ABSTRACT
W e have seen how on one occasion Pusey defended the theologians of Germany and afterwards repented. We must now consider the type of thought that was then in question. We shall find that whereas the Oxford Movement rejected some elements of Reformation thought, German theological science rejected others. In Germany the whole static view of revelation had disappeared as the result of the Enlightenment, and scholars began to apply ever more accurate historical tests to the records of religion and particularly of Christianity. Hegel’s philosophy found an echo in the reconstruction of the early history of the Church as attempted by F. C. Baur. Essential Christianity was a Messianic Judaism which had been fulfilled in Jesus and was taught by Peter. This was the thesis. The antithesis was to be found in the teaching of Paul, who made Jesus into a God. The conflict between the two is the keynote of all the history of the first two centuries, but by the end of that time a synthesis was being found which is represented by the creeds of the early Catholic Church. Of course, such a reconstruction meant the redating of many of the documents, but Baur, with the key in his hand, felt no doubt about his ability to do this with success. He rejected all the Pauline epistles except Romans, Galatians, and Corinthians, which alone show signs of the supposed conflict, and he made Matthew the oldest gospel, because it is Judaising, and put Mark late, because it attempts to hide the conflict. D. F. Strauss pushed investigation farther into the sources for the life of Christ. He took it for granted that Jesus lived, but regarded His life as purely human. At the time when He was born the Jews were looking for a wonder-working Messiah. All their expectations of a divine deliverance of humanity they poured into the mould of the Christ idea and attached ultimately to Jesus; thus the Christ of the New Testament is really the creation of a myth. It was this theory that gave rise to the popular, artistic, and insincere Life of Jesus, by the Frenchman, Ernest Renan, which appeared in 1863. A more moderate type of Christology was to be found in the historical works of Neander and the doctrinal works of Dorner, but the real difficulty that had to be faced was the question whether in the last resort it was easier to regard the Church as the source of Christ or Christ as the source of the Church. This was felt by Albert Schweitzer, who went back to the hint given by Reimarus and resuscitated the idea of an eschatological Christ. But, inadequate as that solution may be, that it does not involve surrender to a dry and wooden rationalism can be judged from the noble self-sacrifice of Schweitzer, who abandoned a great career in Europe to work among the natives of the west coast of Africa as a medical missionary.
