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Strauss, Schleiermacher and Kierkegaard (David Friedrich Strauss…
Strauss, Schleiermacher and Kierkegaard
Background
After 16th/17th century, there was religious conflict in western Europe
Criticism of the state religion was seldom allowed - the State religion never questioned the authority of the Bible
There were some critics of the inerrancy of the Bible - e.g. Science (Copernican theory) became superior to the Ptolemaic theory - so some statements in Genesis started to be taken metaphorically
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Deism: rejection of revealed religion in favour of religion based on reason and historical scepticism exposed forged documents so scrutiny turned to analysis of scripture
'The period generally was not, with very few exceptions, a creative one. It was a time of reflexion, of intellectual stock-taking. Its concern was to understand, explain and defend.' - Reardon
The quest for the historical Jesus became important, to understand reality, validate morality and organise society
Hegel
Believed that advances in understanding involve overcoming opposites and an example of this is God who is infinite, while we are finite - God cannot exist without his creation, and we cannot exist without him
Presented Jesus as a rational philosopher, and miracles as symbols of his philosophical ideas - when Jesus was crucified, he knew evil, which is the separation of the individual from the universal
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The rational is what's real - criticised the understanding of God as omnipotent, omniscient etc. - God cannot be a being at all - he is totally infinite
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Soren Kierkegaard
Christianity has a dualistic nature of law and gospel - Christ put an end to law with his law of love
Concerned with truth in subjectivity - rejected religious organisations as false versions of true subjective faith
Rejected Strauss and claimed that neither historical nor philosophical enquiry could validate incarnation - existence of God as the unknown cannot be rationally proven - 'God is not a name but a concept'
Christ is the leap of faith, going beyond morality into the cross - incarnation should not be rationalised
Christ is not derived from humanity, but humanness given to him from God - God comes from the outside or above
David Friedrich Strauss
Attempted to reconcile a critical understanding of the New Testament with faith guided by historical criticism - myth is the embodiment of symbolism and intuitions
stories of the birth and resurrection of Jesus are symbols expressing the eternal identity of Jesus and God
Criticised naturalistic explanations of myth, instead tried to look at them symbolically to preserve their significance - rejected allegorical readings which translated stories into dogma
Rather than offer naturalistic explanations, it is better to study the imaginative purposes of the author and symbolic meanings
Myth is essential to all religion - it is founded on conceptions of a religious community and embodies the aspirations of humanity to a higher level of being
Miracles are implausible even with divine intervention - why would Jesus take so long to heal the blind and dumb, and why perform a trick of feeding the 5,000 when he could have fed those who were starving?
Denies the word made flesh Christology - claimed the NT contains invented material to give Jesus Messianic status - we can know Jesus through the impact of his actions rather than the details of the actions themselves - Holy spirit is woven into the world, and Jesus is an exceptionally spiritual individual
The myth in the gospel have two sources - the Messianic ideas and expectations existing according to their several forms in the Jewish mind before Jesus, and also the impression Jesus left behind on his followers
Virgin Birth: gospel narratives disagree on the details - it is physiologically impossible and naturalistic explanations are distasteful
Jesus' miracles are not expressions of facts, but they exhibit his character - this addresses the difficulty of God causing miracles - god only acts upon creation at the start, and then leaves it to itself
Gives privilege to John's gospel, which he claimed was unhistorical but symbolic - either the first three evangelists knew nothing about Jesus, or John is symbolic (Pannenburg would say that the contradictions were original, rather than created by the church)
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Does not deny the crucifixion, but claims there are contradictions in the resurrection narrative and they refute any claim to historicity - disciples must have received visions in accordance with their faith
Purpose of criticism is to recreate oneself in the mentality of the author and this allows us to put a high value on the gospels without affirming their historicity
Friedrich Schleiermacher
Romanticism: otherness, mystery, emotion, intuition, subjectivist - experiential - religion and faith should be about the heart and feeling
Theology can only be done within a given tradition of reading, but must be guided by faith and emotion
Jesus is the bearer of supreme God-consciousness - faith is an individual feeling of absolute dependence and sense of being renewed - appeals to the heart instead of the authority of scripture - ideally scripture should match the feelings of the heart
Faith is in inward fact, to be admitted and reckoned with, brought about by confrontation with the historical personality of Jesus as testified by the Scriptures
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Jesus was the proclaimer of truth about God - but the only reliable accounts of his life are those after the baptism and before the arrest - anything prior is only valid in a symbolic way
'Dogmas are not, properly speaking, part of religion: rather it is that they are derived from it'
Fixed understanding of the laws of nature - interprets the raising of the dead as recognising that someone hadn't died yet - Jesus himself may not have been dead after the crucifixion
Sceptical treatment of the virgin birth - Jesus is not exempt from sin if he doesn't have a male father, as sin is still passed on from female parent - Schleiermacher claimed that Jesus has total God-consciousness - he is a way for us to taste the infinite and enables us to have an awareness of God
Christian doctrines are religious affectations set forth in speech - religion is inherently historical, as based on the life of a human man, but the truth doesn't lie in the acceptance of facts, or reasoning - but experience
Romanticised Jesus' death and claimed that he died in serenity instead of pain - dualist Christ, who caused salvation to transform human consciousness into a fully developed consciousness - salvation is more about relationship to God than actions and status
The doctrine of the trinity is the fullest expression of man's relation to God - each part of the trinity is representative of man's relationship to God - life, death, sin, salvation etc.
Jesus is a symbol of moral distance between God and man - Jesus is anticipation of the moral perfection to come - sin it therefore inevitable and Jesus is necessary for salvation following the fall
Responses to Strauss
Offended a lot of people - some claimed he was too radical - some claimed he lacked philosophical rigour and didn't have adequate textual knowledge to back up his claims
Hegelians claimed he distorted Hegel's ideas, and Nietzsche attacked him as a bourgeois liberalist
Tractarians: conservative response - tried to regenerate Christianity in England through spiritual engagement
Feuerbach: any symbolism applied to God and his infinity is representative of our view of our own infinity