The Historical Christ: Warfield's Answer to the Quest for a Desupernaturalized Jesus
I thought what I published last night about the quest for the historical Jesus was the last. As I checked Benjamin B. Warfield's (served as professor of didactic and polemic theology in the Theological Seminary of Princeton, New Jersey, 1887-1921) Christological Studies, I got curious. All three chapters in the book that caught my attention are all related to the quest for the historical Jesus. These chapters include the following:
The Historical Christ
Christless Christianity, and
The Essence of Christianity and the Cross of Christ
The last chapter reminds me of my reading of Bavinck's material. There he mentioned Harnack delivering lectures about the essence of Christianity in the winter of 1899-1900 in Berlin (Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Sin and Salvation in Christ Volume 3, 2006, p. 267).
As for the first chapter (it contains 29 pages in total), it is interesting that Warfield did not separate the idea of the historical Jesus from the apostolic Christ. Instead, he combined the two, a classic stance of an orthodox theologian that doesn't see a distinction between Jesus and Christ.
In this article, my intention is just to give an overview of the first chapter and quote paragraphs and sentences that are relevant to my lecture this coming Wednesday.
The first few pages started with both non-Christian and Christian sources for the historical Christ. Unlike the deistic-inspired scholars who were committed to a purely naturalistic methodology who relied heavily on non-Christian sources, Warfield claimed that the non-Christian source had little information about Christ. To his mind, the writings of the apostle Paul provide "an exceptionally good basis for the historical verity of Jesus' personality and career" (p. 8). This is a claim that critical scholars could not accept, particularly those whose outcome of studies concluded that Paul corrupted the original Gospel of Jesus. I am not sure if Warfield would insist on his claim if he lived to see the discovery of the Nag Hammadi library (1945) and the Dead Sea Scrolls (1947) that renewed the interest of scholars in the third quest (James K. Beilby and Paul R. Eddy, editors. The Historical Jesus: Five Views, 2009, p. 46).
In addition to Paul's epistles, we have the Gospel of Luke and Acts, as well as the Gospels of Mark, Matthew, and John, to provide us the information for the historical Jesus. All these New Testament historical documents agree about not only the supernatural character of Jesus but also his divinity. In Warfield's mind, there is no dichotomy between the Jesus of the Synoptic Gospels and the Jesus of John and the apostle Paul, which characterized most of the studies in the quest for the historical Jesus.
Even with a short period of time reading the chapter, I observe that the supernatural argument is Warfield's primary focus. He acknowledges that such "intense supernaturalism" found in New Testament documents is a great offense to scholars who are "anti-supernaturalistic" (p. 19). Desupernaturalizing Jesus to recover the historical Jesus is bound to fail "for Jesus Himself is the greatest miracle" (ibid.). It is in fact because of its supernatural character "that Christianity has made its way" in world history (ibid.).
Concerning method, Warfield describes desupernaturalizing as precarious (dangerous and uncertain), violent, and subjective (p. 21). It overreaches itself, and by abolishing the supernatural Jesus, it also abolishes the historical Jesus, "since this supernatural Jesus is the only Jesus that enters as a factor into the historical development" (p. 22). It is painful to admit on the part of critical scholars that the desupernaturalized Jesus is the real mythical Jesus (ibid.).
After gleaning the substantial insights from the chapter, I think I have to stop here, for the remaining 11 pages of the chapter contain the portrait of the historical Jesus found in the New Testament. If I find time in the coming days, I intend to finish the remaining two chapters.