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Ferdinand Christian Baur (1792–1860) was professor of Protestant theology at the University of Tübingen from 1826 until his death. He first became famous for his innovative theories about the New Testament, but his academic responsibility included church history and history of dogma as well. His monographs set new standards for historical–critical theology, and he became the leader of the influential Tübingen School in the mid-nineteenth century. The Editorial Introduction focuses on Baur’s relationship to Hegel, his appropriation of the Hegelian method for his work in history, his interpretation of Hegel’s christology, and his advocacy of a Hegelian “middle” position. It provides an overview of Baur’s enormous intellectual achievements and a summary of the book translated in this volume.

This chapter illuminates how theology came to view itself and the unresolved political questions generated by modernity that liberation theologians challenged. The theo-political negotiation that began in sixteenth-century Europe, the reverberations of the Enlightenment and Romantic heart religion, remained as a residue within post-war theology. Both Catholics and Protestant liberationists voiced the attitude of the radical wing of the Reformation, an influential minority appealed to by many subsequent dissenters. The chapter surveys a set of key theo-political negotiations resulting in the Great Separation between religion and politics contributing to the mid-century irrelevancy of theology. The thought of Martin Luther, Thomas Müntzer, and Friedrick Schleiermacher are examined as offering key ideas. In response, liberationists argued for a critical theology against an inherited privatized religion and the assumed autonomy of theology that denied its political character. Refusing to bypass politics, they instigated a call for a critical world-shaping theology.

This chapter notes that, while many introductions to the New Testament have been published recently, relatively few of them reflect on the task of the discipline of the introduction (Einleitungswissenschaft). Baur does so in a lengthy article on this topic (1850) and in his posthumously published lectures on New Testament theology (1864). Baur regards his work as a “critique of the canon” because it challenges the idea of a unitary canon of inspired writings by focusing on the distinctive tendency of each writing—a tendency reflecting theological and socio-cultural Sitze im Leben. Baur also provides a history of the discipline from the Reformation to about 1850. The chapter concludes by offering some reflections on the contemporary state of New Testament studies.

Chapter 6 discusses the early philosophical development of Eduard Zeller, another central figure in the growth of neo-Kantianism in the 1860s. The central theme is Zeller’s gradual evolution away from Hegelianism and towards neo-Kantianism; the key to that development is his increasing realization of the power of Kantian dualisms and the impotence of the Hegelian dialectic. A final section treats his attempt to develop a neo-classical ethics.

This chapter discusses Baur’s relationship to his most important philosophical influence, G. W. F. Hegel. Baur read Hegel only as a mature scholar, after he had already developed his own insight into conflicting tendencies in early Christianity, and in light of the prior influence on him of Schleiermacher and Schelling. Baur was an idealist in the sense that he regarded history as a unitary process of development through differences, the development of an idea. And he was a Hegelian in the sense that this process of development is God’s development, accomplishing itself in dialectical form and realizing freedom in history. But he was an idealist and Hegelian of a distinctive kind because he combined this theological and philosophical conviction with the most exacting historical research. His historical–critical theology represents a modification of Hegelianism that is still relevant today.