts him, this woman has a pain in her upper left cutlet. By the end of the year a corrugated iron ward stood beside the fowlhouse.

(●) 1917 AD: France interned him as an enemy alien, and he came back seven years later to a hospital the forest had swallowed. + Alsace was German in 1914, and that one fact of the map decided the next four years for them, because it made the Schweitzers German citizens living in a French colony on the day the war began. On the evening of 5 August 1914 a guard was posted at their own house at Lambaréné and they were forbidden to treat anybody. He did with the enforced idleness what he did with everything else and began writing a philosophy of civilization. In November the ban on the medical work was lifted, the patients came back, and for nearly three years more the hospital went on in the middle of a war it could do nothing about. Then, in September 1917, they were shipped to France and interned, first at Garaison in the Pyrenees and then, from late March 1918, at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, in the old asylum of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole where Vincent van Gogh had been a patient nearly thirty years before. Schweitzer served as the camp doctor there, and treated people from the town as well. They were released in July 1918 in an exchange of prisoners and came home to Alsace by way of Switzerland. He arrived ill, in debt, and unsure whether there would be a hospital to go back to. There was one piece of good news in that bleak stretch: his daughter Rhéna was born on 14 January 1919, which was his own forty-fourth birthday. The recovery came slowly and it came by the old routes. He preached again at Saint Nicholas, worked as a physician in Strasbourg, and lived on lecture invitations and organ recitals until the ground was firm again; the Olaus Petri lectures at Uppsala in 1920 put him back on his feet, and Zwischen Wasser und Urwald, the little book of Lambaréné sketches published in 1921, found readers everywhere. He returned to the Ogowé in 1924, alone this time, and found the buildings under bush. So he rebuilt, and then discovered that the mission site was too small and too unhealthy for what the hospital had become, and in 1927 he moved the whole thing about three kilometres upstream to ground of his own. What grew there over the next forty years was not a European clinic but an African village with a doctor in it: families camped beside their sick, cooked their own food, and kept their goats. Visitors were often shocked, and said so. He thought a hospital that terrified the people it was built for would stay empty, and that an empty hospital heals nobody however clean its floors are.

(●) 1952 AD: He was given the Nobel Peace Prize, and then picked one last fight, against the bomb. + The dates take a moment to sort out, because the prize arrived by a slow road. No peace prize was awarded at the end of 1952. The Norwegian committee held that year’s award back, which the Nobel Foundation’s statutes let it do, and then gave the prize for 1952 to Schweitzer on 10 December 1953. He himself came to Oslo almost a year after that, and delivered the Nobel lecture, "The Problem of Peace", in the university auditorium on 4 November 1954, reading quietly in French from a manuscript. His case was that war should be refused on a moral ground rather than a political one, because it makes those who wage it guilty of inhumanity, whichever side they are on, and near the end he asked the nations to take to heart a sentence of Paul’s: "If possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all" (Romans 12:18). The prize money did not go into a bank. It went into a village for patients with leprosy at Lambaréné. Then, at eighty-two, he picked a fight with the great powers. On 23 April 1957 Radio Oslo broadcast his "Declaration of Conscience", an appeal to end the testing of nuclear weapons; some hundred and forty other stations relayed it, several governments forbade their broadcasters to carry it, and the New York Times printed the text on 24 April. Three further appeals followed from Oslo in 1958 and were published as Friede oder Atomkrieg. He was not alone in this. Albert Einstein had pressed him about the same danger in the years before his own death in 1955, and he went on corresponding with Bertrand Russell about it afterwards. The reasoning was of a piece with everything else he had written, and it needed no new principle: radioactive fallout is an injury inflicted on life that is not necessary, and what is not necessary is not permitted. Helene, who had never been strong after Africa and the camps, died in 1957, and her ashes were brought to Lambaréné. Nor was he universally admired in his last decade, whatever the medal said. Visitors who arrived expecting a model hospital found the place primitive and wrote it up as such, and African writers in the years of independence found his manner of speaking about Africans insufferable, a charge that had a great deal of substance to it and that his own books supply the evidence for.

