Here I would like to advance the admittedly speculative hypothesis that the peculiar quality of music lies in its ability to produce a highly specific form of relating to the world, one in which our relationship to the world as a whole becomes tangible and thus can be both modulated and modified. Music in a way negotiates the quality of relation itself, whereas languages and sign systems can only ever thematize one particular relationship to or segment of the world at a time… [Listening] to music has a different orientation than seeing, grasping, or feeling. The experience of music suspends the division between self and world, transforming it in a way into a pure relationship. Music is the rhythms, sounds, melodies, and tones between self and world, even if these of course have their source in the social world and the world of things. The universe of sound consists in its ability to express or generate all manner of different and differently nuanced relationships: strife, loneliness, desolation, resentment, alienation, and tension, as well as yearning, refuge, security, love, responsivity. This pure relational quality adheres to music in all of its manifestations, high culture as well as pop culture, and allows us to comprehend how it is that music and dance have always been so closely linked. …
[95] Only from this perspective can we understand how, on the one hand, music possesses the power to change the way we are situated in the world (our “attunement”), while, on the other hand, we crave different kinds of music depending on our relationship to the world at a certain moment. Even (and especially) music that expresses sadness, melancholy, hopelessness, or strife is capable of moving us, because we are able to experience it as resonating with our own sadness, melancholy, or strife, i.e. with our own relationships to the world. We experience being moved by such sounds as something positive (even and especially when we are brought to tears) and not at all as something that itself makes us depressed. To the contrary, it is when we are no longer touched, moved, or gripped by music that we experience alienation or, in extreme cases, depression, as it is then that we experience the world as mute, even as it is still so loud. …
If my contention is correct that music negotiates the quality of relation (to the world) itself, then we can begin to understand the eminently important function that it is capable of fulfilling in modern society. Music affirms and potentially corrects, moderates, and modifies our relation to the world, repeatedly re-establishing it as the “ur-relationship” from which subject and world origi-nate… Seen from this perspective, the “musicalization” of the world since the twentieth century seems to be an almost inevitable correlate (because complementary in its effects) to the growing reification of our two-sided bodily relationship to the world[.]
— Hartmut Rosa (tr. James C. Wagner), Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World (London: Polity, 2019), 94–95
[Our] work is not done simply by distinguishing between good resonance and bad alienation. Rather, it is here that our conceptual problems begin. First, it is possible to identify experiences that exhibit characteristics of “negative” resonance, either because they are directly harmful to subjects or because they have normatively undesirable or even disastrous “side-effects.” Second, the longing for total and lasting resonance with the world itself turns out to be a subjectively pathological and in political terms potentially totalitarian tendency. Third (and relat-edly), we shall see that forms and phases of alienation are not only unavoidable, but also required for the subsequent development of resonant relationships. It will, moreover, prove necessary to conceptually differentiate between brief, often intense moments of resonant experience and lasting resonant relationships, which are necessary to provide a stable and reliable basis for such repeatable experiences.
— Hartmut Rosa (tr. James C. Wagner), Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World, 39
Eighteenth-century man was the man who could no longer remain ignorant of the significance of the fact that Copernicus and Galileo were right, that this vast and rich earth of his, the theatre of his deeds was not the centre of the universe, but a grain of dust amid countless others in this universe, and who clearly saw the consequences of all this. What did this really apocalyptic revolution in his picture of the universe mean for man? An unprecedented and boundless humiliation of man? No, said the man of the eighteenth century, who was not the first to gain this knowledge, but certainly the first to realize it fully and completely; no, man is all the greater for this, man is in the centre of all things, in a quite different sense, too, for he was able to discover this revolutionary truth by his own resources and to think it abstractly, again to consider and penetrate a world which had expanded overnight into infinity—and without anything else having changed, without his having to pay for it in any [24] way: clearly now the world was even more and properly so his world! It is paradoxical and yet it is a fact that the answer to his humiliation was those philosophical systems of rationalism, empiricism and scepticism which made men even more self-confident. The geocentric picture of the universe was replaced as a matter of course by the anthropocentric.
