history when he refuses to explain away the Jewish elements in the plan
and preaching of Jesus as due to mere accommodation, and maintains the
view that the Lord really, to a certain extent, shared this Jewish system
of ideas. According to Hase there are two periods in the Messianic
activity of Jesus. In the first He accepted almost without reservation the
popular ideas regarding the Messianic age. In consequence, however, of His
experience of the practical results of these ideas, He was led to abandon
this error, and in the second period He developed His own distinctive
views. Here we meet for the first time the idea of two different periods
in the life of Jesus, which, especially through the influence of Holtzmann
and Keim, became the prevailing view, and down to Johannes Weiss,
determined the plan of all Lives of Jesus. Hase created the modern
historico‐psychological picture of Jesus. The introduction of this more
penetrating psychology would alone suffice to place him in advance of the
rationalists.
Another interesting point is the thorough way in which he traces out the
historical and literary consequences of this idea of development. The
apostles, he thinks, did not understand this progress of thought on the
part of Jesus, and did not distinguish between the sayings of the first
and second periods. They remained wedded to the eschatological view. After
the death of Jesus this view prevailed so strongly in the primitive
community of disciples that they interpolated their expectations into the
last discourses of Jesus. According to Hase, the apocalyptic discourse in
Matt. xxiv. was originally only a prediction of the judgment upon and
destruction of Jerusalem, but this was obscured later by the influx of the
eschatological views of the apostolic community. Only John remained free
from this error. Therefore the non‐eschatological Fourth Gospel preserves
in their pure form the ideas of Jesus in His second period.
Hase rightly observes that the Messiahship of Jesus plays next to no part
in His preaching, at any rate at first, and that, before the incident at
Caesarea Philippi, it was only in moments of enthusiastic admiration,
rather than with settled conviction, that even the disciples looked on Him
as the Messiah. This indication of the central importance of the
declaration of the Messiahship at Caesarea Philippi is another sign‐post
pointing out the direction which the future study of the life of Jesus was
to follow.
‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
Schleiermacher’s Life of Jesus introduces us to quite a different order of
transitional ideas. Its value lies in the sphere of dogmatics, not of
history. Nowhere, indeed, is it so clear that the great dialectician had
not really a historical mind than precisely in his treatment of the
history of Jesus.
From the first it was no favourable star which presided over this
undertaking. It is true that in 1819 Schleiermacher was the first
theologian who had ever lectured upon this subject. But his Life of Jesus
did not appear until 1864. Its publication had been so long delayed,
partly because it had to be reconstructed from students’ note‐books,
partly because immediately after Schleiermacher, in 1832, had delivered
the course for the last time, it was rendered obsolete by the work of
Strauss. For the questions raised by the latter’s Life of Jesus, published
in 1835, Schleiermacher had no answer, and for the wounds which it made,
no healing. When, in 1864, Schleiermacher’s work was brought forth to view
like an embalmed corse, Strauss accorded to the dead work of the great
theologian a dignified and striking funeral oration.
Schleiermacher is not in search of the historical Jesus, but of the Jesus
Christ of his own system of theology; that is to say, of the historic
figure which seems to him appropriate to the self‐consciousness of the
Redeemer as he represents it. For him the empirical has simply no
existence. A natural psychology is scarcely attempted. He comes to the
facts with a ready‐made dialectic apparatus and sets his puppets in lively
action. Schleiermacher’s dialectic is not a dialectic which generates
reality, like that of Hegel, of which Strauss availed himself, but merely
a dialectic of exposition. In this literary dialectic he is the greatest
master that ever lived.
The limitations of the historical Jesus both in an upward and downward
direction are those only which apply equally to the Jesus of dogma. The
uniqueness of His Divine self‐consciousness is not to be tampered with. It
is equally necessary to avoid Ebionism which does away with the Divine in
Him, and Docetism which destroys His humanity. Schleiermacher loves to
make his hearers shudder by pointing out to them that the least false step
entails precipitation into one or other of these abysses; or at least
would entail it for any one who was not under the guidance of his
infallible dialectic.