(●) 1965 AD: He died at ninety in the hospital he had built, and was buried beside the river. + He died at Lambaréné on 4 September 1965 and was buried there, on the bank of the Ogowé, beside his wife’s grave, under a cross he had made himself. His daughter Rhéna took over the direction of the hospital, which has gone on treating patients under Gabonese direction to this day and now houses a research institute as well. He had kept working to the end: a doctor, a pastor to a congregation, a builder, a fundraiser, an old man playing Bach in the evening on a zinc-lined piano with pedals that the Paris Bach Society had shipped out to him in 1913 so that the tropics would not destroy it. He was still at work on the third volume of the philosophy of civilization, which forty years had not been enough to finish. What outlived him was not a school. Nobody today holds Schweitzer’s reconstruction of Jesus in the form he gave it, and his ethical philosophy never founded a movement. What outlived him is a question he put to Europe and would not withdraw: if you believe what you say you believe, why are you still here?

What He Taught

(T1) Jesus preached the end of the age, and expected it inside his own generation. + Read the Sermon on the Mount the way most people first meet it, and it sounds like advice for a long life: be patient, be generous, do not lie awake over tomorrow. Now imagine finding out that the letter you took for friendly counsel was written by someone who expected to be dead within the month. Nothing in it has changed, and everything has. That, roughly, is what Schweitzer thought nineteenth-century scholarship had got wrong about Jesus. The technical word for the subject is eschatology, from the Greek eschatos, "last": the part of theology that deals with the last things, death, judgment, and the end of the age. The technical word for the event is the Parousia, ordinary Greek for an arrival or a royal visit, used in the New Testament for the coming of the Son of Man. Schweitzer’s position was given the name thoroughgoing eschatology, konsequente Eschatologie, and the point of the name is the word thoroughgoing. Other scholars allowed that Jesus said some end-of-the-world things. Schweitzer said the expectation was not one theme among many but the frame around all of them, and that once you grant it, the strange bits of the Gospels stop being strange. His hinge text is the charge Jesus gives the Twelve when he sends them out to preach (Matthew 10:23). Take the words at face value, Schweitzer insisted, and Jesus is telling the disciples that the Son of Man will come before they finish their circuit of the towns of Israel. On that reading the ethic of the Sermon on the Mount is what he called an interim ethic, Interimsethik: emergency instructions for a very short stretch of time, the way a family behaves in the last hour before the evacuation, not a programme for running a civilization for two thousand years. Christians have taken this in two minds ever since, and both minds are worth having. The Kingdom of God really is the centre of the preaching, and liberal Protestantism really had tamed it into a warm religious feeling. Liberal Protestantism was the confident theology of the German universities in the century before him: it kept Jesus as the great teacher of the fatherhood of God and the value of the human soul, and quietly set aside the miracles, the judgment and the end of the age as the packaging of an older world. On that much Schweitzer was right, and the whole field now agrees with him. But he pressed it into a claim that Jesus set a timetable and missed it, and the Gospels themselves cut against that, since Jesus says in as many words that he does not know the day or the hour (Matthew 24:36; Mark 13:32).

(Q) "He tells them in plain words (Matt. x. 23), that He does not expect to see them back in the present age. The Parousia of the Son of Man, which is logically and temporally identical with the dawn of the Kingdom, will take place before they shall have completed a hasty journey through the cities of Israel to announce it." + Source: Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus, chapter 19 (W. Montgomery translation, 1910). Schweitzer is reading the charge to the Twelve. His point is not that the saying is odd but that generations of commentators had worked very hard to make it mean something less definite, and that it does not mean something less definite. The reference in his own text is to Matthew 10:23, cited in the Roman numerals the older scholarship used (T1).

