이 논문의 첫 부분은 19세기 신학의 역사와 알브레히트 리츨(Albrecht Ritschl)과 튀빙겐 학파(Tübingen School)의 중요성에 대해 설명합니다. 주요 내용은 다음과 같습니다:
- 리츨의 신학: 리츨은 자연과 정신의 개념을 중심으로 한 윤리적 신학을 발전시켰으며, 이는 기독교 교리의 해석에 있어서 중요한 전환점을 의미했습니다.
- 헬레니즘 비판: 리츨과 하르나크(Adolf Harnack)는 초기 기독교가 헬레니즘 철학에 의해 과도하게 영향을 받았다고 비판했습니다.
- 역사적 신학: 튀빙겐 학파는 역사적 접근을 통해 기독교 교리의 발전을 이해하려 했으며, 이는 신학 연구에 있어서 새로운 방향을 제시했습니다.
- 스트라우스의 영향: 다비드 프리드리히 스트라우스(David Friedrich Strauss)의 저작은 리츨과 튀빙겐 학파 사이의 신학적 논쟁에 영향을 미쳤습니다.
이 부분은 신학적 아이디어와 역사적 맥락을 탐구하면서 19세기 신학 논쟁의 복잡성을 드러냅니다.
* PDF와 HTML을 첨부합니다. 19세기의 인문학적 흐름에서 신학이 강화된 과정을 알 수 있습니다. 당연히, 목회지향적인 신학적 흐름의 결과물로 이해할 수 있습니다.^^
Albrecht_Ritschl_and_the_Tubingen_School.pdf
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Albrecht Ritschl and the Tübingen School
A neglected link in the history of 19th century theology
Johannes Zachhuber
Trinity College, Broad Street, GB-Oxford OX1 3BH,
One of the lasting problems Adolf Harnack bequeathed to 20th century theo-
logical scholarship was the assessment, in his magisterial History of Dogma,
that the Greek Church Fathers, especially Gregory of Nyssa, had introduced
into theology a physical doctrine of salvation. The diagnosis, in Harnack’s
own words, is this:
Christ did not assume the human nature of an individual person, but human nature. Ac-
cordingly, all that was human was intertwined with the Deity; the whole of human nature
became divine by intermixture with the Divine. Gregory conceives this as a strictly phys-
ical process: the leaven of the Deity has pervaded the whole dough of humanity, through
and in Christ; for Christ united with himself the whole of human nature with all its char-
acteristics. The incarnation was an actus medicinalis which is to be thought of as strictly
natural, and that extends to all mankind.1
Much ink has been spilled on arguments about the fairness of this evalua-
tion.2 Hardly ever has it been observed, however, that the view Harnack re-
pudiates so fervently in the fathers has a famous parallel in 19th century the-
ology. It is the upshot of the notorious ‘Last Dilemma’ at the end of David
Strauß’ Life of Jesus that no traditional, nor any modern, concept of the In-
carnation that insists on the human individuality of the God-man can miti-
gate the contradictions entailed by classical Christology:
This is indeed not the mode in which Idea realizes itself; it is not wont to lavish all its
fullness on one exemplar, and be niggardly towards all others—to express itself perfectly
in that one individual, and imperfectly in all the rest: it rather loves to distribute its riches
among a multiplicity of exemplars which reciprocally complete each other—in the alter-
nate appearance and suppression of a series of individuals. And is this no true realization
of the idea? Is not the idea of the unity of the divine and human natures a real one in a far
higher sense, when I regard the whole race of mankind as its realization, than when I sin-
Adolf Harnack, History of Dogma. Translated from the 3rd German edition by Neil
Buchanan et al., New York 1958, vol. 3, 297 and note 580; cf. id., Lehrbuch der Dog-
mengeschichte, vol. 2, Freiburg im Breisgau (Mohr) 21888, 165.
Cf. Reinhard M. Hübner, Die Einheit des Leibes Christi bei Gregor von Nyssa. Unter-
suchungen zum Ursprung der ‘physischen’ Erlösungslehre, Philosophia Patrum 2, Leiden
(Brill) 1974, esp. 3–25.
1
2
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52
gle out one man as such a realization? Is not an incarnation of God from eternity, a truer
one than an incarnation limited to a particular point of time?3
Is Harnack’s alertness to, and criticism of, a physical doctrine of salvation
then a response to Strauß’ idea that Christology proper must have as its sub-
ject all humanity? It may not be entirely easy to assert this with full confi-
dence; in any case, the heuristic value of such an observation is that it directs
our attention to the internal workings of 19th century theology, some of
which have hardly been noticed by more recent scholarship. In the following
I shall pursue the historical background to this very particular historical and
doctrinal squabble to uncover some more fundamental connections, depend-
encies and disagreements that have shaped theological debate from the 1830s
to the end of the century.
In order to gauge the theological significance of Harnack’s criticism of
Patristic ‘physical’ soteriology it is imperative to note its background in the
theology of Albrecht Ritschl. While the overall importance of Ritschl’s the-
ology for Harnack’s thought has been variously assessed,4 it is crucial to see
that Harnack’s present judgment echoes almost literally words applied to the
same phenomenon in the first volume of Ritschl’s major work The Christian
Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation, published in 1870. Ritschl
there, in scathing words, expresses his rejection of views that consider salva-
tion on ‘the analogy of a chemical process of nature, while the human nature
which undergoes it is regarded only as a natural unit’5 and ‘the fancies of the
Church Fathers […] about the deification of the human race as a natural
unity’.6 The context of these words is Ritschl’s proposal that in his historical
account of the doctrines he sets about to study, reconciliation and justifica-
tion, he would pass over the patristic period altogether to start directly with
Anselm and Abelard in the 12th century.
By doing this he consciously deviated from the example set by his aca-
demic teacher and mentor, Ferdinand Christian Baur, in his groundbreaking
3
David Friedrich Strauß, The Life of Jesus Critically Examined. Translated from the fourth
German edition by Marian Evans [=George Eliot], New York (Calvin Blanchard) 1860,
895 = id., Das Leben Jesu kritisch betrachtet, vol. 2, Tübingen (Osiander) 1840, 709.
4
4
Cf. the rather sceptical judgment in: Claus-Dieter Osthövener, ‘Adolf von Harnack als
Systematiker’, in: ZThK 99 (2002), 296–331 with the thorough, historical account in:
Christian Nottmeier, Adolf von Harnack und die deutsche Politik 1890–1930. Eine
biographische Studie zum Verhältnis von Protestantismus, Wissenschaft und Politik, BhT
124, Tübingen (Mohr Siebeck) 2004, 69–81.
Albrecht Ritschl, A Critical History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification and Re-
conciliation. Translated from the German, with the author’s sanction, John Black, Edin-
burgh (Edmonston and Douglas) 1872, 8 = id., Die christliche Lehre von der Recht-
fertigung und Versöhnung, vol. 1, Bonn (Marcus) 1870, 8 f. From the second edition
onwards, Ritschl without changing his fundamental position, omitted those strong value
judgments and added a historical survey from Justin Martyr via Athanasius to John of
Damascus: Die christliche Lehre von der Rechtfertigung und Versöhnung, vol. 1, Bonn
(Marcus) 21882, 3–21.
5
6
Ritschl, Critical History, 9.