— Karl Barth, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century: Its Background and History, 23–24
It gives me no pleasure to have (exclusively in private) accurately “predicted” the outcome of this election. Nor do I take it as an indicator of any special prescience. Elections — especially national elections — are complex, highly contingent things. Nevertheless, I think my basic heuristic has been confirmed:
There are (at bottom) two types of elections, and similarly two types of candidates: turnout and persuasion. The type of election is dynamically determined by the candidates running, general background factors, etc., in ways too complicated to get into here; but a clear narrative emerges relatively early about which sort it is.
To be a successful persuasion candidate, a candidate must be remarkably gifted in rhetorically positioning him or herself to draw a margin of victory from voters who might otherwise vote for their opponent.
To be a successful turnout candidate, a candidate must possess a deep personal connection to his or her base of support, such that the margin of victory is secured by turning out a greater proportion of their supporters than their opponent.
Regardless of his or her persuasive gifts, a persuasion candidate is quite unlikely to win a genuine turnout election — it actually depresses energy among one’s existing supporters, because they won’t feel as important. This is the electoral equivalent of bringing a knife to a gun fight.
Donald Trump, especially at this point in his political career, is a turnout candidate par excellence.
The Democrats, to face him, chose… Kamala Harris, a profoundly unpersuasive, remarkably impersonal politician: in other words, neither an effective persuasion candidate nor an effective turnout candidate.
A Trump victory was not inevitable against “Generic Democrat,” or even against a relatively extreme Democrat — indeed I continue to suspect that Bernie Sanders could have won against Trump in any of the last three general elections.
But with the specific Democrat who is Kamala Harris, whom voters consistently said they “didn’t know enough about” and found impersonal, artificial, and distant — a Democratic win in that scenario was almost always next to impossible.
The fundamentally unserious approach to politics which the Democratic Party has taken for the last eight years has now been given (what should be) its decisive rebuke. In that period Democrats have insisted, wall-to-wall, that Trump was a fascist; that he represented a unique threat to democracy; that their opposition to him was specifically about him and not about their distaste for his constituents’ values (this last was always far and away the hardest to believe and the least persuasively presented). At almost no points have they actually behaved as though they believed any of this.
Consider some counterfactuals. If Democrats really thought that Donald Trump were, say, America’s Mussolini, what differing decisions would they have taken?
They would have sought grounds to impeach him early in his first term, when their public ability to hold the moral high ground was far stronger and his hold on American voters — as well as his own personal attachment to the presidency — was far weaker, rather than waiting nearly three years to build an exceptionally complicated and laughably unpersuasive case that was rightly shot down in the Senate;
They would have taken serious account of the economic and political concerns of Trump’s voters, rather than dismissing those voters variously as “a basket of deplorables,” “garbage,” “flyover country,” etc. — the kind of multigenerational condescension that had primed many of these voters to embrace Trump in the first place;
They would have refused to allow Joe Biden to choose, for nakedly ideological reasons, so inept and untested a vice-presidential candidate as Harris, given that Biden was clearly only ever going to be — and ran in 2020 as — a one-term president restoring normalcy and setting up a succession plan;
They would have moved quickly to impeach and convict Trump immediately following the débâcle of January 6, 2021, when there was serious urgency and near-universal agreement that he had committed high crimes and misdemeanors — rather than waiting until he was nearly out of office, once there was not time to complete the process before he left office, raising legitimate constitutional questions about whether a no-longer sitting President could be impeached at all;
They would have taken seriously the Trumpward shift of ethnic minorities, especially among non-white Hispanic and African-American men, that was already on display in the 2020 results and has just cooked their goose in 2024;
They would not have [checks notes] lavishly funded Trumpier candidates in Republican primaries in 2022, on the theory that such extreme candidates would be easier to defeat in general elections (yes — I still can’t quite believe this actually happened);
They would have refused to permit Biden to run for a second term when his cognitive decline was already on display and would obviously be mercilessly exploited by Trump (who could almost hardly believe his good fortune);
They would have taken voters’ concerns about inflation seriously and sought to communicate sympathetically (not to mention listening to the economists who warned in 2021 that inflation was on its way and was being exacerbated by federal policies), rather than dismissing it with the (lamentably accurate but immensely condescending) message that “uneducated voters don’t understand the difference between price level and inflation;”
And so on and so forth.
