I. Drews and the Hartmannian Worldview

Arthur Drews came to theological debate as an outsider. As his critics constantly reminded him, Drews lacked the requisite training, languages, and experience to be a credible participant in the scholarly debates surrounding the New Testament texts. In addition (and this point was more implied than stated outright), there was a widespread sense that Drews lacked the personal and professional habitus necessary to be taken seriously not just by theologians, but by the academic world writ large.Footnote ¹¹ Born in 1865, Drews grew up in a merchant family near Hamburg and was descended, on his mother's side, from boatmen and handworkers and, on his father's side, from teachers and farmers.Footnote ¹² His father, after working several years as a schoolteacher, took over a shipping supply business that sold anchors, chains, ropes, and similar equipment. According to Drews, religion “played almost no role” in his household and he grew up with little connection to it aside from the mandatory sermons he attended in order to be confirmed in the Lutheran church.Footnote ¹³ In other words, there was no traumatic loss of faith or estrangement from the father's religion in Drews's past that might explain his later intellectual development. The young Drews did display an artistic bent, composing poems and plays for his own amusement and dreaming of future literary greatness. But by the time he began his university studies, he had given up the hope of becoming a writer and had dedicated himself instead to philosophy.

The problem for Drews was that the Neo-Kantianism then dominant in German universities held little appeal for him. He was drawn instead to writers who had built their reputation outside of the academy: Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and, above all, Eduard von Hartmann, a Prussian nobleman and ex-artillery officer best known for his Philosophie des Unbewussten (1869).Footnote ¹⁴ Although he was derided in his day as a “fashion philosopher” and is known today chiefly as the butt of Nietzsche's polemics, Hartmann was an influential voice in the intellectual life of the second German Empire. He had suffered a serious knee injury while in the army that left him confined to a couch and later prevented him from accepting a university professorship. But he managed to keep himself in the public eye with a seemingly endless stream of books and journal articles, as well as a certain personal magnetism that comes through in photographs. In 1888, a star-struck Drews visited Hartmann in his Berlin apartment, launching a twenty-year friendship between the two men.Footnote ¹⁵

Hartmann's philosophy can be seen as an attempt to synthesize several competing strains of German idealism into a comprehensive, empirically grounded system.Footnote ¹⁶ Combining elements of Hegel, Schopenhauer, and the late Schelling, Hartmann posited an absolute, the “Unconscious,” which was both irrational “Will” and logical “Idea” and which formed the ground of existence. The Will was the aspect of the Unconscious that brought forth the cosmos and sustained it through a process of continual creation; its blindness and irrationality explained the preponderance of misery and suffering in the world. The Idea, on the other hand, gave the world its forms and laws and made it knowable according to the schema of natural science. It was the Idea that guided the evolution of plant and animal life and oversaw the development of human civilization. Only at the end of this history, Hartmann argued, would it be possible for the logical Idea to overcome the dominance of the irrational Will and point the world toward redemption.

The philosophy of the Unconscious was thus a form of pessimism, though not of complete pessimism. Like Schopenhauer, Hartmann rejected the promise of individual happiness, whether in this world or the next, as an illusion that only intensified and prolonged suffering. Nor was he confident in visions of collective happiness, such as those offered in the name of science or socialism. But while he insisted there could be no positive final balance of happiness, he recognized the existence of real pleasures in the world and endorsed a Kantian notion of duty, which he saw as the foundation for a non-egoistic morality.Footnote ¹⁷ As a result, Hartmann dismissed Schopenhauer's suggestion that individuals retreat from the world into the consolations of art and music. Instead, he urged them to attend to the world-historical tasks of building civilization and securing the life of the nation. In an oft-repeated formula, Hartmann summed up his outlook as “eudaemonistically pessimistic” but “evolutionarily optimistic.”

Hartmann's philosophy expressed the hopes and frustrations of those in the Protestant educated classes who disliked the individual-acquisitive ethos of the early Kaiserreich and distrusted its democratic potentials, but who still identified strongly with the German nation-state. Indeed, Hartmann's own politics were resolutely Bismarckian and Borussian. In his political writings, he vilified liberalism for what he saw as its one-sided devotion to the cause of individual freedom. At the same time, he despised the Social Democrats, whose egalitarian vision of society would entail the victory of the masses over the culture-producing elites. And thirdly, he rejected political Catholicism as a threat to the sovereignty of the state.Footnote ¹⁸ As an alternative to these, Hartmann called for an organic state in which the excesses of capitalism were checked by a system of social insurance and the energies of society were directed toward strengthening Germany at home and abroad.

Hartmann maintained, as early as the 1870s, that his ethical and political vision could only be realized if Christianity were superseded by a pantheistic form of religion.Footnote ¹⁹ In Die Religion des Geistes (1882), he described this religious worldview as “concrete monism,” which he conceived as an alternative both to traditional theism (which viewed God and the world as real but distinct entities) and “abstract monism,” in which only one of the two (either God or the world) was taken as real. Hartmann's standpoint, by contrast, was “monist” because it treated God (that is, the Unconscious) and the world as of the same essence, but “concrete” in that it recognized a pluralism of individuals and attributes within that common essence.Footnote ²⁰ In Hartmann's scheme, God was not a personality but rather an unconscious all-knowing, while the world and everything in it was the realization of its thought. Individual redemption involved an “active dedication to the divine,” which in practice meant working for the good of the whole and freeing oneself from egoism and the search for pleasure. By exposing not only individual immortality but the self as illusions, Hartmann believed he had demonstrated the “bankruptcy of egoistic eudaemonism” as well as the obligation of individuals to sacrifice their egos on behalf of the future.Footnote ²¹

Over the course of his life, Hartmann expanded this religious-philosophical system to touch on questions of ethics, politics, aesthetics, natural science, theology, and even the occult. In addition, Hartmann cultivated an extensive network of acquaintances and followers, who included Ferdinand Tönnies, Paul von Hoensburch (head of the Evangelischer Bund), the theologian Otto Pfleiderer, and, for a time, Rudolf Steiner. But while Hartmann's philosophy appealed to politically conservative but religiously heterodox Protestants in search of an alternative worldview, there was an obvious eclecticism (some might say incoherence) in his metaphysics that prevented it from catching on among university philosophers.Footnote ²²

This would spell trouble for Arthur Drews, whose academic career can be seen as one long tribute to the genius of his master. Drews had difficulty finishing his PhD at Halle, and it was only after failed attempts to habilitate in Berlin, Breslau, and Strasbourg that he finally secured the venia legendi in 1895 from the relatively unprestigious Technical University of Karlsruhe.Footnote ²³ While he was able to lecture at Karlsruhe, he never received a full professorship and, with it, a regular salary or pension. Instead, he would remain, even more than his mentor, an outsider, with few connections to the main currents of philosophical scholarship.