(T2) When the end did not come, Jesus went up to Jerusalem to force it, and it killed him. + Here is the part of the reconstruction that made readers put the book down and stare at the wall. The disciples come back from their mission. Nothing has happened. The heavens have not opened. Schweitzer read everything after that as the consequence: Jesus withdraws from the crowds, goes north, begins for the first time to speak of suffering and dying, and concludes that the tribulation which the prophets said must precede the Kingdom has to be borne by somebody, and that he will bear it alone. So he goes up to Jerusalem at Passover deliberately, to die, and thereby to compel the end of the world. The image he chose for this has never been forgotten. Picture a flywheel, one of those heavy iron wheels that carry the motion of a machine, and a man setting his shoulder against it to start it turning. It will not turn. So, when pushing fails, he throws his whole body onto it. It turns, and it takes him with it. Now, what kind of claim is that? Schweitzer is saying that Jesus was wrong, and saying it about a man he plainly reveres. His Jesus is not a gentle teacher of timeless truths who happened to be executed by a misunderstanding; he is a figure of enormous will who tried to bend history and was destroyed by it. That reading has no room for the resurrection as an event, and Schweitzer does not pretend it has. What it does have is a Jesus nobody could call harmless, which is exactly what he thought the nineteenth century had lost.

(Q) "There is silence all around. The Baptist appears, and cries: 'Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.' Soon after that comes Jesus, and in the knowledge that He is the coming Son of Man lays hold of the wheel of the world to set it moving on that last revolution which is to bring all ordinary history to a close. It refuses to turn, and He throws Himself upon it. Then it does turn; and crushes Him." + Source: Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus, chapter 19 (W. Montgomery translation, 1910). The passage does not stop there. Instead of bringing in the last things Jesus has destroyed them, the wheel rolls on, and the mangled body of "the one immeasurably great Man" hangs upon it still. Schweitzer calls that his victory and his reign (T2).

(T3) Every Life of Jesus written in the previous century was, without meaning to be, a portrait of its author. + Anyone who has sat on a hiring panel knows the feeling. Five people interview the same candidate, and afterwards each of them describes a slightly different person, and each description says at least as much about the describer. Schweitzer sat on the largest such panel in the history of scholarship. He read the Lives of Jesus from the 1770s to his own day and noticed that the rationalists had found a teacher of reason, the romantics a religious genius, the political radicals a social reformer, and the liberal Protestants a preacher of the fatherhood of God and the infinite value of the human soul. Each age had found its own thoughts in Jesus, and, he added, each writer had found his own character. He did not say this as a sneer, and the passage that follows it is one of the most generous things in the book. The Lives written out of hatred, he says, were the best ones: Reimarus, who wanted the church exposed, and David Friedrich Strauss, who wanted the supernatural stripped away, advanced the study of the subject more than all the others put together, because you cannot bring a figure to life on paper without putting into it everything you love or hate. The warning cuts every way, which is why it has outlasted his own reconstruction. A Jesus assembled behind closed doors out of preferred passages will come out looking like whoever assembled him, and that is as true of an apocalyptic prophet built by a German Privatdozent in 1906 as it is of the kindly moralist Schweitzer was demolishing. Later scholars have turned the point on him, and he would not have minded.

(Q) "But it was not only each epoch that found its reflection in Jesus; each individual created Him in accordance with his own character. There is no historical task which so reveals a man's true self as the writing of a Life of Jesus." + Source: Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus, chapter 1 (W. Montgomery translation, 1910). From the opening pages, where he is explaining why the search began at all. George Tyrrell made the same observation about one particular scholar, and his version has become better known than Schweitzer’s. Tyrrell was a Catholic modernist, which is to say one of the Catholic writers of that generation who wanted the faith restated in modern terms, and in Christianity at the Cross-Roads, published in 1909, he turned the point on the most celebrated liberal Protestant historian of the day: the Christ that Adolf von Harnack saw, looking back through nineteen centuries of Catholic darkness, was only the reflection of a liberal Protestant face seen at the bottom of a deep well (T3).

