David Friedrich Strauss

Strauss, David Friedrich (1808–74)

The Christian faith rests upon two major beliefs: the existence of a God who created the universe, and the claim that in the historical person of Jesus of Nazareth this God in a unique way entered into world history. Like the two foci of an ellipse, these beliefs, which may be designated the metaphysical and the historical, constitute the fundamental foundation of the Christian faith. Strauss was the first major theological figure to openly challenge this foundation. The revolutionary Das Leben Jesu (Life of Jesus), which appeared in 1835, was Strauss’ attempt to disprove these two fundamental beliefs from a point of view which no longer accepted the old orthodox dogmas. As an alternative explanation to a divine Christ, Strauss posited a mythological Jesus; in his lifelong search to find a substitute for theism, Strauss moved through a philosophy of nature to Hegelianism, atheism and finally Darwinism.

1 Life of Jesus

David Friedrich Strauss was born in the town of Ludwigsburg, a few miles north of Stuttgart, in the province of Württemberg, on 27 January 1808. He studied theology at the University of Tübingen (one of his teachers being Ferdinand Christian Baur), and also devoted considerable time to philosophy. He found Kant too involved and difficult to understand. Romanticism was the ruling sentiment of the day, and Strauss enthusiastically embraced the works of Goethe, Schiller and other Romantics of the age. But the leading philosopher of Romanticism at that time was Schelling, whose pantheistic philosophy of nature Strauss eagerly absorbed (see Schelling, F.W.J. §1). In doing so he rejected the idea of a God who was both transcendent and personal. ‘I have still not been able to convince myself of the personality of God, as it is found in theism’, he wrote to a friend. ‘In that teaching God is a personal, self-conscious God; the consciousness, however, is nothing other than the expression of a particular life of the Spirit which develops in time’ (1851 (Harris 1973: 11)).

It was in 1828 that Strauss first began a serious study of Hegel’s Phenomenology. What drew him most of all to Hegel was the alternative explanation which Hegel provided for the creating source behind the universe – a God who was not the three-person Creator of the Bible, but an unconscious Spirit which in a threefold process enters into history, becomes conscious, and returns to itself as the Absolute Spirit (see Hegel, G.W.F. §8). In 1831 Strauss travelled to Berlin, hoping to attend lectures from Hegel himself. He did indeed meet the Master, but after attending two lectures was informed by Schleiermacher that Hegel had died of cholera on the previous day. Strauss decided to remain in Berlin, and it was at this time he conceived his plan for a ‘Life of Jesus’ in which the Gospels would be interpreted from a new philosophical viewpoint.

In his investigation of the New Testament, Strauss’ primary concern was to evaluate the Gospels as historical documents, going behind the supernatural elements to arrive at the historical truth lying behind the sources. Here he had first to make the determining assumption that everything supernatural was ipso facto unhistorical and unauthentic. For he perceived that to allow even one supernatural element to remain would vitiate the philosophical framework he envisaged. Therefore, the interpretation was above all ‘a-theistic’, meaning that a supernatural God (if existent) was excluded from the reckoning, without there being any explicit denial that such a God existed (the atheistic interpretation). This a-theistic or purely historical viewpoint, later also espoused by Baur (who after 1835 became the leading Hegelian theologian), may be called the Tübingen theological perspective. Strauss was the first to apply this a-theistic viewpoint openly and consistently to the whole of the New Testament, and not just piecemeal to certain isolated passages. From this point, Strauss abandoned the supernatural element completely in favour of the philosophical principle that in history only the rational is real and the real rational.

Strauss was not the first to interpret the Biblical narratives in this way. The rationalists, pre-eminent among them H.E.G. Paulus, had sought to explain miracles without recourse to the supernatural. But what was new in Strauss was a completely different method of interpreting the historical element. The rationalists had explained each miracle by a variety of natural causes; H.S. Reimarus had accused the Biblical authors of conscious fabrication. But Strauss was the first to interpret the Gospel narratives as a whole neither by rationalism nor by fraud, but by a new explanation called the ‘mythological’ interpretation, in which he claimed that the Biblical writers unconsciously presupposed miraculous events in the life of Christ on the ground of supposed prophecies in the Old Testament. Thus, according to Strauss, the accounts of miracles in the Gospels were simply creations in the minds of the Gospel writers, who reasoned that since such miracles and events were predicted in the Old Testament, then they must have happened, and accordingly represented them as having so happened.

These were the interpretive principles which Strauss used, and they were thus far quite independent of his Hegelian views. But when it came to explaining positively what had actually happened – for Strauss did not deny that there was a historical person called Jesus – he employed his Hegelian philosophical viewpoint. Jesus was the God-man, not in the old traditional sense of an actual unity between the divine Son of God (the second person of the Trinity) and the human body which he adopted through the virgin birth, but in the sense that the man Jesus was simply the representation of what every man actually was, the unity of the divine and human in every personality. ‘The infinite Spirit is real only when it discloses itself in finite spirits, just as the finite spirit is true only when it merges itself in the infinite. The true and real existence of the Spirit, therefore, is neither God by himself, nor man by himself, but the God-man’ ([1835–6] 1972: 777). As such everyone is a God-man, and Jesus is simply on a higher level with other men of genius, such as Napoleon, Goethe, Raphael and Mozart, with the distinction that the religious genius occupies a higher place, since the divine Spirit is present in this form of consciousness directly, and not merely indirectly.

