STUDY OF RELIGION HANDOUT, PART I 1800-1900Prof. Daniel Alvar.docx

STUDY OF RELIGION HANDOUT, PART I: 1800-1900
Prof. Daniel Alvarez, Florida International University
Bibliography and History: William Baird, History of New
Testament Research: From Deism to Tubingen (Fortress, 1992);
John Rogerson, Old Testament Criticism in the 19th Century
(S.P.C.K, 1984).
Friedrich Schleiermacher (d. 1834). Major works: On Religion:
Speeches to its Despisers among the Educated (1799, 3rd
edition, 1821); Celebration of Christmas (1806); The Christian
Faith (1821); Life of Jesus (published posthumously in the
1864); Introduction to the New Testament (1829-1832); and an
influential work on Hermeneutics [Biblical interpretation],
based on handwritten manuscripts (first published in 1838, but
published in a critical edition without student notes in 1959).
English translations of these works are in print, except for the
Introduction to the New Testament.
One of the founders of the University of Berlin in 1810,
preacher, classical scholar, whose translation of Plato’s
Dialogues is the standard translation in Germany today. S. had
close Jewish friends and was instrumental in the rise of Reform
Judaism and Jewish emancipation. Otto von Bismarck, who in
1871 unified Germany, was S.’s catechumen as a young man.
That in the same year that he became chancellor of a united
Germany Jews were recognized as citizens with full civil rights
might not be an accident (nor perhaps an accident either that
Germany embarked on a path towards militarism and
imperialism under Bismarck). Brought to Berlin W. M. L. de
Wette (father of modern Old Testament criticism), Augustus
Neander (father of modern church history, and famous for his
dictum “the heart makes the theologian”), G. W. Friedrich
Hegel (d. 1831), as well as E. W. Hengstenberg (d. 1866), the

leader of German conservative theology from 1827 until his
death. Influenced his young colleague, Friedrich Tholuck (d.
1877), specialist in Oriental languages, who became a
conservative under the influence of E. W. Hengstenberg, but
who in his early career believed Islam was superior to
Christianity, and who wrote an important book on Sufism
(Sufism, or the Pantheistic Philosophy of Persia [1821]) and a
translation of Islamic mystical writings, Eastern Mysticism
(1825). David F. Strauss (d. 1873) was his student at Berlin and
was later to criticize severely S.’s Life of Jesus as seriously
defective from a historical standpoint.
Scheliermacher is considered the father of Liberal theology.
Although influenced by Kantian idealism, he shifts the essence
of religion from dogma and revelation (orthodoxy) and ethics
(Kant) to feeling. As he says elsewhere, religion is a matter of
the heart, not the head, of the affections, not concepts
(reminiscent of the theology of the American Puritan
theologian, Jonathan Edwards [d. 1758]). He accepted the new
historical criticism coming into its own in the 18th century,
including the Kantian critique of religion that challenged the
viability of the dogmatic and epistemological assumptions of
17th century Protestant scholastic theology; and he saw that a
Christian faith based on the old assumptions would neither
satisfy nor fit in with the new historical and scientific
developments. In shifting the seat of religion to the heart, S.
argued that no result of historical or scientific criticism of
Christianity could destroy faith, since faith, our communion
with God, is not dependent on the vagaries or accidents of
historical or scientific investigations. Our communion or
relationship to the divine is grounded in “the divine in our
feelings,” or as he also says, our “God-consciousness,” and thus
not dependent on the “concepts” through which our relationship
to the divine has been variously expressed in different historical
eras or even in different religions (cf. Speech V of On
Religion).

However, by abandoning the basis of Christianity in dogma and
revelation, and specifically, the Biblical revelation, as the
normative sources for the interpretation of Christianity, S.’s
interpretation of religion based on an inalienable god-
consciousness (“feeling of dependence”), or “the sense of the
heart,” is in danger of degenerating into pure subjectivism,
pantheism, and relativism. Subjectivism, because concepts and
reason are demoted to a subordinate status; what matters are
one’s “feelings,” not truth in any objective sense, one’s faith
rather than the facts and the object upon which that faith is
grounded. Pantheism, because the radical distinction between
God and the human appears to be obliterated. For S. the
difference between Jesus and us is one of degree, not of kind.
We are in principle capable of achieving a god-consciousness to
the same extent and of the same kind as Jesus, thus denying
Jesus’ unique relationship to God the Father as maintained by
orthodox theology. Furthermore, for S. the incarnation becomes
a symbol of the essential unity of the human and divine, and
hence a denial of the radical transcendence of God and of the
essential finitude of the human. A corollary of S.’s Christology
is that Jesus’ role as savior of humankind is made superfluous,
as well as his unique mediatorial role. Every human being,
whether Christian or not, is in principle in the relationship to
the divine as Jesus was, and thus Christianity becomes one
vehicle through which our god-consciousness is awakened, but
not the only one. Neither Jesus, his incarnation, his unique
mediatorial and salvific role, nor the Christian religion can be
taken as unique or as the exclusive location of the divine-human
encounter, and thus S.’s position, despite his own high view of
Jesus Christ, degenerates into relativism.
For S. hardly one dogma of Catholic, Reformation, or 17th
century Protestant theology survives without major qualification
or drastic reinterpretation. But to be fair to S., he saw himself
as an apologist (advocate, defender) of the Christian faith for

his generation. He believed that the radical paradigm shift
brought about by the Enlightenment threatened to dissolve
religion and Christianity in particular. S. thought that
Christianity was much more than the dogmas, concepts, beliefs,
assumptions, through which the Christian faith had been
expressed by earlier generations. Christianity for him could not
be held hostage by the worldview—historical, scientific,
cultural, cosmologica assumptions--of the first generations of
Christians. But to identify Christianity with the concepts
through which it was expressed in times past as both the
orthodox and the despisers of religion in the 18th century
(atheists or skeptics who argued that Christianity and all
religions are a mass of superstitions and falsehoods) whom he
was directly addressing in his speeches did was to do precisely
that. S. wanted to recast Christianity in modern terms, make it
once more intelligible and compelling to men and women of his
generation, and show that the greatness of the message of Jesus
was still worth taking seriously. Whether in the end S. gave up
too much (as Karl Barth, Gresham Machen, and Francis
Schaeffer, among others, believed he did) I leave for you to
judge.
Notable quotes from Schleiermacher: “It matters not what
[concepts] a man adheres to, he can still be pious. His piety, the
divine in his feelings, may be better than his [concepts], and his
desire to place the essence of piety in [concepts] only makes
him misunderstand himself” (On Religion, 3rd edition,
translated by John Oman, 95, translation modified by me).
“Here it was that for the first time I awoke to the consciousness
of the relations of man to a higher world… Here it was that that
mystic tendency developed itself, which has been of so much
importance to me, and has supported and carried me through all
the storms of skepticism. Then it was only germinating; now it
has attained its full development, and I may say, that after all
that I have passed through, I have become Herrnhutter

[Moravian Brethren, a Pietist sect with whom he studied in his
youth] again, only of a higher order (from a letter to Gorg
Reimer (April 30, 1802), quoted in Rowan Life of
Schleiermacher, volume 1, 283-84).
Wilhelm Martin Leberecht de Wette (d. 1849). Major Works:
Contributions to the Introduction to the Old Testament (1806);
Critical and Historical Introduction to the Canonical Books of
the Old and New Testament (1817-1848); On Religion: Its
Essence, the Forms of its Appearance and its Influence on Life
(1827); Letters of Martin Luther (1825-28); The Essence of the
Christian Faith from the Standpoint of Faith (1846); Short
Exegetical Handbook to the New Testament (1836-48).
Influenced by Schleiermacher and the Kantian philosopher
Jacob Fries. The father of the modern historical criticism of the
Old Testament. In his ground-breaking Contributions of 1806,
de Wette formulated a comprehensive interpretation of the Old
Testament on strictly historical principles. The result was as
spectacular as it was disturbing to many. De Wette acknowledge
that it was S.’s (and Fries’ strikingly similar) approach to
religion that had freed him to investigate the Bible critically,
without fearing that his investigations and conclusions would
destroy his faith. But the orthodox were not amused. The naïve
picture of the origin and composition of the Hebrew Bible and
the religion of Israel was subverted: The Books of Chronicles
were late and worthless from a historical point of view, and the
Levitical and Priestly religion of the books a post-exilic
fabrication read back to the time of David and Solomon; Moses
was certainly not the author of much, if any, of the books or the
Levitical religion (as described in the bulk of Exodus,
Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy) attributed traditionally
to him (the first five books or the Pentateuch), most of the
contents of the Pentateuch being quite late (post-exilic, after the
exile, in the 5th century); the Pentateuch are made up of
documents or traditions or sources (J for Yahwist, E for