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53
monograph on the same subject, which was published in 1838.7 In many
ways, or so at least I shall argue, Ritschl’s major work and thus his theology
must be seen as an attempt to achieve what Baur sought to achieve without
falling into the traps Baur had fallen into. One of the more obvious traps, as
far as Ritschl was concerned, came to light in its more radical form in the
thought of Baur’s other famous pupil, David Friedrich Strauß. Ritschl
never saw in Strauß the genuine heir of Baur’s theology, but had to accept
that in one regard certainly the two were in agreement.8 Baur’s account of
the development of the Christian doctrine of reconciliation led directly to
his explicit endorsement of, and identification with, the Christological
view formulated by Strauß in his Life of Jesus, first published in 1835:
Only the species, to which the individual belongs, the universal under which the partic-
ular and the singular are conceptually subsumed, can mediate between the individual and
the absolute. If it is a fundamental truth of the Christian faith that the human being is of
divine nature and one with God, how else can this essential unity between God and man
be mediated except through universal human nature as it is in itself; the idea of human-
kind which, while continuously being individuated in the infinite multitude of particu-
lars, is also the living, substantial unity, within which is sublated all that is particular
and individual.9
Baur is not, however, merely following in Strauß’ footsteps. Substantially the
same position can be found expressed already in his 1835 monograph Die
Christliche Gnosis.10 Baur evidently saw some theological merit in the iden-
tification of the historical Christ with universal humanity. It is therefore per-
haps not too surprising that, where he is dealing with the Church Fathers, he
7
Ferdinand Christian Baur, Die christliche Lehre von der Versöhnung in ihrer geschichtli-
chen Entwicklung von der ältesten Zeit bis auf die neueste, Tübingen (Osiander) 1838,
esp. 23–141 (for the earliest development up until John Scotus Eriugena).
Cf. Albrecht Ritschl, ‘Über geschichtliche Methode in der Geschichte des Ur-
christenthums’, in: JDTh 6 (1861), 429–459, here: 431–437 (= Ferdinand Christian
Baur, Gesammelte Werke in Einzelausgaben, ed. Klaus Scholder, vol. 5: Für und wider die
Tübinger Schule, Stuttgart-Bad Canstatt [Frommann-Holzboog] 1975, 474–476). Page
numbers here and in the following refer to the original edition.
8
9
Baur, Lehre von der Versöhnung, 734: “Das Vermittelnde zwischen dem Individuum und
dem Absoluten kann nur die Gattung seyn, zu welcher das Individuum gehört, das All-
gemeine, unter welches seinem Begriff nach das Besondere und Einzelne gestellt werden
muss. Ist es eine wesentliche Wahrheit des christlichen Glaubens, dass der Mensch gött-
licher Natur oder mit Gott Eins ist, wodurch anders kann diese wesentliche Einheit zwi-
schen Gott und dem Menschen vermittelt werden, als durch das Allgemeine, An-
sichseyende, der menschlichen Natur, die Idee der Menschheit, die zwar in der unendlichen
Vielheit der Individuen sich fort und fort individualisirt, aber auch die lebendige, sub-
stanzielle Einheit ist, in welcher alles Besondere und Individuelle aufgehoben ist.” Unless
otherwise indicated translations are my own. Cf. also: op. cit., 622 (note); 733–735 (with
note 1 on p. 735).
10
Ferdinand Christian Baur, Die christliche Gnosis oder die christliche Religionsphilosophie
in ihrer geschichtlichen Entwiklung, Tübingen (Osiander) 1835 (Reprint: Darmstadt
1967), 721.
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54
gives a more positive account of what he calls their ‘mystical’ (and what
Ritschl and Harnack will later call their ‘physical’) doctrine of salvation.11
Why then are Ritschl and Harnack so much opposed to the ‘physical’
doctrine, and why is the same view more attractive to Baur? Pursuing this
question, I should suggest, leads directly to their understanding of nature,
spirit, and history and thus to some of the most fundamental philosophical
notions underlying their respective theologies. Expounding these notions, as
far as is possible within the confines of this paper, will hopefully contribute to
a clarification of the complex relationship between the two major historical
theologies the 19th century produced. My account will start from an exposi-
tion of some of Ritschl’s central philosophical tenets (1). Their reconstruc-
tion serves to perceive Ritschl’s theology as what I call a strong version of
historical theology. It is then argued (2) that in precisely this project Ritschl
was and remained deeply indebted to Baur’s historical theology while, right-
ly, perceiving it as ambiguous and ultimately flawed. Ritschl therefore sought
to bring the project back on track by means of a modification of the very phi-
losophy underlying the Tübingen version of historical theology (3). A brief
analysis of the most important historical debate between Ritschl and the Tü-
bingen School, concerning the historical reconstruction of primitive Christi-
anity, will provide a glimpse of how those philosophical differences influ-
enced historical and exegetical theories (4) and lead to a brief conclusion (5).
1. Albrecht Ritschl on Nature, Mind, and History
In many ways, the conceptual duality of nature and mind (Geist) underlies
Ritschl’s theology as a whole.12 Derived from, and co-ordinated with, that
duality is the conceptual difference of ‘physical’ and ‘ethical’. For Ritschl,
the world is ‘nature’ insofar as it is governed by effective causality, and
thus any description of reality that rests on the mechanism of cause and effect
is ‘physical’.13 Ritschl was aware, of course, that all phenomena are suscep-
tible to this kind of explanation, but should such a naturalistic theory have
the final word? Ritschl thought there was an alternative viewpoint, which
perceived the world as mind (Geist). In this perspective, the world’s structure
11
Baur, Lehre von der Versöhnung, 111–118.
Cf. Ritschl, The Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation. The Positive De-
velopment of the Doctrine, transl. H.R. Mackintosh/A.B. Macauley, Edinburgh (T&T
12
Clark) 21909, 238: ‘Now things are either mind [Geist] or nature. There exist no things-in-
general, which are neither the one nor the other’ (with amendments) = Ritschl, Recht-
fertigung und Versöhnung, vol. 3, Bonn (Marcus) 31889, 226 f.
13
Cf. Ritschl, The Positive Development, 222: ‘…while mental [geistiges] life is subject to
the laws of mechanism so far as it is interwoven with nature, yet its special character as
distinct from nature is signalised by practical laws which declare mind [Geist] to be an end
in itself, which realises itself in this form.’ (with amendments) = Rechtfertigung und
Versöhnung, vol. 3, 211.
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55
is teleological, and it is this teleological understanding of the world as gov-
erned by mind, which Ritschl, somewhat idiosyncratically, calls ethical.14
In the case of human beings the two perspectives collide most obviously:
we can look at them merely as parts of nature, but we will also, inevitably,
think of ourselves in a different way when we address issues such as moral
responsibility or the wholeness and meaning of life. It is Ritschl’s view
that the possibility of, and the tension between, these two conflicting ac-
counts of ourselves precisely is the human predicament and that religion
has always been an attempt to address, in theory and praxis, this existential
problem.15
Christianity, in this perspective, occupies a special place in the history of
religions precisely because it offers the most coherent ethical worldview, in
which our self-understanding as moral persons is consistently given prece-
dence over our entanglement in the physical world, which is reduced to
the status of a means towards the former as an end.16
Christian theology therefore must be ‘ethical’ in the sense of ‘teleolog-
ical’; the use of effective causality in the construction of doctrine is always
suspicious and, more often than not, evidence for borrowings from philoso-
phies that corresponded, historically, to nature religion and will therefore, by
default, be unsuitable for the elucidation of the Christian truth. Unsurpris-
ingly perhaps, this happened most frequently in the earliest period of Chris-
tianity, when the only philosophy available was pre-Christian in character,
which incidentally is the background to Ritschl’s (and again Harnack’s17)
charge of undue ‘hellenisation’ of Christianity in the Patristic period,18 but
be this as it may, it also meant for the working out of Ritschl’s own theology
that the ‘ethical’ concern as a methodological principle had overriding im-
portance for the construction of his own theology. All major doctrinal rela-
tions had to be presented as teleological, and Ritschl’s systematic theology is
14
If Ritschl is often credited with an ‘ethical’ theory of Christianity, it must not be forgotten
that this is how he employed that term; cf. Johannes Zachhuber, ‘Friedrich Schleiermacher
und Albrecht Ritschl. Kontinuitäten und Diskontinuitäten in der Theologie des 19. Jahr-
hunderts’ in: JHMTh 12 (2005), 16–46, here: 34–37.