Americans — and many men and women around the world — are about to pay, I think, a serious price for the Democrats’ unseriousness. Not that I wish Harris had won the election, exactly. I did not vote for her, could not have done so in good conscience, and do not wish her to be president. I would be deeply disturbed by many of the policies which a Harris administration would enact (just as I expect to be under a second Trump administration). In either case, I would and do fear for the peace of the world. Republicans’ unseriousness as well deserves now, and has deserved for nearly a decade, a profound rebuke which it has not received — or perhaps which, in the complete desiccation of public conservatism and the total remaking of the Party of Lincoln according to the image of Trump, it has received in full. If at any point I thought the Republican Party qua party ought to be saved, I do not think so now and have not thought so for several years. Nevertheless it is the Democrats whom I consider responsible for where we are now, more even in a way than Trump himself, who possesses fearsome political showman instincts but clearly did not expect to win in 2016 and even seemed surprised last night to be winning again in 2024. The Democrats, faced with Candidate, then President, then Candidate Trump again, had and should have taken opportunity after opportunity to demonstrate they really were the party of the people, the party in touch with reality, the party of national unity: the party willing to pitch a big tent and pursue a broadly constructive vision together. Instead they have been persistently reactive, elitist, divisive, ideologically purist, and deconstructive.
Eight years ago, I woke up the morning after the election and wrote a private journal entry expressing my deep sense of shame that so many people like me — white, male, theologically conservative Christian — had voted for Donald Trump to be president of the United States. I do not repudiate that now. I still feel ashamed, for both my “tribe” and the whole nation, that Trump has been and most likely will again hold the highest office: that is a deeply shameful state of affairs. I similarly am deeply dismayed at the ongoing rationalization by (mostly white and male) Christians that Trump is (e.g.) a contemporary King David, or Cyrus, or what have you, though such rationalizations have faded in force and frequency as Trump has shown increasingly less and less interest in maintaining a pretense of sympathy to evangelical Christianity or even pro-life positions. (As far as I can tell, Trump understands that with the fall of Roe his “beautiful Christians” have now received their reward in full, and are thus permanently beholden to him; it mystifies me that so many of my fellow Christians apparently cannot see how nakedly transactional Trump’s commitment to the pro-life cause always was, despite the remarkable degree to which he was willing to deliver on that transaction.) Nevertheless, shame is no longer my dominant sensation. Think of the business axiom: “Your system is perfectly designed to produce the results it is producing.” America’s Democrats are an essential part of that system. They may not like the outputs, but they have spent the last eight years and more oiling the machinery to perfection. Now comes their reckoning: Donald Trump (and J.D. Vance) in the White House, a Republican-controlled Senate, most probably a Republican House as well, and a remarkably youthful six-seat conservative majority on the Supreme Court. Will they learn? Will they bear fruits in keeping with repentance?
Addendum: I am not an anarchist, nor a leftist (neither of which, furthermore, are coextensive). Nevertheless the two reactions which have seemed most effectively to put their finger on the matter at hand are those of the anarchist-ish Justin Smith-Ruiu (though you’ll have to pardon the somewhat self-consciously erudite prose) and of the leftist-ish Tyler Austin Harper. Somewhere in the overlap of these two takes, I think, is the heart of the matter.
Addendum secundo: Jake Meador, as usual, is bang on as well.
