David Friedrich Strauss and the Mythology of Religious Belief

David Friedrich Strauss and the Mythology of Religious Belief

Introduction

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche remarks, with David Friedrich Strauss in mind, “He who has once contracted Hegelism and Schleiermacherism is never quite cured of them.” Strauss was drawn to Jakob Böhme, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, and Johann Tauler, and had, as guides, the writer-spiritualist Justinus Kerner as well as the theologians Ferdinard Christian Baur and Heinrich Kern. A Straussian legacy may thus be spoken of in terms of the twofold proposal already laid out in Das Leben Jesu. On one level, the Gospels are doggedly shown to embody the popular hopes of early Christians, an understanding Strauss founds on the inadequacies of two common approaches: the supernatural interpretation, which believes in the New Testament miracles, and a purely rational explanation for these events.

His own mythological alternative begins and ends with the Gospels as historical narratives bent around the goal of proving Jesus' Messiahship; in this light, miracles and fulfilled prophecies were but belated inclusions to match, if not surpass, the myths of the Old Testament. Nonetheless, despite often being maligned and misunderstood, Nietzsche has had enormous influence throughout the twentieth century. Such extreme reactions stem, in part, from his immodesty: he thought that his work represented a turning point in history. His immodesty, he argued, was not a pose or an aspiration but a fate forced on him by the importance of his ideas. Nietzsche was a student of spiritual revolutions, of the great shifts in human understanding marked by the eruption of a new teaching; he thought his own views were such a teaching.

He believed he was kindling a spiritual war that would define the coming centuries and decide the fate of humankind. “God is dead,” Nietzsche said and added that God deserved to die, because the spiritual force behind the idea of a transcendent god is the judgment that life is no good. The result was that Nietzsche became best known for his negotiations and grasped as one whose essential work was critical or destructive. He wrote his books in such a way as to force his reader to slow down, to make connections, to issue challenges, to think for one; he hated reading idlers and would do nothing to help them. His interpretation of other thinkers included a relentless unmasking of how life limited and determined thought, how the particulars of biography and character dictated perspective and conviction. Nevertheless, he strove to transcend the limiting effects of his time, place, and particularities. He sought a comprehensive, true perspective.

David Friedrich Strauss Historic Works

Strauss was to pursue a distinguished career as a theologian, politician, and man of letters; none of his later writings had the impact or influence of this, his first book. It forced the Transcendentalists to reconsider their assumptions about the historical Jesus. When Das Leben Jesu was published, in 1835, two opposed camps of New Testament interpreters dominated the German theological scene. The supernat-uralists believed, with most ordinary ...