Part of the problem was that Drews never felt entirely comfortable operating within the constraints of academic life. As early as 1892, while still an unemployed PhD, Drews confessed his desire to bring the Hartmannian gospel straight to the people:

In his reply, Hartmann warned Drews that such a course of action would make him unemployable and ruin his health in the process:

In the face of this counsel, Drews resolved to focus on his philosophical scholarship and to avoid the more delicate issues of theology and religion.

Yet this decision held only for a few years. Despite a slew of publications, Drews found himself unable to build a reputation in the field of philosophy, to gain acceptance from colleagues, or to be taken seriously. Reading the correspondence with Hartmann, one can detect Drews's mounting frustration as he strove for a reaction—any reaction—from a university professoriate that considered the Hartmannian philosophy beneath comment and that rarely even reviewed Drews's publications in their journals. Aggravating all of this was Drews's personal style: he was given to fits of pique and anger, and Hartmann repeatedly chided him for the vulgar tone he sometimes adopted when writing about his scholarly rivals.Footnote ²⁶ There is little evidence that Drews heeded such criticism however.Footnote ²⁷ Instead, he increasingly saw himself as a victim of academic politics, which he blamed variously on “university philosophy” or, increasingly, the “Jewification [Verjüdelung] of philosophy.”Footnote ²⁸ At one point, Drews even asked Hartmann whether the Marburg Neo-Kantian Paul Natorp was Jewish, adding, “his style of writing almost led me to conclude so.”Footnote ²⁹ Hartmann assured Drews that this was unlikely.

As Drews's chances of becoming professor ordinarius faded, he returned with new vigor to the issue of religion, directing his venom against the exponents of Protestant liberal theology, whom he assailed as “hypocritical to the bone” and lacking “any sense of shame.”Footnote ³⁰ In an essay for the Preussische Jahrbücher entitled “Die Persönlichkeit Gottes” (1904), Drews delivered a bitter attack against theologians’ insistence—in defiance of all logic—on describing God as a divine personality.Footnote ³¹ Yet if Drews thought he was throwing down a gauntlet at the feet of his rivals, the challenged party took no notice, as the theological guild either ignored or remained unaware of Drews's polemic against them. In a letter to his protégé, Hartmann suggested that the theologians had little interest in the question of God's personality because, when it came to God, they were already agnostics: “Your struggle against the personality of God is a struggle against windmills: with it you are only walking through open doors.”Footnote ³² But Hartmann was only half right. For the question of personality was in fact of paramount importance to the liberal theologians and their public, only not as it applied to God, but rather to the figure of Jesus Christ.

II. Jesus as “Personality” circa 1900

If one needs evidence of the central role of the concept of “personality” for interpretations of the historical Jesus circa 1900, one need look no further than Adolf Harnack's hugely popular Das Wesen des Christentums (1900).Footnote ³³ Harnack, professor of church history at the University of Berlin, described his approach to Christianity in these lectures as “historical,” as opposed to apologetic or philosophical, which for him entailed a focus on Jesus Christ and his message. At the same time, however, Harnack insisted on separating that which was “essential,” “alive,” and “permanent” in the Gospel message from that which belonged to its “contemporary shell” or context.Footnote ³⁴ Above all, he argued, Jesus had led the people to a knowledge of “God the Father and the infinite value of the human soul,” while teaching “the higher righteousness and the commandment of love.”Footnote ³⁵ In Harnack's view, Jesus was intensely concerned with the social question, but at the same time cautious about overturning existing institutions. In other words, he was a reformer rather than a revolutionary, and his proclamation of the Kingdom of God was a message of internal healing rather than an “external hope for the future.”Footnote ³⁶

Harnack's lectures were intended not only to present the broad outlines of a liberal Christology, but also to address a series of recent challenges to it. These included the notion that Christianity was “solely a higher form of Judaism,” the argument that the Gospel was derived from Hellenistic mystery religions, the view that Christianity was primarily a social movement and that Jesus was the “savior of the suffering lower classes,” and the position (developed by Johannes Weiss and carried forward by Albert Schweitzer) that Jesus was an apocalyptic preacher who had proclaimed the coming of a literal Kingdom of God.Footnote ³⁷ In addressing these challenges, Harnack returned again and again to the same point, which was that Jesus was not simply a product of his time or, indeed, of any broad historical force, whether social or intellectual, but was instead a personality who transcended the limitations of his surroundings and conditions. Thus, to those Jewish scholars who argued that Jesus's teaching did not go beyond the rabbinical teachings of his day, Harnack countered that even if the words of Jesus's teaching were the same, their meaning was transformed due to the force of Jesus's extraordinary personality.Footnote ³⁸ Even if the belief in a coming Kingdom of God was widespread in first century Palestine, Jesus had added a unique and paradoxical dimension to it, namely the claim that God's kingdom was “in the midst of you,” that this realm was not a matter of “angels and devils, thrones and principalities, but of God and the soul, the soul and its God.”Footnote ³⁹

Harnack's emphasis on “personality” as a force abiding within and yet transcending its historical context, that was able to convey paradox and signal deeper meanings, reflected a broader fascination with “personality,” “individualism,” and “genius” in turn-of-the-century German intellectual culture. In an important essay, Friedrich Wilhelm Graf has described liberal theology circa 1900 as engaged in the “preservation of personality,” a task that reflected theologians’ self-conception as a Wertelite distinct from the masses, whose values placed them in opposition to major trends of the modern world (technology, capitalism, socialism) and who increasingly found their moral and intellectual leadership challenged by the forces of organized secularism on one side and conservative elements within the Protestant churches on the other side.Footnote ⁴⁰

At the same time, however, the turn to personality in theology was part of a broader engagement with this concept in German literature and scholarship.Footnote ⁴¹ “The call for personality issues through our age,” one commentator wrote in 1903. “Indeed, it sees in this word its most characteristic feature.”Footnote ⁴² Likewise, a young Martin Heidegger noted in 1910, “these days much is spoken about ‘personality,’ and philosophers find [in it] new concepts of value.”Footnote ⁴³ Even more than the closely related notion of “genius,” the concept of personality tapped into the psychological turn of the early twentieth century and a growing impatience with rationalist and materialist accounts of the self. A free, well-developed personality was seen as the highest goal of culture, an ideal embodied in figures like Goethe, Schiller, and Nietzsche, individuals who triumphed over their own weaknesses and the limitations of their eras to achieve a “harmonious, creative synergism of their various gifts and powers.”Footnote ⁴⁴ In the discourse of personality, the great individual was defined more by emotion, force, and struggle than by intellect, eloquence, or logic.Footnote ⁴⁵

The concept of personality was central to the portrayal of Jesus by the Göttingen theologian Wilhelm Bousset. One of the central figures in the so-called “History of Religion School,” Bousset sought to demonstrate the influence of Hellenistic mystery religions on the emergence of Christianity, arguing that this influence did not begin with the Gospel of John (as Harnack had maintained), but that it had also shaped the synoptic Gospels and Pauline epistles.Footnote ⁴⁶ Not content just to write for scholars, Bousset helped to found the Religionsgeschichtliche Volksbücher, a book series dedicated to conveying the result of the newer theology to a broad public while countering conservative polemics against the “evils” of modern theology.Footnote ⁴⁷ The first volume in the series was Bousset's short book Jesus (1904), in which he provided a character sketch of the founder of Christianity.