Elohist), confirming what earlier critics (Astruc, 1753, and
Eichorn, 1787) had argued; contradictions, historical errors,
duplications that betray a complex literary tradition behind the
narratives that undermines traditional claims to authorship
abound in the Bible. Only the work of the prophets and the rise
of a prophetic Yahwism, as well as the history of Israel
contained in Judges-II Kings (reflecting the prophetic critique
of Israelite religious practices), can be placed with any degree
of probability between the 9th-6th century, or close to the
traditional chronology.
De Wette was off the mark in one fundamental point however:
The Levitical religion and institutions of Exodus-Leviticus-
Numbers was dated by him as earlier than the book of
Deuteronomy. It was up to his successors, in particular
Bramberg, George, Kuenen, Graf, and finally Wellhausen to
date priestly institutions and rituals to the exile, and hence
posterior to Deuteronomy (which de Wette rightly dated to the
7th century B.C.). It was the identification and reconstruction of
the “P” or Priestly source by the next generation of scholars
(and Julius Wellhausen in the 1870s in particular) that solved
the puzzles and tensions evident in de Wette’s reconstruction of
the religion of Israel. His dating of Chronicles in the exilic
period should have led him to see the priestly religion of the
bulk of the Pentateuch, which issues from the same priestly
circle and world of thought that produced Chronicles, as late as
well, but it was not to be.
For de Wette, the naïve biblicist picture of the Bible as the
“inerrant” word of God dominant until the 17th century, and the
religion of Israel dependent on that picture, will not survive
sustained, detailed, examination based on rigorous application
critical-historical principles derived from secular history. Other
critics, from Thomas Hobbes, Baruch Spinoza, Richard Simon,
Jean Astruc, and a host of critics both in England (the Deists)
and then in Germany (Eichorn, Gabler, Semler, Michaelis,
Paulus) had seen pieces of the historical and literary problems

before, but none had put the pieces together to produce a
comprehensive historical-critical interpretation of the entire Old
Testament as de Wette did. Julius Wellhausen (d. 1918), the
greatest Old Testament scholar after de Wette, recognized in the
1870s that de Wette had anticipated the fundamental aspects of
his own views of the Old Testament at least forty years before
him. It should be noted that although de Wette is best known for
his criticism of the Old Testament, he also wrote an important
introduction and commentary to the New Testament, to which
he applied the same critical principles he had applied to the
study of the Old Testament and with equally devastating results.
Given the undeniable fact that de Wette was a passionate critic
of the Bible, and that he assailed the traditional (orthodox)
picture of the Bible with perhaps too much glee and enthusiasm,
it is understandable that he alienated the conservatives in
Germany, particularly and fatefully at a time when conservatism
was on the ascendancy in 1817 and thereafter. In 1819 he was
dismissed from Berlin and practically exiled to Switzerland,
where he became professor at the University of Basel in 1822
until his death. German students were prohibited from studying
with de Wette, given that from 1827-1866, under the leadership
of Hengstenberg, Germany experienced a tide of conservatism
that also blocked the professorship of the more radical David F.
Strauss in 1835. It took the personal intervention of Otto von
Bismarck in 1871 for Adolf von Harnack, a liberal church
historian, to be appointed professor of Church History at Berlin.
However, to think that de Wette was simply a destructive critic
with no positive view of religion would be a gross mistake and
an incomplete characterization of his work. Like
Schleiermacher, to whose interpretation of religion de Wette’s
own bears a strong affinity and family resemblance, de Wette
did not understand his work as on the whole negative. He
believed that the “rubble” had to be cleared first before the
permanent in religion and Christianity in particular could
emerge with greater force and clarity. Notwithstanding the
“fallible forms” or garb through which religion is mediated to

us through the historic religions (with Christianity being one
form of religion, among others), once the critical moment is
completed, one can move towards a “constructive” moment
where the movement of God is now transparent and discernable
(“graspable”) in the religious life, institutions, myths, history,
and literary productions. Far from seeing his work as merely
destructive, de Wette saw his work as preparatory to an
appreciation and appropriation of the religious spirit and the
work of God in and through the religion of Israel and its
continuation and fulfillment in the life and work of Jesus of
Nazareth. Through the fallible, the finite, the uncertain (for
history gives us only probabilities and educated guesses with no
hope for absoluteness or definitiveness in our judgments), the
communion of the Israelites with God is palpable; the Bible
gives us an “intimation” or a “presentiment” (technical terms
for de Wette) of God’s presence, “graspable” now not through
the objective certainties and dogmatic beliefs of an ahistorical
orthodoxy, but through the humble, often conflicting and
contradictory, manipulated and embellished, distorted and
hyped, yet nevertheless, and in spite of it all, real and
compelling testimony of all-too-human witnesses to and
transmitters to us of the work of God in their lives and hearts.
De Wette remained to his last days, like Schleiermacher before
him and Ferdinand Christian Baur after him, a preacher.
But what we said about Schleiermacher applies with equal force
to de Wette. His position, like Schleiermachers’, fails to satisfy
us because it is unstable. It wants to be historical, but faithful
to the Christian faith. But can it be both without loss to one or
the other? This question was answered decisively by Strauss,
but not in the way we would like. Mysticism of the
Schleiermachian or de Wettian variety might save religion, but
what about Christianity? The title of one of de Wette’s books is
suggestive in this regard: On Religion: Its Essence, the Forms
of its Appearance and its Influence on Life. Religion takes
many forms, one of which is Christianity. Relativism,

subjectivism, and pantheism rear their ugly head again.
Notable quote from de Wette: “I would gladly have arrived at
results more definite and more in harmony with the views
generally received in the Church; but the Truth can alone
decide. That is no genuine love of Truth which is not ready to
sacrifice its inordinate curiosity where certainty is unattainable,
as well as its pious prejudices. The value of criticism I place
chiefly in the activity to which it excites the spirit of inquiry;
but this spirit of inquiry can never harm a genuine Christian
piety (quoted by Baird, History of New Testament Criticism,
224, from de Wette’s Historico-Critical Introduction to the
Canonical Books of the New Testament, 5th edition, 1848, v).
To that quote one may add another, reflecting the same spirit,
by Samuel Taylor Coleridge: “He, who begins by loving
Christianity better than truth, will proceed by loving his own
Sect or Church better than Christianity, and end in loving
himself better than all” (“Moral and Religious Aphorisms,
XXV,” in Aids to Reflection [1826]).
Georg Wilhelm FriedrichHegel (d. 1831). Major works:
Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), Science of Logic [“Greater
Logic”] (1813-1816), Encyclopedia of the Philosophical
Sciences [“Lesser” Logic, Philosophy of Nature, Philosophy of
Mind] (1817-1830), Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion
(1821, 1824, 1827, 1831).
Hegel was the first major scholar to lecture on world religions,
four times between 1821 and 1827. He was a colleague of
Schleiermacher (and the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer) at
Berlin from 1817 until his death in 1831. If S.’s philosophy and
theology are focused on “feeling” (the affections or emotions)
and religious experience, Hegel’s philosophy focused on the
intellect, on Reason (capital “R”), and Reason’s ability to know
God, to know reality, in contrast to both Schleiermacher and
Kant, since Kant denied that we can have real knowledge of
reality (except as it “appears” to us, never as it is “in itself”) or