15
‘In every religion what is sought, with the help of the superhuman spiritual power rever-
enced by man, is a solution of the contradiction in which man finds himself, as both a part
of the world of nature and a mental [geistige] personality claiming to dominate nature’:
Ritschl, The Positive Development, 199 (with amendments) = Rechtfertigung und Ver-
söhnung, vol. 3, 189.
16
‘Christianity, by its completely rounded view of the world, guarantees to the believers that
they shall be preserved unto eternal life in the Kingdom of God, which is God’s revealed
end in the world – and that, too, in the full sense that man is thus in the Kingdom of God set
over the world as a whole in his own order’: Ritschl, The Positive Development, 200 =
Rechtfertigung und Versöhnung, vol. 3, 191.
Cf. Harnack, Dogmengeschichte, vol. 1, 45–54.
Cf. e.g. Ritschl’s critique of the ‘Areopagitic conception of God’, which is physical insofar
17
18
as it is Platonic: The Positive Development, 271 = Rechtfertigung und Versöhnung, vol. 3,
257 f.
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56
an impressive attempt to do precisely this.19 Rejection of a ‘physical’ doctrine
of salvation is merely one of many applications of this principle. Ritschl’s
charge then that such a doctrine considers humanity as ‘a natural unit’, is
not (or not primarily) individualistic; the emphasis is not on ‘unit’, but on
‘natural’. From the Christian point of view, humanity must indeed be seen
as one, but united on the basis of a teleological, not a ‘natural’ principle,
namely the spirit of love.20 Ultimately, the value of such a teleologically con-
ceived unity is that it does not obliterate individuality; it rather puts it into its
proper place.
While the confrontation of a natural and an ethical perspective on
human beings is familiar enough, the link perceived by Ritschl between
the ethical and the historical may not seem equally obvious. Yet for Ritschl
this is crucial. Having history, being historical is one of the defining marks of
humanity, and history therefore, rather than nature, has a claim to reveal
God to us.21 Ritschl’s obsession with natural theology is almost as pervasive
as it will later be in Karl Barth,22 but Ritschl’s concern is once again derived
from his juxtaposition of natural and teleological: natural theology is un-
Christian because it is physical, because it constructs the relation between
God and world as one of cause and effect.23 Adopting a ‘natural’ perspective
blurs historical distinctions depriving specific phenomena of their individual
form, whereas the teleological perspective of Christian theology reveals the
relationship between God and world as fundamentally historical, leading to
a common goal, the Kingdom of God.
In this sense, history is the medium of religion, and a proper understand-
ing of religion—and thus of the place of Christianity as a religion—can only
be achieved by studying it historically. Consequently, Ritschl states in § 2 of
the third, systematic volume of Justification and Reconciliation:
19
A good example is provided by Ritschl’s strictly teleological reconstruction of the doctrine
of God in: Rechtfertigung und Versöhnung, vol. 3, 262–265 = The Positive Development,
275–279.
‘In order to prove its kinship with God, it would be necessary to conceive the human race
20
as a unity in spite of its natural multiplicity, a unity which is other than its natural generic
unity. The conception we are in search of is given in the idea of Christian community,
which makes the Kingdom of God its task. This idea of the moral unification of the human
race, through action prompted by universal love of our neighbour, represents a unity of
many which belongs to the realm of the thoroughly defined, in other words, the good will’:
The Positive Development, 280 = Rechtfertigung und Versöhnung, vol. 3, 267.
21
This was already Schleiermacher’s position. ‘History, in the most proper sense, is the
highest object of religion’: Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion. Speeches to its Cultured
Despisers, ed. Richard Crouter, Cambridge (CUP) 1988, 42 = id., Über die Religion.
Reden an die gebildeten unter ihren Verächtern, Berlin () 1799, 100 = KGA I/2, 232,38–
233,1.
Cf. Hans Joachim Birkner, ‘Natürliche Theologie und Offenbarungstheologie. Ein theo-
logiegeschichtlicher Überblick’, in: NZSTh 3 (1961) 279–295 = id., Schleiermacher-
Studien, ed. Hermann Fischer, Berlin/New York (De Gruyter) 1996, 3–22, here: 11–17.
22
23
Ritschl, The Positive Development, 271 f. = Rechtfertigung und Versöhnung, vol. 3, 257–
259.
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57
The specifically peculiar nature of Christianity, which at every turn of theology must be
kept intact, can be ascertained only by calling the general history of religion to our aid.24
How does the history of religion come ‘to the aid’ of the theologian? Ritschl
thinks that historical comparison reveals the unique place Christianity holds
in the world of religions:
The observation and comparison of the various historical religions from which the gen-
eral conception is abstracted, likewise shows that they stand to one another not merely in
the relation of species, but also in the relation of stages. They exhibit an ever more rich
and determinate manifestation of the chief features of religion; their connection is always
more close, their aims more worthy of man. Such a way of looking at them opens up more
fruitful vistas than are offered by the abstraction of a general conception of religion, fol-
lowed by the comparison of the historical religions as species of this genus. For in this
case, the various religions are treated merely as natural phenomena; in the other case
they are viewed as elements in the spiritual journey of humanity.25
In order for such an approach to work, of course, the history of religions
must yield normative results. Will it do this, however? Is not this the upshot
of historicism that history is a realm of relativity thus creating the abyss be-
tween ‘historical’ and ‘dogmatic’ method which Troeltsch would decree only
a few decades later26 and whose existence had, 100 years earlier, been de-
clared equally categorically by Lessing, who famously spoke of the ‘ugly
ditch’ between the two?27
Evidently, Ritschl’s view of the relation between history and theology
rests on the assumption that such an antagonism cannot be the last word.
Rather, he believes it is rather just another remnant of natural/physical think-
ing, which Christian theology must overcome in order to become what it is
meant to be.28 Yet this means that a theological interpretation of history and
historical theology must go hand in hand; one cannot exist without the other.
Theology (and only theology) generates an understanding of history that
shows a way beyond ‘historicist’ relativism, but theology can do this only
by being itself fully and entirely historical. I call this historical theology in
the strong sense of the term, and it is precisely this strong version of historical
theology for which Ritschl remained indebted to Baur’s work, however much
he wished to dissociate himself from its results.
24
Ritschl, The Positive Development, 8 = Rechtfertigung und Versöhnung, vol. 3, 8 f. That
the different wording of this definition in the various editions indicates Ritschl’s declining
interest in the history of religions has been argued by Caius Fabricius, Die Entwicklung in
Albrecht Ritschls Theologie von 1874 bis 1889, Tübingen (Mohr) 1909, 101–108.