These, then, were essentially the views which in 1835 caused an uproar in the theological circles of Germany. ‘The book stood there’, wrote the Hegelian Karl Schwarz, ‘with the hard indifference of fate; it was the final account drawn up in the criticism of the Gospel history, and the inventory read: Bankrupt! For this reason the effect of the work was enormous. An electric shock ripped through the whole of German theology’ (1869: 97). In Britain the book was translated into English by the young Mary Ann Evans, later to achieve fame as the novelist George Eliot.

Reaction was not long in following. Strauss was dismissed from his position as tutor in the Tübingen Seminary. For a time he taught classical languages in the school at Ludwigsburg. An attempt by the new democratic government at Zurich to appoint him professor of theology aroused such strong opposition throughout the Canton that he had to be pensioned off without having set foot in the city; the pension, however, secured his financial independence. Marriage to a famous singer, Agnese Schebest, in 1842, brought him only temporary happiness, a divorce being agreed five years later. In 1848, following the revolution, Strauss was appointed to the Württemberg Parliament as the liberal candidate for Ludwigsburg, but he could not agree with the radical majority and after a few months handed in his resignation.

2 Later works

For some years Strauss devoted his time to literary works, producing biographies and sketches of lesser known historical figures. A new version of the Life of Jesus was published in 1864, Das Leben Jesu für das deutsche Volk bearbeitet (A New Life of Jesus), in which Strauss followed the same a-theistic approach, but abandoned his Hegelian reconstruction of the person of Jesus. In 1872 his final work was published, Der alte und der neue Glaube (The Old and the New Faith), in which he espoused the new evolutionary views of Charles Darwin – the first theologian to do so. Thirty-seven years had passed since he had written his first Life of Jesus and his philosophical views had undergone a great change; no longer did he hold the Hegelian ideas he had endorsed in his youth. In the 1840s the Hegelian bubble had burst (see Hegelianism §2). Baur’s pupils, Strauss, Eduard Zeller, Albrecht Ritschl and others, had all slowly abandoned the Hegelian rhetoric. Ludwig Feuerbach (§2) drove the final nail into the Hegelian coffin, declaring that such metaphysical ideas were simply so much verbiage; finally Baur himself discarded his former Hegelian convictions. Feuerbach had convincingly demonstrated that there was no absolute, infinite Spirit; such ideas were just the projection of man’s mind into space. The secret of theology was nothing but anthropology; the knowledge of God nothing more than the knowledge of man! All Hegel’s metaphysical ponderings were in the end just grandiose illusions. What remained was nothing but man himself.

But where had the universe come from? Where had humankind come from? Strauss’ examination of the various possibilities began with Schopenhauer’s unconscious primeval Will, which evolved through consciousness and intelligence, through the plant and animal world, to humankind itself as the highest manifestation of that Will (see Schopenhauer, A. §§3–4). Eduard von Hartmann developed these ideas further, and asserted that everything must have originated from the Unconscious, for if God was conscious and aware of what he was doing when he created the world, then his creation would be an enormous and inexpiable crime. Strauss was fascinated by these solutions, and though he did not accept all of Schopenhauer’s ideas and was extremely critical of Hartmann, he saw in the evolutionary process the key for which he was looking in order to unlock the riddle of the universe. In Darwin’s natural selection he found the confirmation he was seeking. In that direction lay the way the train of scientific thinking would go.

In espousing evolution and Darwin, Strauss was criticized by many of his supporters, but his keen sense of logic and consistency have certainly been vindicated by the twentieth-century acceptance of the evolutionary viewpoint. In adopting this viewpoint Strauss was, as always, ahead of the radical thinking of his time. The book went through six large editions in a year, a success which had never before attended any theological or philosophical work in Germany. Even Nietzsche’s vituperative and rude attack in the following year (Nietzsche looked upon Strauss as a representative of a decrepit, bourgeois culture and morality) could not significantly detract from the enormous popularity the book had enjoyed (see Nietzsche, F.).

Strauss died two years later on 8 February 1874, having expressly forbidden a Christian funeral. His first Life of Jesus set in motion the whole ‘quest’ for the historical Jesus, which sought to discover the true Jesus of history stripped of his supernatural features. Strauss’ criticism of the Gospel sources also provided the foundation on which Baur built up the historical criticism of the New Testament, with other scholars working on parallel lines in the Old Testament. Rudolf Bultmann’s later demythologization of the New Testament, where everything supernatural is regarded as mythical, is simply a modern extension of Strauss’ work (see Bultmann, R.). Strauss has no ‘followers’ as such today, but his a-theistic principles and views in various ways have permeated and influenced almost every area of theological scholarship.