of God, and not even of God’s existence.
Kant’s theory of knowledge, central to S.’s understanding of
God, is that we do have real knowledge, but only of a reality
that is in some sense “in us.” The Understanding has power to
impose a structure on appearances (the way we are affected by
reality), but these “appearances” exist entirely within our
consciousness. Even our sense of space and time are forms of
sensibility that exist within consciousness’ immanent (or
“transcendental”) field, and this transcendental field includes
also a rational (categoreal) structure that orders (i.e. imposes a
structure on) the stimuli originating or having their source
beyond or outside consciousness. So, for example, when we
look at any object, we perceive it as outside of us, as one, and
in causal relations or interactions with other objects, as subject
to time-determinations, as existing, as having a host of sensible
properties, and, furthermore, we can anticipate that any future
of experience of any sense experience of the “world” will
appear to us clothed, as it were, in those structural, general
properties. The objectivity of the world of experience is not
guaranteed by empirical experience (which is uncertain and
subjective and, in itself, not subject to rules) but by the
universal, invariant categoreal structure of REASON.
So for Kant there is knowledge of objects given to us in sense
experience, and it is objective knowledge, but this knowledge is
nonetheless limited to the sensible; beyond the bounds of sense
experience nothing can be known. But Hegel (and a few others,
including Kant himself) noticed that Kant’s view of knowledge
leads to a very undesirable consequence: you end up with two
worlds, two realities, two types of objects. One reality (and
object) exists within consciousness, because that reality is
constructed by the Understanding’s operation of the data of the
senses. But the Understanding, said Kant, cannot produce (i.e.
create) the stimuli or the data itself; it can provide the structure,
but the structure is without content until experience (of a
something other than consciousness) provides us with the
content. But where is this content coming from, if it does not

originate from within consciousness? From “outside” in a much
different sense of “outside.” There is the “outside” within
consciousness; but there is an absolute “outside” from whence
originates the content upon which the Understanding runs its
operations. This “outside” source Kant calls the Thing-in-itself.
But if we know nothing about this supersensible reality
(literally, beyond sense experience), first, how do we know it’s
there; and how could it enter into a causal relationship with our
consciousness, which is limited to sense experience, that is the
sensible? This conundrum and the need to solve is what gets
Hegel’s philosophy off the ground.
Hegel argues that if there is real knowledge, then there cannot
be two realities, two objects, one sensible and the other
supersensible. (Remember that sensibility in us cannot produce
or generate the stimuli; sensibility is passive and can only
receive stimuli, input, from a source or cause other than itself.)
Assuming that real knowledge is not only possible but
attainable, Hegel argues against Kant that there is only one
reality, and subject (consciousness) and object exist within that
one reality. Kant was on the right track, the object is indeed
“inside” consciousness, but not in a relative but in an absolute
sense; Consciousness generates both the concepts or the
categories of Reason and the object (i.e. the content) itself.
That is why we can know reality, because reality is not beyond
consciousness or Reason, but is produced or “constituted” by
Reason itself. That Reason Hegel calls Geist (German, Spirit).
The object, reality, is us looking back at itself. Or as Hegel
puts it more dramatically, Reality is “God looking back at
itself” as in a mirror!
The point is not that Hegel is right; the point is that he is right
vis à vis Kant. Unless something like what Hegel is saying is
right (there is no gap between thought and reality), then
objective knowledge is not possible. A reality totally
independent our the Understanding’s categoreal structure cannot
be guaranteed to obey the rules given by the structure, and even
Kant understood that most clearly! [Students interested in where

Kant recognizes this can see me or ask me in class.]
So religion is for Hegel not grounded in mystical experience (as
in S.); and in fact it is not grounded in historical evidences or
proofs. Both experience and history are questionable (as his
great disciple, David F. Strauss sought to demonstrate [see
below]). We can know reality and we can know God, because
we are beings who are Spirit or Consciousness (in theological
language, God) in principle; and history is our ascent to a self-
consciousness of ourselves as Spirit and of reality itself as
Spirit, Consciousness. Indebted to the Enlightenment, Hegel
(and S.) recognized that neither Christianity nor religion can be
defended on the basis of dogma or revelation, nor on the basis
of history; religion, if it is to survive in the modern world,
needs to be grounded in something else, and that for Hegel was
his philosophical system and interpretation of knowledge and
reality. Both S. and Hegel saw themselves as defenders of the
Christian faith and of the place of religion in the post-
Enlightenment world. S. on the basis of religious experience;
Hegel on the basis of a an interpretation of reality that he
claimed saved and preserved the doctrines (content, message) of
Christianity, but now (correctly) in terms of philosophy.
Christianity is not founded on history (“external” events) but on
deep truths that can only be properly understood and
appropriated through a vast philosophical re-interpretation.
So what becomes of the “incarnation” in Hegel? In humanity
and creation, God has become incarnate (see Strauss’ “Preface”
to the Life of Jesus [posted on Blackboard]). We are the
expression of God in his finite dimension (just as God in the
traditional language of dogma is the infinite polarity of the
finite-infinite dimension of Geist. The death of Jesus on the
cross? God died on the cross literally because God had to
experience finitude to the fullest extent (i.e. incarnation in a
finite human being, the experience of death, the most extreme
form of finitude). What is “the finite” for Hegel? A category
of his Science of Logic, which for Hegel captures the structure
of God’s reality, and all the phases or stages through which God

(Spirit) has to pass (or experience) as the development of God
in history! “Salvation”? The realization of freedom and justice
in history, which will come to pass since history is the field in
which God realizes his “will” (manifests God’s self). What of
the “Holy Spirit”? It is the reconciliation of the finite of the
infinite as realized in the Christian community, the kingdom of
God on earth, where the will of God is realized as it is in
“heaven.” Hegel has “demythologized” the concepts of dogma,
but has sought to preserve their content in a way that can be
defended against both the Enlightenment, on the one hand, and
Dogmatic theology, on the other; and that can be established on
the basis of a firm philosophical and logical foundation!
But for some, like E. W. Hengstenberg, both S. and Hegel
represented the destruction of Christianity. Even Hegel
commented that his “translation” of Christian concepts to his
philosophical and political thought would be perceived not as a
preservation of the content but its elimination. For
Hengstenberg, the content is inseparable from the concepts, and
therefore traditional concepts taken literally must be defended
against the subjectivism of S.’s mysticism and the rationalistic
translation of Hegel that only manages to destroy Christianity,
not save it.
What about the non-Christian religions? Christianity was for
Hegel the “absolute” religion, the highest stage of the evolution
of Spirit in history. There is no question about that. But he
recognizes the march or manifestation of Spirit (God) in all
religions, from the most primitive to the highest. Neither S. nor
Hegel abandoned their belief that Christianity was the highest
and most spiritual of all religions.
David Friedrich Strauss (d. 1873). Major works: Life of Jesus
Critically Examined (1835); The Christian Faith in its Historical
Development and in War with Modern Knowledge
[Wissenschaft] (1840-41); In Defense of My Life of Jesus
Against the Hegelians (1841); Life of Jesus For the German
People (1864); The Christ of Faith and the Jesus of History: A
Critique of the Schleiermachian Life of Jesus (1865); The Old

