Von Professor D. Johannes Weiss, Heidelberg. Religionsgeschichtliche Volksbücher für die deutsche christliche Gegenwart. Tübingen. 1909. Verlag von J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck).
Christologie des Urchristentums. Von Johannes Weiss (in Schiele’s “Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart,” i. 1909, coll. 1711 ff.).
Paulus und Jesus. Von Johannes Weiss. Berlin: Verlag von Reuther und Reichard. 1909.
Jesus im Glauben des Urchristentums. Von Johannes Weiss. Tübingen: Verlag von J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck). 1910.
Jesus von Nazareth. Mythus oder Geschichte? Eine Auseinandersetzung mit Kalthoff, Drews, Jensen. Von Johannes Weiss. Tübingen: Verlag von J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck). 1910.
Die Geschichtlichkeit Jesu. Von Professor Johannes Weiss und Professor Georg Grützmacher. Tübingen: Verlag von J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck). 1910.1
There is no representative of contemporary German thought with respect to the criticism of the Gospel history and the origins of Christianity who is better worth listening to than Johannes Weiss. Of a temper but little less radical than William Wrede himself, he approaches Wrede also in sharpness of vision, independence of spirit, and bluntness of speech. He may perhaps even not unfairly be looked upon as Wrede’s successor as the enfant terrible of the “liberal” school. The very thoroughgoingness of his naturalism makes him bold; he abandons without fear entrenchments which have become habitual to “liberal” thought, and frankly declares untenable contentions which “liberals” have been accustomed to treat as key-positions; he is so secure in his naturalism, it seems, as scarcely to feel the need of any protection for it whatever. As we read his treatises we are sensible of coming into contact with a vigorous mind, stored with learning, bent on understanding the origin of Christianity and its record—understanding them, of course, as a naturalistic mind understands “understanding,” which means just the discovery of the complex of causes and conditions out of which they naturally proceeded and the processes by which they naturally came into being; but nevertheless understanding them—in which is involved also the exact ascertainment of the precise things which are to be naturalistically accounted for. In both stages of this proceeding he is very instructive to us. In his attempts to determine the exact things which are to be explained from natural causation, he displays a very unusual clearness and acuteness of perception and becomes a not unwelcome guide to many points of difficult exegesis and historical construction. In his attempts to naturalize the things thus determined, he makes unwontedly plain to us the violence of the assumptions on which alone the naturalization of the origins of the Christian religion can be accomplished.
By some chance it was bought about that Johannes Weiss gave repeated expression to his views on the great subject of the Christology of the New Testament during the early months of 1909. Then came the publication of Arthur Drews’s “Die Christusmythe,” and in the early months of 1910 the sudden bursting into flame of the fire that it had kindled and that had been smoldering for the preceding year. Of course Johannes Weiss, in company with his fellow “liberals,” was drawn into this controversy, by which the entire structure of the “liberal” Christology was thrown violently on the defensive; and in his effort to treat a sensational subject unsensationally he was led to give another expression to his Christological conceptions. Thus, we have from him a series of little volumes put forth within the limits of a twelvemonth, in which his ideas concerning Jesus and the development during the New Testament period of the thought of His followers concerning Him, are stated over and over again with different audiences in view and with different and even opposite antagonists in mind. We cannot complain that we are left in any doubt as to how he himself thinks of Jesus or as to how he thinks Jesus’ first followers thought of Him.
The first book upon our list, entitled “Christ: the Beginnings of the Dogma,” appears in the well-known series of “liberal” handbooks publishing under the general title of “History-of-Religion Peoples’ Books for the Present-Day Christianity of Germany,” and is accordingly of a semi-popular character. It undertakes to describe the development of the doctrine of the Person of Christ through the New Testament period under the successive rubrics of “the Belief of the Primitive Community,” “Paul,” and “the Christology after Paul”; and in doing this, it seeks to preserve a strictly historical point of view. It opens with these words: “ ‘What think ye of Christ? Whose Son is He?’—so still runs to-day the burning question by which our church is split up, many earnest Christians disquieted, and not a few conscientious men hindered from entering into a close relation to the Person of Jesus and His religion. No attempt will be made in the following pages to give a definitive reply to this question: the author feels no call whatever to obtrude his convictions in this matter on others. He certainly thinks it would be desirable, however, that even those who are not theologians, so far as they are earnest inquirers and not afraid of a little labor, should come to clearness as to what the earliest witnesses to our religion really teach with respect to the Person of Christ, what the old difficult and obscure terms ‘Son of God’ and ‘Son of Man,’ ‘Lord’ and ‘Messiah’ really meant at first, and what convictions of belief the oldest confessors intended to express by them.” Of course the historical objectivity announced in this declaration is not preserved in the discussion itself (or, for that matter, throughout this declaration itself), as indeed it could not be. The author is soon found reading his own faith back into the primitive Christian community and, indeed, making his booklet a historical argument for his own point of view. In another one of the little volumes, indeed,—that entitled “Paul and Jesus” (pp. 4–5)—he drops the mask entirely and openly pleads the cause of his personal Socinianism against that Christianity which he confesses to be, and to have been since the beginning, dominant. “Primitive Christianity,” he says there, “is—at least in one part of it—Christ-religion, that is, there stands at its center an inner relation of faith to the exalted Christ. This form of religion has throughout the millenniums passed as the real Christianity, and there are still to-day innumerable Christians who know and wish no other form of faith. They live in the most intimate communion of soul with the ‘Lord,’ pray to Him and long to see Him face to face. Alongside of this there flows another religious stream which is no longer able to find a religious relation to the exalted Christ and has its full satisfaction in permitting itself to be led to the Father by Jesus of Nazareth. Both forms of religious life stand in our church side by side; it were to be wished that they would tolerate one another and that the preaching of the Gospel should not suffer violence from either of them. I make no concealment of my profession, along with the majority of recent theologians, of the second of these views, and my hope that this view will gradually become dominant in our church. But as a historian I must say that it is widely different from the ruling view of primitive Christianity, from the Pauline view. On the other hand, however, I must decidedly maintain that the historical Jesus, as far as we can perceive Him, saw His task in drawing His followers into the direct experience of sonship with God, without demanding any place for Himself in their piety.”