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As a theology student at Tiibingen in 1829, David Friedrich Strauss enthusiastically embraced the philosophy of Hegel because he was convinced of its promise to do justice to the content of religion and to make peace between religion and modern thought.1 Five years later, after having immersed himself far more deeply in a study of Hegel's writings and lectures, he wrote The Life of Jesus Critically Examined (1835-36), believing that in it he had fulfilled the Master's promise.2 In spite of Strauss's intentions, The Life of Jesus, as perhaps no other single work, would prove to disturb the efforts of Christian theologians seeking to find peace with modernity, and from the moment of its appearance Strauss met with charges from his fellow Hegelians that, instead of fulfilling Hegel's promise, he had betrayed it. The main lines of this criticism, drawn up in the nineteenth century but also carried over into the twentieth, are that in his famous work Strauss (1) fell back of Hegel to the standpoint of rationalism and (2) misinterpreted Hegel's philosophy in the direction of Spinoza or Schelling. These two lines of criticism converge in the often repeated charge that Strauss failed to do justice to Hegel's treatment of subjectivity. Here I will examine the shapes this charge has taken and attempt to show that Strauss made a brilliant and, in my opinion, successful defense against it in his Streitschriften (1837).

The nineteenth-century German thinkers who became known as the "Young Hegelian movement" or the "Left Hegelian party" have not only been slighted as individual thinkers, but have been treated collectively as having little other significance besides that of connecting Hegel and Marx. They have been seen as "Hegelians," that is, as totally dominated by their master's idealist presuppositions, and yet as "Young," that is, as having the presentiment of a new age without the foresight to envision either Marxist socialism or German nationalist expansionism. From this point of view, they seem to have shared in the mediocrity of the age in Germany between the deaths of Hegel and Schleiermacher and the ministry of Bismarck. William J. Brazill's proposal to study these men primarily as individuals whose interests and goals only momentarily coincided (p. 12) goes far toward enabling a more appreciative historical evaluation.1 His historical introduction, his treatment of the development of the individual thinkers against their historical backgrounds, and his excellent bibliographical essay give a concrete taste of the sense of crisis and movement in which these men shared

MASSEY HAMILTON SHEPHERD, JR. KRE LIGIOUS groups, like other units of human society, are bound together by common patterns of behavior and of belief. Nonconformity in either behavior or belief is certain to produce conflict. If cultus is the dominant concern of the group rather than theology, then it naturally follows that nonconformity in matters of ritual behavior is a more serious threat to the stability of the group than heresy. Such was the case with the religious world of antiquity. Indeed, so small a part did questions of belief play in ancient polytheism that theology as such was fostered by individual philosophers, who had no official relationship with the cultus; whereas the hierarchies of priests and augurs confined themselves to the performance and preservation of correct ceremonial. This explains why Christianity so early incurred the opposition of the government as well as of society generally. Pagans really cared very little that their Christian neighbors believed the gods to be not gods but rather evil demons, or, at best, deified men of old; nor were they especially annoyed that Christians adhered to certain foolish notions of the despicable Jews, or worshiped as their own peculiar god a criminal. But when Christians refused even to death to burn a penny's worth of incense or pour out a couple drops of wine for the safety of the emperor, and refrained from