Dialogue while Hiking – Martin Buber and Albert Schweitzer

In his 1950 Forward to Two Types of Faith, Buber’s major book comparing Judaism and Christianity, he wrote a warm acknowledgement of four Christian theologians whose work had been instrumental for the thinking expressed in the book. Albert Schweitzer was one of those four.

Buber’s published correspondence with Schweitzer spanned thirty years from 1928 to 1958. Their mutual admiration was clear throughout as were their theological differences.

On February 23, 1933, Buber took a train from Heppenheim to Königsfeld, a small town at the northern edge of the Black Forest near Strasbourg where Schweitzer had made his home, to spend a good part of the day with Schweitzer. In the Foreword he wrote seventeen years later, Buber referred explicitly and movingly to the personal impact of that I-Thou encounter as it unfolded in the course of their walk together:

The hours of a hike we took together through the landscape of Königsfeld and through that of the spirit remain unforgettable in my heart . . .  (14)

That day when they traversed landscapes, both of the Black Forest and of the spirit, became the core moment of the dialogical relationship which the two men shared.

Buber traced his debt to Schweitzer back to 1901, when a book by Schweitzer first gave him “a strong incentive for my studies on . . . the meaning of the servant of God in Deutero-Isaiah for Jesus.” It was that year that Schweitzer published Das Messianitäts- und Leidensgeheimnis: eine Skizze des Lebens Jesu (tr. The Mystery of the Kingdom of God), a study of Jesus in relation to the servant of God in Isaiah which has strong parallels to Buber’s interpretation of Jesus in Two Types of Faith (Otto Spear, “In the View of Research: Schweitzer and Buber on the Will of Jesus and the Idea of the Kingdom of God,”Universitas, January 1980).

In summing up, Buber expressed his gratitude to Schweitzer for more than just his writings; he had received something of Schweitzer’s openness of spirit through his person and his life:

I am thankful to Albert Schweitzer that through him, through his person and his life, I first got to know the open-mindedness, and thus also the particular closeness to Israel, which are possible for Christians and also for Christian theologians.  (13-14)