Albert Schweitzer

Life

Schweitzer was born in 1875 in Kaysersberg, Alsace, which was then German territory. He grew up in Günsbach, where his father served as a Lutheran pastor. He studied philosophy and theology at the University of Strasbourg and earned a doctorate in philosophy with a dissertation on Kant's philosophy of religion. He later served as a preacher at St. Nicholas Church in Strasbourg and taught in the university's faculty of theology.

Around the age of thirty, he resolved to devote himself to medical service in Africa and began studying medicine, qualifying as a physician in 1913. That same year he and his wife, Helene Bresslau, traveled to Lambaréné in Gabon, then part of French Equatorial Africa, and opened a hospital. The undertaking was carried out in cooperation with the Paris Missionary Society. Because some within the society objected to his theology, however, he reportedly had to agree not to preach and to confine himself to medical work.

During World War I he was interned in France as a German national. He returned to Lambaréné in 1924 and rebuilt the hospital, thereafter raising funds for its operation by giving concerts and lectures in Europe. He died at Lambaréné in 1965.

Work and Achievements

• Theology: In From Reimarus to Wrede (1906; later editions titled The Quest of the Historical Jesus), he surveyed the portraits of Jesus drawn by nineteenth-century scholars. He argued that each of these portraits projected the scholar's own ideals onto Jesus. In their place, he presented Jesus as an apocalyptic prophet who awaited the imminent end of the world and the coming of the kingdom of God, a view known as "consistent (or thoroughgoing) eschatology." This view had a major influence on the study of eschatology and the interpretation of the Gospels. In 1930 he published The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle, which interpreted the thought of Paul as "Christ-mysticism."
• Music: He wrote a study of Bach and was active as an organist and as an advocate for the restoration of organs.
• Ethics and medicine: He proposed "reverence for life" as the fundamental principle of ethics—the conviction that all life is to be respected and protected. The hospital at Lambaréné treated the local population for nearly half a century. He received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1952, and in his later years he issued appeals against nuclear weapons testing.

Assessment

His service and his ethic of reverence for life are highly regarded across denominational lines. Assessments of his theology, however, are divided. Conservative denominations and theologians place him within the stream of liberal theology, citing his view of Jesus as a prophet whose eschatological predictions went unfulfilled and his distance from orthodox Christology. Historical-critical scholars, by contrast, regard his work as a turning point that exposed the limitations of nineteenth-century Jesus research. His medical work has also drawn criticism. Some have argued that his attitude toward Africans reflected benevolent paternalism—regarding them merely as objects of protection rather than treating them as equals—and others have contended that the way he ran the hospital never escaped a colonial-era outlook.