Resurrection and Historical Reason by Richard R. Niebuhr (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 285 Resurrection and Historical Reason: A Study of Theological Method. By RICHARD R. NIEBUHR. New York: Scribner's, 1957. Pp. 184. $3.95. Professor Niebuhr states in his Preface that " this book represents an attempt to understand the connection between the biblical proclamation of the resurrection of Jesus Christ and the order of theological thought." He expresses the fundamental conviction that Christ and the Resurrection are inseparable. Despite the fact that there is a tension between Christ as the object of historical consciousness, and that consciousness itself, the common Protestant dichotomy of "Jesus of history-Christ of Faith" does nothing to solve the problems connected with the Resurrection. On the contrary, Niebuhr contends, it succeeds only in dissolving Christ Himself as Well as the Church. The first of the six chapters of the book is an acute analysis of attempts of the modern Protestant mind to cope with the Resurrection, a doctrine which was central to the faith of the early church, but which has been moved to the periphery of Protestant teaching. The reason for the change is that " the primitive resurrection faith conflicts disastrously with modern canons of historicity." (p. l) The history of recent Protestant theology, Niebuhr points out, can be read " as a series of attempts to halt the conflict between the insistent canons of historical criticism and the unquenchable resurrection tradition." (p. £) The study of these modern attempts, which fail insofar as they seek to reduce the Resurrection faith to the dimensions specified by preconceived philosophy of history or by psychology, illuminates the nature of historical thought. Oddly enough, as Niebuhr points out, there cannot be a final victory of historical reason in its conflict with more or less "Biblical" faith, for such a victory, by destroying the orthodox recollection upon which criticism feeds, would be destructive of criticism itself. Strauss, Hermann, Harnack, and Schweitzer, who " did much to create the mold of all subsequent theology that has taken seriously the problem of the historical character of the New Testament" (p. 12), are first analyzed. For Strauss, the assumption of all historical criticism is that the " absolute cause " never intervenes by single arbitrary acts in the chain of secondary causes. Hence the a priori impossibility of the apostolic encounters with the risen Jesus. Philosophical reason compensates for the deprivation by perceiving a " larger kind of resurrection," enacted in the drama of absolute spirit. Hermann, like Strauss, upholds the inviolability of nature, and for Harnack, " religion must transcend nature because nature is the realm of death." (p. 10) Schweitzer differs in that he fails to compensate for his criticism with a philosophy of transcendent spirit, but rather leaves us with a Jesus who has revealed Himself in death to be no more than a man. The significance of these typical theologians, we are 286 BOOK REVIEWS told, is that, united in their loyalty to the canons of nineteenth century criticism, they face the resurrection as an insoluble problem. Such assumptions have driven many thinkers (e. g. William Adams Brown and John Baillie) to the double truth theory in various forms, more or less subtle. An oddity common to all of them is the attempt to substitute the crucifixion for the resurrection as the focus of faith and surreptitiously invest it with the significance of the resurrection. The regrettable consequences of the disintegration of the New Testament pattern is reflected in Renan's Life of Jesus, wherein the Biblical account is seen as a sort of Aramaic copy of the Crito. Deterioration into sentimentality is inevitable in such a work, for an adequate ratio cognoscendi has been made impossible by ignoring the resurrection tradition. Not all Protestant thinkers, however, have made the resurrection peripheral. There is a " metaphysical " approach, represented by Lionel Thornton, for whom the risen body of Christ is the Church. The fallacy of such an approach, Niebuhr succinctly states, is that we do not have the option of thinking either historically or metaphysically, but we have only the option of thinking historically about historical events, or historically about the metaphysical implications of such events. By the " metaphysical " approach the Jesus of history is dissolved. Other recent thinkers have attempted to come to...