Like Harnack, Bousset saw Jesus's personality as central to his overcoming of the legalistic and nationalistic limits of Judaism and his creation of an ethic oriented toward the infinite: “That is Jesus's ethical character: heroism, enthusiasm, boundless devotion to the holy will of God that tolerates no exceptions and stipulations, drives the person [Mensch] from demand to demand, and holds him in a state of constant unrest.”Footnote ⁴⁸ But Bousset's Jesus, when compared to that of Harnack, was less a teacher than a man of action—raw and emotional, impatient with the “casuistry” of the Pharisees, resolute in his commitment to God and his vocation. This held true even as Jesus became certain of his impending death and suffering, for it was at this moment that he broke with previous, political notions of messiahship and proclaimed himself “Son of Man,” a “bold deed of faith” that allowed him to become the “leader of ages and peoples to God.”Footnote ⁴⁹ In sum, Bousset's Jesus comes across as a kind of “life reformer,” who railed against the intellectual and moral conventions of his day, even as he avoided the pitfalls of political conflict.

Bousset honed these views during a year-long debate with the radical clergyman Albert Kalthoff, who was first pastor at the St. Martini Church in Bremen.Footnote ⁵⁰ Bremen was at this time a hotbed of religious radicalism, where individual congregations elected free-thinking pastors and where the local teachers’ association had petitioned for the elimination of religious education from public schools on the grounds that the state had a right and duty to care for children's “scientific, technical, and moral education,” but not for their “dogmatic-religious” training.Footnote ⁵¹ Over his career, Kalthoff oscillated between Marxian socialism and Nietzschean individualism while issuing a series of broadsides against liberal theology and its notion of Christian origins. In Das Christus-Problem: Grundlinien zu einer Sozialtheologie (1902) and Die Entstehung des Christentums (1904), Kalthoff turned Harnack's emphasis on the personality of Jesus on its head by denying that he had existed at all. The Christ of the Gospels, he argued, was merely a personification of the social aspirations of the Roman proletariat during the reign of Trajan, but displaced into the religious landscape of first-century Jewish apocalypticism. “Under the veil of an apocalyptic narrative,” Kalthoff argued, lurked a real piece of “social history,” notably that of workers who demanded justice, human rights, and the implementation of a democratic-communist order.Footnote ⁵² Bousset challenged these views in a speech sponsored by the Bremen chapter of the left-liberal Protestantenverein, which inspired a series of counter-polemics from Kalthoff.

In the end, Kalthoff proved too radical for even Bremen, and in 1906 local pastors petitioned to remove him from office on the grounds of espousing atheism. The same year, however, he was elected president of the German Monist League, which had been founded by the evolutionary biologist Ernst Haeckel in order to help promote a monistic worldview grounded in natural science.Footnote ⁵³ As Todd Weir has shown, the Monist League was only the most prominent organization in a broader freigeistig, or secularist movement, that by the 1900s had won over a sizeable percentage of the lower middle class and working class population in North German cities like Berlin and Hamburg. By demanding that their organizations be put on a par with other religious groups in Germany, secularists threw into question the legitimacy of state-sponsored religious education, state-sponsored faculties of theology, and the very existence of established churches.Footnote ⁵⁴ Like other secularist and freigeistig groups, the Monist League worked roughly in parallel with the Social Democrats, and its official orientation was internationalist and pacifist. But its members adhered to a wide variety of viewpoints, as the election of Kalthoff as president indicates.

The publicity surrounding the Kalthoff-Bousset debate soon attracted the attention of Arthur Drews. In a letter to Hartmann, he declared Kalthoff's lecture “excellent” while Bousset's was “terribly weak, full of platitudes, and lacking in content.”Footnote ⁵⁵ An even more incisive statement from the Hartmannian perspective was that of Wilhelm von Schnehen, a private scholar and former military man who had become active in right monist circles (Drews would dedicate Die Christusmythe to him). In Der moderne Jesuskultus (1906), Schnehen identified the debate over the “Romantic veneration of the ‘human’ Jesus” as “the religious question of the day,” and “the one great occurrence, surpassing all others, around which almost all religious life appears to revolve, outside that of the orthodox church.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Yet this “aesthetic cult of an earthly personality” marked a radical departure from what was previously called Christianity, which was based on faith in the resurrected Christ, the Son of God who would return to judge the world. Echoing earlier critiques by Nietzsche, Overbeck, and Hartmann, Schnehen attributed liberal theology's cult of Jesus to its “religious agnosticism,” which denied the possibility of a true knowledge or experience of God.Footnote ⁵⁷

For Schnehen, the cult of the historical Jesus was problematic even when viewed simply from the standpoint of historical logic. As the Catholic theologian Alfred Loisy had noted in L’Évangile et l’Église (1903), liberal theologians blatantly ignored the principle of evolution when they narrated the history of Christianity as a falling away from an original “pure principle.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Thus, while Harnack acknowledged that Jesus was conditioned by his era, he insisted that the “essential elements” of his gospel and personality transcended the circumstances of their origin.Footnote ⁵⁹ Schnehen, by contrast, argued that once one dispensed with the obviously supernatural elements of the Gospels, they revealed a man who, while full of love for the poor and oppressed, expressed extreme anger and bitterness against his theological opponents, calling for them to be cast into the fires of hell.Footnote ⁶⁰ Those elements of Jesus's teaching that were most compatible with present-day sensibilities, such as the commandments to love one's neighbors and one's enemies, could already be found in the Jewish prophets and in contemporary Greek and Hellenistic philosophy and thus hardly constituted the basis of a new religion, much less a new moral and ethical sensibility. Meanwhile, liberal theologians like Harnack and Bousset had cast off as a mere shell the element of Jesus's ministry that was most important to him and his disciples, namely the proclamation of a real (not metaphorical) Kingdom of God. In this way, they disguised the fundamental incompatibility between Jesus's teaching and any project of national cooperation or selfless action on behalf of a common good.Footnote ⁶¹

