Introduction

Introduction This book was started with the average theology student in mind. In my fifteen years of teaching theology at undergraduate and postgraduate level, I have come to understand that, within most student quarters, the dominant image of Ferdinand Christian Baur is that of a theologian associated with a nontraditional perspective on the Bible—generally dubbed “liberal”—so his name is primarily connected with biblical studies. It has become evident to me that a significant number of students do not even realize that Baur was more than just a biblical theologian, let alone ask why he believed what he wrote in his numerous academic productions. His interest in philosophy and religion escapes most students interested in theology, so questions related to his understanding of these issues rarely surface during courses and seminars. Consequently, I began to write this book hoping that theology students would understand not only what lies beneath Baur’s “liberal” (in the sense of nontraditional, because he did precede German theological liberalism) perspective on the Bible, but also get a sense of how his perspective on theology was shaped by a couple of his famous predecessors, most notably Jakob Böhme and G.W.F. Hegel, to whom Baur is greatly indebted for his intellectual development. It should be said here that Böhme and Hegel are not the only figures who moulded Baur’s understanding of religion in general and of Christian theology in particular. Friedrich Schelling and Friedrich Schleiermacher were also mentioned alongside Böhme and Hegel, but since in Baur’s view Schelling and Schleiermacher did less than Hegel in minutely detailing the relation- ship between various forms of religion such as Paganism, Judaism, and Christianity—and in so doing, focusing exclusively on the reality of man’s subjectivity—only Hegel (who dealt with God’s objectivity as the absolute spirit in the concreteness of the natural world) and, through him, Böhme (who attempted to view God based on how the objective reality of nature works in its tangible materiality) will be investigated in this book. Unfortunately though, once Böhme and Hegel got into the picture, the book gradually ceased to stay at the level of the average theology student. The rather difficult nature of the issues discussed by Hegel coupled with the notori- ously ambiguous writings of Böhme turned my work into a book which goes beyond the level of a mere introduction. It is therefore very likely that it will be more appealing to established scholars in the field of philosophy of religion and especially to those who specialize in the German tradition of the eigh- teenth and nineteenth centuries. I do hope, however, that theology students will not find this book a discouraging exercise of academic reading because my © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��5 | doi ��.��63/9789004�75��8_00� 2 Introduction intention was not to come forward with a new thesis or even with a new approach to either systematic theology or the philosophy of religion. Despite my failure to keep the book at the level of an introductory work, what I intended—and hopefully managed—to do in the end was to present a certain coordinate in Baur’s thought which has not been investigated in academia and which has consequently remained somewhat obscure or even concealed to those interested in Baur’s works. This is why this book presents a neglected and unfamiliar dimension of Baur’s philosophy, and in doing so it seeks to replace the dominant perspective on Baur as a theologian concerned with reading the Bible in a nontraditional way with an image that presents him as a pivotal authority in the philosophy of religion. To be clear from the start, I did not tackle Baur’s understanding of biblical theology in any way whatsoever; what I did was to investigate how his general perspective on theology was influenced by Böhme and Hegel. Why Böhme and Hegel? Simply because Baur himself points to both, and a close analysis of how he understands their writings reveals how he came to shape his own perspective on theology. It is important to notice that the word “theology” refers to Christian theology, the very core of the Christian religion, which is the starting point of Baur’s inquiry long before he delves into issues related to other religions, such as Judaism and Paganism as well as—to a certain degree—Islam. Although one cannot say with absolute certainty how Baur’s study of Christian theology actually began and whether it was precedent or subsequent to his interest in other religions, it is fairly easy to notice that while he starts with Christian theology, his preoccupation with it is far from the “standard” approach of traditional theology. His nontraditional understanding of Christian theology led him to believe that Christianity is a mere religion among others and even if he may have believed in its superiority over other religions, such a con- viction was not shaped theologically, but rather made up philosophically. It is here that Baur needs to be discussed in connection with Hegel and Böhme. While it is quite safe to say that Baur must have made his acquaintance first with Hegel (they were contemporaries and their lives did overlap) and only then with Böhme, it really does not matter who came first under Baur’s careful scrutiny. It may be that Baur read Hegel first and, having been influenced by his thought, he then continued with Böhme, who only strengthened his already cemented Hegelian convictions. What is really important here is to understand that both Hegel and Böhme (or the other way around) had something to say to Baur, so he eventually learned from both how to redefine Christian theology as a philosophy of religion. For the sake of keeping a certain chronology as fundamental for the argu- ment of this book, I decided to start with the things Baur learned from Böhme .

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