(T4) Paul was not a Greek philosopher in disguise, but a Jew who still expected the end. + The scholarly fashion of Schweitzer’s youth was called the history-of-religions school, the religionsgeschichtliche Schule: the attempt to explain early Christian ideas by finding their relatives in the surrounding religions of the eastern Mediterranean. Applied to Paul, it produced a tidy story. Jesus had preached a simple message about God and neighbour; Paul, a city man who spoke Greek, had dressed it up in the clothes of the mystery religions, the initiation cults that promised their members union with a god who died and rose. Baptism and the Lord’s Supper on that account are Greek sacraments smuggled into a Jewish movement. Schweitzer spent two books taking that story apart, and the argument is simple enough to state at a kitchen table. The centre of Paul is not a doctrine but a phrase he uses over and over: being in Christ. Everything else in him hangs off it, including baptism and the Supper. So the question to ask is where an idea like that could have come from. Union with a dying and rising god in the mysteries is a private, timeless transaction available to anyone who pays the initiation fee. Paul’s version is nothing like that. It is corporate, it is tied to one particular execution under one particular governor, and above all it is dated: believers are people on whom the ends of the ages have come, living inside a world that has already started to end, which is why Paul can say they have died and risen already while the world goes on around them. That is not Greek. It comes straight out of Jewish apocalyptic, the literature of the last things, and Schweitzer called it eschatological mysticism. Mysticism, in that phrase, does not mean feelings or trances, and a reader who hears the word and thinks of candles and visions will be looking for the wrong thing. It means the claim that one person can genuinely share the life of another, so that what happened to Christ has happened to those joined to him. Schweitzer’s thesis was a minority report when he published it, and it has aged extremely well: the view that Paul is Jewish to the bone rather than a Hellenizer is now the ordinary starting point of the field.

(Q) "If the impulse, the pressing need to which they were the response, is once recognised, then Paulinism is understood, since in its essence it can be nothing else than an eschatological mysticism, expressing itself by the aid of the Greek religious terminology." + Source: Albert Schweitzer, Paul and His Interpreters: A Critical History, chapter 8, "Summing-Up and Formulation of the Problem" (W. Montgomery translation, 1912). "They" are Paul’s sacraments and his mystical language, the very things the history-of-religions school had traced to Greek sources. Schweitzer’s reply is that Paul borrows Greek vocabulary the way a translator borrows words, and that the thing being said in them is Jewish and apocalyptic (T4). He worked the case out in full in The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle nearly twenty years later.

(T5) Reverence for life: I am life that wills to live, in the midst of life that wills to live. + In September 1915 Schweitzer was on a river barge being towed slowly upstream to reach the sick wife of a missionary at N’Gômô, filling page after page for two days without finding the single idea that would hold an ethic together. On the evening of the third day, at sunset, the barge was making its way through a herd of hippopotamuses, and the phrase arrived: reverence for life, Ehrfurcht vor dem Leben. He had been looking for it for months. He spent the rest of his life unpacking it. The starting point is a deliberate swipe at Descartes. Philosophy, Schweitzer said, went wrong when it began with "I think, therefore I am", because a thinking thing in a vacuum can be argued into anything and out of everything. Begin instead with the fact you actually meet every waking hour: I am a living thing that wants to go on living, and I am surrounded on every side by other living things that want exactly the same. He borrowed the phrase will-to-live from Schopenhauer, but turned it the opposite way: Schopenhauer concluded that the will to live should be renounced, and Schweitzer that it should be honoured wherever it is found. If my own will to live is the thing I am most certain of, then consistency obliges me to treat the will to live in front of me as I treat my own. Good is what maintains and encourages life; evil is what destroys or obstructs it. He was perfectly aware that this cannot be obeyed cleanly, and he refused to soften it, which is what makes the ethic interesting rather than sentimental. You cannot eat, farm, or practise medicine without destroying life. What reverence for life forbids is destruction beyond necessity, and he pressed the point to places most moralists would rather not go: a farmer who has mown down a thousand flowers to feed his cows must not idly knock the head off a single flower by the roadside on the way home, because that one was not necessary. The man who has this disposition lifts the stranded earthworm off the hot road onto the grass, and holds out a leaf to the insect drowning in a puddle, and does not mind being laughed at for it. A Christian reader will notice both the resonance and the gap. Nothing in Scripture treats the life of a creature as cheap, and Schweitzer was speaking to a Europe that had just fed a generation into the trenches. But he built the ethic to stand on the will to live alone, without a Creator who gave the life its worth, and a foundation like that is harder to load than it looks. Ask the ethic why the will to live deserves reverence, and it can only point back to the fact that it exists.

