Tubingen its reputation in the 18th century. Both Bengel himself in his noble personality, and the historical character of his critical labours on the New Testament, remarkable for their time, had a charm for the youthful student of the 19th century. With historical interest Baur combined a special interest in tke philosophy of religion, but as yet without betraying any opposition to the supernatural stand point of the older theology. His earliest literary produc tion a review of Kaiser s Biblical Theology (Bengal s Archiv fur Theologie, ii. 656) in 1817 shows nothing of this opposition. It required a change of circumstance, as well as a new impulse of intellectual excitement, to direct his thoughts into the bolder current, in which they were destined to run, and in their course so largely to ail ect the
stream of contemporary thought,In 1817 he was called as professor to Blaubeuren, which he had left as a pupil eight years before. It was his business here to direct the historical and philosophical studies of the youth, and his keen and comprehensive genius soon found a congenial subject of investigation in the relations of Christianity to preceding modes of thought. The result of his investigations appeared in his Symbol ik und Mythologie, in 1824. This was his first elaborate work, the precursor of all his special studies in religious history and the development of religious thought. Ani mated by a thorough and enlightened spirit of learning, and valuable as a contribution to the knowledge of classical antiquity, it was yet dominated by a theological interest, and showed how truly this was the prevailing bias of the author s mind. It showed, moreover, how from this early period he combined, in almost equal force, the three great elements of culture philological, philosophical, and theological which his later works discovered in such maturity.
This publication drew attention to Baur s marked abilities, and, on a vacancy occurring in the theological faculty at Tubingen, he was promoted after some hesitation to the chair of historical theology in that famous university, destined from his labours to acquire a yet more notable reputation. This took place in 1826; and for thirty-four years Baur s life was passed at Tubingen in an unceasing round of academic work, while his name continued to gather from his successive writings an increasing lustre and influence. All accounts agree in testifying to his mar vellous industry and unceasing toil of research, his con scientiousness and self-sacrifice as a teacher, and the unobtrusive enthusiasm and dignity with which he dis charged all the duties entrusted to him, not only as a pro fessor, but as for some time the head of the Stiff, or college of residence for the Protestant- divinity students. His theological opinions, trenchant and alarming as they must have sometimes appeared, never made any separation betwixt him and his colleagues in the theological faculty. All acknowledged his power and earnestness; and the multitudes who thronged his lecture rooms carried the impulses of his thought throughout Germany and Switzer land. His mariner was somewhat reserved and silent ; all his enthusiasm was put into his work, and was felt more as an underglow animating his lectures and writings than as a demonstrative power creating a temporary noise. He lived for theological science : nothing else seems to have occupied him or drawn him aside. When we add to this the fact that any faith in supernatural religion, with which he began his labours as a professor, ere long dis appeared, and that the great aim of all his studies and researches was to find the natural factors or principles out of which Christianity arose in the world, there is presented to us a strange picture of theological enthusiasm It may seem, an inconsistent and unhappy picture, Yet there is something heroic if also pathetic in such intense application to the study of Christian phenomena, and such thorough and earnest aims to reach the truth regarding them, with out the faith which witnesses to the reality of a personal divine life, behind the phenomena and revealed in them.
Baur at first, like almost all his contemporaries, owned the influence of Schleiermacher. The Glaubenslehre of the latter, which appeared in 1821, is said to have affected him deeply, and moulded his thought for some time. But there was too little affinity bstwixt the men, the one mystic and spiritual, the other intellectual and objective, to permit this influence to be permanent. From Schleiermacher Baur passed to Hegel, whose commanding genius laid its spell upon him as upon others. The Hege lian philosophy became the permanent and pervasive element of his intellectual life. Its great doctrine of oppcsitcs, or of extremes finally terminating in a conciliation, is found more or less to underlie all his thought, and to furnish the key to his most daring speculations on the origin and growth of Christianity.
It was not, however, till nearly ten years after his settle ment at Tubingen that his theological views underwent a decided change, and that the special tendency known as that of the Modern Tubingen School was fully developed. The earlier period of Baur s academic life was not unfruitful, but did not mark him off in any striking manner. Even his treatise, on the Christ-party in the Corinthian Church and the Antagonism betwixt the Pauline and Petrine Chris tianity, which appeared in 1831, and which may be said to contain the germs of his future system, was published peaceably (in the Tubingen Zeitschrift) along with the effusions of Sleudel, one of his co-professors most devoted to super-naturalism. His answer to Mohler s famous Sym- bolik (1833) attracted a widespread reputation, and fixed attention upon him as one of the ablest defenders of German Protestantism. Masterly and ingenious as Mohler s book was, it was felt that Baur had not only fairly met but overthrown its chief position. Eut with all his reputation as a powerful writer and controversialist, he had hardly as yet made his mark as a new thinker.
development is dated from the year 1835, when Strauss s Leben Jesu appeared, and spread commotion in the theo logical mind of Germany. In the same year Baur pub lished his great work on Gnosticism, in which he had obviously quite passed beyond the influence of Schleier macher. A brief work on the So-called Pastoral Epistles in the same year showed him at work in an independent critical direction, and ready to take a new start in theo logical inquiry. This start, or at least the lengths to which it carried him, have been by many attributed to the effect of Strauss s work. But he has himself plainly denied this, and claimed an independent origin for his own specula tions. " I had begun," he says (Kirchenyeschichte dcs 19 Jahrhunderts, 395), " my critical inquiries long before Strauss, and set out from an entirely different point of view. My study of the two epistles to the Corinthians led me first to seize clearly the relation of the apostle Paul to the other apostles. I was convinced that in the letters of the apostle themselves there was enough from which to infer that this relation was something very different from that usuully supposed, that, in short, instead of being a relation of harmony it was one of sharp opposition, so much so that on the part of the Jewish Christians the authority of the apostle was held everywhere in dispute. A closer investigation of the Pseudo-Clementine homilies, to whose significance in reference to the earliest period of Christian history Neander first drew attention, led me to a clearer understanding of this opposition ; and it always became more evident to me that the contrast of the two
parties in the Apostolic and sub-Apostolic age must be traced