The following extract from Strauss's work conveys his Christology.
“This is the key to the whole of Christology, that, as subject of the predicate which the church assigns to Christ, we place instead of an individual, an idea; but an idea which has an existence in reality, not in the mind only, like that of Kant. In an individual, a God-man, the properties and functions which the church ascribes to Christ contradict themselves; in the idea of the race they perfectly agree. Humanity is the union of the two natures;—God become man; the infinite manifesting itself in the finite, and the finite spirit remembering its infinitude: it is the child of the visible mother and the invisible father, Nature and Spirit: it is the worker of miracles, in so far as in the course of human history the spirit more and more completely subjugates nature, both within and around man, until it lies before him as the inert matter on which he exercises his active power: it is the sinless existence, for the course of its development is a blameless one, pollution cleaves to the individual only, and does not touch the race or its history. It is Humanity that dies, rises, and ascends to heaven; for, from the negation of its phenomenal life, there ever proceeds a higher spiritual life; from the suppression of [pg 434] its mortality as a personal, rational, and terrestrial spirit, arises its union with the infinite spirit of the heavens. By faith in this Christ, especially in his death and resurrection, man is justified before God; that is, by the kindling within him of the idea of humanity, the individual man participates in the divinely human life of the species. Now the main element of that idea is, that the negation of the merely natural and sensual life, which is itself the negation of the spirit, is the sole way to true spiritual life. This alone is the absolute sense of Christology. That it is annexed to the person and history of one individual is a necessary result of the historical form which Christology has taken.” Leben Jesu, vol. ii. § 151. (pp. 709, 10. 4th ed. 1840); in the English translation, vol. iii. p. 433.
Note 37. p. [278]. Strauss.
A few facts concerning the life and writings of Strauss may be interesting.
He was born in 1808, and was educated at Tübingen and Berlin. He was Repetiteur at Tübingen in 1835, when he published his Leben Jesu, described in the text of Lect. [VII]. In 1837 he published his Streit-schriften, or replies to his critics. In 1839 he was elected Professor of theology at Zurich, an appointment which produced such popular indignation that it was cancelled, and a change of government was caused by it. In 1840 he published Die Christliche Glaubenslehre im Kampfe mil der modernen Wissenschaft dargestellt; in which, after an introduction concerning the history of opinions on the relation of the two, he discussed the principles of Christian doctrine, such as the Bible, Canon, Evidences, &c. and next the doctrines themselves; viz. (part i.) on the divine Being and His attributes, as an abstract conception; (part ii.) on the same, as the object of empirical conceptions in its manifestation in creation, &c. See Foreign Quart. Rev. No. 54. 1841; and C. Schwarz's Gesch. der n. Theol. b. ii. ch. i. He published also Monologen in dem Freihafen, translated 1848; Soliloquies on the Christian Religion, its Errors, and Everlasting Truth.
In 1848, the revolutionary year, he was elected to the Wurtemburg Parliament; and took the conservative side, to the surprise of his constituents. He has subsequently lived chiefly at Heilbronn, engaged in literary labours; mostly writing the lives of sceptics, or persons connected with free thought whose fate has been like his own. Among these have been, a sketch of Julian, 1847, intended probably as a satire on the romantic reaction conducted by the late king of Prussia; a Life of Schubart, 1849, a Swabian poet of the last century; one of Maerklin 1851, his own early friend; one of N. Frischlin, 1856, a learned German of the [pg 435] sixteenth century; a life of Ulric von Hütten, 1858; and Gespräche von Hütten, 1861; also Kleine Schriften, 1861; and a work on Reimarus, 1862, concerning which see Note [29]. Some of these works are reviewed in the Nat. Rev. Nos. 7 and 12.
Note 38. p. [273]. The Replies To Strauss.
Schwarz gives an interesting account of the various replies to Strauss, and of the works written by various theologians to support their own point of view against his criticisms. Gesch. der n. Theol. p. 113 seq.