and the New Faith (1873). Student of Hegel (for one year) and
Schleiermacher at Berlin, and Ferdinand Christian Baur at
Tubingen, and later Professor there until his dismissal in 1836.
Strauss criticized all that went before him, and specially
Schleiermacher, for not applying the historical method with
thorough-going rigor. For Strauss, all his predecessors had
straddled the fence, feigning to uphold and apply the historical
method but shielding enough of the “supernatural” from it to
save their faith. In his Life of Jesus of 1835, Strauss abandons
all attempts that try preserve the historicity of the Biblical
narrative through a “rationalistic” explanation in non-
supernatural terms (Paulus); all “mediating” efforts
(Schleiermacher, de Wette, Neander, Tholuck) that either limit
the supernatural only to the most exceptional cases (e.g., the
resurrection), or elevate it to the “supra-historical” (beyond and
above history and historical investigation) level accessible only
through faith or direct religious experience; and the old
“supernaturalism,” defended most ably by Hengstenberg from
1827 onward, that takes the Bible as it is as giving us a factual
and literal record of what actually happened, with miracles,
resurrection, incarnation, virgin birth, substitutionary
atonement, messianic prophecies, and verbal plenary inspiration
and inerrancy. Instead Strauss, in the first edition of Life of
Jesus (1835), under the influence of a Hegel, believes that he
has proven Hegel’s point: that the “representational”
interpretation of Christianity as historical “fact” has been
destroyed by historical criticism and only myth is left.
The validation of Christianity on the basis of history is denied
by a careful historic-critical investigation of the life of Jesus,
and only a philosophical appropriation of Christianity based on
Hegel’s system, where the content [Inhalt] or message is
preserved can save Christianity from refutation. [Only much
later, will Strauss reject Hegel and move towards a more radical
form of Naturalism, the only point of view consistent with the
standpoint of secular critical history and modern science

according to him, in his last work, The Old and the New Faith.]
From the historical (and implicitly naturalistic) standpoint,
Strauss jettisons the virgin birth, miracles (except for a few that
have natural, psychological or psychosomatic explanation),
resurrection, incarnation, and the like. The incarnation and
virgin birth are clearly mythological; the resurrection not only
mythological but also “impossible” from a modern scientific
point of view. The appearances of the risen Jesus must have
been some sort of mass hallucination or hysteria, or something
like it. For Strauss, the gospels, and particularly the Gospel of
John, are unhistorical; they furnish us with fragments so laden
with myth—for him, unhistorical fiction, which, from a
Hegelian standpoint is proper to the representational-external
mode of thinking, although not without some truth that can only
be recovered by a philosophical, conceptual-philosophical
interpretation, that is, Hegel’s—,contradictions, and
improbabilities, that a reconstruction of the life of the Jesus
historically is impossible. Myth has swallowed up Jesus, and
what can be salvaged at best from the Gospel records is the Idea
(i.e. content or message) that in history the Absolute (Spirit) of
Hegel has manifested itself, although Strauss adds emphatically,
by no means uniquely in the one man Jesus of Nazareth (cf.
“Preface” to the first edition of the Life of Jesus, on
Blackboard). Ironically, if anything historical can be salvaged
from the gospels said Strauss is Jesus’ belief in his imminent
return (the 2nd coming, or the coming of the “Son of Man”),
which Strauss takes Jesus to have said it would take place
during the life-time of the disciples (cf. Matthew 10:23, 16:28;
Mark 9:1 and parallels; II Peter 3:3, 4). And in this belief, Jesus
was clearly proven to be wrong. The strong “delay motif” in
Luke and II Peter is prove that the apologetic strategy of the
third generation of Christians to stave off criticism of the
failure of the second coming to materialize was failing. Only
the spiritual or allegorical interpretation of Christianity by the
late 2nd century and dominant for 1500 years was able to
deflect and in the end repress and suppress the unvarnished

truth that historical criticism had now made irresistible obvious
since Hermann Samuel Reimarus’ Wolfenbüttel Fragments since
their publication by Lessing in 1768 and now established
decisively by Strauss’ even more rigorous examination.
The Life of Jesus was perceived to be, correctly, a brilliant but
utterly destructive work. Strauss realized this and promised a
constructive part II (on Hegelian basis) to follow this first, the
ground-clearing part. Part II never appeared; Strauss never
overcame or transcended (using a technical Hegelian term) the
first moment. In fact, his work became progressively more
critical, and caustic, until in his last work, his testament, he
transcends religion altogether. He did overcome the tension
plaguing the mediating theologians such as Schleiermacher, but
only by an elimination of religion and Christianity.
Hengstenberg, of all people, wrote an appreciative review of the
book. And Hengstenberg also noted, possibly not without pride
(or arrogance), that Strauss was the only consistent Liberal
theologian, the only one willing uncompromisingly to follow
through on his naturalistic assumptions all the way to the end;
all the others held back, not because they were not as
naturalistic as Strauss, but because they lacked the integrity or
conviction that Strauss had. Strauss did in fact severely
castigated Schleiermacher for not being faithful to the
historical-critical method Schleiermacher aspired to apply in his
Life of Jesus (the lectures of which Strauss attended). For
Hengstenberg Strauss’ Life of Jesus represented the reductio ad
absurdum of Liberalism and historical criticism, or at any rate,
a historical criticism that was not at the service of Christianity
and the Bible, and hence the greatest vindication of
supernaturalist Christianity based on the absoluteness of the
Biblical revelation. For Hengstenberg there was no middle
ground possible: Either we go with supernatural Christianity or
we must become in the end, like Strauss, atheists.
Ferdinand Christian Baur (d. 1860). Major works: Symbolism
and Mythology or the Nature Religion of Antiquity (1824); The
Manichean Religious System According to the Sources Newly

Investigated and Developed (1831 ), two works showing Baur’s
concern with the history of religions (anticipating Troeltsch’s
standpoint); The Opposition of Catholicism and Protestantism
According to the Principles and Major Dogmas of both
Conceptual Systems (1833 ); The so-called Pastoral Letters of
the Apostle Paul (1835), where he challenged Pauline
authorship of these letters (anticipated by Schleiermacher in
this); The Epochs of Church Historical Writing (1852), a major
essay on historiography; Paul, the Apostle of Jesus Christ: His
Life, and Impact, his Letters and his Teaching (1845); Critical
Investigations of the Canonical Gospels, in their Relationship to
Each Other, their Character and Origin (1847); Christianity and
the Christian Church in the First Three Centuries (1853). The
books on Paul and early Christianity were the most important
works on Paul and the early Church history of the 19th century,
and the culmination of years of laborious research that began
with the work on “The Christ-Party in the Corinthian Church,
the Opposition between Petrine and Pauline Christianity in the
Early Church …” (1831).
What de Wette was to the Old Testament, Strauss to the life of
Jesus, Baur was to Paul and the history of early Christianity.
Baur was Strauss’ teacher at Tubingen. When Strauss was
dismissed from Tubingen, Baur was the only faculty member
who did not vote against him. He argued that academic freedom
should prevail in the universities, and he also voiced the
opinion that what Strauss had said was already known or
suspected in academic circles (although no one had been able to
synthesize the material with the systematic coherence and
methodological clarity and consistency as Strauss had). Baur
agreed with Strauss on all the major points of the work and,
most importantly, with Strauss’ historical methodology,
although he felt that Strauss had been unnecessarily negative
(sarcasm and ridicule abound throughout the work), and
superficial in his handling of the source materials (deficiencies
Baur attempted to correct in his 1847 work on the Gospels).
Baur believed the gospel accounts contained more history than

