Albert Schweitzer

1875-1965 · Alsatian (German and French) · New Testament and Ethics

He comes to us as One unknown, without a name, as of old, by the lake-side.

Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965) had three careers and gave up two of them. By thirty he was a New Testament scholar who had demolished the entire nineteenth-century quest for the historical Jesus, a concert organist and the authority on Bach, and principal of a theological college in Strasbourg. He then enrolled as a medical student, took his degree at thirty-eight, and left for Lambaréné in French Equatorial Africa to build a hospital, where he stayed with interruptions for fifty-two years.

Topics Albert Schweitzer addresses

• thoroughgoing eschatology
• the imminent Kingdom
• the sending of the Twelve
• the delay of the parousia
• Interimsethik
• the quest of the historical Jesus
• the liberal Jesus as self-portrait
• Reimarus
• Wrede and the messianic secret
• the messianic and passion secret
• the historical Jesus as a stranger
• Paul as eschatological mystic
• being-in-Christ
• justification as a subsidiary crater
• the mysticism of the apostle Paul
• reverence for life
• the will-to-live
• world-and-life-affirmation
• the decay of civilisation
• ethics as the foundation of culture
• the guilt of the living
• Lambaréné and the hospital
• the debt owed to Africa
• Bach and the musical picture-language

Questions to put to Albert Schweitzer

The Quest for the Historical Jesus

• What did you discover when you read through all the nineteenth-century lives of Jesus?
• Why do you say the liberal Jesus was a self-portrait of the scholars who wrote about him?
• What do you mean when you say Jesus comes to us as a stranger?
• How did scholars justify removing the apocalyptic material from the Gospels?
• What's the difference between your view and Wrede's messianic secret theory?

Thoroughgoing Eschatology and the Kingdom

• What did Jesus expect to happen when he sent out the Twelve in Matthew 10?
• How do you know Jesus expected the Kingdom to arrive imminently?
• What happened when the Kingdom didn't come as Jesus expected?
• What do you mean by calling Jesus's ethic an Interimsethik?
• Can we still follow Jesus's teachings if they were meant for a brief interval before the end?

Paul and the Mysticism of Being-in-Christ

• Why do you call Paul an eschatological mystic rather than a theologian of justification?
• What does being-in-Christ mean for Paul?
• How is justification by faith a subsidiary crater within Paul's thought?
• What makes Paul's mysticism different from Hellenistic religion?
• How does your reading of Paul connect to your reading of Jesus?

Reverence for Life and the Philosophy of Civilisation

• What do you mean by reverence for life?
• How did you arrive at reverence for life as the fundamental ethical principle?
• Why does your ethic refuse to draw any line below which life may be destroyed?
• What do you mean when you say the person who destroys life to preserve life remains guilty?
• How does reverence for life address the decay of European civilisation?

Lambaréné and the Debt to Africa

• Why did you leave theology and music to study medicine and go to Africa?
• How do you understand the hospital work as a debt rather than a gift?
• What have you learned from your decades at Lambaréné?
• How do you respond to those who see your work in Africa as paternalistic?
• What does reverence for life look like in the daily work of the hospital?

Converse with Albert Schweitzer on Simposeum. Replies are grounded in Albert Schweitzer's own writing, cited to the page.