Schnehen was not alone in his sense of the incompatibility of Christian teaching with modern conditions. In Briefe über Religion (1903), the Protestant clergyman and activist Friedrich Naumann had drawn a sharp line between Jesus's teachings, particularly those on the dangers of wealth and the need to turn the other cheek, and the imperatives facing twentieth-century Germany, where Darwinism marked the apex of science, capitalism was the only viable economic system, and great power rivalries required a strong military and an aggressive foreign policy.Footnote ⁶² Naumann was departing here from his earlier insistence on an “evangelical” social policy, even if he did not break entirely from the Christian religion. In a long polemic, Schnehen castigated him for trying to hold onto Christianity in the face of its evident “bankruptcy,” in an effort to avoid what had long been obvious, that is, that the religious needs of the present could only be met by a new religion of the future.Footnote ⁶³ And for the outline of such a religion, Schnehen recommended that his readers consult Arthur Drews's recently published Die Religion als Selbst-Bewusstsein Gottes (1906).

III. “Religion as the Self-Consciousness of God”

Drews resolved to write a book on Religionsphilosophie at a time when theological debate in Germany had become public and political to a degree not seen since the Vormärz. Harnack's Das Wesen des Christentums (1900) sparked a wide-ranging debate among not just Protestants, but also Catholic and Jewish commentators. Friedrich Delitzsch's lecture Babel und Bibel (1902) proved even more controversial, as scholars, journalists, and even cartoonists debated its derivation of large sections of Genesis from Babylonian sources. At the time, Drews viewed these debates as superficial, even “laughable,” since they did not touch on what he saw as the core metaphysical issues underlying the current religious situation.Footnote ⁶⁴ “A work on the philosophy of religion would be very timely given the present conditions in Germany,” he wrote Hartmann in 1903. “Whether it would be politically shrewd is of course another question.”Footnote ⁶⁵ Whatever Drews's hesitations, he soon put them aside and threw himself into the project. Within two years he had placed his manuscript with the publishing house of Eugen Diederichs, “a peculiar man, but filled with the highest goals and who, for all that, should be held in affection.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Given Diederichs's interest in idealist philosophy and religious controversy (he had already published works by Arthur Bonus and Albert Kalthoff), Drews's book was a natural fit, and it appeared in a typically lavish edition in early 1906.

Drews opened Die Religion als Selbst-Bewusstsein Gottes (Religion as the Self-Consciousness of God) with a lament over the religious crisis in Germany, which he saw as a legacy of the Reformation and the resulting confessional divide. Neither Catholicism nor Protestantism had shown itself capable of meeting “the heightened religious need of the present,” and further attempts to reform these churches would result only in a half-hearted, incoherent Christianity of the type that helped bring about the current state of affairs.Footnote ⁶⁷ In addition to the confessional situation, Drews was harshly critical of the German system of established churches, church taxes, state-sponsored religious instruction, and university faculties of theology. The state, he argued, had no real interest in propping up any of the existing confessions, but only required that “religion in general” be widespread among the people, since “without a living religious consciousness, the organic cohesion of the state's components would dissolve into anarchy and the carrying out of worldly duties would lack the force of inner recognition.”Footnote ⁶⁸ Drews's critique of the current religious situation paralleled those of more left-leaning secularists and monists, who called for a “worldview” beyond the existing churches.Footnote ⁶⁹ But by describing his goal as a “religion,” he signaled his intention to build on the speculative traditions of German idealism.

Drews also differed from most monists in his direct engagement with contemporary Protestant theology, which came in for repeated and sustained attack in Die Religion als Selbst-Bewusstsein Gottes. Much like Hegel, Drews viewed the central insight of the Christian religion as its recognition of the fundamental unity of humanity and God. In this regard, Christianity marked an advance over both Judaism and the pagan polytheisms. But by requiring belief in Jesus as the God-man, Christianity had bound itself to an individual whose life history was murky and existence uncertain. Yet it was precisely this historical event that liberal Protestantism had placed at the center of its theology, as it proclaimed, rather paradoxically, that the future of Christianity lay in the “Jesus of history.”Footnote ⁷⁰

Like Schnehen, Drews was deeply critical of liberal theologians’ reliance on the concept of “personality”: “Influenced by the modern individualistic intellectual trend, it has lately become common on the Protestant side to make the concept of personality fruitful for morality and thereby bring about a reconciliation of Christianity with the modern spirit by declaring the development and affirmation of personality to be the true principle of Christian morality.”Footnote ⁷¹ In Drews's view, the contradiction between this new version of Christian ethics and the actual content of the Gospels was obvious: “Morality consists for Jesus always and everywhere in the execution of the divine will, in the heteronormative submission to the God-given law. . . . At no time and in no place did it occur to him to ascribe any moral value whatsoever to the development of the personality and to the harmonious development of its inherent inclinations and powers.”Footnote ⁷² As a particularly crass example of this latest theological trend, Drews cited a recent speech by Martin Rade, a theologian at Marburg and the editor of Die Christliche Welt, in which he proclaimed that “moral is only he who wants what his self wants.”Footnote ⁷³

For Drews, the transformation of Christianity into a “Jesus religion,” in which the contingent details of the founder's life became more important than his status as a divine being, signaled theology's abandonment of religion as such, since religion required actual and ongoing contact between the human and the divine: “That in the present moment the cult of personality can achieve such an astonishing upswing, such that it claims even the terrain of religion for itself,” is “only the most obvious sign of an era that has seized onto the bearers of revelation because it is no longer allotted actual revelations on the basis of its previous religious worldview.”Footnote ⁷⁴ In this sense, contemporary theology's substitution of history for metaphysics was both symptom and cause of Christianity's exhaustion as a religion or would-be religion.