In the course of this dialectic treatment, all the historical questions
involved in the life of Jesus come into view one after another, but none
of them is posed or solved from the point of view of the historian; they
are “moments” in his argument.
He is like a spider at work. The spider lets itself down from aloft, and
after making fast some supporting threads to points below, it runs back to
the centre and there keeps spinning away. You look on fascinated, and
before you know it, you are entangled in the web. It is difficult even for
a reader who is strong in the consciousness of possessing a sounder grasp
of the history than Schleiermacher to avoid being caught in the toils of
that magical dialectic.
And how loftily superior the dialectician is! Paulus had shown that, in
view of the use of the title Son of Man, the Messianic self‐consciousness
of Jesus must be interpreted in accordance with the passage in Daniel. On
this Schleiermacher remarks: “I have already said that it is inherently
improbable that such a predilection (_sc._ for the Book of Daniel) would
have been manifested by Christ, because the Book of Daniel does not belong
to the prophetic writings properly so‐called, but to the third division of
the Old Testament literature.”
In his estimate of the importance to be attached to the story of the
baptism, too, he falls behind the historical knowledge of his day. “To lay
such great stress upon the baptism,” he says, “leads either to the Gnostic
view that it was only there that the λόγος united itself with Jesus, or to
the rationalistic view that it was only at the baptism that He became
conscious of His vocation.” But what does history care whether a view is
gnostic or rationalistic if only it is historical!
This dialectic, so fatal often to sound historical views, might have been
expressly created to deal with the question of miracle. Compared with
Schleiermacher’s discussions all that has been written since upon this
subject is mere honest—or dishonest—bungling. Nothing new has been added
to what he says, and no one else has succeeded in saying it with the same
amazing subtlety. It is true, also, that no one else has shown the same
skill in concealing how much in the way of miracle he ultimately retains
and how much he rejects. His solution of the problem is, in fact, not
historical, but dialectical, an attempt to transcend the necessity for a
rationalistic explanation of miracle which does not really succeed in
getting rid of it.
Schleiermacher arranges the miracles in an ascending scale of probability
according to the degree in which they can be seen to depend on the known
influence of spirit upon organic matter. The most easily explained are the
miracles of healing “because we are not without analogies to show that
pathological conditions of a purely functional nature can be removed by
mental influence.” But where, on the other hand, the effect produced by
Christ lies outside the sphere of human life, the difficulties involved
become insoluble. To get rid, in some measure, of these difficulties he
makes use of two expedients. In the first place, he admits that in
particular cases the rationalistic method may have a certain limited
application; in the second place he, like Hase, recognises a difference
between the miracle stories themselves, retaining the Johannine miracles,
but surrendering, more or less completely, the Synoptic miracles as not
resting on evidence of the same certainty and exactness.
That he is still largely under the sway of rationalism can be seen in the
fact that he admits on an equal footing, as conceptions of the
resurrection of Jesus, a return to consciousness from a trance‐state, or a
supernatural restoration to life, thought of as a resurrection. He goes so
far as to say that the decision of this question has very little interest
for him. He fully accepts the principle of Paulus that apart from
corruption there is no certain indication of death.
“All that we can say on this point,” he concludes, “is that even to those
whose business it was to ensure the immediate death of the crucified, in
order that the bodies might at once be taken down, Christ appeared to be
really dead, and this, moreover, although it was contrary to their
expectations, for it was a subject of astonishment. It is no use going any
further into the matter, since nothing can be ascertained in regard to
it.”
What is certain is that Jesus in His real body lived on for a time among
His followers; that the Fourth Gospel requires us to believe. The reports
of the resurrection are not based upon “apparitions.” Schleiermacher’s own
opinion is what really happened was reanimation after apparent death. “If
Christ had only eaten to show that He could eat, while He really had no
need of nourishment, it would have been a pretence—something docetic. This
gives us a clue to all the rest, teaching us to hold firmly to the way in
which Christ intends Himself to be represented, and to put down all that
is miraculous in the accounts of the appearances to the prepossessions of
the disciples.”