A catena of quotations from Schweitzer’s elegant concluding chapter — whatever one makes of his own historical portrait of Jesus, which is the complementary strand in his thought to the below (indeed the number of ellipses etc. indicates that the two are twisted together in this chapter like a double helix), it is very hard to deny the force and incision of this polemic against the projection-as-historicization of Jesus:
Whatever the ultimate solution may be, the historical Jesus of whom the criticism of the future, taking as its starting-point the problems which have been recognized and admitted, will draw the portrait, can never render modern theology the services which it claimed from its own half-historical, half-modern, Jesus. He will be a Jesus, who was Messiah, and lived as such, either on the ground of a literary fiction of the earliest Evangelist, or on the ground of a purely eschatological Messianic conception. In either case, He will not be a Jesus Christ to whom the [397] religion of the present can ascribe, according to its long-cherished custom, its own thoughts and ideas, as it did with the Jesus of its own making. …
The study of the Life of Jesus has had a curious history. It set out in quest of the historical Jesus, believing that when it had found Him it could bring Him straight into our time as a Teacher and Saviour. It loosed the bands by which He had been riveted for centuries to the stony rocks of ecclesiastical doctrine, and rejoiced to see life and movement coming into the figure once more, and the historical Jesus advancing, as it seemed, to meet it. But He does not stay; He passes by our time and returns to His own. What surprised and dismayed the theology of the last forty years was that, despite all forced and arbitrary interpretations, it could not keep Him in our time, but had to let Him go. He returned to His own time, not owing to the application of any historical ingenuity, but by the same inevitable necessity by which the liberated pendulum returns to its original position. …
[398] We modern theologians are too proud of our historical method, too proud of our historical Jesus, too confident in our belief in the spiritual gains which our historical theology can bring to the world. The thought that we could build up by the increase of historical knowledge a new and vigorous Christianity and set free new spiritual forces, rules us like a fixed idea, and prevents us from seeing that the task which we have grappled with and in some measure discharged is only one of the intellectual preliminaries of the great religious task. We thought that it was for us to lead our time by a roundabout way through the historical Jesus, as we understood Him, in order to bring it to the Jesus who is a spiritual power in the present. This roundabout way has now been closed by genuine history.
There was a danger of our thrusting ourselves between men and the Gospels, and refusing to leave the individual man alone with the sayings of Jesus. There was a danger that we should offer them a Jesus who was too small, because we had forced Him into conformity with our human standards and human psychology. To see that, one need only read the Lives of Jesus written since the ‘sixties [1860s], and notice what they have made of the great imperious sayings of the Lord, how they have weakened down His imperative world-contemning [sic] demands upon individuals, that He might not come into conflict with our ethical ideals, and might tune His denial of the world to our acceptance of it. Many of the greatest sayings are found lying in a corner like explosive shells from which the charges have been removed. No small portion of elemental religious power needed to be drawn off from His sayings to prevent them from conflicting with our system of religious world-acceptance. We have made Jesus hold another language with our time from that which He really held.
In the process we ourselves have been enfeebled, and have robbed our own thoughts of their vigour in order to project them back into history and make them speak to us out of the past. It is nothing less than a misfortune for modern theology that it mixes history with everything and ends by being proud of the skill with which it finds its own thoughts—even to its beggarly pseudo-[399]metaphysic with which it has banished genuine speculative metaphysic from the sphere of religion—in Jesus, and represents Him as expressing them. …
[400] Because it is thus preoccupied with the general, the universal, modern theology is determined to find its world-accepting ethic in the teaching of Jesus. Therein lies its weakness. The world affirms itself automatically; the modern spirit cannot but affirm it. But why on that account abolish the conflict between modern life, with the world-affirming spirit which inspires it as a whole, and the world-negating spirit of Jesus? Why spare the spirit of the individual man its appointed task of fighting its way through the world-negation of Jesus, of contending with Him at every step over the value of material and intellectual goods—a conflict in which it may never rest? For the general, for the institutions of society, the rule is: affirmation of the world, in conscious opposition to the view of Jesus, on the ground that the world has affirmed itself! This general affirmation of the world, however, if it is to be Christian, must in the individual spirit be Christianised and transfigured by the personal rejection of the world which is preached in the sayings of Jesus. It is only by means of the tension thus set up that religious energy can be communicated to our time. There [401] was a danger that modern theology, for the sake of peace, would deny the world-negation in the sayings of Jesus, with which Protestantism was out of sympathy, and thus unstring the bow and make Protestantism a mere sociological instead of a religious force. There was perhaps also a danger of inward insincerity, in the fact that it refused to admit to itself and others that it maintained its affirmation of the world in opposition to the sayings of Jesus, simply because it could not do otherwise. For that reason it is a good thing that the true historical Jesus should overthrow the modern Jesus, should rise up against the modern spirit and send upon earth, not peace, but a sword.