Strauss was willing to acknowledge. In particular, Baur
believed it difficult to explain the rise of the resurrection faith
apart from the impact of the historical Jesus. “If Jesus in his
whole appearance was not more than results from this
[Strauss’s] investigation, then it remains all the more puzzling
how the conviction of the disciples, that he must have risen
from the dead, could have developed (Baird, 255).
He also said that he was not (at that time) competent to judge
the work of his brilliant student, whether shrewdly to protect
his own neck from colleagues who always suspected Baur no
less than Strauss, or honestly since no one had until Strauss
subjected the life of Jesus to such piercing analysis and
criticism. It is interesting that Baur’s research focused on Paul
and early church history, indirect evidence (at least to me) that
he believed that Strauss had put the study of the gospels and the
life of Jesus on sound historical grounds. To the end, Strauss
remained loyal and grateful to his teacher. Reproducing Baird
verbatim:
Shortly before Baur’s death, Strauss wrote: “While you in your
writings and in your scientific school have established a might
fortress, the flat land of theology has sunk into a condition of
incredible degeneration. Compared with other theologians, “You
appear as a watchman among the dreamers, a sober man among
the drunken, as a man among boys, a giant among dwarfs”
(Baird, History of New Testament Research, 255, who quotes it
from Horton Harris, Strauss and His Theology [Oxford
University Press, 1975]).
The major achievement of Baur, and one that still haunts our
study and reconstruction of the history of early Christianity
(late 1st and 2nd century), is his argument that there was a deep
rift between a type of Hellenistic-Greek Christianity represented
most notably by Paul, and Jewish or Judaizing Christianity
represented by Peter (and James) and the Jerusalem apostles. To

support this claim Baur carefully studied the Pauline letters
(Galatians and II Corinthians in particular), the Book of Acts,
and the later or Catholic Epistles (Jude, I and II Peter, including
the Pastorals, Ephesians, which for Baur are not from Paul [a
judgment subsequent scholarship has confirmed], and James).
Paul’s interpretation of Christianity was so un-Jewish, and in
some cases so anti-Jewish, that the Jerusalem apostles resented
and opposed Paul’s version of Christianity and tried to
undermine his mission. Paul, as II Corinthians 11-13 and
Galatians 2 show according to Baur, would not submit either to
the authority of the Jerusalem apostles nor conform his “gospel”
to theirs. The Letter of James, as even Luther recognized,
contains a very explicit critique of Paul’s doctrine of
justification by faith alone, and a Jewish emphasis on works [of
the Law]. This conflict was finally resolved by the “early
Catholicism” of the late New Testament letters, including
primarily the Book of Acts, and not only the traditional
“catholic” (or universal) letters, such as Jude, I and II Peter, but
also James, the Pastorals and Ephesians. The Book of Acts,
which devotes 14 chapters to Peter, and the last 14 chapters to
Paul, is for Baur the clearest example of the work of reconciling
(with apparent difficulties even for the author of Acts) Petrine
with Pauline Christianity, with Petrine Christianity triumphing
in the end with Acts subordination of Paul to the authority of
the Jerusalem apostles in Acts 15 and status as their agent in the
propagation of the gospel. Peter is made by the author of Acts
the leader of the gentile (Greek) mission, and Paul is presented
as acting in greater conformity and sympathy with Judaism than
the Paul of his own letters would allow us to deduce.
The errors in dating some of the New Testament writings Baur
was led to make by his Hegelian reconstruction of the
development of early Christianity between Paul and the mid-2nd
century have led many to dismiss Baur too easily. The fact that
his reconstruction, for all its obvious and confirmed defects
(e.g. he dates the Pastorals to the middle or late 2nd, and John

to the late 2nd century, as well as an oversimplication of the
complex views and parties during mid-1st to mid-2nd
centuries), should not overshadow the fact that Baur’s shadow
continues to loom large in the reconstruction of the history of
early Christianity, a history which to date no scholar has been
able to tell in such a comprehensive and compelling way as
Baur. Because of his alleged Hegelian presuppositions, which
according to his critics clouded his judgment and made him
force early Christianity into an artificial procrustean bed of his
own making, Baur’s work has been summarily dismissed by
many. Yet it is becoming progressively clear to scholars that
Baur embarked on a historical reconstruction on rigorous
historical principles, which stands on its own independently and
in spite of his Hegelianism. Baur came self-consciously to see
his task as that of doing for Paul and early Christianity what his
student Strauss had done for Jesus and the Gospels (whose work
likewise stands on its own, despite Strauss’ explicitly stated
identification with Hegel’s philosophy).
Before I leave the period dominated by Strauss and Baur, I must
mention the work of E. W. Hengstenberg, such as The
Authenticity of Daniel and the Integrity of Zachariah (1831),
The Authenticity of the Pentateuch (1836-39), and Christology
of the Old Testament (2nd edition, 1854-57) against liberals of
every stripe (whether Schleiermachian or moderate
[“mediating”], or more radical like Strauss and Baur); and the
sustained and still compelling critiques of Strauss, Baur, and
the Tübingen School (founded by Baur) by Theodore Gottlieb
(Modern Doubt and Christian Belief, 1874) and George P.
Fisher (Essays on the Supernatural Origins of Christianity,
1865). So impressive was the apologetic work of these men that
20th century conservative critiques of liberalism have not
advanced very far beyond the arguments in these works.
Students who are interested in pursuing conservative or
evangelical critiques of 19th (and by extension, 20th) century
liberalism should consult C. Stephen Evans, The Historical

Christ and the Jesus of Faith (Oxford, 1996), and Horton Harris,
The Tübingen School (1975) and David Friedrich Strauss
(1973). For the American and British responses to German
historical criticism at the end of the 19th and beginning of the
20th century, cf. Living Papers Concerning Christian Evidences,
Doctrine, and Morals (Ten volumes, ca. 1887), and The
Fundamentals (Four volumes, 1917), and I should add the later
but continuous (in principle and tone) work of R. Laird Harris,
Inspiration and Canonicity of the Bible (1957). Today, the kind
of defense of Christianity favored by Hengstenberg, whereby
the critics of Christianity are met on their own terms (historical
criticism and science), has received renewed stimulus since the
1980s through the work of Alvin Plantinga (since the late
1960s), and Richard Swinburne, William Lane Craig , and J. P.
Moreland (since the 1980s). These thinkers use philosophy and
science to argue against the critics of Christianity (most
notably, Richard Dawkins, Stephen Hawkings, and a host of
atheistic or naturalistic-minded philosophers and scientists. All
of these thinkers are still alive as of 2015.
Julius Wellhausen (d. 1918). Major works: Prolegomena to the
History of Israel (1878); The Composition of the Hexateuch and
of the Historical Books of the Old Testament (1889), which
reprints his earlier (1876-77) articles published in the Yearbook
for German Theology, Volumes 21, 22; Israel,” Encyclopedia
Britannica, 9th edition (1881); Israelite and Jewish History
(1894).
There were many scholars who labored in the field of Old
Testament between de Wette and Wellhausen. The names of
Vatke, Graf, Kuenen Dutch), Ewald, Bramberg, George
immediately come to mind as the key contributors, and to a
lesser degree Gesenius, Bunsen, Bleek, Hofmann. But to de
Wette and Wellhausen belongs the bulk of the glory as the two
dominant figures of 19th century Old Testament critical
scholarship. As an important important bridge between de Wette
and Wellhausen, the work of Karl Heirich Graf (d. 1869), The

Historical Books of the Old Testament (2 volumes) has to be
mentioned. In this work, “like de Wette, Graf argued for the
untrustworthiness of Chronicles in order to remove the support
of that book for the view of Israelite religion that saw priestly-
levitical institutions as dating at least from Solomon
[institutions that are absent from the parallel narrative in the
books of Kings] (Rogerson, Old Testament Criticism, 258); and
he argued, against de Wette and rightly, that Deuteronomy was
earlier than the priestly-legal-temple material (in the bulk of
Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers), perhaps the fundamental (but
at the time understandable) weakness of de Wette’s Beitr?ge
(1806). Wellhausen, building on the work of Graf, et al., went
on to argue that with Ezekiel in the 6th century B.C., “one saw
the movement towards the triumph of the priestly over the
prophetic, and the Priestly Code and its back-projection of
priestly religion [as seen in Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers] to
the time of Moses marked, together with Chronicles [a work
from priestly circles], the complete triumph of the priestly”
(Rogerson, ibid., 265). De Wette in effect figured out J, E, and
D, but not P (Priestly Code); it was left to Wellhausen, putting
together the pieces given to him by De Wette, and then George,
Bramberg, Graf, and Kuenen, into the dominant theory of the
origins and composition of the Pentateuch, the Documentary
Hypothesis (after the documents J, E, D, P).
Rise of Positivism and Scientific Philosophy after Hegel
After 1840 Hegelianism in Germany was dead Some of his most
important disciples—David F. Strauss, Ludwig Feuerbach, Max
Stirner, Bruno Bauer, and Karl Marx—had repudiated the
religious idealism of Hegel and taken a sharp turn towards
materialism and atheism. This anti-Hegelianism was
accompanied both in Germany and France with a return to the
radical empiricism of John Locke and David Hume (along with
the most materialist and anti-religious aspects of the
Enlightenment), with a strong emphasis on the growing prestige
of naturalism in science after Darwin’s publication of On the

