David Strauss Quotes on God
David Friedrich Strauss (1808–1874), the Tübingen Hegelian whose Life of Jesus, Critically Examined (1835–36) supplied nineteenth-century Protestant theology with its first systematic mythical interpretation of the gospel narratives, defended the case that the supernatural elements of the evangelists' accounts are neither historical reports nor conscious inventions but the natural outgrowth of the messianic expectations of the early Christian community. The framework treats the resulting historical reconstruction as the philosophical separation of the unconditional religious idea — the unity of the divine and human natures realized in the species rather than in any individual — from the conditioned mythical form in which it had originally been received. The book's publication ended Strauss's academic career and shaped the subsequent development of nineteenth-century theology.
Quotes
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Attributed to David Strauss:
“The miracles of the Gospels are products of mythic religious imagination.”
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Attributed to David Strauss:
“Jesus the historical person and Christ the dogmatic figure must be carefully distinguished.”
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Attributed to David Strauss:
“Religion must be read as it actually grew, not as later orthodoxy declared.”
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Attributed to David Strauss:
“What was sacred to one age becomes the historical document of another.”
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Attributed to David Strauss:
“Faith and history are not the same kind of knowledge.”
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“Criminal history shows us how many torturers of men, and murderers, have first been torturers of animals . The manner in which a nation in the aggregate treats animals, is one chief measure of its real civilization. The Latin races, as we know, come forth badly from this examination; we Germans, not half well enough. Buddhism has done more in this direction than Christianity, and Schopenhauer more”
The Old Faith and the New ( Der alte und der neue Glaube , 1872, translated from the 6th edition by M. Blind , New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1873), vol. II, part IV, ch. 71, pp. 59 -60.