Ritschl, The Positive Development, 196 = Rechtfertigung und Versöhnung, vol. 3, 187.
Emphasis mine.
Ernst Troeltsch, ‘Historische und dogmatische Methode in der Theologie’ (1898), in:
Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2, Tübingen (J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck]) 1931, 728–753.
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, ‘Über den Beweis des Geistes und der Kraft’ (1777), in: G.E.
Lessing’s Gesammelte Werke, hg. K. Lachmann/F. Muncker, Bd. 13, Leipzig (Göschen)
31897, 1–8 here: 5; ET: Henry Chadwick (ed. and transl.), Lessing’s Theological Writings,
London (Adam & Charles Black) 1956, 53.
25
26
27
28
Cf. Ritschl, ‘Geschichtliche Methode’ (as in n. 8), 444 f.
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58
2. Historical theology in F.C. Baur’s book on Christian Gnosis
It may be useful for the present purpose to consider Baur’s historical theology
on the basis of the one monograph which Ritschl himself singled out as the
climax of Baur’s academic achievement.29 Die christliche Gnosis oder die
christliche Religions-Philosophie in ihrer historischen Entwicklung was pub-
lished in 1835; like most of Baur’s works it has never seen a second edition30
nor is there an English translation. In 1832 Baur had made the acquaintance
of Hegel’s philosophy,31 and this influence is discernible (and acknowledged
by Baur) in this study already.32
Nevertheless, the customary assessment of Baur as a theological Hege-
lian is a rather gross simplification. There is no room here to enter into an
exhaustive discussion of Baur’s intellectual development, but it seems evident
that many of the central tenets of his thought are present in publications from
the 1820s already, without any evidence of Hegelian influence to explain
them there. There is some earlier influence of Schelling and Schleiermacher,
but, once again, this cannot pursued here.33
The full title of the book at once betrays how Baur intends to approach
his object of study: Christian Gnosis or The Christian Philosophy of Religion
in its Historical Development. The three chief intentions of the book are ap-
parent from its title.
First, Baur offers a study in the historical phenomenon of Gnosticism in
late antiquity. Much space is taken up by painstaking attempts at recon-
structing the thought systems of the major Gnostic schools and their relation-
ships. Nevertheless this aspect of his study will be left to one side here. It
would be the task of a separate paper to investigate Baur’s historical-critical
work taking into account the sources available at that time and establishing
on that basis the strengths and weaknesses of his approach.34
In any case it seems evident—and this is the second clue we can take
from the title—that Baur’s interest in Gnosticism was not confined to the his-
torical reconstruction of an ancient philosophical and religious movement.
More precisely, one might say that ‘historical reconstruction’ for him ideally
29
Cf. A. Ritschl, ‘Geschichtliche Methode’, 433.
The first edition has been reprinted in 1967 by Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft.
Horton Harris, The Tübingen School, Oxford (OUP) 1975, 25–27.
Baur, Gnosis (as in n. 10), viii.
Eduard Zeller argued in his extensive obituary that the most fundamental influence on
30
31
32
33
Baur throughout his life had been Schleiermacher’s (‘Ferdinand Christian Baur’ [1861], in:
id., Vorträge und Abhandlungen geschichtlichen Inhalts, Leipzig (Fues [L.W. Reisland])
1865, 354–434, here: 361), but this judgment has been harshly criticised (Harris, Tü-
bingen School, 155–158). For a discussion of Schelling’s influence cf. Carl Hester, ‘Ge-
danken zu Ferdinand Christian Baurs Entwicklung als Historiker anhand zweier un-
bekannter Briefe’, in: ZKG 84 (1973), 249–269.
Many important scholarly contributions are documented in the collection edited by Kurt
Rudolph, Gnosis und Gnostizismus, Wege der Forschung CCLXII, Darmstadt (Wissen-
schaftliche Buchgesellschaft) 1975.
34
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59
included going beyond the mere facts, stretching out towards an understand-
ing of the phenomenon by setting it within a larger, more complex whole
thereby elucidating its relevance and its meaning. Baur attempts to capture
the essence of Gnosticism by understanding it as ‘the Christian philosophy of
religion’. This to us sounds odd, but we have to be aware that Gnosticism
appeared to most 18th and early 19th century scholars as a strange hybrid
combining Christian, Jewish and Pagan elements, and hovering somewhere
between theology, philosophy and myth. So it was characterised by Baur’s
immediate predecessors, Neander and Matter, as ‘syncretistic theosophy’.35
Against this background, we may be able to appreciate Baur’s suggestion that
this ‘syncretism’ was much rather a Christian attempt to understand what
religion was by bringing the existing religions into a comparative system:
Religion is the very object of its (i.e. Gnosticism’s) study, but not so much religion in its
abstract idea, but in its concrete forms in which it existed historically at the time when
Christianity first came into existence.36
In Baur’s reconstruction, the Gnostics studied the actual, ‘positive’ religions
of antiquity, Paganism, Judaism, and Christianity, in order to gain
knowledge (gnosis) of their own position within the world of religions.
This knowledge the Gnostics sought to obtain is directly related to their
faith; it is the product of ‘faith seeking understanding’. The Christian
faith, Baur thinks, carries with it the notion of its own superiority over
other religions, while being aware at the same time that it shares common
features with them. The resulting tension requires a reflection, which must
be philosophical and historical in nature insofar as it has to engage with
the other, competing religions in a way that explains their respective places
in history as significant for their theological and philosophical evaluation.
Late ancient Gnosticism, then, ultimately provides the paradigm for a
much more general assumption Baur makes: this is that Christian theology
must be historical in the sense that its task, the proper exposition of Chris-
tianity as the absolute religion, requires the proof that this historical religion
brings together spirit and matter, eternity and history, in idea and reality of
the Incarnation, which offers an absolute point of reference within history
thus making truth essentially historical and history, in its turn, the revelation
of the eternal.
This idea is central to, and foundational for, Baur’s thought. In his ear-
liest published monograph Symbolik und Mythologie oder die Naturreligion
35
Cf. Jacques Matter, Histoire critique du Gnosticisme et de son influence sur les sectes
religieuses et philosophiques des six premiers sicles de l’re chrØtienne, 2 vols., Paris (F.G.
Levrault) 1828, vol. 2, 191.
Baur, Gnosis (as in n. 10), 18 f.: “Die Religion ist das eigentliche Object, mit welchem sie
[sc.Gnosis] es zu thun hat, aber zunächst nicht die Religion ihrer abstracten Idee nach,
sondern in ihren concreten Gestalten und den positiven Formen, in welchen sie sich zur
Zeit der Erscheinung des Christenthums historisch objectivirt hatte”.
