THE NEW SCHAFF-HERZOG
" Without philosophy, history seems to me dumb and dead." The attention it attracted won Baur a place in the theological faculty of Tubingen on its reorganization (1S2(3) after the death of his old teacher Bengel. His impressive and inspiring personality at once drew the young men to him, and his influence in tho faculty was contested only by Dr. Steudel, the sole survivor of the old school body.
The fact that in the course of his further intellectual development Baur gradually came into conflict with the theology of Schleier-
2. Baur's macher may be partly explained by Relation to the difference in the mental constitu-
Schleier- tions of the two men. There was macher and no trace in Baur's method of the fusion Hegel. of sentiment and reason which characterized the other; only the intellectual side was allowed to be heard. His strong point was his faculty of conceiving historical phenomena objectively, amid the surroundings and from the standpoint of their age. His relation to the philosophy of Hegel is somewhat difficult to determine exactly; but it may be safely asserted that his fundamental views on the essence of religion and the course of history were taken from the Hegelian system. The transition from Schleiermacher to Hegel was a gradual process which took place between 1826 and 1835, in the nine years which have been called the period of preparation. It is probable that at first Baur was unconscious of its extent, and it was not until he applied the Hegelian principles to the canon that they brought him into sharp conflict with traditional orthodoxy. His Symbolik was logically followed by his works on Manicheanism and Gnosticism (Tubingen, 1831 and 1832)— phenomena lying on the border between theology and philosophy, between Christianity and paganism. In his tractate on the opposition between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism, in answer to Mohler (Tubingen, 1834), Hegelian terminology begins to appear distinctly, though the foundation still rests on Schleiermacher. The influence of the Hegelian system on Baur was a very fructifying one. No department of history had suffered more from the leveling tendency of rationalism than the history of dogma. Since Hegel had taught the application of the iron rule of development to the phenomena of the intellectual life as well as to other phenomena, he pointed the way to a profounder understanding of the beliefs which appeared frequently so haphazard and so arbitrary, to a knowledge of laws which prevailed over individual will. Thus, when Baur went on from the philosophy of religion to Christian dogma, and in that to the most important parts (the Atonement, Tubingen, 1838, the Trinity and the Incarnation, 1841-43), he became a pioneer of the history of dogma in the modern sense. Even though the Hegelian categories proved a bed of Procrustes for Christian dogmas, and though the understanding of these suffered from the defects of the Hegelian conception of religion, the impulse had none the less been given to a profounder study. More recent historians of dogma have felt themselves entitled to correct Baur's views, as set forth
in the above-mentioned works, in almost every point; but these views had won him, by the end of this first period, a prominent place in the ranks of those who were trying to strike out new lines in the study of Christian history; and when Schleiermacher's chair at Berlin was vacant in 1834, the Prussian minister Altenstein thought for a time of appointing Baur to it.
II. The Period of Biblical Criticism: The second period, however, is the one which comes to mind when the Tubingen School is mentioned. Though certain books already named are of later date, the period may be properly begun with 1835, in which year Strauss's Leben Jesu drew general attention to the questions to which Baur was already inclined to turn. The application to the canon of Scripture of the Hegelian laws of historical development was peculiarly appropriate to the place in which Baur carried on his work, since the distinguishing mark of the older Tubingen School had been a Biblical supernaturalism, for which dogma was nothing more than the teachings of Scripture, arrived at by means of exegesis. He felt himself driven to a consideration of this question by the need of a settlement with the school from which he had sprung and with his own past; by his studies in the history of dogma, since the source of dogma, in the last resort, unless it is a mere collection of irresponsible opinions, is the Bible; and by his investigation of Gnosticism, which could not fail to raise the question of the canon.
In 1835 appeared (at Stuttgart and Tubingen) Baur's work on the Pastoral Epistles. According to his own account of this and of his article on the Corinthian parties (TZT, 1831), it was his lectures on the Epistle to the Corinthians which first opened up the vista of more far-reaching historico-critical investigation into the controversies of the apostolic age, and led him to follow out, by means of New Testament and patristic studies, his independent conception of the clash of heterogeneous elements in the apostolic and subapostolic days, their parties and tendencies, their conflicts and compromises— to demonstrate the growth of a catholic Church as nothing but the result of a previous historical process. Dealing with Schleiermacher 's
treatment of I Timothy, he considered
i. Historico- the three pastoral epistles from the
Critical same historical standpoint, and defined
Study of the the task of New Testament criticism
New Testa- by asserting that the origin of such
ment. writings (as to the authenticity of
which more evidence was needed than the accepted name of an author on their face and a vague, uncertain, and late tradition) could only be explained by a complete view of the whole range of historical circumstances in which, according to definite data, they were to be placed. With this character of historic objectivity, the new criticism, which naturally could not but seem merely negative and destructive in contrast with the unfounded assumptions that it controverted, intended to meet the arbitrary subjectivity of the hypotheses which had, up to that time, played so large a part in New Testament criticism. The above statement, substantially in Baur's own