Origin of the Species in 1859. In France Auguste Comte (d.
1857) had proclaimed the rise of a new philosophy: Positivism,
which banished all metaphysics (anything beyond the evidence
of the senses and what the natural sciences can verify) as
illusion and fiction. This “scientific philosophy” had a strong
influence on the emerging disciplines of sociology (Durkheim,
Weber), anthropology (E. B. Tylor, James Frazer), and
psychology (Freud). For Comte the world had gone through
three stages: the religious, the philosophical, and the scientific.
The scientific age had arrived and the previous two ages had
passed.
When Albrecht Ritschl, the most significant religious thinker of
the second half of the 19th century, is writing there has been a
reaction to the very anti-spiritual, anti-religious spirit of
Positivism, and many thinkers in Germany saw a return to
Kant’s philosophy as the only way to reclaim the spiritual
(ideal) dimension of reality that naturalistic Positivism had
banished to the nether world of fiction and delusion. Kant had
sharply distinguished between the realm of the senses, the
region of appearance (the province of science, how things
appear to us), and the supersensible realm of reality beyond the
senses (the province of religion and morality, the things in
themselves). Knowledge is limited to the sensory, empirical
evidence, but reality is not co-extensive with the sensible.
Meta-physical (literally, beyond the physical, the sensible)
cannot be proven or known by reason or science, but it cannot
be disproved or proved to be illusion. There is a sharp divide
for Kant here, and in his great work, The Critique of Pure
Reason (1781/1787 2nd edition), he had argued that the realm of
the sensible (science, things as they appear to or affect us
cannot infringe on the realm of the supersensible, the realm of
morality and religion). We cannot experience or know God as
he is in himself (or whether he exists), but we can have faith in
God and direct access to our “moral sense” and “freedom”
within ourselves. As he put in the preface to the second edition
of the CPR, “I must put limits to reason to make room faith.”

We can only know how things affect us, or the effects alone of
the things in themselves. This “back to Kant” movement in the
1870s begins with Friedrich Lange’s publication of his History
of Materialism (1877) and the Neo-Kantian movement in
Germany began in earnest and continued well into the early 20th
century. This revival of Kant gave an enormous impetus to
theology, and Ritschl’s appropriation of Kant for theology and
the interpretation of Christianity led to most important
development in Christian theology at the end of the 19th
century.
Albrecht Ritschl (1839-1889). Major works: The Emergence of
the Early Catholic Church: A Churchly- and Dogmatic-
Historical Study (2nd edition, 1857) The Christian Doctrine of
Justification and Reconcilation (1870-74, 3 volumes, with the
third volume being the most important for understanding
Ritschl’s point of view); Theology and Metaphysics (1881);
Instruction in Christian Religion (1875); History of Pietism
(1880-86, 3 volumes).
Ritschl did not write much, compared with other thinkers;
however, his influence in the second half of the 19th century
and beginning of the 20th was without equal. He is to the
second half of the 19th century what Schleiermacher was to the
first. Originally a follower of the Tübingen School (Ferdinand
Christian Baur), by 1857 he broke away from its influence and
started to develop his own distinctive point of view. Under the
influence of Kant (d. 1804), he accepted that God was not
knowable as he is in himself. Therefore, all we can do as
Christians is to go back to the historical Jesus and the sources
of early Christianity (especially the Bible) to find out what the
foundations of the Christian faith are to which we, as
Christians, are and should be committed. For R. these
foundations are: Jesus, the church, and the kingdom of God.
Jesus is he through which God justifies (makes righteous) and
reconciles humanity to Himself.
Beyond the historic Christian faith we know nothing else about

God, and therefore our faith and understanding of God has to be
strictly based on the Christian witness to God as found in our
Bible. God known not through individual mystical experience
(as Pietists emphasized, the ones that influenced
Schleiermacher), but only through the community, the church;
and it is the business of the church founded by Jesus to realize
the kingdom of God on earth, the message of the kingdom of
God being one of the two major aspects of Jesus’ teaching (the
other being the church itself). The church is the means God is
using to bring about the good news of the gospel to the world
and reconcile humanity to Himself. As Christians we take the
New Testament witness as foundational and authoritative, which
although not perfect (R. is not a Biblicist, like Hengstenberg
and modern-day fundamentalists), is correct in its general
outline (i.e. the message of justification, reconciliation, the
church, the kingdom of God, and the centrality of Jesus of
Nazareth and the force of his personality and influence that
continues to live in and through the church, the community of
the faithful in whom Christ’s spirit dwells and influence
through the ages is felt). No amount of historical studies and
criticism, which R. encouraged, as practiced by Strauss, Baur,
de Wette, or Wellhausen and co. can affect the central message
of the Old and New Testaments (the Bible).
How does Ritschl’s theology work? Here are some examples.
On Jesus Christ:
In himself, Christ is completely unknowable to us; to the extent
that he is [an] object of our knowing, he is an appearance. All
that Scripture and church doctrine say about him does not
describe his essence but only expresses the religious
consciousness of the church. Christ is nothing more than the
Christ appearance in the consciousness of the church. The Holy
Spirit is not a being, not a person, but the foundation of the
communal consciousness of being a child of God. The case is
similar with all doctrine.

And:
Ritschl claims that theology can say nothing about Christ’s
divine nature, his essential unity with the Father, or his pre- and
post-existence {as human}. The question is not what or who
Christ is in himself but only about his value and significance
for us. The Christological dogmas are of no value in helping the
church express its valuation of the person of Christ.
On theology:
… theology is never concerned with the realities of Scripture,
God, Christ, Holy Spirit, etc., in themselves, but only as they
are for us. Each phenomenon, therefore, is dependent on the
observing and knowing capacity of human beings. A thing that
is not observed is unknowable, is nothing; it becomes a thing
only when observed, thanks to the relationship that it now has
with the knowing subject. Therefore, God does not exist without
his kingdom, Christ does not exist without his church that
confesses him as their Lord, revelation does not exist apart from
those who receive it, justification does not exist without faith,
and so forth. What they might be in themselves is idle
speculation.
On knowledge of God:
“The nature of God and the Divine we can only know in its
essence by determining
its value [emphasis mine] for our salvation. . . . we know God
only by revelation, and therefore also must understand the
Godhead of Christ, if it is to be understood at all, as an attribute
revealed to us in His saving influence upon ourselves.”
The conservative Reformed (Calvinist) theologian, Herman
Bavinck (d. 1921), from whom these quotations come, charged