36
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60
des Alterthums,37 an attempt to describe and explain mythology within the
framework of the history of religions, which appeared in 1824 and many
years before Baur made the acquaintance of Hegel’s philosophy, he states
that, in principle, there are only two roads which the study of the history
of religions can follow:
… either that of a completely analytical splitting up of phenomena which, ultimately,
leads to atomism, fatalism and atheism, or that in which we perceive the intellectual
life of the nations in its coherence as one great whole, thus obtaining an ever more sub-
lime idea of the divine. … I am not scared of the well-worn charge of mixing philosophy
and history. Without philosophy, history for me remains forever dead and dumb.38
Empirical, analytic study of historical data must be combined with synthetic,
philosophical reflection in order to understand history as ‘the revelation of
the Godhead’ as Baur calls it in the same place.39
Let us return to his treatment of the Gnostics though! The three prin-
ciples to be found in many Gnostic writings, material creation, the demiurge
and the saviour for Baur indicate three stages in the history of religions:
Pagan nature religion, in which the divine is (ultimately) identical with the
material world, Jewish theism, in which God is seen chiefly as creator
and, as such, transcendent and wholly detached from the world, and the re-
ligion of salvation or, better, reconciliation, which is aimed at bringing the
two realms of transcendence and immanence, spirit and world together in
the Incarnation. It is not difficult to see why Baur thinks that such a construc-
tion would show the superiority, in fact, the ultimate validity of the last of
those types as it would succeed in portraying the other two as necessarily
one-sided forerunners inevitably to be superseded by the advent of a religion
that bridges the gap between them by showing how each of them is, and is
not, true.
This success depends, however, on the Gnostics’ ability to show that the
conjunction of God and world in the Incarnation had actually occurred.
Characteristically, Baur denies that they achieved any such thing. As a matter
of fact, the Gnostics were notorious for their docetic Christology; for them
there is not, nor could there be, a real union between the spiritual and the
37
Ferdinand Christian Baur, Symbolik und Mythologie oder die Naturreligion des Alter-
thums, 2 vols., Stuttgart (J.B. Metzler) 1824/25.
Baur, Symbolik und Mythologie, vol. 1, xi: “Ich sehe hier nur zwei Wege, entweder den der
38
Trennung und Vereinzelung, welcher, consequent fortgesetzt, nothwendig zuletzt auf
Atomistik, Fatalismus, Atheismus führen muss, oder denjenigen, auf welchem auf diesem
Gebiete in dem Grade ein reineres und höheres Bewusstseyn des Göttlichen aufgeht, in
welchem das geistige Leben der Völker in seinem großartigen Zusammenhang als Ein
großes Ganze [sic!] erkannt wird. […] Den bekannten Vorwurf der Vermengung der
Philosophie mit der Geschichte fürchte ich dabei nicht: ohne Philosophie bleibt mir die
Geschichte ewig todt und stumm.” (Unless otherwise indicated translations are my own).
Baur, Symbolik und Mythologie, vol. 1, v. For the same idea cf. also: Friedrich Wilhelm
Joseph Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism, transl. Peter Heath, Charlottesville
(University Press of Virginia) 1978, 211.
39
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61
material.40 They thus fail, from Baur’s point of view, in the very task they had
to solve. Their saviour figure remains very much an element of the spiritual
world leading those, who are themselves part of that world, back to their ori-
gin.
This inability to achieve a real notion of incarnation has consequences
for the historicity of salvation. If there is no real amalgamation of God and
world in Christ, Baur contends, salvation does not really occur within history
either. The saviour enters the world from above; his salvific activity has, as
Baur puts it, an ‘absolute beginning’, expressed most characteristically in
Marcion’s famous opening of ‘his’ Gospel of Luke, where Jesus is said to
have ‘come down from heaven’ in the 15th year of the Emperor Tiberius.41
If, however, the life of the saviour has such an ‘absolute beginning’, its
salvific effect will never really become part of history either. And so, what is
true for Christ is, in a sense, true for all later Christians. They enter into the
realm of grace or, we might better say, grace enters into them from above
with no relation to their previous histories. There is thus no history of salva-
tion, only as it were a quasi-history of salvation. Salvation thus becomes as
unhistorical a thing as the Incarnation.42
How then are Christians related to the ‘historical’ saviour? Is there any
link connecting us with the man Jesus who flourished in the first century of
the Common Era? The Gnostics, Baur suggests, tried to alleviate this prob-
lem by introducing their famous myth of Adam as the original man, who in a
way encompasses all those who came later.43 In order to be properly related
to all other human beings, the saviour must be this original or paradigmatic
man. As such, however, he cannot any longer be thought to be identical with
any individual man. There is an infinite chasm separating the ideal, universal
Adam of Gnostic speculation from any particular, historical individual. The
philosophical reconstruction of the history of salvation thus ends with the
unresolved duality of a historical Jesus and an ideal Christ.
At this point, finally, the failure of the Gnostic philosophy of religion
becomes fully apparent. While it set out to do the right thing, trying to vin-
dicate Christianity as a historical philosophy of religion, it fails to succeed in
this attempt because it is unable to demonstrate how God became human in
one individual. In the end, the separation of God and world remains as stark
as it has always been; not even remotely is the coming together of the two
explained by the Gnostics’ efforts.
40
Baur, Gnosis (as in n. 10), 261.
Baur, Gnosis, 263 f. Cf. Tertullian, adv. Marcionem I 19: ‘Anno XV. Tiberii Christus Iesus
41
de caelo manare dignatus est, spiritus salutaris Marcionis’ (= Adolf von Harnack, Mar-
cion. Das Evangelium vom fremden Gott, Leipzig [J.C. Hinrichs’sche Buchhandlung]
21924, 184*).
Baur, Gnosis, 264.
Baur, Gnosis, 265.
42
43
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62
This failure has a further corollary. If this philosophy of religion is un-
able to overcome the duality of the transcendent and the immanent, then it
cannot claim either to have shown that history is ultimately meaningful.
Rather, history remains very much the realm of relativity and is therefore un-
able to provide any evidence for or against philosophical or theological state-
ments. In Baur’s perspective—and due to his specific conception of historical
theology, there is a subtle yet powerful interrelation between the material
and the formal level, between contents and method. The historical approach
to the philosophy of religion needs for its own confirmation the success of the
incarnational argument, as only the latter would resolve Lessing’s ‘ugly
ditch’. The failure of Gnosticism as a philosophy of religion, then, is com-
plete.
Is this specifically the fault of those 2nd century philosophical theolo-
gians? Have they perhaps merely misconstrued the task they were facing?
Baur’s book not only wishes to argue that Gnosticism is best understood
as philosophy of religion, but that the path followed by those 2nd century fig-
ures is, in principle, the path to be followed by any Christian theologian with
an equally keen interest in the philosophy of religion.44 This, then, is the third
major concern his study has, and once again it is to some extent apparent
from the book’s title. The Christian Gnosis or The Christian Philosophy
of Religion in its Historical Development—this clearly hints at a normative
interest. Historical study ideally teaches us what philosophy and theology
are. Here at the very latest, it becomes apparent how similar Baur’s own po-
sition is to that of the Gnostics. His own historical work, which as we saw he
perceived as being at the same time philosophical, depends on the success of
his attempt to overcome Lessing’s dichotomy of absolute truth and relativis-
tic history. Historical research can be philosophically or theologically rele-
vant only if philosophy can demonstrate that history is more than the
realm of contingent events and actions, but if such a proof is successful, his-
tory may well turn out to be the paradigmatic object for philosophical and
theological study.45 As in Gnosticism, then, philosophy of religion has to be
historical because only as such it can actually reflect religions, which are his-
torical phenomena. The philosophical imperative of developing a normative
concept of religion must therefore be pursued on the basis of a critical en-
gagement with the empirical material from the history of religions.
The last third or so of Baur’s monograph, consequently, is dedicated to a
detailed study of the modern varieties of the old tradition of a historical phi-
44
Baur, Gnosis, 11.
