Louvain Studies 32 (2007) 81-110 doi: 10.2143/LS.32.1.2032353 © 2007 by Louvain Studies, all rights reserved The Outsideless Life: Historicism, Theology and the Quest for Jesus Sheila Greeve Davaney Abstract. — This article examines the rise of historicism in Europe and the United States and its relation to and challenges for the historical quest for Jesus. In particu- lar, the article interrogates the ramifi cations for theology and the role the fi gure of Jesus has and might still play in theology today when historicist assumptions concerning the conditioned, situated, fallible and thoroughly human character of all human knowledge are taken seriously. The article calls for the historicizing and naturalizing of theology and the objects of its inquiry including the Christian past and its central fi gure, Jesus. I. Prefatory Remarks This volume has as its focus the relation between the various stages of the on-going Quest for the historical Jesus. In particular the essays contained herein are concerned to delineate how the most recent quest, the so-called Third Quest, is indebted to its predecessors in ways that might not always be acknowledged or even recognized by the present day searchers for the historical fi gure of Jesus. In this regard, our contempo- rary moment, infl ected by its rejection of so much of modernity, appears to be characterized by a certain forgetfulness or amnesia leading present day thinkers to ignore the insights of those who have gone before. More- over, current thinkers often seem to fail to note the problems our fore- bears identifi ed including those ones that earlier scholars were not able to adequately overcome. These articles seek to analyze more closely both the earlier moments in the quest of the historical Jesus and the present day quest to gain more insight into their dialectical relation. I enter this conversation neither as a biblical scholar engaged in the quest nor as a historian of the quest. Rather I am an American academic theologian working out of a historicist perspective whose primary con- versation partners are cultural theorists and not biblical scholars. As such I come to this discussion without the confessional or dogmatic interests that drive many other theologians today. My interests are primarily in 11252-08_LouvainStud_05.indd252-08_LouvainStud_05.indd 8811 001-09-20081-09-2008 16:17:3516:17:35 82 SHEILA GREEVE DAVANEY the continuities and differences that can be discerned between nine- teenth century historicism and contemporary historicism and in the implications of historicist claims for theology and especially for how present day theology might conceive its relation to the past, including that past designated by the quest for the historical fi gure of Jesus. Hence, my concerns are more theoretical and methodological than substantive; I am less interested in what any particular quest for Jesus proposes and more concerned with what theologians understand the purpose and implications of such a venture to entail for contemporary theological construction. To that end I will sketch a version of earlier forms of his- toricism and then, in turn, examine present day historicist claims in order to refl ect upon their implications for theology and for the status of the past in theological proposals for today. II. The Emergence of Historicism Historicism is a term that has emerged during the last several cen- turies along with such cognate notions as historicity, historical conscious- ness and historical understanding. It does not have a singular meaning or defi nition that all thinkers who have been associated with historicism share. The notion has, in fact, carried a diversity of assumptions, impli- cations and repercussions that have been and are now appropriated for diverse and sometimes disparate purposes. In the most general sense historicism and its related terms are the conceptual indicators of the recognition that human existence is thor- oughly historical, situated within, conditioned by and productive of his- tory. For historicists, it is human historicity that provides the entrée into understanding human life; the historical realm designates the locus of “the truth, meaning and value” in relation to human existence.1 The historical realm is, for historicists, the arena within which human exist- ence takes place and in relation to which human existence gains its sig- nifi cance; history is both the residence of human action and thought and the vehicle for all human meaning and value. Historicism is, however, not just a conceptual tool for interpreting the nature of human existence. It also designates a particular movement and set of developments that arose at a particular time and have a specifi c history of their own. Historicism arose, in its European mode, in the late 1. Dwight E. Lee and Robert N. Beck, “The Meaning of ‘Historicism’,” American Historical Review 59 (1953-54) 577. 