David Friedrich Strauss: A Centennial Comment

Extract

In a letter of November 1837 proclaiming the beauties of Agnese Schebest to his friend Rapp, Strauss declared ‘Her speech, too, is thoroughly noble and intelligent’. It is common for a man to note in others his own defects, and particularly common for a clergyman to notice such defects, but Strauss here seems to be admiring a virtue others thought to be his own. George Eliot, for example, in 1858 at her second meeting with Strauss remarked that he spoke ‘with very choice words, like a man strictly truthful in the use of language’. And it has become a commonplace of Strauss criticism in this century to praise the honest purpose of the Life of Jesus. This huge work, like the short attacks on the foxy Schenkel, was ‘directed against counterfeiting’. Strauss was ever striving to state the truth of a matter.

But is honesty enough? Was Strauss’ achievement merely, as Albert Schweitzer remarked, and Karl Barth approvingly quoted, ‘uncertain truthfulness?’ To the opening sentence of Schweitzer’s appraisal in the Quest, ‘Strauss must be loved in order to be understood’, Barth, in his Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century, put the caution: ‘This can only mean that we must feel sympathy for him. Strauss is not a tragic figure’. He is not, perhaps, quite consistent enough in his statement of the truth to command our awed respect.

Barth’s explanation of the uneven quality of Strauss’ work was that he came across a great practical problem almost by accident, by a chance of mood. The problem was that of the relation of revelation and history. And Strauss himself admitted that he was not always ready to deal with it: I am too much dependent upon mood, and far too self-occupied’. His discovery and its disturbing effects made him ‘probably the best-known and influential theologian of the Nineteenth Century in non-theological and non-church circles’.