§ 182.5. The so called =Rational Supernaturalism= admits the supernatural revelation in holy scripture, and puts reason alongside of it as an equally legitimate source of religious knowledge, and maintains the rationality of the contents of revelation. Its chief representative was =Baumgarten-Crusius= of Jena. Of a similar tendency, but more influenced by æsthetic culture and refined feeling, and latterly inclining more and more to the standpoint of “free Protestantism,” =Carl Hase=, after seven years’ work in Tübingen, opened his Jena career in A.D. 1830, which he closed by resigning his professorship in A.D. 1883, after sixty years’ labour in the theological chair. In his “Life of Jesus,” first published A.D. 1829, he represents Christ as the ideal man, sinless but not free from error, endowed with the fulness of love and the power of pure humanity, as having truly risen and become the author of a new life in the kingdom of God, of which the very essence is most purely and profoundly expressed in the gospel of the disciple who lay upon the Master’s heart. The latest revision of this work, issued in A.D. 1876 under the title “_Geschichte Jesu_,” treats the fourth gospel as non-Johnannine in authorship and mythical in its contents, and explains the resurrection by the theory of a swoon or a vision. In his “_Hutterus Redivivus_,” A.D. 1828, twelfth edition 1883, he seeks to set forth the Lutheran dogmatic as Hutter might have done had he lived in these days. This led to the publication of controversial pamphlets in A.D. 1834-1837, which dealt the deathblow to the _Rationalismus Vulgaris_. His “Church History,” distinguished by its admirable little sketches of leading personalities, was published in A.D. 1834, and the seventh edition of A.D. 1854 has been translated into English.
§ 182.6. =Speculative Theology.=--Its founder was =Daub=, professor at Heidelberg from A.D. 1794 till his death in A.D. 1836. Occupying and writing from the philosophical standpoints of Kant, Fichte, and Schelling successively, he published in A.D. 1816 “Judas Iscariot,” an elaborate discussion of the nature of evil, but passed over in A.D. 1833, with his treatise on dogmatics, to the Hegelian position. He exerted great influence as a professor, but his writings proved to most unintelligible.--=Marheineke= of Berlin in the first edition of his “Dogmatics” occupied the standpoint of Schelling, but in the second set forth Lutheran orthodoxy in accordance with the formulæ of the Hegelian system.--After Hegel’s death in A.D. 1831 his older pupils =Rosenkranz= and =Göschel= sought to enlist his philosophy in the service of orthodoxy. =Richter= was the first to give offence, by his “Doctrine of the Last Things,” in which he denounced the doctrine of immortality in the sense of personal existence after death. =Strauss=, A.D. 1808-1874, represented the “Life of Jesus,” in his work of A.D. 1835, as the product of unintentional romancing, and in his “_Glaubenslehre_” of A.D. 1840, sought to prove that all Christian doctrines are put an end to by modern science, and openly taught pantheism as the residuum of Christianity. =Bruno Bauer=, after passing from the right to the left Hegelian wing, described the gospels as the product of conscious fraud, and =Ludwig Feuerbach=, in his “Essence of Christianity,” A.D. 1841, set forth in all its nakedness the new gospel of self-adoration. The breach between the two parties in the school was now complete. Whatever Rosenkranz and Schaller from the centre, and Göschel and Gabler from the right, did to vindicate the honour of the system, they could not possibly restore the for ever shattered illusion that it was fundamentally Christian. Those of the right fell back into the camps of “the German theology” and the Lutheran confessionalism; while in the latest times the left has no prominent theological representative but Biedermann of Zürich.