Baur, incidentally, knew quite well that he is here effectively turning against a powerful
45
tradition in the philosophy of religion. In a footnote he remarks candidly that there was no
greater distance conceivable than that between Gnosis and [Christian Wolff’s] rationalistic
philosophy of religion. While the latter, Baur writes, intends to be philosophy of religion,
its concept of God is nothing but the abstract notion of the ens perfectissimum: Baur,
Gnosis, 555, n. 5.
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63
losophy of religion in Schelling, Schleiermacher, and Hegel.46 There is no
need to follow this discussion in detail here. The crucial question, after
what we have found about Baur’s view on the Gnostics of the 2nd century,
evidently is this: does this most recent development provide the key to the
aporiae that were left unresolved 1600 years earlier? Does Baur find evidence
in Schleiermacher or in Hegel for the eagerly sought solution to the dilemma,
which was only exposed but not answered, by their theological-philosophi-
cal forebears?
The answer is as simple as it may be surprising: he does not. Not for a
second do we find Baur tempted to give in to the fascination of Hegel’s ab-
solute idealism; if anything, its perfection is seen in the fact that the unre-
solved problems which, in Baur’s own interpretation, were characteristic
of 2nd century Gnosticism come out more clearly in his own time. In
Hegel, Baur insists,
Christ is the God-man only through the mediation of faith. What is behind faith, the ob-
jective reality of history that must form the presupposition for the transformation into
faith of the merely external, historical consideration, remains veiled in a mystery into
which we ought not to enter. It does not matter whether Christ as such, according to
his objective, historical appearance, was the God-man. What matters is that through
and for faith he became the God-man.47
Ultimately, Hegel’s absolute mind or reason or spirit, according to Baur, is
itself trans-historical: ‘Whatever the spirit is and does, is not history’, he fa-
mously commented.48 Baur thus finds, in the most recent representatives of
‘Gnosis’ precisely the same ambiguity he had discovered in its earlier var-
iants. Neither Schleiermacher nor Hegel, according to Baur, succeed closing
the gap between God and world, mind and body, reason and history.
We must remember that this is not a marginal error. Only success in this
attempt would have justified the entire procedure of treating the philosophy
of religion historically. Without it, the foundation, on which Baur himself is
erecting his edifice of a historical study of the philosophy of religion with
normative implications for philosophy and theology, is bound to collapse.
At the end of all those lengthy analyses from 2nd century Gnosticism down
46
Baur, Gnosis, 557–735.
Baur, Gnosis, 712: “Christus ist mit einem Worte Gottmensch nur durch die Vermittlung
47
des Glaubens. Was aber hinter dem Glauben liegt, als die historisch gegebene, objective
Realität, unter deren Voraussetzung die bloß äußere, geschichtliche Betrachtung zum
Glauben werden konnte, bleibt in ein Geheimniß gehüllt, in welches wir nicht eindringen
sollen, denn die Frage ist nicht, ob Christus an sich, seiner historischen Erscheinung nach,
der Gottmensch war, sondern nur darauf kommt es an, dass er dem Glauben der Gott-
mensch wurde.”
48
Baur, Gnosis, 715. Cf. with this Hegel’s own remark according to Marheineke’s edition of
the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion: “Was der Geist tut, ist keine Historie; es ist
ihm nur um das zu tun, was an und für sich ist, nicht Vergangenes, sondern schlechthin
Präsentes.” (Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Werke. Vollständige Ausgabe durch einen
Verein von Freunden des Verewigten, eds. Philipp Marheineke et al., Berlin [Duncker und
Humblot] 1832–1845, vol. 17, 318).
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64
to 19th century philosophers and theologians we seem to arrive very much at
the place from which we had started. Baur has come nowhere near a position
that permits him leaving behind Lessing’s dictum about the impossibility of
reconciling historical and philosophical statements. We are, more perhaps
than before, faced with the utter duality of unhistorical reason (‘whatever
the spirit is and does, is not history’) and relativistic, meaningless history.
The great project, undertaken commonly by historical research, philosophy
of history and, not least, Christian theology, designed to finding within his-
tory its own ultimate point of reference, has utterly failed, so it seems.
It is in the face of, and in response to, this failure, that Baur takes refuge
in the theory that Jesus’ humanity is all humankind:
If the god-man as such is the union of the divine and the human, humanity being unified
with God, then the historical Christ is humanity becoming unified with God in all its
members who are the one body of Christ. [In this process, humanity] fulfils the concept
of religion and rises from earth to heaven.49
This is, in all essentials, the same theory that was touted with much fanfare
by Baur’s student, David Strauß, in the same year. It is this same theory also,
which Baur – rightly or wrongly – identified and commended as ‘mystical
theory of salvation’ in the Greek Fathers.
Yet it ought to be clear by now that Baur’s support for this view really is
an act of desperation that ultimately cannot conceal his inability to develop a
sound answer to his own, most fundamental question of how theology can
conceptualise Christianity as something that is both divine and human, both
eternal and historical, both universal and particular.
3. Ritschl’s critique of Baur’s historical theology
Baur’s theology, then, ends in ambiguity. On the one hand we have what I
would call an idealistic programme, which rests on the assumption that Less-
ing’s dilemma can be overcome by a philosophical reflection on the history of
religions or a historical study of the philosophy of religion. Yet this pro-
gramme is undermined and ultimately cancelled out by Baur’s own positiv-
istic historicism, that is his belief in the empirical, continuous, and contingent
nature of history. Albrecht Ritschl was bound all the more acutely to perceive
this ambiguity within Baur’s thought as the development, in Baur himself as
well as in the Tübingen school from 1835 to 1855 increasingly veered to-
wards the historicist line of thought and effectively took leave altogether
49
Baur, Gnosis, 721: “Ist der Gottmensch an sich die Einheit des Göttlichen und Mensch-
lichen, die mit Gott einige Menschheit, so ist der historische Christus die in allen ihren
Gliedern, die zusammen der lebendige Leib Christi sind, den Begriff der Religion reali-
sierende, von der Erde zum Himmel aufstrebende, mit Gott sich einigende Menschheit”.
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65
from the idealist programme of a synthesis of history and speculation.50 All
that remained of this programme was the notion of a philosophical or spec-
ulative ‘interest’ developed and articulated independently of historical schol-
arship while the latter was perceived, and proudly advertised, as ‘presuppo-
sitionless’ and strictly historical.51 Thus the settlement of 18th century ration-
alism combining empiricist positivism with natural theology was practically
restored.
Ritschl’s own position was developed very much in response to this de-
velopment, which occurred while he was aligned with the Tubingen School
for a decade from the mid-1840s. As I argued earlier, he clearly and fully un-
derwrote Baur’s original interest in historical theology, expressed perhaps
most coherently in Die christliche Gnosis, a book Ritschl singled out as
the climax of Baur’s academic achievement.52 It is, further, Ritschl’s view
that in order to follow Baur there, he had to oppose him in quite a number
of his other tenets which caused Baur’s own programme to fail making him
lapse back into the very duality of faith and history, which he had set out to
overcome.
