BAUR, F. C. (1792–1860) was a German Protestant theologian, biblical scholar, and church historian. Ferdinand Christian Baur is best known as the leader of the "Tübingen school" and the practitioner of an allegedly Hegelian historial method. He was perhaps the most important German theologian between Friedrich Schleiermacher and Albrecht Ritschl. Over the years he has suffered from caricature and neglect, but reappraisal was made easier in the 1960s when selected works by him began to reappear in a new edition.

Baur was born in Schmiden, near Stuttgart, and educated mainly at Blaubeuren seminary and the University of Tübingen. In 1817 he returned to Blaubeuren as a teacher, and his thinking changed radically from the supernaturalism of the so-called Old Tübingen School to the conviction, learned from Schleiermacher, that Christianity cannot be studied in isolation from other religions, as though it alone had a...