THE TUBINGEN SCHOOL OF " DESIGN."
Ma. MACKAY has been somewhat unfortunate in the time he has selected for bringing out his reports from Tubingen. For every- body has been reading M. Renan's " Life of Jesus ;" and when one closes the latter and opens the volume before us, it is like turning from the freshness and flowers of a garden in full bloom to the glass cases of a museum containing the mere labelled specimens of a hortus siccus. M. Renan's book is instinct with life ; Mr. Mackay's is cold and lifeless. M. Renan is a poet ; Mr. Mackay is a partizan. The Frenchman startles by his creative power ; the Englishman oppresses ns with second-hand criticism, and second-hand assertions, which we cannot under- stand how any one could repeat after a direct perusal of Polycarp, Ignatins, Irenasue, Clement of Alexandria, or Euiebius. The realistic imagination of M. Renan strives to win back for the consciousness of this century that veritable human presence which, as he strangely conceives, the legends and dogmas of generations hide from our simple beholding. As Strauss himself had attempted before, M. Renan endeavours to reconstruct the life of Christ. But we search in vain throughout Mr. Mackay's dreary pages for anything even approaching a distinct con- ception of the personality of the Founder of Christianity. At most, we learn that in Christ's life we see "idealism" ' carried to excess in an extravagant renunciation of the world." This idealism was " still noble in despondency," and "the feelings (sic !) and maxims of Christianity would scarcely have made a distinct historical epoch had they not been attached to an his- torically remarkable individual." This " attachment," however we must regard as an unmitigated calamity ; for, adds our re- porter, "hence, by a natural illusion, the feelings and convictions of ethical and intellectual religion were eclipsed and superseded by an idolatry of the person" (p. 19), which converted " the lowly moral teacher of the Synoptics" into "the visionary Christ of the fourth Gospel" (p. 277). Between the two conflicting representations, as he is pleased to imagine them, Mr. Mackay gets quite bewildered, and calls in the services of Dr. Karl Hose, who comforts him with the soothing language that "no one out of Bedlam could have imagined the master on whose breast he leaned at supper was the Lord of the world." The school in behalf of which Mr. Mackay comes forward as the special pleader in this bulky pamphlet may be designated the critical school of " Design " (Tendenz). Omitting what may be called transitional aspects from our consideration, we have in the Tiibingen School the third phasis of German Biblical criticism. The first was the "ration- alistic," properly so called ; and its representative men, such as Paulus, Venturini, and Thiess, inverting the legendary pro- cess of extracting sunshine from cucumbers, professed to be masters in the art of turning sunshine into cold vegetable. According to them,the Evangelists were, probably enough, honest, well-meaning men ; but, being neither literary nor scientific, -their narratives demand constant rectification. If at times they really seem to regard certain cures as miraculous, it is incumbent on the rational critic to lay bare the warp of simple fact that underlies the florid woof of the uncritical historian ; while, in other instances, we should wrong the writers by supposing that they intended to represent certain issues as the results of preternatural interference. For example, the apparent miracle in John ix.—that of giving sight to a blind man—was, in reality, only a case of water-cure awkwardly stated ! But this very " little system" had its cold day, and ceased to be, and by and bye came the world-famous school of mythical interpretation founded specially by Strauss. Accord- ing to Strauss, the Evangelists were unconscious novelists. The personality of the devout Rabbi Joshua, whom we call Jesus, wrought with such mighty attraction on the feverish Mes- sianic expectancy of his day, that, although he performed no miracles, which, however, were to be the unfailing credentials of Messiahship, nevertheless, his followers first persuaded them- /selves, and then their master too, that he was in very deed the Messiah, while, after his death, the ascriptive powers of a regret- ful memory and glorifying imagination invested the earthly sojourn of the loved teacher with all the attributes which he should have possessed, but failed to exhibit.
Not to speak of the endless absurdities, the contradictions, the anachronisms, &c., which Strauss professed to have found in the Gospels, and paraded under his microscope, the Evangelists themselves were, from his standing-point, the most hopeless and helpless of fabricators. They suffered from what Bacon calls
• The Tubingen School and its elnleeedenis. By R. W. Mackay, Y.A. London and Edinburgh : Williams and Norgate. 1863.
"the lie which sinketh in"—unconscious deceivers, who never doubted their perfect veracity.