Why had this happened? Ritschl’s first and decisive answer is that
Baur’s failure is due to a mistaken understanding of history.53 For Ritschl,
the ethical or teleological view of history, which Christian theology must
achieve, emphasises the importance of individuals. This in itself is relevant
given the crucial importance of Jesus’ human individuality for historical the-
ology and Baur’s failure to conceptualise it; it is also directly related to the
specific issue, raised at the outset, of ‘physical’ doctrines of salvation. Yet
Ritschl goes further by arguing that within history individuality must be rec-
ognised not only at the level of persons, but also on a transpersonal plane. In
this view, people, cultures, epochs, and—not least—religions can be consid-
ered as quasi-individuals. In many ways, such a view was at the very core of
early German historicism; it is embodied in Leopold von Ranke’s famous
word that each epoch is equally ‘immediate unto God’.54 Its earliest and
most influential application to religion is to be found in Schleiermacher’s
fifth Speech on Religion—which Ritschl later on will praise for precisely
50
This is the overall tendency in David Strauß; cf. for this the perceptive study by Jörg F.
Sandberger: David Friedrich Strauß als theologischer Hegelianer, Göttingen (Vanden-
hoeck & Ruprecht) 1972. For similar positions articulated by other Tübingen theologians
cf. Eduard Zeller, ‘Vorwort’, in: ThJ 1, iv-viii. Adolf Hilgenfeld, ‘Die wissenschaftliche
Theologie und ihre gegenwärtige Aufgabe. Vorwort des Herausgebers’, in: ZwTh 1, 1–21.
51
The ideal of theological science (Wissenschaft) as ‘presuppositionless’ (voraussetzungslos)
is set up for the first time in the preface to the first edition of Strauß’ Life of Jesus (as in n.
3), 4 = Leben Jesu (as in n. 3), 5.
Ritschl, ‘Geschichtliche Methode’ (as in n. 8), 433.
The basis for what follows is Ritschl’s argument in ‘Geschichtliche Methode’, 444 f.
Leopold von Ranke, Über die Epochen der neueren Geschichte, hg. Theodor Schieder/
52
53
54
Walther Peter Fuchs, München (Oldenbourg) 1971, 59 f. Cf. Henning Ottmann, In-
dividuum und Gemeinschaft bei Hegel, Berlin/New York (de Gruyter) 1977, 59 f.
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66
this insight.55 Such a historical quasi-individual is marked off from other his-
torical phenomena by an immanent criterion, by an idea or an organising
principle. This criterion would, in a sense, be itself historical, yet it would
also be teleological by offering limit and structure to historical development
and process. The analogy with a human individual may be helpful: insofar as
each of us is part of a natural process that is strictly speaking continuous, the
difference between an earlier and a later phase in a person’s life on the one
hand, and that between a person’s and their own grandparents’ lives on the
other, could appear to be gradual. In some way this may, actually, be a legit-
imate perspective. Insofar as we consider human persons individuals, how-
ever, and insofar as we consider them responsible agents, this difference is
quite decisive.56
Ritschl, not without justification, perceived Baur’s failure to bridge the
ontological (and epistemic) gap between religion and history as fundamen-
tally rooted in his inability to employ properly in his theology this concept
of individuality. Already in the programmatic lines in Symbolik und Myth-
ologie, which were quoted above,57 Baur started from a mere antagonism of
whole and part, universal and particular, and in this conflict he unequivocal-
ly comes down on the side of the whole. In other words, he conceptualises
universal history at the cost of individuals which are, as it were, submerged
in its continuous stream in an almost Heraclitean sense.58 In contrast, Ritschl
thinks that a philosophical (and theological) reflection of history reveals that
it is legitimate to isolate particular epochs as quasi-individuals on the basis of
historical criteria. This is applied, in the first place, to Christianity overall
and then, more specifically, to Primitive Christianity.59
With regard to the former, this principle permitted Ritschl to contain
the problem of the history of religions. I quoted earlier his strong words
about the need to root Christian theology in the study of the history of reli-
gions; this statement, however, contrasts rather starkly with the practical ne-
glect of any such study by Ritschl himself and by his school. Ritschl thought
that the relative isolation of Christianity as an ‘individual’ of religion, togeth-
er with a valid argument for its specific role as the apex of the history of re-
55
Albrecht Ritschl, Schleiermachers Reden über die Religion und ihre Nachwirkungen auf
die evangelische Kirche Deutschlands, Bonn (Marcus) 1874, 4.
Cf. Ritschl, ‘Geschichtliche Methode’ (as in n. 8), 485: “Schon der einzelne Mensch kann
56
nur deshalb als Subject eines geschichtlichen Verlaufs betrachtet werden, weil man ihn
nicht als Resultat eines natürlichen Gattungsprozesses, sondern, unter der Bedingung eines
solchen, als wunderbare Schöpfung Gottes verstehen muss”.
See p. above.
Not aufgehoben in Hegel’s terminology; characteristically, in Baur’s appropriation of
57
58
Hegelianism this concept seems to play no role.
In line with Schleiermacher (The Christian Faith § 10 [postscript], transl. and ed. H.R.
59
Mackintosh/J.S. Stewart, Edinburgh [T & T Clark] 1999, 50 = Der christliche Glaube
nach den Grundsätzen der evangelischen Kirche im Zusammenhange dargestellt, 2. Auf-
lage, KGA I/13, vol. 1, 90,5–14) Ritschl thinks that this is what ‘revelation’ means: the
beginning, in history, of something new (‘Geschichtliche Methode’ [as in n. 8], 485).
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67
ligions would dispense the theologian of any further work on non-Christian
religions. Once Christianity had been assigned to its special place within the
history of religions, its study would be tantamount to the study of religion
insofar as it represents the full realisation of the concept of religion.60
4. Ritschl’s historical theology – the case of Primitive Christianity
Much more central to Ritschl’s work was his application of his philosophical
view of history to the study of Primitive Christianity. It is significant, though
rarely acknowledged, that the conflict between Ritschl and the Tubingen
School developed primarily over the interpretation of the history of Primitive
Christianity. While the present paper does not permit a comprehensive ac-
count of the historical and exegetical problems involved in this debate,
even such summary reference as can be given serves to highlight the paradig-
matic importance this scholarly debate had for the complex relationship be-
tween Ritschl and the Tübingen School.
Baur’s famous theory starts from the assumption that Paul’s and Luke’s
accounts of the Apostle’s council in Galatians 2,1–10 and Acts 15 cannot be
reconciled.61 From this observation he deduced the tension between Jewish
and Hellenistic Christians as the driving force for the development of Chris-
tianity during much of the 2nd century until they were brought into an alli-
ance of sorts in Early Catholicism.62 One consequence of this view is that
the bulk of the New Testament would have been written late with the Gospel
of John, as the seal of this development, produced some time towards the end
60
Cf. Ritschl, Schleiermachers Reden (as in n. 55), 7 where a method is demanded according
to which “diejenige einzelne positive Religion, welche die höchste Stufe einnimmt, zugleich
als die ‘ganze Religion’ erkannt werde”. In the later editions of Justification and Re-
conciliation Ritschl tried to steer away from this stark claim. He admits it will be useless to
demonstrate ‘scientifically to a Mohammedan or a Buddhist that the Christian religion,
and not theirs, occupies the highest rank. […] The arrangement of religions in stages,
consequently, amounts to no more than a scientific attempt to promote mutual underst-
anding among Christians’ (The Positive Development [as in n. 12], 197 = Rechtfertigung
und Versöhnung, vol. 3, 188); compare with this, e.g., Die christliche Lehre von der
Rechtfertigung und Versöhnung, vol. 3, 11874, 170).
61
Cf. Baur’s own summary in id., Kirchengeschichte des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts, ed.
Eduard Zeller, Tübingen (Fues) 1862, 395.
