FC Baur

"This draft handbook chapter offers an overview about the reception history of Christian theology as found among major 19th century German theologians who are influenced by Kantian and idealist philosophies. I argue that their historicist theologies are 'reception history' in a very specific sense in that a historical understanding of Christianity is the very foundation of their entire enterprise.
The text will be published in the Oxford Handbook for the Reception History of Christian Theology, ed. S. Coakley/R. Cross."

In the mid-19th century, German theologian, historian, and philosopher Ferdinand Christian Baur developed an impressive account of Christianity within the framework of the history of religions. He started from the assumption that a full philosophical and historical reflection on this history would ultimately prove the absolute claims of Christianity. Yet not only did he fail to produce this evidence, his own historical method is based on principles that rule out any such conclusion.

The paper traces the internal links between ways of conceptualising religion and history in two of the most influential theological schools of 19th century Germany. It is argued that in many ways the latter of those sought to achieve the same goals as the former albeit with different means. The ensuing polemical tone has misled scholars to neglect the close relationship between the two.

Christopher Buck, “Illuminator vs. Redeemer: A ’Trajectory’ of Ebionite Christology from Prophet Messianism to Baha’i Theophanology.” Abstracts: American Academy of Religion/Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meeting 1983 (Dallas). Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1983, p. 86.  

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• CITED BY HANS KUNG:

“Present-day scholars like Christopher Buck also have come to the same conclusion: ‘In the course of time the Ebionites together with the Sabaean Baptists seem to have become established in Arabia. This fertilization invites the hypothesis that the Qur’an reflects Ebionite prophetology’.” –  Hans Küng, Christianity: Essence, History, and Future (New York : Continuum, 1995), p. 106 and 819, n. 177:

“Present-day scholars too have concluded: ‘In the course of time the Ebionites together with the Sabaean Baptists seem to have become established in Arabia. This fertilization invites the hypothesis that the Qur’an reflects Ebionite prophetology’.” – Hans Küng, Islam: Past, Present, and Future. Translated by John Bowden (Oxford: Oneworld, 2007), p. 42 and p. 672, n. 58: “C. Buck, report to American Academy of Religion, Abstracts AAR/SBL 1983.”

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ABSTRACT (published in 1983)

The rediscovery of Ebionite Christianity is one of the achievements of recent scholarship. Since World War II, specialists in Christian origins have sought to recover what might be thought of as “lost” forms of Christianity. Of all forms of Jewish Christianity, Ebionism is the most distinct and well known. The researches of Bavarian scholar Schoeps drew the notice of fellow scholars to verifiably Ebionite elements preserved in the Pseudo–Clementine Homilies (“H”) and Recognitions (“R”), until then deemed romances devoid of much historical worth. The late Cardinal Danielou treated Jewish Christianity phenomenologically, defining its various forms collectively as a culture (“a culture of apocalypses”). Made possible by the convergence of manuscript discoveries, Danielou succeeded in presenting Jewish Christianity as the predominant though not exclusive influence in the early Church for a full century after Christ. Jewish Christians were primarily living in Palestine, Transjordan, and Syria, but were doubtless in Rome, Asia Minor, and northern Africa as well. Jewish Christianity, like a lost civilization, appears once to have had a formative (though later ostracized) presence in the early Christian world.

The two Jewish revolts reversed the situation, such that the ethno- (“pagan”) Christians emerged as the prevailing “orthodoxy.” Judged in relation to “triumphant Pauline Christianity,” the early major forms of Jewish Christianity were “completely misunderstood by Western heresiologues” which condemned Millenarism, Encratism, and Ebionism as impoverished doctrine. All of this surprising data so revolutionized concepts of Christian origins that Quispel of Utrecht was led to declare that “the Jewish Christians or Ebionites were the legitimate heirs of primitive Christianity, whereas the New Testament to a large extent reflects the views of Gentile Christianity as defended by St. Paul and his fellows. This is the present state of scholarship.”

What, then, can be said about “the present state of scholarship” which Quispel asserted favoring the primacy of the Ebionites as preservers of the “original” traditions? We can safely say that there was more to Christianity than met the orthodox or heterodox eye. Post-World War II research has, indeed, revolutionized our views of Christian origins. Several important forms of Christianity took root and effloresced in a variety of cultural soils. That history favored one form over the other is not a proof of primacy. Perhaps we can think of a plurality of “apostolic successions” rather than in terms of one only. The fullest picture of early Christianity is perhaps the most impressive: a mosaic, not a monochrome. Historical enquiry can remove the whitewash of orthodoxy, such that orthodoxy itself becomes more human, more alive as the drama with all its actors is replayed before our historical eyes. Perhaps the appreciation and not the suppression of diversity within Christianity will evoke the richest sense of heritage, the broadest sense of commonality, and the greatest impulse against judgementalism ⎯ the fomenter of religious prejudice. The recovery of Ebionite Christianity is part of a long and painstaking process: the total restoration of our Christian past ⎯ a process which might be thought of as the “salvation” of salvation-history.

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NOTES

This is the author's research paper for his first graduate course, "Problems in Ebionism," a directed study at Western Washington State College (now Western Washington University), under William K.B. Stoever (now Professor Emeritus), chair of Liberal Studies. The paper was awarded an A on its completion in June 1982. Dr. Stoever is named on the last page of the paper. The paper itself was word-processed by Carol Lenhard.

