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Jesus Minimus
Last edited Wed Jul 25, 2012, 10:04 AM - Edit history (1)
How Hume lead to the social gospel. Well, I think Joe's being a bit too glib here. Hume and Darwin were like the intellectual A-bomb and H-bomb of the 18th and 19th centuries, sure, but you can't minimize the impact of those transcendentalists and occultists either. But I take Hoffmann's point that Hume is the one who really set the wrecking ball in motion when it comes to the deconstruction of the literal Jesus. Anyhow, a pleasantly pointed read as always.
In other words, you believe in the Bible because it’s one of the only books you have ever read—and almost certainly not even it, cover to cover. And in a vague, unquestioning, socially proper kind of way, you believe the book carries, (to use the language of Hume’s contemporary Dr Tillotson) the attestation of divine authorship, and in the circularity that defines this discussion prior to Hume, “divine attestation” is based on the miracles.
Divinity schools in England and America, which ridiculed such popish superstitions as the real presence and even such heretofore protected doctrines as the Trinity (Harvard would finally fall to the Unitarians in the 1820s, while the British universities came through unscathed thanks to laws against nonconformists), required students for the ministry to take a course called Christian Evidences.
...
But all was not well, even in 1785. Hume’s “Of Miracles” was being read, and was seeping into the consciousness, not only of philosophers and theologians, but of parish ministers and young ministers in training and indolent intellectuals in the Back Bay and Bloomsbury. Things were about to change.
...
When the tide rolled out on miracles, what was left standing on the shore was the Jesus of what became, in the early twentieth century, the “social gospel.”
He wasn’t new—actually, he had a long pedigree going back to Kant and Schleiermacher in philosophy and theology. He’d been worked through by poets like Coleridge and Matthew Arnold, who detested dogma and theological nitpicking and praised the “sweet reasonableness” of Jesus’ character and ethical teaching—his words about loving, forgiving, caring for the poor, and desiring a new social covenant based on concern for the “least among us.”
There is no doubt in the world that these words sparked the imaginations of a thousand social prophets reformers, and even revolutionaries.
Full post (~4,300 words): http://rjosephhoffmann.wordpress.com/2012/07/24/jesus-minimus
Divinity schools in England and America, which ridiculed such popish superstitions as the real presence and even such heretofore protected doctrines as the Trinity (Harvard would finally fall to the Unitarians in the 1820s, while the British universities came through unscathed thanks to laws against nonconformists), required students for the ministry to take a course called Christian Evidences.
...
But all was not well, even in 1785. Hume’s “Of Miracles” was being read, and was seeping into the consciousness, not only of philosophers and theologians, but of parish ministers and young ministers in training and indolent intellectuals in the Back Bay and Bloomsbury. Things were about to change.
...
When the tide rolled out on miracles, what was left standing on the shore was the Jesus of what became, in the early twentieth century, the “social gospel.”
He wasn’t new—actually, he had a long pedigree going back to Kant and Schleiermacher in philosophy and theology. He’d been worked through by poets like Coleridge and Matthew Arnold, who detested dogma and theological nitpicking and praised the “sweet reasonableness” of Jesus’ character and ethical teaching—his words about loving, forgiving, caring for the poor, and desiring a new social covenant based on concern for the “least among us.”
There is no doubt in the world that these words sparked the imaginations of a thousand social prophets reformers, and even revolutionaries.
Full post (~4,300 words): http://rjosephhoffmann.wordpress.com/2012/07/24/jesus-minimus
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