Fundamental for Baur’s assumption about the perseverance of those conflicts is his (pro-
62
blematic) interpretation of the so-called Ps.-Clementine Homilies, which he first proposed
in his 1831 Easter programme De Ebionitarum origine et doctrine ab Essenis repetenda
and then, in its most influential form in his classical paper ‘Die Christuspartei in der
korinthischen Gemeinde, der Gegensatz des petrinischen und paulinischen Christentums in
der ältesten Kirche, der Apostel Petrus in Rom’, in: TZTh 1831, Issue 4, 61–206, here:
116–133. The historical problems are extremely intricate; cf. Hans-Joachim Schoeps,
Theologie und Geschichte des Judenchristentums (1949), in: id., Gesammelte Schriften, I/
2, Hildesheim (Olms), 1998.
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68
of the 2nd century.63 This view, whatever else its merits and weaknesses may
be, has the effect of blurring the distinctions between an early phase of ‘prim-
itive Christianity’ and 2nd century Christianity; the fundamental antagonism,
which remains relevant until the end of the 2nd century, is the product of the
period immediately following upon the foundation of the Church.
Ritschl, in the 2nd edition of his Entstehung der altkatholischen Kirche,64
disagrees with this account almost tout court. For a start, he thinks that al-
most all the New Testament writings could be genuine.65 Primitive Christian-
ity, furthermore, while it contained within itself doctrinal and practical dif-
ferences, was overall faithful to the essential message of Jesus himself, who
had taught (in a nutshell) that the law was adiaphoron except where it con-
cerned the ultimate goal of human existence.66 Within this framework, the
conflict between Paul, Peter, and James could be settled (cf. Acts 15). In
the 2nd century, Jewish Christianity lost its relevance largely due to external
factors, such as the Bar Kokhba revolt.67 Thus it was Hellenistic Christianity
alone that developed into Early Catholicism.68 Yet 2nd century Hellenistic
Christianity is as little ‘Pauline’ as Jewish Christianity during this period is
‘Petrine’ or ‘Jacobean’.69 The former, Ritschl thinks, in the post-apostolic
age lost a proper understanding of the Old Testament background of
Jesus’ preaching of the Kingdom of God;70 the latter forsook its apostolic cre-
dentials when it made full observance of the law the criterion for salvation.71
Once again, the historical and exegetical value of Ritschl’s position
must be left to one side here; it is crucial, however, to see that Ritschl’s ac-
count of early Christian history, in combination with his ‘teleological’ theory
of history, produces a relatively self-contained phase of Primitive Christian-
ity, characterised by a full appreciation of Jesus’ teaching including its Old
Testament background.72 It can therefore be considered an absolutely nor-
mative point of reference for Christianity and for Christian theology. The
books of the New Testament, in their turn, are foundational insofar as,
and to the extent that, they are the literary product of this very historical
63
Ferdinand Christian Baur, ‘Die Einleitung in das Neue Testament als theologische Wis-
senschaft. Ihr Begriff und ihre Aufgabe, ihr Entwicklungsgang und ihr innerer Orga-
nismus’, in: ThJ 9 (1850), 463–566; 10 (1851), 70–94, 222–252, 291–328, here: 318–
328.
Albrecht Ritschl, Die Entstehung der altkatholischen Kirche. Eine kirchen- und dogmen-
64
geschichtliche Monographie, Bonn (Marcus) 21857.
65
Cf. Ritschl, Entstehung, 48 f. on the genuineness of the Gospel of John and Adolf Hil-
genfeld (‘Das Urchristenthum und seine neuesten Bearbeitungen von Lechler und Ritschl’,
in: ZwTh 1 [1858], 54–140; here: 59 f.) for a summary of Ritschl’s revisionist datings.
Ritschl, Entstehung, 33.
Ritschl, Entstehung, 257 f.
Ritschl, Entstehung, 330.
Ritschl, Entstehung, 22.
Ritschl, Entstehung, 331.581.
Ritschl, Entstehung, 259–261.
Ritschl, Entstehung, 47.
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
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69
epoch; thus a biblical theology is once again feasible and indeed inevitable,73
but this biblical theology can also claim to be truly ‘scientific’ (wissenschaft-
liche) theology insofar as it is based on a combination of historical research
and philosophical reflection.
We can thus see how Ritschl saw his own theology as an answer to Less-
ing’s dilemma that avoided the pitfalls of Baur’s theory. From a Christian
point of view history will appear as structured teleologically, its continuity
consisting of self contained ‘individuals’ developing towards a common
goal, the Kingdom of God. This insight had far reaching consequences. With-
in the bounds of the Ritschlian paradigm, there was a possibility for histor-
ical theology that was both truly historical and truly theological, and it was
the force of this paradigm which enabled the Ritschl School to dominate all
branches of German Protestant academic theology for the final third of the
19th century.
5. Conclusion
What united Baur and Ritschl was their awareness of the particular role of
history within and for Christian theology. This relevance, they rightly dis-
cerned, is a direct implication of the Christian tenet that Christ was born
into human history when the fullness of time had come (Gal 4,4). Taken to-
gether, these two ideas, of Jesus as a historical figure and of his life span as a
transforming qualifier of world history both necessitate the most rigorous
historical study of Christianity, especially its beginning, and an unashamed
theological interpretation of history because only in the light of the Incarna-
tion history may be understood most properly.
Their efforts coincided with a wider intellectual movement in Germany,
historicism, in which a combination of historical research and a broadly ide-
alistic frame of mind determined academic work for many decades in the 19th
century. It is therefore no coincidence that Baur, Ritschl and their schools do-
minated academic theology in Germany for much of this time. This they did
not so much as ideologies that had to be shared by their followers, but as
paradigms (in Thomas Kuhn’s sense) enabling the most original and creative
research for quite some while.
At the danger of being a trifle too stringent one might say that histori-
cism always has two main dangers: one is to get too much bogged down by
the details of individuals and their ultimately idiosyncratic objectives and in-
73
Cf. Ritschl in The Positive Development, 1: ‘Once this authentical exposition [i.e. in the
NT] of the ideas named [i.e. the relation between the Christian and God] has been given,
however, the interests of theology are satisfied. For succeeding thinkers were guided, in
part intentionally, in part unconsciously, by the models of the New Testament, or should
not be followed when they in point of fact diverge from them.’ (= Rechtfertigung und
Versöhnung, vol. 3, 1).
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70
terests and thus lose sight of the greater developments; the other is, quite to
the contrary, ignoring the individual in an attempt to conceptualise the larger
trends and trajectories. Baur’s work was driven by an awareness of the for-
mer error, but strayed into the latter, whereas Ritschl was—through Baur’s
and Strauß’ examples—alerted to the importance of individuals, but failed to
realise the force of historical universals, a failure which, in his school, result-
ed in the kind of systematic blindness which Troeltsch later exposed and fa-
tally defeated.
Abstract
The article starts by observing a parallel between the identification of Christ’s humanity and
universal human nature, for which Harnack repudiates some church fathers, and David Strauss’
claim, in his Life of Jesus, that the subject of the Incarnation must be all humanity. It is argued
that this oppositional stance is indicative of fundamental philosophical and theological differ-
ences between the Tübingen School and the Ritschl School. Those differences, however, are
then explained as emerging from what is ultimately a common project of a radical form of his-
torical theology. This project, it is argued, Ritschl took over from Baur while correcting it in
crucial ways. Taken together, the two central theological schools of the 19th century thus illus-
trate the potential and the limits of christian theology within the historicist paradigm.
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