11252-08_LouvainStud_05.indd252-08_LouvainStud_05.indd 8822 001-09-20081-09-2008 16:17:3616:17:36 HISTORICISM, THEOLOGY AND THE QUEST FOR JESUS 83 eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as part of a widespread critical reaction to the Enlightenment. It represented both the continuance of certain assumptions and commitments inherited from the Enlighten- ment, such as a desire for certain knowledge, and a clear rejection of many Enlightenment themes especially the universalism of the early modern period. As the nineteenth century unfolded various forms of historicism took shape, sharing a critical attitude toward the immediate past but often confl icting with one another. Clive Marsh, in an interest- ing article on the various permutations of the quest for the historical Jesus, asserts that there have been at least nine variations of the quests that simultaneously overlap and challenge one another.2 Much the same could be stated about historicism. There have been many variations of historicism and it is important not to reduce the complexly-textured development of historicist thinking to only one form. This article will delineate several forms of historicism that are most pertinent to the dis- cussion of the quest for Jesus but does not purport to offer an exhaustive account. It is important to begin this account of historicism by noting that in almost all its forms in Europe historicism took shape in critical reac- tion to the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment, which stretched from the seventeenth century until the early nineteenth century (depending upon where you locate Immanuel Kant in the debates) sought, in part, to discover clear and self-evident grounds for adjudicating among com- peting claims to truth and for resolving political, social and religious disputes. The Enlightenment itself emerged from a hundred years of religious and political warfare in Europe and refl ected the need to fi nd some non-violent, shared means of responding to confl icts and compet- ing assertions about what should be taken to be true. Enlightenment thinkers turned to reason and especially the developing sciences to fi nd ways beyond the intractable confl icts among various religious groups and political perspectives. During the Franco-British or western phase of the Enlightenment, thinkers sought to free themselves from the burden of both the past and of tradition and to articulate and certify as true only those claims that might hold true in all circumstances and every time and place. The authorities of Church and tradition yielded to the authority of the autonomous and rational individual and to the mandates of an assumed to be universal reason embodied most fully in modern science, especially 2. Clive Marsh, “Quests of the Historical Jesus in New Historicist Perspective,” Biblical Interpretation 5 (1997) 403-437. 11252-08_LouvainStud_05.indd252-08_LouvainStud_05.indd 8833 001-09-20081-09-2008 16:17:3616:17:36 84 SHEILA GREEVE DAVANEY mathematics. The Western Enlightenment, from René Descartes on, sought in the words of Jeffrey Stout, “to escape history.”3 The Western or Franco-British Enlightenment was not, however, the only form emergent modernity took. There developed in Germany, in the fi rst half of the eighteenth century, an especially Germanic form of the Enlightenment which was not nearly as hostile to history and the past including the religious inheritances of Christianity and Judaism. Whereas revolutionary political and intellectual orientations character- ized the Western Enlightenment, the Aufklärung of Germany was much more reformist in nature and far more positive toward the particularities of its own historical heritage. It was during this period of the German Enlightenment that history began to come to prominence, the historical critical method of inquiry gained defi nition and the enunciation of his- toricist themes commenced both within the work of signifi cant thinkers and across the wider reaches of society. Over against the Franco-British appeal to abstract reason shorn of tradition, Germanic thinkers increas- ingly turned to the study of history asserting that it was emersion [immersion?] into the rich histories of particular peoples that enabled modern persons to avoid the sectarianism and parochialism that had led to the religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. For the thinkers of the German Enlightenment interest in universal reason was tempered by the conviction that history provided a critique of the present and visions for the future. As the eighteenth century unfolded increas- ingly there were developments in philology, the collection and analysis of documentary evidence and archival materials, and a growing consoli- dation of scholarly standards for historical research. On numerous fronts, a growing interest in the particularities of language and culture became prominent, replacing the cosmopolitanism and universalism of the Western Enlightenment. The study of the Bible in Germany demonstrated both the growing interest in the past and also the steady evolvement of historicist attitudes toward earlier ages in the human saga. Critical biblical scholarship was on the increase throughout Europe and most especially in Germany.