Ritschl with subjectivism. God, Christ exist only for us, as
subjective dimension of our experience, and only a very reduced
form, as we find these concepts of value for us. Apart from our
valuation, our own consciousness (i.e. subjectivity), they are
nothing to us or in themselves. Ritschl would reply that he is
not denying the objective reality of these objects (objects in a
logical sense); only that we only know their effects on the self-
consciousness of Christians through the ages (as Schleiermacher
had said in his mature work, The Christian Faith [1821])
beginning with the work of Jesus in early Christianity. That is
all we have available to us; beyond that historical witness
"about these realities and all we have are their effects upon us,
how do we know they really exist in themselves? Kant himself
could not assure us that God exists, and all we have is faith;
maybe they are all illusions created by a needy consciousness
that fabricates them (as Feuerbach, Marx, Durkheim, Freud and
co. would claim). Ritschl I don’t believe can entirely disavow
this possibility. All he can reply is that “we have these effects,
these historical influences that cannot be denied, and that they
are of enormous value and significance to us. All we can do, as
Kant say, once knowledge and proof is denied to us, is to have
faiththat they are not make-believe.” Furthermore, the church,
the community of Christians provide a corrective to any descent
into subjectivism. For Ritschl, Jesus lives on, as a memory, as
an effect in the church, not in individual personal, mystical
experience (which does lead into subjectivism). The center of
gravity in theology for Ritschl lies in the church, where Christ’s
influence dwells as an abiding “presence.”
At the end of the 19th century Ritschlian theology and
theologians dominated the landscape. Against the mystical and
individualistic aspect of Schleiermacher and Pietism, R.
emphasized church and community; Christ is experienced not
individually, but in and through the community, the church.
This emphasis on church, community, and the kingdom of God
(which was not absent from the mature Schleiermacher) was to
influence the theology of the social gospel that has shaped the

agenda of liberal Christianity until our day (the emphasis social,
economic, and political justice so characteristic of liberal
Christianity, for example).
This side of Ritschl even Ernst Troeltsch, the great theoretician
of the History-of-Religions school, found of great significance
and value. The greatest historian of dogma, Adolf von Harnack,
was a Ritschlian, who articulated the view of theology known as
the Essence-of-Christianity approach in the manifesto of liberal
Christianity, The Essence of Christianity (1900, English
translation, What is Christianity).
But as Troeltsch perceptively noted, Ritschl’s approach to
Christianity tends to degenerate into a kind of biblicism
(emphasis on the Bible, but in Ritschl’s case without inerrancy,
dogmatism, and hostility to historical criticism) and exclusivism
that ignores the encounter of Christianity with the world
religions, on the one hand; and also tends to ignore the
relativizing impact of history on the claims to absoluteness and
finality of Christianity (as Ritschl believed), on the other.
Ritschlian theologians tended to be religious exclusivists, who
were totally indifferent to the impact the study of the non-
Christian religions was having at the end of the 19th century.
Ritschl writes from such a pronounced internalist (i.e. inside
Christianity) point of view that he is indifferent and impervious
to new developments, as if the anthropological and ethnological
study of non-Western cultures and religions (E. B. Tylor’s
Primitive Culture, 1871) is not happening around him, for
example. It is this absence of awareness of the changing
historical situation, including as well the ongoing historical
investigation into early Christianity, that would render
questionable this aspect of the approach to Christianity and
religion of Ritschl and his followers for Troeltsch. Troeltsch
did find Ritschl’s emphasis on the centrality of Jesus of
Nazareth, the community, the church, and the kingdom of God
to be perhaps the most important and lasting contribution of
Ritschl the Christian faith. In the second Handout I deal with
Karl Barth’s critique Liberalism from a totally different

perspective.
Ernst Troeltsch (d. 1923). Major works: “Historical and
Dogmatic Method in Theology” (1898); The Absoluteness of
Christianity and the History of Religions (1901); The Social
Teachings of the Christian Churches (1912); “The Dogmatics of
the History-of-Religions School” (1913); “What does ‘Esssence
of Christianity’ Mean?” (1913); “The Significance of the
Historical Existence of Jesus for Faith” (1911); Historicism and
its Problems (1922); “The Place of Christianity among the
World Religions” (1923); The Christian Faith (1925,
posthumous).
It is the legacy of Schleiermacher, de Wette, Strauss, Baur, and
Wellhausen that Ernst Troeltschhas in mind when he speaks of
the historical method in his great essay of 1898, “On Historical
and Dogmatic Method in Theology.” These were the early
architects and builders of the grand Liberal Tradition in
theology, to which others like Albrecht Ritschl and Wilhelm
Herrmann (theology, with an Schleiermachian emphasis on
personal religious experience), Adolf von Harnack (Ritschlian,
church history), Julius Wellhausen (Old Testament), among
many others, and Troeltsch (history of religions) himself were
to add finishing touches and perhaps a few wrinkles here and
there. But one major unforeseen consequence of the
Schleiermachian approach to theology, and the encounter with
the world religions, was the radical undermining of the
“dogmatic” assumption of the absoluteness and finality of
Christianity. Already Kant, Schleiermacher in Speech V of On
Religion, and the writings of de Wette, Baur, and even Tholuck
(on Islam in the early 1820s) make clear, the religious
consciousness, now severed from, and made independent and
prior to, the Christian revelation opened the possibility that
non-Christian “revelations” and religious experiences could also
mediate an apprehension of the transcendent and the sacred
comparable (and as the young Tholuck exclaimed, superior) to
Christianity. The hegemony of Christianity was broken quite
early then, despite Troeltsch’s own effort to maintain as late as

1901 the “absoluteness of Christianity” (in his book, The
Absoluteness of Christianity and the History of Religions).
Already in his paper of 1898, Troeltsch had realized that there
was no way to retreat from or abandon the historical method
honed in the previous one hundred years. In 1923, a few months
before his death, in a lecture posthumously read at Oxford
University entitled, “The Place of Christianity among the World
Religions,” Troeltsch finally abandons the position of his 1901
book, to the consternation of the editor of that essay. This kind
of Historicism—the view that history relativizes all revelations
and religions, exposing them as a product of historically
conditioned, particular, time-bound cultural matrices, and not
universal, timeless, and perfect disclosures from on high—
occupied Troeltsch in his last years, and his last thoughts on the
subject appeared in volume one of his unfinished Historicism
and its Problems (Historismus und Seine Probleme). This
radical descent into relativism is what led Karl Barth (1889-
1968), the greatest 20th century Protestant theologian, to say
that if he were convinced that the development of the
Reformation (Luther and Calvin) led to Schleiermacher and
Troeltsch, he would consider becoming a Roman Catholic. And
in his monumental Church Dogmatics (1932-1968), Barth
attacks religious relativism explicitly and reaffirms the
absoluteness of the Christian revelation and of Jesus Christ.
Roman Catholicism, despite the strongly ecumenical stance of
Vatican II (early 1960s), has with Pope John Paul II reasserted
the “salvific uniqueness and universality” of the Catholic
Church and Jesus Christ. The Dogmatic method refuses to go
gently into that good night (to paraphrase Dylan Thomas).
Developments after 1860 will be treated in Part II of this
handout.
� By external Hegel means, for example, the kind of
description of Jesus we find in the gospels, where the disciples
are living with Jesus, walking and eating with him, going from
one place to another; and then after he dies and rises from the

dead, rising into heaven in a cloud and telling them he is
coming back to establish the kingdom (the kingdom of God?
The Davidic kingdom, or “kingship,” as in the restoration of the
Davidic dynasty? [Acts 1:6]). Hegel thinks this “external”
history does not capture but rather hides the true meaning
(message, content) of Christianity and as such is irrelevant to
the truth of Christianity. As John 6:44 says, a passage very
meaningful to Hegel, “flesh and blood” cannot reveal to us who
Jesus is but only the Spirit of God. This truth has nothing to do
with Jesus’ physical resurrection and ascent to heaven, where he
is sitting on a throne, and from whence he will return to restore
the Davidic dynasty and rule the world (or Israel) from
Jerusalem. This description or representational of the meaning
of Christianity is superficial in the worst sense of the word: it
focuses on the merely physical or exterior aspect of the
message, which entirely misses the deeper significance of Jesus’
message and truth, which only thought (philosophy) can
retrieve. To insist on the mythical or representational meaning
of Christianity is to doom it to refutation by historical criticism.
� Herman Bavinck, “The Theology of Albrecht Ritschl” (1898),
in The Bavinck Review 3 (2012): 123–63.
� Bavinck, “Theology of Ritschl.”
� Bavinck, “Theology of Ritschl.”
� Ritschl, The Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation
(205), quoted in Bavinck,

