8 - FERDINAND CHRISTIAN BAUR
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2016
Summary
The inscription on the grave of Ferdinand Christian Baur (1792–1860) describes him in a single word: Theologe. The once bitterly attacked founder of the Protestant Tübingen school of radical historical criticism was indeed a theologian, in Dilthey's and Hirsch's view second only to Schleiermacher, convinced that the Christian tradition witnessed to divine truth and seeking to make this apparent in an intellectual milieu dominated by German idealist philosophy and the new discipline of critical history. He not only set the critical study of Christian origins on a sound methodological basis from which subsequent research could advance, but also integrated the science and philosophy of his time and place into his own understanding of Christianity. That the resulting restatement of Christian faith was cast in the form of theologically interpreted historical investigations, including critical assessments of the contemporary scene, is what is meant by the historical theology which he pioneered. As this phrase of Schleiermacher1 suggests, it is ‘part of the modern study of history’, but is theology, not ‘unintelligent empiricism’; it includes exegetical theology (in effect, New Testament), church history, and ‘historical knowledge of the present condition of Christianity’.
After two years preparatory study in philosophy Baur received his theological training (1811–14) in the old Tübingen supernaturalist school of G. C. Storr (d. 1805), Siiskind, the Flatts and above all E. G. Bengel, in which the independence of biblical revelation was asserted but harmonized with and supported by Kant's philosophy.
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- Nineteenth-Century Religious Thought in the West , pp. 261 - 290Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1985
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