— Albert Schweitzer (tr. William Montgomery), The Quest of the Historical Jesus: A Critical Study of its Progress from Reimarus to Wrede (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1910), 396–401.
The dispute arises in part because there are really two types of continents: Those recognized by cultures around the world, and those recognized by geologists. Cultures can define a continent any way they want, while geologists have to use a definition. And geological research in recent years has made defining continental boundaries less simple than it might have once seemed as researchers find evidence of unexpected continental material.
A strong co-sign to this from Matt Martens, on “The Problem of Voting for Candidates who Promise to Do Evil”. To his final paragraphs about the “lesser of two evils” and “throwing your vote away” questions with which weirdos like me (and him) are ceaselessly plagued I would like to add two things.
Christians are resurrection people. That is to say, the non-negotiable ground of our faith — and therefore also of the whole of our lives — is the belief that Jesus of Nazareth, having been quite definitively condemned by His own people’s leaders and shamefully executed at the hands of the occupying Roman state, was raised from the dead on the third day in cheerful defiance of those verdicts. (“He that dwelleth in heaven shall laugh them to scorn!”) From the earliest days, as soon as His friends had got over their initial shock, they came to reflect upon His resurrection as the singular and definitive demonstration that in His death God had triumphed over not only all earthly and spiritual principalities and powers but also the deeper corrupting principles of Sin and Death from which those principalities derived their authority. This meant that the Christians had a sure ground for hope — both beyond and within their earthly lives — precisely from beyond the horizons of earthly power. Bishop Lesslie Newbigin is supposed to have remarked, “I am neither an optimist nor a pessimist. Jesus Christ is risen from the dead!” Here is the point: A resurrection person ought not constrain his or her horizons of hope — and therefore of evaluation, of judgment, of choice — to those provided by earthly powers and principalities. They are simply too small, too narrow, too weak, to contain the immense possibilities that are disclosed and promised by Life sprung from the tomb. The kingdom of God is (as Jesus taught us) like a mustard seed. It appeared small and insignificant when it was planted. But after nearly two thousand years of growth, it has become a great tree that shades the whole world, and its leaves are for the healing of the nations.
Being resurrection people therefore comes with a remarkable freedom with respect to the powers and principalities, and the whole cultural-symbolic-religious structure that keeps them in place. We serve them not. There are indeed many ‘gods’ and many ’lords’ in heaven and on earth — but for us, One God and One Lord! They wish to occupy the center of our lives, thoughts, decisions, fears, anxieties — but Jesus, enthroned in heaven and reigning here through the Holy Spirit (Whose power raised Him from the dead), has already displaced them. They wish us to submit to them, to accept their terms of service, to make their devils’ bargains — but we have already and exclusively submitted to Jesus, Who has overthrown them. What this means in the context of this election is that I am supremely unconcerned about “throwing away” my vote by withholding it from either major-party candidate (in a swing state no less!). If you see the devil, as Luther may have remarked, spit in his face and go on your merry way.* The bipolar political system has set itself up as an idolatrous orthodoxy, and the only thing to do with an idol is to desecrate it however you can. I will not cast my vote for a candidate whom I understand to be the “lesser of two evils” merely because he or she is the “lesser” one. Think about what the “lesser of two evils” language assumes: two options, both evil, no alternatives. Jesus came to set me and you free from such false dichotomies! How can those of us who died to sin still live in it? What does it profit a man if he gains the world — or at least his preferred presidential candidate in office for a few years — but loses his soul? I do not accept the terms and conditions.