� For the Social Gospel, see the American theologians,
Washington Gladden, “The Fatherhood of God” (1899); Walter
Rauschenbusch, Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907), and A
Theology of the Social Gospel (1917); Reinhold Niebuhr,
Leaves from the Notebook of an Tamed Cynic (1929); Arthur C.
McGiffert, “The Kingdom of God” (1909); William Adams
Brown, The Essence of Christianity (1906). Quite
independently of Troeltsch, and no doubt under the pressure
exerted on the social questions of the day by the communist-
socialist movement, the Catholic church had also begun, since
1891, to articulate its own concerns with the social issues of the
day in Leo XIII’s Papal Encyclical, Rerum Novarum.
PAGE
18
REL 2011
MIDTERM EXAM
FALL 2016
Answer three (3) questions in essay form. Each essay should be
at least two (2) pages in length, double-spaced, 12 pt. font. The
total length of the exam should be 6-8 pages. To answer these
questions it is necessary that you have done the readings I list
after each question (Pals, Nigosian, Livingston). The essays
should be submitted as one submission (not three separate
submissions) to Turnitin assignments in Blackboard, no later
than MONDAY, NOVEMBER 7TH, 2016, BEFORE 11:30 P.M.
IT SHOULD BE OBVIOUS YOU WILL NOT BE ABLE TO
ANSWER SOME OF THESE QUESTIONS UNLESS YOU
COME TO CLASS.

1. The (radical) Enlightenment (Spinoza, Reimarus, Hume, and
Kant) had a very negative view of revealed religion in general,
and Christianity in particular. For example, Reimarus looked at
Christianity as a fraud, a fabrication of the power-hungry early
disciples of Jesus. Kant had a complete disregard for revealed
religion (which he found full of superstitions and gross
immoralities) and sought translate Christianity into a moral
system, which we can get on our own through Reason (not
revelation). Hume proposed a naturalistic explanation of
religion and attacked all attempts to rationally prove the
existence of God. Although Schleiermacher and Hegel were
influenced by the Enlightenment in their critique of revelation
and dogma, and were both influenced by Kant and Spinoza, they
had a different analysis and interpretation of religion. 1. State
the (radical) Enlightenment understanding of religion and
compare it and contrast it with that of Schleiermacher and
Hegel. 2. In what ways the way Schleiermacher, and Hegel
see religion a more positive and sympathetic interpretation of
religion and Christianity? 3. Or are the views of religion
offered by Schleiermacher and Hegel in the end more harmful to
Christianity in particular, and religion in general (e.g. by
making too many concessions to scientific naturalism and the
Enlightenment)? (For this essay Handout #1 is essential, and
my lectures on the Enlightenment, Schleiermacher, Hegel; the
Strauss selection posted on Blackboard will give you a pretty
good idea of Hegel’s position.)
2. Emile Durkheim offered a major interpretation of religion
that rivaled Tylor’s and Frazer’s in depth and in many ways
surpassed them in influence. 1. Explain’s Durkheim’s
interpretation and analysis of religion. 2. Explain how
Durkheim’s analysis is similar to Marx’s (and Feuerbach’s), and
ways in which it is different. 3. Is Durkheim’s analysis of
religion continuous (in sync) with the Enlightenment (Hume,
Reimarus, and Feuerbach), or does it significantly go beyond
the Enlightenment? (For this question you must read carefully

the chapter on Durkheim and Marx in Pals, as well my lectures
on Marx, Feuerbach, and Strauss. I have posted a selection
from Feuerbach).
3. Discuss Marx’s thesis, building on the work of Feuerbach
and Hegel (as Hegel was interpreted by Feuerbach) that religion
is a major obstacle to the emancipation of humanity from
superstition and oppression, that religion has been a major force
in legitimizing and justifying the conquest of subjugation of
peoples in the name of their god and religion. QUESTION: a.
Is Marx’s critique of religion for the most part correct, partially
correct, or too simplistic (black and white) to be right? b. In
what ways, as Nietzsche claimed, can it be argued that Marxism
a “Christian heresy.” (You must read the Marx selection in
Pals, and I strongly recommend that you read the Feuerbach
selection posted on Blackboard as well; my lectures on Hebrew
prophecy will be most useful for answering at least part of this
question)
4. The Bhagavad Gita is one of the greatest syntheses in the
history of religions. The Gita reconciles the different paths to
salvation (Karma/Action, Jñana/Knowledge, and
Bhakti/Devotion or faith in God) offered, respectively, by the
Vedas (action in the world), the Upanishads (knowledge of
Brahman or the Absolute), and the Gita (devotion or faith in a
personal, loving and savior God who takes on human form to
make his message available to us humans). Without a doubt, it
represents either one of the greatest spiritual achievement, or
certainly a great example of society at work as Durkheim would
argue; or, as Marx would say, the kind of deceptive and
manipulative attempt to keep a decadent and dying religion
alive for the benefit of the upper Hindu priestly and warrior
classes who saw their power and influence over the masses
decline and who needed to reinvent themselves and their
religion to secure and prolong their power and control over the
people. Defend one of these interpretations (Durkheim, Marx).
(Readings: Marx and Durkheim).
5. As commonly perceived, Judaism, Christianity, Islam,

(Theistic) Hinduism of the Vedic and Bhakti/Devotional (the
Bhagavad Gita) types offer: a. comparable other-worldly
understanding of human “salvation” (liberation) and well-being:
life in a beyond ths world or future life (heaven, paradise, or
Nirvana), that seeks to exit the historical, material existence as
either evil, unchangeable, and not subject to transformation.
With the Upanishads, Hinduism offers a more Pantheistic
(Self=God) understanding of salvation; Buddhism, although
atheistic, understands human salvation (liberation) in terms of a
change of consciousness in the face of suffering and
acquiescence in (acceptance of) the status quo, both agreeing
that life on earth is beyond repair and cannot be altered, and the
only hope is in a new understanding of ourselves in relation to
an illusory, impermanent existence. QUESTION: FIRST, how
is this understanding of “salvation” (from evil, suffering,
injustice, death) in the major world religions vulnerable to the
Marxist interpretation and critique of religion; SECONDLY, is
religion in principle (in its totality and essence) committed to
an other-wordly, supra historical (i.e. beyond or above
historical, or simply indifferent to material existence)
understanding of salvation as Marx claimed? In other words, is
religion only a tool for legitimation of the status quo; or,
secondly, are there voices within at least some of these
traditions that either command transformation of historical-
material existence for the sake of humanity, or are susceptible
to modification and revision that allows them to integrate
action-in-the-world within without doing violence to their
fundamental assumptions (against Marx’s interpretation of
religion). (For this question you need to read, in addition to
Marx in Pals, Livingston chapters 10, 11 and 13 and both of my
handouts; Peter Berger’s selection on Blackboard is important
for understanding the concept of “legitimation” in religion).
6. Although there is a wide gulf separating E. W.
Hengstenberg’s Biblicist Confessionalism (i.e., Conservative
Christianity, holding on the claims and concepts of the Bible
interpreted literally) and the Liberal tradition stemming from

Schleiermacher to Ritschl and Troeltsch(Handout I:
Schleiermacher to Troeltsch), QUESTION: Do they have
anything common? In particular, in how both points of view,
liberal and conservative well into the late 19th century, deal
with Christianity’s encounter with the world religions, the
status of Christianity as compared with the non-Christian
religions, the rise of the sociological-anthropological
understanding and interpretation of religion (Marx, Durkheim,
Tylor, Frazer), and the naturalistic-reductionist assumptions
informing these disciplines? (For this question you should read
carefully Handout I: Schleiermacher to Troeltsch, and should
have read the Pals chapters on Marx, Durkheim, Tylor/Frazer).

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