notes. The chief excellence of this invaluable and indispensable work is in its very carefully selected
and critically elucidated extracts from the original authorities down to the year 1648 (as far as he
edited the work himself). The skeleton-like text presents, indeed, the leading facts clearly and
concisely, but does not reach the inward life and spiritual marrow of the church of Christ. The
theological views of Gieseler hardly rise above the jejune rationalism of Wegscheider, to whom
he dedicated a portion of his history; and with all his attempt at impartiality he cannot altogether
conceal the negative effect of a rationalistic conception of Christianity, which acts like a chill upon
the narrative of its history, and substitutes a skeleton of dry bones for a living organism.
Neander and Gieseler matured their works in respectful and friendly rivalry, during the
same period of thirty years of slow, but solid and steady growth. The former is perfectly subjective,
and reproduces the original sources in a continuous warm and sympathetic composition, which
reflects at the same time the author’s own mind and heart; the latter is purely objective, and speaks
with the indifference of an outside spectator, through the ipsissima verbaof the same sources,
arranged as notes, and strung together simply by a slender thread of narrative. The one gives the
history ready-made, and full of life and instruction; the other furnishes the material and leaves the
reader to animate and improve it for himself. With the one, the text is everything; with the other,
the notes. But both admirably complete each other, and exhibit together the ripest fruit of German
scholarship in general church history in the first half of the nineteenth century.
Ferdinand Christian Baur (Prof. of Church History in Tübingen, d. 1860) must be named
alongside with Neander and Gieseler in the front rank of German church historians. He was equal
to both in independent and thorough scholarship, superior in constructive criticism and philosophical
generalization, but inferior in well-balanced judgment and solid merit. He over-estimated theories
and tendencies, and undervalued persons and facts. He was an indefatigable investigator and bold
innovator. He completely revolutionized the history of apostolic and post-apostolic Christianity,
and resolved its rich spiritual life of faith and love into a purely speculative process of conflicting
tendencies, which started from an antagonism of Petrinism and Paulinism, and were ultimately
reconciled in the compromise of ancient Catholicism. He fully brought to light, by a keen critical
analysis, the profound intellectual fermentation of the primitive church, but eliminated from it the
supernatural and miraculous element; yet as an honest and serious sceptic he had to confess at last
a psychological miracle in the conversion of St. Paul, and to bow before the greater miracle of the
resurrection of Christ, without which the former is an inexplicable enigma. His critical researches
and speculations gave a powerful stimulus to a reconsideration and modification of the traditional
views on early Christianity.
We have from his fertile pen a general History of the Christian Church, in five volumes
(1853–1863), three of which were, published after his death and lack the originality and careful
finish of the first and second, which cover the first six centuries;Lectures on Christian Doctrine
History (Dogmengeschichte),published by his son (1865–’67, in 3 volumes), and a briefLehrbuch
der Dogmengeschichte, edited by himself (1847, 2d ed. 1858). Even more valuable are his
monographs: on St. Paul, for whom he had a profound veneration, although he recognized only
four of his Epistles as genuine (1845, 2d ed. by E. Zeller, 1867, 2 vols., translated into English,
1875); on Gnosticism, with which he had a strong spiritual affinity (Die christliche Gnosis oder
die christliche Religionsphilosophie, 1835); the history of the Doctrine of the Atonement (1838, 1A.D. 1-100.