The author of this book, a reworked version of a doctorate written at the University of Fribourg, seeks to link Albert Schweitzer's biblical-critical work, in particular on Jesus, with his wider philosophical idea of reverence for life. Put more specifically: ‘Albert Schweitzer's interpretation of the life of the historical Jesus was done against the backdrop of his philosophical worldview and in view of his soteriological ethical scheme.’

The book divides itself into eight chapters. After a brief introduction, the reader is introduced to the main influences and tenets of Schweitzer's thought. Special importance is given to Kant's quest for a reasoned ethical principle, to Schopenhauer's empirical foundation of ethics and Nietzsche's emphasis on life affirmation and the need for a subjective ethic. Also significant is Schweitzer's agnosticism about discovering a purpose for the world (epistemological scepticism), inherited in different ways from Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. For Schweitzer, if purpose is to be found in existence, this can only be from within the human will, not from observation of the world, which lacks a discernible telos. Schweitzer's own philosophical idea, captured rightly or wrongly in the idea of reverence for life, is the means by which the world, so obviously in a degenerate state (here Schweitzer draws upon Nietzschean critiques of the world as it is) will be regenerated. Schweitzer's philosophical thoughts, then, are, according to Igbokwe, bereft of religious content and, because of their exclusivist claims, pose ‘a big challenge to the Christological soteriology of Christian theology’. It is Igbokwe's claim that it was against this background that Schweitzer set out on his quest for the historical Jesus. There then follow four chapters devoted to discussion of Schweitzer's understanding of Jesus. The first of these is taken up with a discussion of the structure of Schweitzer's Quest, showing how it is dictated by Schweitzer's own theory of ‘konsequente Eschatologie’ or ‘thoroughgoing eschatology’. Or put another way, how Schweitzer ‘wishes to recast the history of research into a new division: vor der Eschatologie und nach der Escahtologie; or vor Schweitzer und nach Schweitzer’. The next three chapters address what Igbokwe takes to be the central concerns of Schweitzer's own life of Jesus, the secret of the kingdom of God, the secret of the Messiah and the secret of the passion. These chapters are largely descriptive, explaining Schweitzer's sometimes complex reconstruction of the life of Jesus around the idea of thoroughgoing eschatology. In chapter vi Igbokwe makes plain the results of Schweitzer's discussion of Jesus’ life, namely that the historical Jesus, seen as an eschatological Messiah designatus, was a failure. Jesus’ death in fact spells the end of the eschatological worldview. ‘To talk of a gracious, salvific intervention of God in the world has no meaning within the framework of Schweitzer's worldview.’ Schweitzer's attempt, in the light of this presentation, to replace the historical Jesus, a failed preacher of an ethic of life denial, with a spiritualised Jesus, whose will can somehow motivate our own, fails because the tensions between this Jesus, inspired by some of his own philosophical principles, and the historical Jesus of Schweitzer's reconstruction, are too great. Attempts to read Schweitzer's work on Paul, with its emphasis on Jesus mysticism (already present in the Quest), as signs of an incipient Christology are unconvincing. Schweitzer's own soteriological viewpoint, surreptitiously supported by his own deconstruction of the life of Jesus through his theory of thoroughgoing eschatology, leave no room for a set of Christian principles centred on Christ's redemptive action through the cross and resurrection, ideas of grace and a ‘real’ eschatological vision involving the final actions of God. Igbokwe's concluding chapter, which has more the quality of an apologetic/polemic, repeats some of the points just made in support of a theocentric vision of the world and its future.

This is an odd book in some ways. It presents the reader with a solid and thoughtful introduction to aspects of Schweitzer's work, in particular his philosophy and his understanding of the life of Jesus and along the way makes some helpful observations, not least on Schweitzer's relationship to theological liberalism and to Nietzsche; and on the self-serving structure of Schweitzer's Quest. But I wonder to what extent it successfully marries Schweitzer's philosophy of ethical mysticism with his work on Jesus? At one level Igbokwe appears to be arguing that Schweitzer's work on Jesus, with its emphasis on thoroughgoing eschatology, and its concomitant claim that the historical Jesus was a messianic failure (for want of a better term), was somehow a necessary (and negative) step in making his own ‘secular’ theory of redemption more appealing. True, Igbokwe attempts to show in chapter vi how Schweitzer's own ‘spiritualised’ Jesus reflects some of the assumptions of his philosophical view but this is not done in any real detail or with specific reference to the idea of ‘thoroughgoing eschatology’. Igbokwe's emphasis, as far as I understand him, is much more on the negative effect of Schweitzer's research on Jesus as a means of pointing up his own secular vision of salvation than on the relationship between such work and his philosophical assumptions. The case for a negative view of thoroughgoing eschatology's role is perhaps exaggerated. After all, as Pleitner has shown, Schweitzer in all of his books on Jesus is engaged in a complex hermeneutical battle to preserve Jesus for the modern world (more in this respect could have been made of the difference between the first and second editions of the Quest, reference to which barely features in the book under review, and which is important for a number of reasons, not least the fact that Igbokwe attributes so much significance to Schweitzer's statement about the wheel of history crushing Jesus, a paragraph which is strikingly omitted from the second edition of the Quest). Schweitzer remained extraordinarily attached to Jesus all his life and while not possessing a conventional Christology, found it difficult, in spite of his rationalist assumptions, to dispense with him. Barsam's attempts, following Clark, to posit a stronger Christological commitment than Igbokwe is willing to, emerges in part from his sense that Schweitzer's belief that an individual's reflection on being a will to live among other wills to live would lead automatically to reverence for life, only works in logic if we assume the transformative presence of a will to love, associated by Schweitzer with Christ, is not really addressed; as are other points that Barsam makes in defence of a more conventional understanding of God than the pantheism that Igbokwe posits. The Quest is certainly not a straightforward textbook introducing students to a complicated subject in as objective a way as possible, and it certainly is, in its concluding remarks, especially in the second edition, dependent upon developing philosophical thoughts on the part of Schweitzer (he admits as much in his Selbstdarstellung of 1926, originally attributed to Ernst Barthel, and published as ‘Albert Schweitzers Selbstdarstellung seiner theologischen Entwicklung’, in Claus Günzler, Ulrich Luz and Johann Zürcher [eds], Albert Schweitzer: Vorträge, Vorlesungen, Aufsätze, Munich 2003, 370); but I would suggest that it is not also part of a kind of secularist manifesto, whatever one might think of Schweitzer's own religious views.

Schweitzer remains a difficult and sometimes contradictory thinker, as Igbokwe makes clear, but I fear that this book, about which much more could be said, has not quite succeeded in clarifying the connection between Schweitzer's philosophical and theological endeavours, though they undoubtedly existed.