(Q) "Ethics consist, therefore, in my experiencing the compulsion to show to all will-to-live the same reverence as I do to my own. There we have given us that basic principle of the moral which is a necessity of thought. It is good to maintain and to encourage life; it is bad to destroy life or to obstruct it." + Source: Albert Schweitzer, Civilization and Ethics, chapter 21, "The Ethic of Reverence for Life" (C. T. Campion translation, in the revised English edition of 1946; the second part of The Philosophy of Civilization, 1923). The sentences immediately before these are the ones that gave the doctrine its slogan: true philosophy must start from the most immediate and comprehensive fact of consciousness, which says, "I am life which wills to live, in the midst of life which wills to live" (T5).

(Q) "He comes to us as One unknown, without a name, as of old, by the lake-side, He came to those men who knew Him not. He speaks to us the same word: 'Follow thou me!' and sets us to the tasks which He has to fulfil for our time. He commands. And to those who obey Him, whether they be wise or simple, He will reveal Himself in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings which they shall pass through in His fellowship, and, as an ineffable mystery, they shall learn in their own experience Who He is." + Source: Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus, closing paragraph of chapter 20 (W. Montgomery translation, 1910). These are the last words of a book whose stated conclusion is that the Jesus of the scholars never existed. Readers who could not follow a line of the argument have carried this paragraph in their pockets for a century, and more than one missionary has dated a decision to it. Eleven years after he wrote it Schweitzer was in a French internment camp, having laid down a lectureship, a pulpit and a concert career to obey what he had just described.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) He made the comfortable Jesus of the nineteenth century impossible, and nobody since has been able to write as though he had not. + Schweitzer was not first. Johannes Weiss had argued in a short book of 1892 that Jesus’ preaching of the Kingdom was thoroughly apocalyptic, and Schweitzer said so generously and at length. What Schweitzer added was the entire history of the field, marshalled so that the conclusion looked inevitable, and the nerve to follow it past the point where it stopped being comfortable. After 1906 a scholar could still disagree; a scholar could no longer ignore. The answers came quickly and they are still coming. Rudolf Bultmann took the apocalyptic Jesus as settled fact and drew a radical conclusion from it: if the message really did come wrapped in a first-century picture of the world, then it had to be demythologized, stripped of that wrapping and preached as a call to decision here and now. C. H. Dodd went the other way. He replied with what he called realized eschatology, meaning that the Kingdom in the Gospels is not merely on its way but already arriving in the things Jesus is doing, so that the parables are announcements rather than predictions. Between those two came the settlement most Christians now hold without ever having heard its name, worked out by Joachim Jeremias and Werner Kümmel: the Kingdom as already and not yet, genuinely present in Jesus and genuinely still to come. The argument did not stop there either. E. P. Sanders and Dale Allison defended a strongly apocalyptic Jesus on historical grounds, while N. T. Wright argued that the apocalyptic language was ordinary Jewish idiom for God acting decisively inside history, so that the sayings about the Son of Man coming are about vindication and about the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70, and were not disappointed at all. There is also a debt that nobody signed for. Conservative Christians who have never read a page of Schweitzer have lived comfortably off his demolition of liberal Protestantism, and preachers who would be horrified by his conclusions preach his premise every Advent: the Kingdom of God is not a metaphor for moral improvement, and the man who announced it was not a gentleman.

