Journal: Westminster Theological Journal
Volume: WTJ 47:1 (Spring 1985)
Article: "Wissenschaft" and Secularization in New Testament Gospel Studies: A Historical Paradigm, 1885-1985
Author: Royce Gordon Gruenler

WTJ 47:1 (Spr 85) p. 97

Wissenschaft and Secularization in New Testament Gospel Studies:
A Historical Paradigm, 1885-1985

Royce Gordon Gruenler

The issue of Jesus and the Gospels seems to be at the forefront of contemporary debate, especially in evangelical circles. An important study by Daniel Pals on the British Lives of Jesus from 1860 to 1910 gives an invaluable perspective on fundamental questions that have remained essentially unchanged for the last century.1

The volume is a revised version of a doctoral dissertation written under the supervision of Martin Marty at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago, with additional counsel from Langdon Gilkey, Leonard Krieger, Nathan A. Scott, and Norman Perrin, affording an interdisciplinary perspective that adds considerably to its accuracy as well as relevance to contemporary discussion.

The scheme of the book is straightforward and historical and begins with a review of the earlier tradition in Britain from the sixteenth century to the early 1900s, tracing both the devotional retelling of the Gospel story and the rise of the modern critical study of Scripture in the seventeenth century, with a temporary merging of the two in the last quarter of the nineteenth century in Victorian Britain. The Introduction observes that the distinctively British Lives of Jesus have remained virtually unnoticed in present day scholarship and offer a researcher the challenge to describe and assess for the contemporary reader a once immensely influential literature. Pals remarks that nothing like the Victorian synthesis of scholarship and popular piety occurred in Germany where pure scholarship (Wissenschaft) served as the principal goal of the independent university scholar, whereas in Victorian Britain the typical Life of Christ sought

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to turn scholarship into public literature with some sense of responsibility to orthodox faith and the larger community of believers.

Chapter one traces the earlier tradition of the Lives in Britain from the Reformation to the 1860s. There is an apologetic tone in these books but none that reflects a deep concern for the new critical revolution going on in Germany. British scholarship was not yet emphasizing the kind of interaction with German thought that would later become important in the latter part of the nineteenth century. The Deist controversy left little imprint on the literature of the period, though the appearance of Strauss’ myth-centered Leben Jesu in 1835–36 invited some heated response. By 1862 a wry critic observed in the Westminster Review that “High Churchmen and Low Churchmen…hush naughty children with the name of...