Schweitzer's Historicism

Lately a good deal of my reading has dealt with Albert Schweitzer including biographies, his autobiography, and his theological works. Schweitzer is becoming something of a dear friend to me. Like any dear friend, he is nothing if not utterly frustrating at times, if for no other reason that the stark contrasts (contradictions?) of his life. He did, after all, write (arguably) the book on the historical person of Jesus which also went a long way to undermine the faith of theologians and laymen alike, and yet he devoted more than half of his life to the service of Jesus in part renouncing not one brilliant career but many (music, theology, philosophy, medicine...). Regardless of his capacity to frustrate with nuance and contradiction, it is always a bit of coming home when I sit down with his words on a Saturday evening.

This particular evening I am starting his work _The Mysticism of the Apostle Paul_. In the preface he writes the following:

"The investigation of historical truth in itself I regard as the ideal for which scientific theology has to strive. I still hold fast to the opinion that the permanent spiritual importance that the religious thought of the Past [sic] has for ours makes itself most strongly felt when we come into touch with that form of piety as it really existed, not as we make the best of it for ourselves. A Christianity which does not dare to use historical truth for the service of what is spiritual is not sound within, even if it appear to be strong. Reverence for truth, as something that must be a factor in our faith if it is not to degenerate into superstition, includes in itself respect for historical truth." [my emphasis]

One of Schweitzer's greatest traits was certainly his single-minded, and utterly honest, devotion to "truth". Here he sheds a little light on how this devotion drove his historical researches with regard to theology. Having expressed my appreciation for this drive in his work, I now want to question it gently.

Does the respect for historical truth, which must be read as respect for available historical truth (i.e., what can honestly be inferred from existing historical record), rationally permit assent to something wholly "other"? Schweitzer explicitly references "scientific theology" and implicit in "scientific" approaches is very often a notion of uniformitarianism, meaning that things happened in more or less the same way then as they do now. This is the foundational assumption, for example, in geology, e.g., that fossils were created by the same sorts of processes that occur now. It seems, in fact, to be the basic assumption of all historical inference.

But in the Gospels we are faced with a man who is purported to be God, and who further claims to be "the truth". The tension in Schweitzer's words, it seems to me, is how we go about bracketing these claims in a way that maintains "reverence for truth". Or, can Schweitzer be revering Truth even as he brackets the claim that Jesus is truth? To what exactly is Schweitzer in service once he brackets the truth of the Gospel? The Gospels make claims about what truth is, and go on to claim that truth is a historical god-man (whatever that means). If Jesus is the Truth, then how can we bracket this and still be in service to Jesus? If, on the other hand, he is not the Truth, then a similar question remains: What is it that Schweitzer would have us reverence?

If "Truth" is just intellectual honesty, then it seems that we can, in a way, be intellectually honest and bracket Jesus's divinity. We can, for example, think through all sorts of counterfactual scenarios in brutal deductive detail. But equating Truth with intellectual honesty, to me, seems problematic, because we can be intellectually honest without ever arriving at a conclusion. That is, we can construct an infinite number of valid inferences without ever establishing, or requiring, the truth of a single one. We begin each line of reasoning with "If it were the case that..." and arrive at many conclusions, but at what point are we required to make a stand on whether "it is the case that..."?

Schweitzer is certainly correct if he means that reverence for intellectual honesty includes respect for historical accuracy. However, the threat of a faith devolving into superstition must be based on actual truth claims about the potential for historical method to encounter something/someone wholly other and not just a string of valid, though unsubstantiated, inferences. In that sense the closure of history against the other, where that other is God, is itself a potential superstition. And what methodological principle will save us from devolving into that superstition?