None of this means that I am not — that Christians ought not be — deeply dismayed by the evils of the world; indeed, those who live by the resurrection should be most dismayed by and most tireless in opposing the principles of crucifixion. Neither am I blind to the real effects that this election will have on me, on my neighbors, on my future children, on those who live (unlike me) far from the heart of the American Empire; both, I think, lesser and greater effects than is generally supposed. In a way I am less concerned about whom I, or anyone else, may vote for than how I approach the task of voting for someone — and of living: in the full fear and love of God, and according to the dictates of the conscience that fear and love shape. I am, like St. Paul, not aware of anything against myself in this matter, but I am not thereby acquitted. It is God who judges me. Therefore do not pass judgment before the appointed time, before the Lord comes, when whatever has been in darkness will be brought into the light and the secrets of the heart will be revealed. On that day I will give account to God for every careless word. So vote for a major party candidate if you like, if your conscience permits you to do it — but do it in fear and trembling for the reckoning that is coming. For our nation, yes: but also for your soul.
* Admittedly, Luther probably said “fart in his face” instead — or something even more pungent. He was Christendom’s greatest scatologist.
[While] the Enlightenment — heterogeneous, contradictory, and complex as its ideas may have been — did gradually come to establish the concept of the self-determined way of life as an effective cultural benchmark in the realms of politics and pedagogy, religion and aesthetics, the economy and everyday practice, it generally tended to supplement this concept with the idea that reason, nature, and the (political) common good would come to provide a “natural” limit to the spaces opened up by the ideal of self-determination and thus a more or less generalizable, socially acceptable way of life and concept of happiness. Over the course of the nineteenth and especially the twentieth century, the demand for self-determination expanded into ever more spheres of life, while the idea that this demand could be substantially or essentially limited by reason, nature, and community became increasingly less plausible and lost much of its binding force. At the same time, social institutions were gradually reshaped to become dependent on anonymous actors. From education to the professions [19], from the supermarket to party democracy, from the religious constitution to the art market to the use of media, subjects capable of acting and making decisions in accordance with individual preferences have become a functional requirement of modern institutions.
— Hartmut Rosa (tr. James C. Wagner), Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World (London: Polity, 2019), 18–19
A truly stunning passage — nay, demolition job — on the whole historical-critical project from Albert Schweitzer, which deserves and demands to be quoted in full:
For the last ten years [i.e., the first decade of the 1900s] modern historical theology has more and more adapted itself to the needs of the man in the street. More and more, even in the best class of works, it makes use of attractive head-lines as a means of presenting its results in a lively form to the masses. Intoxicated with its own ingenuity in inventing these, it becomes more and more confident in its cause, and has come to believe that the world’s salvation depends in no small measure upon the spreading of its own “assured” results broad-cast among the people. It is time that it should begin to doubt itself, to doubt its “historical” Jesus, to doubt the confidence with which it has looked to its own construction for the moral and religious regeneration of our time. Its Jesus is not alive, however Germanic they may make him.
