The German Genius

this in two ways—by asking what Jesus would do and by asking if our immediate concern is with the other person or with ourselves. There are risks in this approach—no outcome is ever guaranteed, either in the short run or the long run, but once we start thinking in terms other than the immediate, we are rationalizing our behavior to avoid feeling bad about ourselves and are potentially aligning ourselves with evil. To act responsibly is to act against evil without thought of the consequences.
    Albert Schweitzer was not “just” a theologian. He was a philosopher, a doctor, a musician, and a missionary. He won the Goethe Prize for his writings and the Nobel Peace Prize for the activity, achievement, and example of his whole life.
    Born in 1875 in Kaisersberg, he was brought up in the village of Güns-bach, in Alsace, when it was German (the village became French after World War I). Schweitzer’s father was a pastor, but the whole family seems to have been musicians and he was taught to play the organ at home. He studied in Paris and at Tübingen, writing his PhD thesis on Kant’s religious views before becoming a pastor at a church in Strasbourg. 33 In 1905 he answered an invitation from a missionary society in Paris that was looking for a doctor. He studied medicine and eventually left for the Gabon in West Africa, where he ran a hospital. Later in life Schweitzer achieved fame in equal measure as a medical missionary and as an organist, but theologically he is best known for two things—his examination of The Quest of the Historical Jesus ( Von Reimarus zu Wrede ) and his philosophy/theology of “reverence for life,” most notable perhaps because he practiced so well what he preached. 34
    In The Quest (1906) he did two things. He brought to an end (for a time at least) the great desire by historians to winnow the historical accretions away from the record of Jesus; Schweitzer argued that these exercises tell us more about the historians than about Jesus, and he made a convincing case that the actual Jesus, the historical Jesus if you like, was a figure who expected the imminent end of the world. Schweitzer’s scholarship was convincing and, together with a later book, Mystik des Apostels Paulus ( The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle ; 1930), which ascribed much of the biblical view to Paul, his argument is still that subscribed to by many theologians and biblical historians.
    Since Gabon was French, Schweitzer was interned in France during World War I, and afterward traveled across Europe, becoming better known, before returning to his hospital in Lambaréné which, over time, became celebrated. Like one or two others, Schweitzer, now equally well known for his music as for his missionary work and his theology, widened his interests and, after the invention of the atomic bomb, campaigned against it. He received the 1952 Nobel Peace Prize (in 1953) in recognition of his “reverence for life.” 35
    Martin Buber (1878–1965) was born in Vienna but brought up in Lvov, the grandson of a renowned Jewish scholar who was also a successful investor in mines and banking. Martin underwent a religious crisis as a young man and came under the influence of Kant, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche. At the University of Vienna he studied philosophy, art history, philology, and German studies, then went on to Leipzig, Berlin, and Zurich, coming under the successive influence of Stefan George, Wilhelm Wundt, Georg Simmel, Ferdinand Tönnies, and Wilhelm Dilthey. 36 Regaining his belief, he joined the Zionist movement and, in 1902, took up the editorship of Die Welt , the main journal of the Zionists. Unlike Theodor Herzl, who was a friend, he valued a return to the Holy Land more for its spiritual possibilities than for its political advantages and later withdrew to devote himself to his writing, later still cooperating with Franz Rosenzweig in the House of Jewish Learning and on a new German translation of the Bible.
    Buber’s greatest book, published in 1923, was Ich und Du ( I and Thou ), in which he argued that there are two modes of being, the dialogue and the monologue, and that the central element in life, the “premise of existence,” is the encounter . He argued that the relationship between people is the central fact of life, that mutuality, exchange, meeting, is the central aspect of experience, in which satisfaction and meaning are to be found. He felt that modernity had induced more Ich-Es (“I-It”) relations,