Schweitzer was brought up as a Lutheran. His father was a Lutheran pastor, but the village church was shared amicably with the Roman Catholic priest and his congregation.
From early childhood Schweitzer was fascinated by the Bible stories, and also puzzled. He wanted to know how it was that Jesus’ family were so poor when they had been given presents of gold and frankincense and myrrh by the Wise Men from the East.
As he grew to manhood these inconvenient questions became more serious, and in the end led to the publication of two hugely important books, “The Mystery of the Kingdom of God” and “The Quest of the Historical Jesus”. These were to create shock and some bitterness among his fellow pastors and professors at Strasbourg University.
The conclusion he reached, after the profoundest study of the Gospels, was that Jesus, a Jewish rabbi, had genuinely expected that by being crucified he would return after three days as the Lord of a world transformed into total peace and perfection – the Kingdom of God predicted by the prophets.
So Jesus had been mistaken. And the Christian Church had spent the subsequent 2,000 years trying to explain this failure by saying that Jesus had been speaking of a spiritual kingdom in human hearts, not a physical one. This, however, was a conception so foreign to Jewish thought at the time that if he had meant that he would have had to say so. But he never did.
The paradoxical thing was, however, that the more Schweitzer studied Jesus, the more he felt that this was a man of such supreme spiritual and ethical perfection that for Schweitzer he was forever “my Master”.