But the roots of this exhaustion lay deeper than liberal theology, according to Drews. Instead, he argued it could be traced back to modern Christianity's conception of God as an absolute personality. In one sense, the theistic view of God was a legacy of Judaism and had been with Christianity from the beginning. But the dualistic tendencies in Christianity had been exacerbated by the rise of Cartesianism and post-Enlightenment notions of individuality, which were projected back onto the figure of God. And yet, Drews explained, “personality” as a concept only made sense when applied to human beings, since “personality” was not an essence but rather an achieved condition, the result of a struggle by individuals to elevate themselves above their finite condition and to achieve a more spiritual state. But a purely spiritual God, such as that described in Christian theology, could have no conflict within itself, no tension between spirit and nature that required reconciliation, and thus, Drews argued, it could never be described as a “personality.”Footnote ⁷⁵

Drews's critique of “divine personality” led him back to the fundamental principles of “religion,” which, following Hartmann, he defined as a union of self-consciousness with the divine (or “God”). This union could not consist of a fusion of two different personalities (after all, how could two distinct self-consciousnesses coexist in the same psychic space without one overwhelming the other?), but rather in the identification of the limited, illusory, empirical “ego” with its real, fundamental, divine “self.” This “real self” was not an individual essence, however. To argue this was the fatal flaw of Stirner and Nietzsche, who for all their criticisms of Christianity had claimed its notion of personality for the self, deifying the empirical “ego” and laying the philosophical foundations for anarchism in the process. In fact, the “real self” was a universal but unconscious essence, in other words, the Hartmannian Absolute or “God.” “The absolute personality is . . . hardly the religious view of God as such,” Drews argued, “to the contrary, precisely the impersonality of God forms the first and most important postulate of religious consciousness.”Footnote ⁷⁶ In other words, true religion—as a fusion of the self with its divine substrate—was only possible in pantheism or, more precisely, “concrete monism.”

Yet even as Drews attacked modern Christianity's dogma of divine personality, he retained much of its theological language, incorporating notions of “belief,” “grace,” works,” “redemption,” and “rebirth” into his monist Religionsphilosophie, implying at various points that his philosophy marked a return, if not to orthodoxy, then to a form of religious thinking that was congruent with the insights of Meister Eckhart and Martin Luther.Footnote ⁷⁷ In this regard, Drews's religious stance was not nearly as uncompromising as the gruff tone of his polemics against clergy, theologians, and the confessional system initially suggested.

Drews was an avid reader of Arthur de Gobineau and Houston Stewart Chamberlain, and even if he did not subscribe to all of their ideas, their racialist approach to religion left its mark on Die Religion als Selbst-Bewusstsein Gottes. Thus Drews argued that the Semitic race was fundamentally inclined toward theism, while the Aryan race was inclined toward pantheism, and Christianity, as a hybrid of Semitic-Jewish and Aryan-Hellenic ideas, combined elements of both.Footnote ⁷⁸ Nonetheless, the Germanic peoples had never been satisfied with Christianity and its institutions, and over the years had repeatedly rebelled against it, initially through an inclination to mysticism, later in the Protestant Reformation, and most recently in the pantheistic thinking of Goethe, Schelling, Hegel, and of course Hartmann. All of these movements reflected an instinctive antipathy to “Semitic theism,” which was alien to the essence of the Aryan race. “If this is right,” and Drews insisted that it was, “then the fight over the personality of God is not purely theoretical, not merely a conflict over speculative doctrines; rather, what has been perceived as an opposition of wills is in fact a conflict of races.”Footnote ⁷⁹ Only the Germans’ long habituation to clerical ideas, which suffocated and erased their inborn instincts, blinded them to the fact that the current religious struggle was also a racial struggle.

On reading a copy of Drews's manuscript, Hartmann declared it a work of “incalculable value.”Footnote ⁸⁰ Not only had Drews laid out the concrete monist standpoint in clear and comprehensible prose, but he had also connected it to recent religious polemics and thereby given it a contemporary relevance. On the other hand, Hartmann was taken aback by the racial determinism that seemed to undergird Drews's presentation, noting the obstacles such theories posed to concrete monism becoming a global religion.Footnote ⁸¹ A further point of disagreement concerned the historicity of Jesus. Hartmann had complained of the Bremen pastor Kalthoff that he “went much too far in eliminating any influence of the person of Jesus” when considering the origin of Christianity.Footnote ⁸² And indeed, the Jewishness of the historical Jesus was an important basis for Hartmann's anti-Christianity. This may explain why Drews largely avoided the life of Jesus question in Die Religion als Selbst-Bewusstsein Gottes, simply noting that “only [Jesus's] name and several trivial details correspond with historical reality.”Footnote ⁸³ But Hartmann would die in June 1906, freeing Drews from the shadow of his mentor. It was at that point that he began preparing a radical new attack on the figure of Jesus, arguing that Christ was a mythical figure to whom a history had been appended.

IV. The Argument of Die Christusmythe

This was the central thesis of Die Christusmythe (1909), which was published by the Eugen Diederichs Verlag.Footnote ⁸⁴ For all its radicalism, however, Drews's work entered into a crowded field. Already the British free thinker John Robertson had published Christianity and Mythology (1900) and Pagan Christs (1903), which laid out the parallels between the Gospel narratives and various non-Christian myths.Footnote ⁸⁵ Likewise, the Tulane University mathematician William Benjamin Smith had anticipated several of Drews's theses in Der vorchristlicher Jesus (1906).Footnote ⁸⁶ The diverse origins of these scholars (to which one could add the Dutch scholar Gerardus Bolland, the Italian Emilio Bossi, the Pole Andrzej Niemojewski, and the German Peter Jensen) show that, by the first decade of the twentieth century, not only liberal theology but also radical anti-theology had become global, and that Drews was merely riding the crest of a wave. For Drews, however, the salient fact was that “official scholarship in Germany and especially theology” had remained “as good as untouched” by the new literature, passing it over in sovereign disdain.Footnote ⁸⁷ In the meantime, a recent series of popularizing works had sought to glorify the person of Jesus while evading the problem of historical evidence through “unctuous phrases and a tone of conviction.”Footnote ⁸⁸ In the first edition of Quest for the Historical Jesus (1906), Schweitzer had prophesied that theology would become “sincere” on this question at some point in the near future.Footnote ⁸⁹ “We non-theologians,” Drews now wrote in reply, “we who nevertheless have an intense interest in the problem of the true beginnings of the Christian religion, cannot wait for this ‘future.’”Footnote ⁹⁰

Drews's main task in Die Christusmythe was to demonstrate that “practically all of the features of the image of the historical Jesus, at least those that were most important and religiously significant, have a purely mythical character” and that there was no reason to suspect that there was a “historical figure” lurking behind this myth.Footnote ⁹¹ According to Drews, the worship of Jesus predated the birth of Christianity, as he was worshipped as a “cult-god” by a group of Jewish sects whose doctrine was essentially Gnostic, but who drew also from Hellenistic and Persian mystery traditions. Citing evidence from Epiphanius's Against Heresies (circa 375 c.e.), Drews argued for the existence of a sect called the Nazoraioi who were similar to the Essenes and the Therapeuts but who identified Jesus as the “messiah,” which they conceived as a god of healing or deliverance. This cult was likely the origin of the notion that Jesus was a “Nazarene,” especially since there was no evidence that a place called Nazareth existed in pre-Christian Palestine.Footnote ⁹² Drews went on to link the pre-Christian Jesus cult to pagan traditions that featured a god who was killed and rose again from the dead, drawing on the biblical studies of Hermann Gunkel (a key figure in the History of Religion School), and the comparative mythologies of Ignaz Goldziher and especially Adalbert Kuhn, who had traced the origins of this teaching to the fire worship of the ancient Aryans.

