An Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 317 pages of information about An Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant.

An Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 317 pages of information about An Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant.

Many details in Baur’s view are now seen to have been overstated and others false.  Yet this was the first time that a true historical method had been applied to the New Testament literature as a whole.  Baur’s contribution lay in the originality of his conception of Christianity, in his emphasis upon Paul, in his realisation of the magnitude of the struggle which Paul inaugurated against Jewish prejudices in the primitive Church.  In his idea, the issue of that struggle was, on the one hand, the freeing of Christianity from Judaism and on the other, the developing of Christian thought into a system of dogma and of the scattered Christian communities into an organised Church.  The Fourth Gospel contains, according to Baur, a Christian gnosis parallel to the gnosis which was more and more repudiated by the Church as heresy.  The Logos, the divine principle of life and light, appears bodily in the phenomenal world in the person of Jesus.  It enters into conflict with the darkness and evil of the world.  This speculation is but thinly clothed in the form of a biography of Jesus.  That an account completely dominated by speculative motives gives but slight guarantee of historical truth, was for Baur self-evident.  The author remains unknown, the age uncertain.  The book, however, can hardly have appeared before the time of the Montanist movement, that is, toward the end of the second century.  Scholars now rate far more highly than did Baur the element of genuine Johannine tradition which may lie behind the Fourth Gospel and account for its name.  They do not find traces of Montanism or of paschal controversies.  But the main contention stands.  The Fourth Gospel represents the beginning of elaborate reflexion upon the life and work of Jesus.  It is what it is because of the fusion of the ethical and spiritual content of the revelation in the personality of Jesus, with metaphysical abstractions and philosophical interpretation.

Baur was by no means so fortunate in the solution which he offered of the problem which the synoptic Gospels present.  His opinions are of no interest except as showing that he too worked diligently upon a question which for a long time seemed only to grow in complexity and which has busied scholars practically from Baur’s day to our own.  His zeal here also to discover dogmatic purposes led him astray.  The Tendenzkritik had its own tendencies.  The chief was to exaggeration and one-sidedness.  Baur had the kind of ear which hears grass grow.  There is much overstrained acumen.  Many radically false conclusions are reached by prejudiced operation with an historical formula, which in the last analysis is that of Hegel.  Everything is to be explained on the principle of antithesis.  Again, the assumption of conscious purpose in everything which men do or write is a grave exaggeration.  It is often in contradiction of that wonderful unconsciousness with which men and institutions move to the fulfilment of a purpose for the good, the purpose of God, into which their own life is grandly taken up.  To make each phase of such a movement the contribution of some one man’s scheme or endeavour is, as was once said, to make God act like a professor.

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An Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.