(†) His life preached what his theology could not, and the church took the sermon. + The hospital is the argument. By the early 1960s Lambaréné had grown to some seventy buildings and could hold more than five hundred patients at a time, paid for out of book royalties, recital fees, and small gifts from strangers on four continents. Gunnar Jahn, presenting the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of the Norwegian committee, described a man whose impact was not that of a sermonizing missionary but of a realist who went where the suffering was worst, and who had spent his life sowing what Jahn called the seed of faith in the gospel of love. Schweitzer himself wrote that he was devoted to Christianity in deep affection and was trying to serve it, and he meant reverence for life to bring Christian faith and hard thinking closer together. He went out under a mission society, after all, and he had insisted on qualifying as a doctor precisely so that he could serve without having to talk. Getting there was not simple. The Paris Evangelical Mission Society was nervous enough about his theology to doubt whether it could take him at all, and it accepted him only on his word that he would go as a doctor and not preach. The missionaries at Lambaréné soon released him from the promise, and for years afterwards he preached to their congregation on alternate Sundays, through an interpreter. What followed was a pattern rather than a school. The Albert Schweitzer Fellowship was founded in the United States in 1940 to support the hospital and now funds students who serve underserved communities; hospitals and fellowships in his name run in several countries; and the phrase reverence for life passed into the working vocabulary of medical ethics and of Christian writing on creation. For two generations he was simply what a Christian life spent on other people looked like, which is a strange legacy for a man who thought the historical Jesus a mistaken prophet, and which he would have been the first to call an argument he had not intended to make.

(†) Where the gospel parts company with him: a mistaken Christ, a faith cut loose from the event, and an elder brother’s authority. + Honesty requires the other side of the ledger, and in his case the entries on it come from his own hand rather than from his critics. - A Jesus who was wrong. Schweitzer’s reconstruction has Jesus predicting the end of the age within a few months and being refuted by events, and it treats the resurrection as the rise of the disciples’ faith rather than as something that happened to a body. Paul had already answered that in advance: "if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins" (1 Corinthians 15:17). And against the charge that Jesus set a date, the Gospels are blunter than Schweitzer allowed. Jesus says he does not know the day or the hour: "But concerning that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father only" (Matthew 24:36). - The spirit without the man. His way of keeping Jesus while giving up the history was to say that what is abiding and eternal in Jesus is independent of historical knowledge, and is reached by contact with his spirit. That is a real parting of the ways, not a difference of emphasis. Christian faith is staked on an event, on a Word who became flesh and was seen (John 1:14), on a day God has fixed and guaranteed by raising a man from the dead (Acts 17:31). A spirit detached from the person who bore it can be carried anywhere, and Schweitzer’s own hospital shows how far; but it cannot forgive anybody, and it is not what the apostles preached. - The elder brother. In On the Edge of the Primeval Forest he set down, in his own words, the formula he used with the Africans he served: "I am your brother, it is true, but your elder brother." He wrote in the same paragraph that the African is a child and that nothing can be done with children without authority, and he told the story of a fellow missionary who went to live as an equal in a village and lost his influence, as a warning. He was defending a practice he thought kindness required, and the sentence records how he actually spoke and thought. The gospel he served does not leave it standing: God made from one man every nation of mankind (Acts 17:26), and in Christ, "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus" (Galatians 3:28). Brotherhood in the New Testament has no senior branch. None of this is meant to settle the account. A man who gave up three careers to spend fifty years treating strangers in a place with no road to it has a claim on Christian attention that his theology cannot cancel, and the parts of him that Christians must refuse are worth stating clearly for exactly that reason.