Another key source was James Frazer's The Golden Bough (second edition 1900). Frazer had introduced the notion that the various myths of sacrificed gods (Jesus, Adonis, Dionysus) were traceable to the worship of rising and setting suns (the “solar mythology”) and to the related practice of exalting and then sacrificing kings, a tradition with echoes in the Babylonian feast of Sacaea and also the Jewish festival of Purim, which divided the original exalted then scapegoated king into two characters, Mordechai and Hamann.Footnote ⁹³ Frazer found echoes of this tradition in the passion of Jesus Christ, in which the Romans (with the assent of the Jewish crowd) allowed the prisoner Barabbas to be released while Jesus (as a stand-in for Hamann) was crucified.Footnote ⁹⁴ Yet whereas Frazer accepted the passion narrative as more or less historical, Drews saw these parallels as evidence of its mythical nature.Footnote ⁹⁵

If the worship of “Jesus” could already be found within pre-Christian Jewish sects, then it was Paul of Tarsus who made belief in Jesus the foundation of a new religion. According to Drews, there was nothing in Paul's epistles that suggested he had any knowledge of a historical individual named Jesus, or that he was aware of the ethical teachings attributed to Jesus and given such prominence by liberal theologians. Indeed, even Paul's insistence on the “humanity” of Jesus did not necessarily mean that he took bodily form or walked among the people of first-century Palestine. To the contrary, the Jesus of Paul's epistles was “a purely divine personality, a heavenly spiritual being without flesh or blood, a completely unindividual superhuman phantom” that was fully in accord with the Jewish-Gnostic cult of “Jesus/Joshua” and of any number of other non-Jewish myths of a suffering god.Footnote ⁹⁶ Paul's real innovation lay in using the figure of Jesus to resolve a key dilemma posed by Jewish law, that is, the inability of the Jews to fulfill its tenets and make themselves righteous in advance of the arrival of the Messiah. Paul resolved the problem by arguing that the Messiah—in the form of Jesus—had already achieved the long-sought-for righteousness through his death and resurrection. What was crucial—and new—in all of this was that the sacrificed god was conceived as a man, and that the sacrificed man was conceived as a god. But because this God/man transcended history, he lacked the distinctive traits of time or place, much less a “personality” in the sense posited by the liberal theologians. Any sense of Jesus's personality only came about as a result of the Gospels, which Drews viewed as ex post facto fabrications, produced by the early church fathers in their competition with various pagan Gnosticisms. By anchoring Christianity in the life of a particular individual and in the circumstances of the Jewish community, the evangelists hoped to win support for their new religion in Palestine. In other words, “the historical Jesus is from the very beginning a dogma, a fiction, woven together out of the religious and practical-political needs of the emerging and struggling Christian church.”Footnote ⁹⁷

In denying any historicity to Jesus, Drews broke not only with liberal theologians like Albrecht Ritschl, Harnack, and Bousset, but also with Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who had attempted to reconstruct an “Aryan Jesus” out of various fragments of the Gospel narratives. It was true, Drews noted, that Christianity's doctrine of a God-man who sacrificed himself for humankind could be traced back to the “fire worship” of the earliest Aryans. But “only insofar as that faith points in the end to an Aryan origin can one say that Jesus was ‘an Aryan’; all further claims in this direction, such as, for example, Chamberlain makes in his Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts, are pure fantasy and rest on a complete misunderstanding of the true state of affairs.”Footnote ⁹⁸

In the conclusion of Die Christusmythe, Drews railed once more against the notion that Christianity had originated from a historical personality named Jesus. Like Kalthoff, Drews saw religion as originally a social phenomenon, rooted in the tribe, the people, or the state, while the Christianity of the present, with its talk of personal salvation, was the creation of a society that had differentiated itself into individual personalities.Footnote ⁹⁹ Given all of this, it was supremely ironic that the liberal theologians presented their interpretation of the New Testament, which boiled the Gospel life of Jesus down to a supposed “historical kernel,” as an act of bravery and daring, when in fact it marked the abandonment of Christianity's original (Pauline) metaphysical truths in favor of a purely mythical invention. For Drews, therefore, the path forward entailed “stripping away the mythical personality” from the idea of the God-man and reconceiving it in a pantheistic sense, so that God was man and man was God.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

The hope for this lay in the monistic movement, though not as it was currently configured. After Drews published Die Religion als Selbst-Bewusstsein Gottes, Kalthoff sent him a letter inviting him to join the fledging German Monist League, and two years later he was listed as one of their designated speakers. Yet Drews harbored deep suspicions against the form of monism that Haeckel had developed and that was being promoted by the current leaders of that organization. This was the naturalistic or “abstract” monism that he had sought to distinguish from true or “concrete” monism.

In the meantime, however, the chief obstacle to spiritual renewal in Germany remained the belief in “the historical reality of a ‘unique,’ exemplary and unsurpassable redeemer personality.”Footnote ¹⁰²

As scholarship, Die Christusmythe was deeply problematic. Because he lacked the requisite training in ancient Greek and Hebrew, Drews had been forced to rely on existing scholarship rather than undertake his own analysis of the primary sources. Moreover, his iconoclastic tendencies led him to rely on authors, such as Friedrich Ghillany, Friedrich Nork, and Johann Eisenmenger, whose speculative arguments and (in some cases) extreme anti-Semitism placed them either on the margins or completely outside the bounds of respectable scholarly discourse. Finally, in his haste to assemble a case against the historicity of Jesus, Drews combined arguments from comparative mythology, anthropology, and theology that were hardly compatible with each other. In later editions of Die Christusmythe, Drews added to the confusion by adopting arguments that revised or even contradicted his earlier positions. Schweitzer would chart these shifts in painstaking and devastating detail in his account of the Drews controversy.

