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Essay 3: Albert Schweitzer's Affirmations of Reverence for Life |
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5
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Schweitzer affirmed
Reverence for Life
exegetically.
Second, Schweitzer affirmed Reverence for Life exegetically.
Albert Schweitzer grew up as a PK, a preacher’s kid, and from
an early age he was exposed to the interpretation of the Bible
in an open, liberal, Lutheran context. He was given a copy of
the New Testament, he says, at age eight, and he apparently
entered the world of critical biblical scholarship already in his
youth. If wise men from the East visited baby Jesus and
offered him valuable gifts, young Albert asked, why was the
holy family so poor? If shepherds saw the holy child in the
manger, he wondered, why did none of them become
followers of Jesus? And, not to leave out critical questions
pertaining to the Hebrew scriptures, how could a rainstorm
lasting forty days and forty nights produce a cataclysmic flood
according to Genesis, he questioned, when a similarly heavy
rain in Günsbach produced nothing of the kind? (His father’s
answer: In the old days it came down in bucketsful, not in
drops as it does today.)
Later, as a young man
involved in military service
for Germany, Schweitzer
spent some of his leisure
time opening his Greek New
Testament and reading a text
that was to play a powerful
role in his exegesis of the
Bible and his interpretation
of the person of Jesus:
Matthew 10. (Today I might
prefer to refer to this as the
Matthean version and
revision of the mission
speech in the synoptic
sayings source Q.) In
Matthew 10, Jesus sends out
the twelve followers to announce that heaven’s kingdom is
near, and he reassures them that, although they will be
opposed, they will not finish going through the towns of Israel
before the child of humankind – conventionally called the son
of man – comes. The child of humankind who is coming,
Schweitzer recognized, is the apocalyptic figure announced in