A good deal of what may be termed side-play bad been going on before the appearance of Strauss's " Life of Jesus," relative to the authenticity of the four Gospels, and Bretschneider (1820) had even ventured so far as to affirm that the Gospel of John was the work of a dogmatic Tendenzschrifisteller, who lived in the first half of the second century. Strauss himself, however, meddled but little, if at all, with the question of the author- ship of the Evangelic narratives. His criticism was mainly directed against the materials of the history. But " myths " do not, like the prophet's gourd, come to maturity in a single night, and it was felt that the basis of the Straussian hypothesis was itself mythical; that the legendary character of the Gospels could not be maintained so long as their com- position was assigned to the first century. The myths had not had time to grow ; consequently, as the necessities of criticism demanded a later origin for the New Testament historical records, the conjecture of Bretschneider, though apparently re- tracted by himself, was proclaimed to be the deus ex machina, and by the chiefs of the Tubingen School, the late Professor Baur, Zeller, and Schwegler, was extended to the genesis of all the canonical Christian Scriptures, excepting the Apocalypse, and Paul's Epistles to the Corinthians, the Galatians, and the Romans. Rationalism and mythicism having gone to their own place, Tendemazism reigns, pro tempore, in their stead ; and thus we may condense its imperial decrees :- A church being inevitably a compromise, and its conservative genius being always hostile to free thought, the early history of Christianity, if read aright, must reveal a struggle between con- tending parties, and one has but to open the genuine letters of Paul (echt paulinische), in order to find abundant proofs of the existence of a contest in which the Apostle of the Gentiles takes his stand, on the one side, as the advocate of ideal Christianity, while the Twelve are ranged on the other, as the representatives of Judaical narrowness. With the " rancour of the visionary pamphleteer," and " consistently true to the bigotry and intoler- ance of Judaism," St. John discharges his anathemas from the heavy artillery of the Apocalypse—a curious kind of Jew, this same pamphleteer, seeing that the Gentiles, whom he admits into his heaven, form "a multitude which no man could number, of all nations, and people, and tongues," while he hesitates not to speak of the metropolis of "bigotry," the city where the Lord was crucified, as "Sodom and Egypt," and over against the countless throng of glorified heathens he seals off for salvation only 144,000 Jews ! St. Paul, again, from the rifle-pits of progress and free thought, keeps up incessant practice on the traditionary ranks.
Alas ! St. Paul's character, after all, comes forth from the Tubingen laboratory in very questionable shape. With "the bigotry and intolerance of Judaism," be first appears on the stage of history, seeking to sweep Christianity from the face of the earth, and then failing to " destroy " the Church by external assault, he enters it under a flag of truce, in order, with " the rancour of a visionary ' dialectician, to overthrow it by internal division !
After the death of Paul, the interests of liberalism became seriously imperilled, so are we to believe, and Petrine " views " rose into the ascendant. Nay, more, they threatened wholly to eclipse the lights dimly burning in the Pauline Epistles, when, somewhere about the middle of the second century, recourse was had to diplomatic mediation. Gifted writers—but great luminaries so thoroughly hid under bushels that nobody knows anything of their names or whereabouts—sent forth their respective Tendenz-compositions, and immediately one side or the other thanked God and took courage.
"The Tendenz of Luke was to antagonize that of Matthew." The Acts of the Apostles was launched to cover Paul with obloquy (p. 214)1 For thus Tiibingen judges now, whereas, but a abort while ago, Dr. Baur imparted to us the secret that the Tendenz of the Acts—at times, too, of a very unscrupulous character—was to support the pretensions of Paul, and place him on a level with the canonical apostles—and then, on the Pauline side, we have the grandest effort of all, viz., the Gospel of John, in which (under cover of a wrong name, for John, as we hear, was a " bigoted Jew"), the author hits out right and left against the Synoptics, publishes to the world a mild universalism, a " calm transcendentalism" (p. 262), and, above all, by announcing the 14th of Nisan as the day of theCrucifixion, drives a ploughshare through the Eastern tradition, sanctioned though
that tradition was, by- St. John's own practice of commemorating the 15th of the month as the anniversary of Christ's death (pp. 264-5, &c.)!
Our limits forbid further analysis. Of Baur himself we can speak in terms of large respect, for his industry, his learning, and his great literary power. Few have written better German than he did, and, to name but one of his works, his "History of the Doctrine of the Atonement" is one of the most valuable contri- butions to theology which Germany has supplied. But his Tendenz Criticism" is an elaborate dramatic phantasy, in which world-wide influence of the highest character is wielded by men whose distrust of God's truth is so tremendous that they must call in to its assistance what Carlyle would call the Devil's lie.
Waiving, however, moral considerations, which, according to Strauss, avail nothing on the field of science, we are quite pre- pared to prove, among other matters, that the alleged difference between the East and the West in the celebration of Easter was wholly ritual, and not dogmatic ; but to this we must return in another article.
At Thbingen, St. Paul is still, it seems, accepted as the first of theologians," and, as we have seen, " the four great epistles" (p. 221) are "the sole remaining swimmers in the vast whirlpool." How long even they will be able to buffet the waves of Tendenz, how soon they, too, must sink down, to suffer a " sea-change" into something at least very "strange," nobody can tell. For it is mere caprice to elect them specially for patronage. if priori, one could make out a much stronger case against Paul than the "Designers " have been able to accomplish against John. How utterly incredible that the " rancorous," "bigoted," intolerant, bloodthirsty Jew should, in consequence of a sunstroke, suddenly become the gentlest, the most patient, the most lowly, and the most loving of all men, should do all and dare all for a master of whose existence he had but "visionary" proof, while yet he spent his giant energies in doing battle life-long with those who were that master's personal friends. Why, the Acts being declared unhistorical, what proof of all this have we but the Jew's own assertions?
But, meanwhile, believing, as we do, in the enduring claims of these letters, we find in them those great facts which render the Tiibingen criticism an unhistorical romance, and that Christology in the light and on the level of which the evangelical narratives become simple and natural records. For they speak of One who, in the undoubted words of St. Paul, was "the power of God and the wisdom of God."
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