For all that, Drews did succeed in highlighting many of the weaknesses and contradictions in not just liberal, but also post-liberal attempts to reconstruct a historical Jesus, sometimes relying on the earlier arguments of Kalthoff, Schnehen, and William Benjamin Smith, but also advancing new ones, including some drawn from the History of Religion School. Indeed, the theologian Hermann Gunkel, clearly embarrassed to have been cited so often and so favorably in Die Christusmythe, took the step of publishing a “refutation” of Drews, declaring that “between us exists the abyss that lies between dilettantism and scholarship.”Footnote ¹⁰³ Such verdicts did little to sway Drews, who was perfectly willing to appeal over the heads of the professoriate directly to the German public, traveling from city to city in order to give lectures, engage in debates, and otherwise promote his ideas. Twenty years after Hartmann counseled against it, Drews had taken on the roles of traveling speaker and evangelist for the concrete monist religion. It was this aspect of the Drews affair, as much as the actual content of his book, that differentiated it from earlier theological controversies and that impressed itself so much on contemporary observers.

V. Debating the “Christ Myth”

In his promotion of Die Christusmythe, Drews drew on public relations strategies developed by Ernst Haeckel and the Monist League. In a series of lectures at the Berlin Singakademie, held in 1905, Haeckel had not only condemned the opponents of evolution, but denied the existence of the soul, denounced the papacy as “humbug,” and proposed that “automatic praying machines” be installed in the newly-built Berlin Cathedral.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ The German Monist League, founded the following year, established a roster of speakers that included a wide range of religious and social radicals, including Magnus Hirschfeld, Helene Stöcker, Bruno Wille, and Friedrich Lipsius, along with Drews.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Drews's rightist politics and “religious” worldview squared poorly with the generally leftist and secularist tenor of the Monist League, and he appears to have never been a member. Nonetheless, he took advantage of their organizational and promotional resources as he launched a speaking tour through Germany that included stops in Metz, Dresden, Magdeburg, Krefeld, Düsseldorf, Plauen, Jena, Bremen, Dortmund, Elberfeld, Mannheim, Kassel, Augsburg, and Darmstadt. In Jena, local Monists rented out a meeting hall, provided advanced notices in newspapers, and challenged local clergy or theologians to show up and judge Drews's arguments without prejudice. “The lay people,” insisted an anonymous letter writer to the Jenaische Zeitung, “have a right to that.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ That ordinary individuals, whatever their level of education, had a right to weigh in on matters of theology was a key issue in the debate over Die Christusmythe. Indeed, from the perspective of the church's critics, Drews's alleged dilettantism was as much an asset as it was a liability.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

Within Drews's long-running campaign on behalf of Die Christusmythe, no event matched the impact of the so-called Berlin Religionsgespräch (“Religion Colloquy”), which was held in the large restaurant hall of the Berlin Zoological Gardens on the nights of January 31 and February 1, 1910. As in Jena, it was the Monists who sponsored and organized the event, and it was they who put up the provocative posters around Berlin asking whether Jesus Christ had ever lived. Moreover, while The New York Times depicted Drews as facing all comers, the roster of speakers at the Zoological Gardens was actually skewed in his favor. Several of the participants, including Friedrich Lipsius and the pastors Friedrich Steudel and Theodor Kappstein, had known Monist sympathies. The pastor Max Maurenbrecher had broken entirely from the Protestant Church, joining the Free Religious Movement and publishing a heterodox life of Jesus entitled Von Nazareth nach Golgotha (1909).Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Opposing the radicals were the liberal theologian Hermann von Soden, the Berlin pastor and peace activist Hans Francke, and the New Testament specialist Georg Hollmann. Thus, it was the exponents of liberal theology who found themselves on the “right wing” of the Berlin Religionsgespräch.

The first evening was devoted to a speech by Drews entitled “Was Jesus a Historical Personality?” In it he summarized the key theses of Die Christusmythe: (1) that before the time of the Gospels there was a Jesus cult among certain Jewish sects that combined elements of apocalypticism with pagan notions of a dying and rising god; (2) that Paul knew nothing of a historical Jesus and that his Christ was a redeemer god who died for the sins of the world; (3) that the Gospels were written after the emergence of the Jesus cult in order to give its figure historical form; (4) that almost everything significant in the Gospel of the life of Jesus could be found in pagan mythical sources; and (5) given that virtually nothing was known of a historical Jesus, that belief in his person could not serve as a basis for salvation.

On the second day, the defenders of Jesus's historicity had a chance to refute Drews's arguments. As experienced speakers, they recognized that a slog through the details of biblical history would simply confuse and bore the assembled audience. Thus, Heinrich von Soden tried to point out how unlike the Gospel narratives were to Greek or Roman “myths” and how much they read like a good novel that one might peruse before going to sleep at night.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Georg Hollmann asked why Paul or anyone else would have undertaken missionary journeys on behalf of the mere idea of a God/man. Hans Francke departed from the terrain of historical argument altogether and emphasized Jesus's ongoing relevance to the social question and the problem of women's emancipation. Speaking to the workers in the audience, he asked, “Why does a picture of Jesus hang in the union hall in Amsterdam between the pictures of Marx and Lassalle? Because they are conscious that he is an ideal ally in their struggle against soul-destroying, spirit-enslaving poverty!”Footnote ¹¹⁰ The event closed with one more speech by Drews, who called for a reform of Christianity that would take it beyond a “book religion” and ground its faith in philosophical ideas. Striking a conciliatory note, he declared, “Whoever can still believe in the historical Jesus, we don't want to stop him. But whoever can't believe in him—and there are many, there are thousands, and I believe their number will grow daily—to them we are trying to show a new way, how they can find their way in life without Jesus. And one more thing: don't be impressed by the modern indifference to religion: struggle ladies and gentlemen, struggle without respite!”Footnote ¹¹¹

Responses in the press to the Berlin Religionsgespräch ranged from enthusiasm to disappointment to detached irony. In a report entitled “Theologians’ Bickering,” the socialist daily Vorwärts praised Drews's book as “quite readable and containing a number of stimulating thoughts and problems,” but described the debate itself as a farce, since it was impossible to resolve detailed scholarly questions in front of a large and unruly audience.Footnote ¹¹² Vorwarts’s skepticism toward the spectacle of public theological debate was shared by the right-wing Staatsbürgerzeitung, which described the event as a “theological boxing match,” that did little to illuminate public understanding: “Or what is it other than boxing when the one theologian claims about a certain literature: it doesn't exist, and the other declares: it exists in abundance. The layman must shake his head at this and doesn't know what he should say.”Footnote ¹¹³ For other observers, however, the importance of the Berlin Religionsgespräch was obvious. The left liberal Volkszeitung displayed a partisan sympathy for Drews, contrasting the “sober, professorial style of the historical researcher [Drews]” with the “theological pathos” and “sentimental” argumentation of Soden, and suggesting that by the end of the debate the defenders of the historical Jesus had been left at a loss for words.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Meanwhile, the Catholic newspaper Germania characterized the event as a “domestic dispute,” a sign of the “inner disunity of German Protestantism” and evidence of a religious longing that could only be stilled within the “Church of God.”Footnote ¹¹⁵

