The Life of Jesus Critically Examined

...transparent symbolic vestment. How much more truthfully and profoundly can the miracle at Cana, or the raising of Lazarus, or the cure of the man born blind be interpreted from this point of view than from that of Strauss! In this respect, Baur’s interpretation of the Fourth Gospel was an immense advance beyond Strauss, as the latter himself subsequently acknowledged.

With the above defects of Strauss’s method of interpretation is connected the fact that the outcome of his book, in reference to the decisive question—What, then, is the historical kernel of the evangelical tradition; what is the real character of Jesus and of his work?—is meager and unsatisfactory. In the closing essay at the end of his work, it is true, he endeavored to restore dogmatically what he had destroyed critically, but he effected this in a way that amounted to the transformation of religious faith in Christ into a metaphysical allegory.

The predications of faith regarding Christ are to be regarded as containing assertions about the relations of the human race to the Absolute, about the self-abasement of the Infinite to the Finite, the return of the Infinite to itself, about the mind and its power over nature (and its dependence on it), and the like. In all this, Strauss was led astray by the influence of the Hegelian philosophy The philosophy of G.W.F. Hegel, which emphasizes historical development and dialectical processes., which looked for the truth of religion in logical and metaphysical categories instead of in the facts and experiences of moral feeling and volition. But as there is no essential relation between these metaphysical ideas and the person of Jesus, he is made arbitrarily—as anyone else might have been—an illustration and example of absolute ideas to which he stands in no more intimate relation than the rest...