When He revealed himself to Mary Magdalene He had no certainty that He
would frequently see her again. “He was conscious that His present
condition was that of genuine human life, but He had no confidence in its
continuance.” He bade His disciples meet Him in Galilee because He could
there enjoy greater privacy and freedom from observation in His
intercourse with them. The difference between the present and the past was
only that He no longer showed Himself to the world. “It was possible that
a movement in favour of an earthly Messianic Kingdom might break out, and
we need only take this possibility into account in order to explain
completely why Jesus remained in such close retirement.” “It was the
premonition of the approaching end of this second life which led Him to
return from Galilee to Jerusalem.”
Of the ascension he says: “Here, therefore, something happened, but what
was seen was incomplete, and has been conjecturally supplemented.” The
underlying rationalistic explanation shows through!
But if the condition in which Jesus lived on after His crucifixion was “a
condition of reanimation,” by what right does Schleiermacher constantly
speak of it as a “resurrection,” as if resurrection and reanimation were
synonymous terms? Further, is it really true that faith has no interest
whatever in the question whether it was as risen from the dead, or merely
as recovered from a state of suspended animation, that Jesus showed
Himself to His disciples? In regard to this, it might seem, the
rationalists were more straightforward.
The moment one tries to take hold of this dialectic it breaks in one’s
fingers. Schleiermacher would not indeed have ventured to play so risky a
game if he had not had a second position to retire to, based on the
distinction between the Synoptic and the Johannine miracle stories. In
this respect he simplified matters for himself, as compared with the
rationalists, even more than Hase. The miracle at the baptism is only
intelligible in the narrative of the Fourth Gospel, where it is not a
question of an external occurrence, but of a purely subjective experience
of John, with which we have nothing to do. The Synoptic story of the
temptation has no intelligible meaning. “To change stones into bread, if
there were need for it, would not have been a sin.” “A leap from the
Temple could have had no attraction for any one.”
The miracles of the birth and childhood are given up without hesitation;
they do not belong to the story of the life of Jesus; and it is the same
with the miracles at His death. One might fancy it was Strauss speaking
when Schleiermacher says: “If we give due consideration to the fact that
we have certainly found in these for the most part simple narratives of
the last moments of Christ two incidents, such as the rending of the veil
of the Temple and the opening of the graves, in reference to which we
cannot possibly suppose that they are literal descriptions of actual
facts, then we are bound to ask the question whether the same does not
apply to many other points. Certainly the mention of the sun’s light
failing and the consequent great darkness looks very much as if it had
been imported by poetic imagination into the simple narrative.”
A rebuke could have no possible effect upon the wind and sea. Here we must
suppose either an alteration of the facts or a different causal connexion.
In this way Schleiermacher—and it was for this reason that these lectures
on the life of Jesus became so celebrated—enabled dogmatics, though not
indeed history, to take a flying leap over the miracle question.
What is chiefly fatal to a sound historical view is his one‐sided
preference for the Fourth Gospel. It is, according to him, only in this
Gospel that the consciousness of Jesus is truly reflected. In this
connexion he expressly remarks that of a progress in the teaching of
Jesus, and of any “development” in Him, there can be no question. His
development is the unimpeded organic unfolding of the idea of the Divine
Sonship.
For the outline of the life of Jesus, also, the Fourth Gospel is alone
authoritative. “The Johannine representation of the way in which the
crisis of His fate was brought about is the only clear one.” The same
applies to the narrative of the resurrection in this Gospel. “Accordingly,
on this point also,” so he concludes his discussion, “I take it as
established that the Gospel of John is the narrative of an eyewitness and
forms an organic whole. The first three Gospels are compilations formed
out of various narratives which had arisen independently; their discourses
are composite structures, and their presentation of the history is such
that one can form no idea of the grouping of events.” The “crowded days,”
such as that of the sermon on the mount and the day of the parables, exist
only in the imagination of the Evangelists. In reality there were no such
days. Luke is the only one of them who has some semblance of historical
order. His Gospel is compiled with much insight and critical tact out of a
number of independent documents, as Schleiermacher believed himself to
have shown convincingly in his critical study of Luke’s Gospel, published
in 1817.
