TIM KIRK STRAUSS, DAVID FRIEDRICH (1808–74)

TIM KIRK STRAUSS, DAVID FRIEDRICH (1808–74)

David Friedrich Strauss was a Protestant theologian from the Swabian region of Southwest Germany, who shook the world of Church and theology in 1835–6 with his work on The Life of Jesus (Das Leben Jesu, trans. 1842–4)—a work often referred to as the most important theological milestone in the nineteenth century. It was soon translated into various languages, saw several editions and triggered off the publication of some fifty theological counter-polemics. Strauss thus became famous beyond the borders of Germany. He is regarded as a major influence on both the development of Protestant theology and the atheistic critique of religion.

Son of a merchant and a Protestant minister’s daughter, he studied theology with the aim of becoming a minister. His studies led him to Hegel whose dialectical thinking had a profound impact on him (see HEGEL AND HEGELIANISM). In 1832, Strauss was offered a position in the famous Protestant Seminary in the Swabian university town of Tübingen. The publication of Das Leben Jesu triggered off a furious debate about his contention that the gospels had to be seen as myths and not as historical accounts of the life of Jesus. Not surprisingly, such a public assault on the bastions of traditional Christian faith put an end to any hopes of him ever becoming a minister. Due to his radical theological ideas even a university career subsequently proved to be elusive, forcing him to work as a private scholar and writer. In the revolutionary year of 1848 he

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failed to secure a mandate to the German parliamentary assembly in Frankfurt but managed to be elected as a moderate liberal to the Diet of his home state of Württemberg.

During his life he published several successful works, amongst which biographies of historical personalities who had been ‘dissenters’ like himself, for example the biography of Ulrich von Hutten (1858, trans. 1874). His Christliche Glaubenslehre (Christian Dogma, 1840–1) portrayed the traditional Christian belief system as being inferior to science. In 1864 he wrote a popularized version of his early masterpiece—The Life of Jesus for the People (Das Leben Jesu für das deutsche Volk bearbeitet, trans. 1879). In his last work The Old Faith and the New: A Confession (Der alte und der neue Glaube, 1872, trans. 1873) he explained his concept of a humanistic religion based on science and materialism.

Strauss’s goal was to develop Christianity into a humanistic religion by means of interpreting the gospels as myths and stressing the identity of Christ with humanity. Strauss did not deny the historical existence of Jesus; he viewed Jesus as a historical person, as a Jewish prophet who grew up in Nazareth, was baptized by John, had disciples, opposed the Pharisees, was an exceptional man giving the impression to be the Messiah and was crucified. But the crucial point in Strauss’s argument was that Jesus was only human and not divine. From a historical perspective there were no divine incarnation, miracles or resurrection—a contention that was diametrically opposed to the Church teachings, which saw the gospels as ‘supernatural history’ based on the direct intervention of God. Strauss was not the first and only one of contemporary theologians to question certain elements of the historical veracity of the gospels, in particular the virgin birth: his theology needs to be seen in the context of the so-called ‘life of Jesus- research’. This research had been inspired by the Enlightenment and was conducted by Protestant theologians from the late eighteenth century onwards as a scientific enquiry into the life of Jesus by means of biblical and non-biblical sources. They asked themselves to what extent the gospels could be considered a reliable source for the reconstruction of the life of the historical Jesus, and they tried to distinguish between the teachings of Jesus and those of the Apostles. What they struggled with most in their efforts to come close to the historical Jesus were supernatural events such as the miracles. But Strauss went further: he was the first to de-mask the gospels in their totality as myths. By doing so, he denied the centrality of the historicity of Jesus as God’s son for Christianity—a tenet that was held inalienable by his theological opponent Schleiermacher. Strauss regarded the authors of the gospels not as frauds but as propagandists of a ‘truth’ that they had come to believe in as the fulfilment of messianic prophecies: since Jesus was believed to be the prophesied Messiah all the other prophesies, such as the virgin birth, were projected as real historical events onto his life, with the miracles serving as confirmations of his divine power.

Strauss deemed the idea of a ‘Christ’ to be a valid one, but its realization would not be enacted in a historical individuality, in a single person, but rather in the whole of mankind. His logical conclusion was to see the gospels merely as myths containing excellent maxims of life conduct and portraying the idea of the ‘Gottmensch’ (God-man). God was an impersonal, infinite spirit manifesting itself in the finite forms of the natural world and the human spirit. This infinite spirit was neither God by himself nor man by himself, but the God-man, neither the infinite alone nor the finite alone. Unity of man and the divine could never be reached in one individual but only in the whole of humanity.

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Strauss thus attacked the very core of traditional Christology, substituting an individual, Jesus, with the idea of a ‘Christ’ manifesting itself in humanity. It can be argued that such an idea is basically un-Christian and even a-theistic. His peculiar fusion of theology and philosophy was certainly un-Christian in the orthodox sense. He laid the theoretical groundwork of a critique of religion that was elaborated upon by philosophers such as FEUERBACH and Marx (see MARX AND MARXISM), and which in connection with the theories of DARWIN was a powerful tool to question religious belief as such.