character. He has taught it how to get rid of foreign elements which were still present in it, and which marked an imperfect stage of its development."
He has been the most influential factor in the necessary process of separation. There is no one with whom Hengstenberg feels himself more in agreement than with the Tiibingen scholar. Had he not shown with the greatest precision how the results of the Hegelian philosophy, one may say, of philosophy in general, reacted upon Christian faith? "The relation of speculation to faith has now come clearly to light."
"Two nations," writes Hengstenberg in 1836, "are struggling in the womb of our time, and two only. They will be ever more definitely opposed to one another. Unbelief will more and more cast off the elements of faith to which it still clings, and faith will cast off its elements of un- belief. That will be an inestimable advantage. Had the Time-spirit continued to make concessions, concessions would constantly have been made to it in return." Therefore the man who "calmly and deliberately laid hands upon the Lord's anointed, undeterred by the vision of the millions who have bowed the knee, and still bow the knee, before His appearing," has in his own way done a service.
Strauss on his part escaped with relief from the musty atmosphere of the study�beloved by theology in carpet-slippers�to the bracing air of Hengstenberg's Kirchenzeitung. In his "Replies" he devotes to it some fifty-four pages. "I must admit," he says, "that it is a satisfaction to me to have to do with the Evangelische Kirchenzeitung. In dealing with it one knows where one is and what one has to expect. If Herr Hengstenberg condemns, he knows why he condemns, and even one against whom he launches his anathema must admit that the attitude becomes him. Any one who, like the editor of the Evangelische Kirchenzeitung, has taken upon him the yoke of confessional doctrine with all its implications, has paid a price which entitles him to the privilege of condemning those who differ from his opinions."[1]
Hengstenberg's only complaint against Strauss is that he does not go far enough. He would have liked to force upon him the role of the Wolfenbiittel Fragmentist, and considers that if Strauss did not, like the latter, go so far as to suppose the apostles guilty of deliberate deceit, that is not so much from any regard for the historical kernel of Christianity as in order to mask his attack.
Even in Catholic theology Strauss's work caused a great sensation. Catholic theology in general did not at that time take up an attitude of absolute isolation from Protestant scholarship;
- ↑ Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg was born in 1802 at Frondenberg in the "county" (Grafschaft) of Mark, became Professor of Theology in Berlin in 1826, and died there in 1869. He founded the Evangelische Kirchenseitung in 1827.