It is only on the ground of such a valuation of the sources that we can
arrive at a just estimate of the different representations of the locality
of the life of Jesus. “The contradictions,” Schleiermacher proceeds,
“could not be explained if all our Gospels stood equally close to Jesus.
But if John stands closer than the others, we may perhaps find the key in
the fact that John, too, mentions it as a prevailing opinion in Jerusalem
that Jesus was a Galilaean, and that Luke, when he has got to the end of
the sections which show skilful arrangement and are united by similarity
of subject, gathers all the rest into the framework of a journey to
Jerusalem. Following this analogy, and not remembering that Jesus had
occasion to go several times a year to Jerusalem, the other two gathered
into one mass all that happened there on various occasions. This could
only have been done by Hellenists.”(26)
Schleiermacher is quite insensible to the graphic realism of the
description of the last days at Jerusalem in Mark and Matthew, and has no
suspicion that if only a single one of the Jerusalem sayings in the
Synoptists is true Jesus had never before spoken in Jerusalem.
The ground of Schleiermacher’s antipathy to the Synoptists lies deeper
than a mere critical view as to their composition. The fact is that their
“picture of Christ” does not agree with that which he wishes to insert
into the history. When it serves his purpose, he does not shrink from the
most arbitrary violence. He abolishes the scene in Gethsemane because he
infers from the silence of John that it cannot have taken place. “The
other Evangelists,” he explains, “give us an account of a sudden
depression and deep distress of spirit which fell upon Jesus, and which He
admitted to His disciples, and they tell us how He sought relief from it
in prayer, and afterwards recovered His serenity and resolution. John
passes over this in silence, and his narrative of what immediately
precedes is not consistent with it.” It is evidently a symbolical story,
as the thrice‐repeated petition shows. “If they speak of such a depression
of spirit, they have given the story that form in order that the example
of Christ might be the more applicable to others in similar
circumstances.”
On these premises it is possible to write a Life of Christ; it is not
possible to write a Life of Jesus. It is, therefore, not by accident that
Schleiermacher regularly speaks, not of Jesus, but of Christ.
VII. DAVID FRIEDRICH STRAUSS—THE MAN AND HIS FATE
In order to understand Strauss one must love him. He was not the greatest,
and not the deepest, of theologians, but he was the most absolutely
sincere. His insight and his errors were alike the insight and the errors
of a prophet. And he had a prophet’s fate. Disappointment and suffering
gave his life its consecration. It unrolls itself before us like a
tragedy, in which, in the end, the gloom is lightened by the mild radiance
which shines forth from the nobility of the sufferer.
Strauss was born in 1808 at Ludwigsburg. His father was a merchant, whose
business, however, was unsuccessful, so that his means steadily declined.
The boy took his ability from his mother, a good, self‐controlled,
sensible, pious woman, to whom he raised a monument in his “Memorial of a
Good Mother” written in 1858, to be given to his daughter on her
confirmation‐day.
From 1821 to 1825 he was a pupil at the “lower seminary” at Blaubeuren,
along with Friedrich Vischer, Pfizer, Zimmermann, Märklin, and Binder.
Among their teachers was Ferdinand Christian Baur, whom they were to meet
with again at the university.
His first year at the university was uninteresting, as it was only in the
following year that the reorganisation of the theological faculty took
place, in consequence of the appointment of Baur. The instruction in the
philosophical faculty was almost equally unsatisfactory, so that the
friends would have gained little from the two years of philosophical
propaedeutic which formed part of the course prescribed for theological
students, if they had not combined to prosecute their philosophical
studies for themselves. The writings of Hegel began to exercise a powerful
influence upon them. For the philosophical faculty, Hegel’s philosophy was
as yet non‐existent.