The “Abstract” (supra) was published in 1983. Although the paper itself is unpublished, it may be considered to be the equivalent of a peer-reviewed paper insofar as the paper was critically reviewed by Dr. Stoever. Of interest is the striking phenomenological resonance between the Ebionite Christian doctrine of the "True Prophet" with the Bahá’í doctrine of the “Manifestation of God.”

Excerpt from an early Jewish-Christian work, The Homilies of Clement:

Salvation of Jews and Christians
"For on this account Jesus is concealed from the Jews, who have taken Moses as their teacher, and Moses is hidden from those who have believed in Jesus. For, there being one teaching by both, God accepts him who has believed either of these" (H 8:6). "For even the Hebrews who believe Moses, and do not observe the things spoken by him, are not saved, unless they observe the things that are spoken to them... Neither is there salvation in believing in teachers and calling them lords" (H 8:5).

"Neither, therefore, are the Hebrews condemned by account of their ignorance of Jesus, by reason of Him who has concealed Him, if, doing the things commanded by Moses they do not hate Him (Jesus) whom they do know. Neither are those from among the Gentiles condemned, who do not know Moses, provided that these also, doing the things spoken by Jesus, do not hate Him (Moses) whom they do not know" (H 8: 7) .

"And some will not be profited by calling the teachers lords, but not doing the works of servants... Moreover, if anyone has been thought worthy to recognize both as preaching one doctrine, that man has been counted rich in God, understanding the old things as new in time, and the new things as old" (H 8:7).

This article develops an original account of the rise of the modern misperception of deification as an exclusively Eastern Christian doctrine antithetical to Western theology. The study argues that the origins of the misconstruction lie in the distorting influence of German Idealism on the seminal treatment of the doctrine advanced by Ferdinand Christian Baur. With Idealist categories shaping his retrieval, Baur inaccurately portrays ancient Christian figures as advocating an automatic, mechanical deification of humanity as a whole that leaves the individual no role to play in his or her salvation. Such a view of deification as a mechanical, “physical” process is the precise basis on which Baur’s student Albrecht Ritschl and those in his school influentially claim it has no place in Western theology. The antecedent condition for deification coming to be characterized as Eastern, then, is it being understood as “physical,” and it is Baur who is ultimately responsible for Ritschl so viewing the doctrine. Baur’s Idealist-inspired retrieval thus raises a mistaken understanding of deification to prominence in the modern period, resulting in misunderstandings of the doctrine that persist down to the present day.

I argue in this article that Schelling's influence on F.C. Baur can only be gauged if one accepts that it had a fundamentally different character from the kind of influences that Schleiermacher and in particular Hegel had over Baur's thought. Schelling became important for Baur's version of historical or even historicist theology. As such his influence occurred early and during Baur's formative period.

This article investigates F. C. Baur's book Die Epoch der kirchlichen Geschichtsschreibung published in 1852 arguing that it is a key text for a specific form of theological historicism according to which Church History is, so to speak, responsible for its own prolegomena. A close reading of this late text reveals its dependence on much earlier research conducted by Baur in preparation of his first lecture courses in the 1820s. This link makes evident who strongly Baur remained committed to the ideal of a theology of history in the spirit of F.J.W. Schelling and the early Philipp Marheineke.

This handbook chapter offers an overview of discussions in nineteenth-century theology about the concept of theology as science or Wissenschaft. I sketch the origin of that debate as lying partly in the rise of modern theology and partly in the institutional setting of theology in the university. I then discuss in more detail concepts developed by Schleiermacher, Fichte, Newman, Baur, Strauss, and Ritschl.

The paper considers the famous notion that theology is 'faith seeking understanding' or the 'rationality of faith' in light of the Weberian concept of rationalisation. It asks how theology disciplines and restrains as part of its rational character. the paper's particular focus is the theology that became institutionalised in the 19th century research university. Three different theories based on different understandings of religion and of rationality are discussed: Friedrich Schleiermacher's view of theology within a broad concept of practical rationality; David Strauss' critical reconstruction of theology on the basis of scientific rationality, and F.C. Baur's historicist version, based on the concept of historical reason. The three versions combine in strikingly different ways theology as the faith's rationality with an instrumentalist form of rationalisation. Ultimately, I argue that theological rationalisation is good when and insofar as it contributes to the practice of the Christian religion.

The early Christian church incubated a new genos, the "third race" of the ancient world. By the close of the first millennium AD, virtually every European ethny traced its spiritual, if not its biological ancestry to the once-powerless and persecuted race of Christians. In effect, Christian theology created a new ethnos. People drawn from different biological races and from many diverse ethnic groups took on an altogether novel ethno-religious identity. Christians learned to use various forms of "ethnic reasoning" to distinguish themselves from other groups.

But there were limits to the plasticity of Christian racial/ethnic identity. When the Germanic peoples were brought into the fold of Christendom, Christian identity became less fluid and more fixed. By the end of the first millennium, the three element of spirit, water, and blood were the constituent elements of every Christian nation.

Those three elements of Christian racial/ethnic identity reflect the unity in diversity of the three persons of the triune God.