It was no accident that the chief priest of “German art for German people” found himself at one with the modern theologians and offered them his alliance. Since the ‘sixties [i.e., the 1860s] the critical study of the Life of Jesus in Germany has been unconsciously under the influence of an imposing modern-religious nationalism in art. It has been deflected by it as by an underground magnetic current. It was in vain that a few purely historical investigators uplifted their voices in protest. The process had to work itself out. For historical criticism had become, in the hands of most of those who practised it, a secret struggle to reconcile the Germanic religious spirit with the Spirit of Jesus of Nazareth. It was concerned for the religious interests of the present. Therefore its error had a kind of greatness, it was in fact the greatest thing about it; and the severity with which the pure historian treats it is in proportion to his respect for its spirit. For this German critical study of the Life of Jesus is an essential part of German religion. As of old Jacob wrestled with the angel, so German theology wrestles with Jesus of Nazareth and will not let Him go until he bless it—that is, until He will consent to serve it and will suffer Himself to be drawn by the Germanic spirit into the midst of our time and our civilisation. But when the day breaks, the wrestler must let Him go. He will not cross the ford with us. Jesus of Nazareth will not suffer Himself to be modernised. As an historic figure He refuses to be detached from His own time. He has no answer [311] for the question, “Tell us Thy name in our speech and for our day!” But He does bless those who have wrestled with Him, so that, though they cannot take Him with them, yet, like men who have seen God face to face and received strength in their souls, they go on their way with renewed courage, ready to do battle with the world and its powers.
But the historic Jesus and the Germanic spirit cannot be brought together except by an act of historic violence which in the end injures both religion and history. [Note: !!!!!!!!!] A time will come when our theology, with its pride in its historical character, will get rid of its rationalistic bias. This bias leads it to project back into history what belongs to our own time, the eager struggle of the modern religious spirit with the Spirit of Jesus, and seek in history justification and authority for its beginning. The consequence is that it creates the historical Jesus in its own image, so that it is not the modern spirit influenced by the Spirit of Jesus, but the Jesus of Nazareth constructed by modern historical theology, that is set to work upon our race.
Therefore both the theology and its picture of Jesus are poor and weak. Its Jesus, because He has been measured by the petty standard of the modern man, at variance with himself, not to say of the modern candidate in theology who has made shipwreck; the theologians themselves, because instead of seeking, for themselves and others, how they may best bring the Spirit of Jesus in living power into our world, they keep continually forging new portraits of the historical Jesus, and think they have accomplished something great when they have drawn an Oh! of astonishment from the multitude, such as the crowds of a great city emit on catching sight of a new advertisement in coloured lights.
— Albert Schweitzer (tr. William Montgomery), The Quest of the Historical Jesus: A Critical Study of its Progress from Reimarus to Wrede (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1910), 310–11.
In John 12:41, the narrator of the Fourth Gospel remarks, “Isaiah said these things because he saw his glory and spoke of him.” There is no question that the referent of the pronouns “his” and “him” is Jesus. Similarly there is no ambiguity about the episode in which Isaiah “saw his glory”: it is the vision of Isaiah 6 in which the prophet sees the Lord “high and lifted up.” (The quotation from Isaiah 6 which immediately precedes this verse all but proves this.) John is making a simple exegetical point, with weighty theological ramifications: when Isaiah saw the Lord, the Lord he saw was Jesus, the Logos, the eternal Son, in his eternal heavenly glory.
(John also clearly believes that the “suffering servant” of Isaiah 53 is likewise Jesus; but that is a point upon which to expand another time.)
This helps to clarify what, from the trinitarian perspective of the New Testament (yes, I said it!), is the exact nature of the testamental discontinuity — and continuity. It is not that the Old Testament exclusively reveals the Father as God, while the Son is previously “unknown” as also being God. (A fortiori regarding the Spirit!) Neither, therefore, is it that God was known as One in the Old Covenant, and is now known as Three in the New, and these must somehow be reconciled by a complicated theological grammar. Rather, John’s remark implies that when the One God has been seen and heard and worshipped in the Old Covenant, it is as the eternal Son that He has been seen and heard and worshipped. The Logos is always characteristically the one who makes the invisible God visible — audible, perceptible, thinkable, knowable. (Consider John 1:18: “No one has ever seen God.”) There is for John thus, at the divine level, an absolute continuity of both revelation and worship between the covenants. The discontinuity — and therefore the scandal — of the New Covenant is merely (!) that God the eternal Son is revealed and worshipped as a man: “the Logos became flesh and dwelt among us.” This is the scandal which is too great for the Pharisees in the passage to accept — “to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?”