These student friends were much addicted to poetry. Two journeys which
Strauss made along with his fellow‐student Binder to Weinsberg to see
Justinus Kerner made a deep impression upon him. He had to make a
deliberate effort to escape from the dream‐world of the “Prophetess of
Prevorst.” Some years later, in a Latin note to Binder, he speaks of
Weinsberg as “Mecca nostra.”(27)
According to Vischer’s picture of him, the tall stripling made an
impression of great charm, though he was rather shy except with intimates.
He attended lectures with pedantic regularity.
Baur was at that time still immersed in the prolegomena to his system; but
Strauss already suspected the direction which the thoughts of his young
teacher were to take.
When Strauss and his student friends entered on their duties as clergymen,
the others found great difficulty in bringing their theological views into
line with the popular beliefs which they were expected to preach. Strauss
alone remained free from inner struggles. In a letter to Binder(28) of the
year 1831, he explains that in his sermons—he was then assistant at Klein‐
Ingersheim near Ludwigsburg—he did not use “representative notions”
(_Vorstellungen_, used as a philosophical technicality) such as that of
the Devil, which the people were already prepared to dispense with; but
others which still appeared to be indispensable, such as those of an
eschatological character, he merely endeavoured to present in such a way
that the “intellectual concept” (_Begriff_) which lay behind, might so far
as possible shine through. “When I consider,” he continues, “how far even
in intellectual preaching the expression is inadequate to the true essence
of the concept, it does not seem to me to matter much if one goes even a
step further. I at least go about the matter without the least scruple,
and cannot ascribe this to a mere want of sincerity in myself.”
That is Hegelian logic.
After being for a short time Deputy‐professor at Maulbronn, he took his
doctor’s degree with a dissertation on the ἀποκατάστασις πάντων
(restoration of all things, Acts iii. 21). This work is lost. From his
letters it appears that he treated the subject chiefly from the religious‐
historical point of view.(29)
When Binder took his doctorate with a philosophical thesis on the
immortality of the soul, Strauss, in 1832, wrote to him expressing the
opinion that the belief in personal immortality could not properly be
regarded as a consequence of the Hegelian system, since according to
Hegel, it was not the subjective spirit of the individual person, but only
the objective Spirit, the self‐realising Idea which constantly embodies
itself in new creations, to which immortality belongs.(30)
In October 1831 he went to Berlin to hear Hegel and Schleiermacher. On the
14th of November Hegel, whom he had visited shortly before, was carried
off by cholera. Strauss heard the news in Schleiermacher’s house, from
Schleiermacher himself, and is said to have exclaimed, with a certain want
of tact, considering who his informant was: “And it was to hear him that I
came to Berlin!”
There was no satisfactory basis for a relationship between Schleiermacher
and Strauss. They had nothing in common. That did not prevent Strauss’s
Life of Jesus being sometimes described by opponents of Schleiermacher as
a product of the latter’s philosophy of religion. Indeed, as late as the
’sixties, Tholuck thought it necessary to defend the memory of the great
theologian against this reproach.
As a matter of fact, the plan of the Life of Jesus arose during Strauss’s
intercourse with Vatke, to whom he felt himself strongly drawn. Moreover,
what was first sketched out was not primarily the plan of a Life of Jesus,
but that of a history of the ideas of primitive Christianity, intended to
serve as a standard by which to judge ecclesiastical dogma. The Life of
Jesus was originally designed, it might almost be said, as a mere prologue
to this work, the plan of which was subsequently carried out under the
title, “Christian Theology in its Historical Development and in its
Antagonism with Modern Scientific Knowledge” (published in 1840‐1841).
When in the spring of 1832 he returned to Tübingen to take up the position
of “Repetent”(31) in the theological college (_Stift_), these plans were
laid on the shelf in consequence of his pre‐occupation with philosophy,
and if things had gone according to Strauss’s wishes, they would perhaps
never have come to fulfilment. The “Repetents” had the right to lecture
upon philosophy. Strauss felt himself called upon to come forward as an
apostle of Hegel, and lectured upon Hegel’s logic with tremendous success.
Zeller, who attended these lectures, records the unforgettable impression
which they made on him. Besides championing Hegel, Strauss also lectured
upon Plato, and upon the history of modern philosophy. These were three
happy semesters.