The loudest and most passionate reaction to the Christusmythe debate came from the conservative pastors and theologians of the hastily assembled Positive Church Union for the Promotion of Protestant Life in Berlin (Positive Kirchliche Vereinigung zur Pflege des evangelischen Lebens in Berlin). Within three weeks, the Positive Union had organized a counter-rally under the title “Jesus Lives!” Originally scheduled for the 5000-seat Circus Busch, the rally drew such a throng of visitors that a second parallel event had to be improvised at the nearby Berlin Cathedral.Footnote ¹¹⁶ And just as the Zoological Gardens’ debate had featured the leading lights of Berlin's freigeistig scene, so the Circus Busch event attracted some of the most respected figures of Berlin's conservative Protestant establishment, including Ernst Dryander (vice president of the Prussian Evangelischer Oberkirchenrat and court preacher to Kaiser Wilhelm II), Bodo Voigts (president of the Prussian Evangelischer Oberkirchenrat), and August von Trott zu Solz (Prussian Minister for Religious Affairs). Most speakers reaffirmed the central message of the day: that Jesus not only once lived, but still lived in the hearts of the faithful. Others took a more combative tone. Pastor-Licentiate Reinhard Mumm, a key figure in the Christian Social Party, insisted that Drews's arguments were simply one more challenge for Protestantism: “Over there it is said: ‘he never lived.’ Here we answer: ‘Jesus Christ, yesterday, today, and the same into eternity.’ That is the beloved new campaign front: we can be thankful to our enemies for it.”Footnote ¹¹⁷

The Circus Busch event drew its energy not only from its joyful proclamation of Jesus's living power, but also from the sense, among the organizers at least, that the Drews controversy had energized theological conservatives while pushing liberalism into a corner.Footnote ¹¹⁸ On the one hand, the forces of organized secularism continued to challenge the trappings of the “confessional state,” including the entire notion of university faculties of theology. At the same time, these groups had begun to aggressively promote a Church Withdrawal Movement that by 1909 had convinced thousands of Germans (a large portion of them Berliners) to formally leave the Protestant churches.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Meanwhile, the “positive” organizations were making increasing headway at the level of church government, displacing or marginalizing liberal pastors and laity and heightening the divide between pastoral life and the work of the university theologians. By presenting his arguments to the German public as the logical outcome of historical-critical research on the Bible, Arthur Drews had ratcheted up the sense among both secularists and conservative Protestants (or “Positives”) that Protestant liberal theology had been undone at its very foundations, that is, at the level of scholarship.

This was also the perspective of many Jewish scholars, particularly those associated with the Reform movement. On May 8, 1910, the Association for Liberal Judaism in Germany held a public meeting that was specifically devoted to the Berlin Religionsgespräch and its possible consequences for Judaism. Given liberal theologians’ repeated insistence on the significance of Jesus's “personality” as that which separated him from his Jewish environment, it was understandable that a certain note of satisfaction, even schadenfreude, crept into the proceedings.Footnote ¹²⁰ The Stettin rabbi Heinemann Vogelstein noted that the mere question “Did Jesus live?,” whether answered positively or negatively, showed that the “rock on which the church is built has sustained serious splits and fissures, which can no longer be hidden or washed over. Because for Christianity the personality of its founder . . . is the beginning and center of the faith, the star and core [Stern und Kern] of the religion.”Footnote ¹²¹ Judaism, by contrast, could do away with all the great men of its history, and the core of its faith would remain untouched.

In his remarks, Leo Baeck argued that, while the Berlin religious dispute might evoke a degree of sympathy from Jews, its central question—the historicity of the Gospel Jesus—was ultimately irrelevant to them, since everything “great and holy” in Christianity had been derived from Judaism: “We received nothing new in the New Testament; for us the New Testament, insofar as it proclaims morality and piety, is an Old Testament.”Footnote ¹²² Nonetheless, Baeck recognized the historical significance of the Christusmythe debate for Protestantism, as it signaled the collapse of a liberal theological paradigm that just ten years earlier had seemed ascendant. Indeed, it was not entirely clear whether belief in the historicity of Jesus would survive this latest challenge—in the end, the only firm basis for proving the existence of Jesus lay in a knowledge of first-century Judaism that most Protestant theologians lacked: “In the struggle that Protestant theology must carry out, it has come home to roost that they dogmatically and arbitrarily ignored many facts that are indispensable for the understanding of the Judaism of that era. Scholarship that is to be grounded in historical understanding must turn to these facts, this entire field, without bias. Otherwise, the theory of the Christ myth will not be refuted in the long run.”Footnote ¹²³ Christianity, if it was to move beyond this latest crisis, Baeck suggested, would need to return to its Jewish roots and embrace a more Jewish future.Footnote ¹²⁴

The sentiment, expressed from so many quarters, that the Christusmythe debate marked an existential crisis for liberal Protestantism helps to explain the extraordinary outpouring of books, pamphlets, and speeches by liberal theologians whose purpose was to challenge Drews's theses and to defend the historicity of Jesus.Footnote ¹²⁵ Space does not allow for a detailed examination of this literature, but one can gain a sense of the range of positions by examining the reactions of three of Germany's most prominent Protestant theologians: Adolf Harnack, Wilhelm Bousset, and Albert Schweitzer.

As the most influential theologian in Germany, it was to be expected that Harnack would make his voice heard early on in the Drews controversy. He did so in a May 1909 piece in the Vienna Neue Freie Presse that was directed at Drews, Kalthoff, and Peter Jensen, who all denied the historicity of Jesus. Harnack made no attempt to hide his contempt for these men, whom he characterized as “dilettantes, whose coarse historical errors and wild combinations prove that they have never received methodological training with regard to church history.”Footnote ¹²⁶ In normal times, no scholar worth their salt would have had anything to do with writers like these, but the enthusiasm of the public for their works had forced serious theologians to expose their errors and exaggerations. What interested Harnack most, however, was not the details of their arguments, but what he called the “fanaticism” of their viewpoint, which he traced to a desire to reduce everything to a lowest common denominator and to eliminate the idea of “genius” or “greatness”: “For many this feeling is especially uplifting because it seems to give them the right no longer to be disturbed in their smallness.”Footnote ¹²⁷ Drews, Kalthoff, and Jensen were unable to fathom the power of the individual and thus could not understand that the rise of Christianity, absent its “founding historical personality,” was unthinkable.Footnote ¹²⁸ The existence of Jesus, Harnack insisted, was an undeniable fact—“even Judaism has always respected it.”Footnote ¹²⁹ That the amateurish attempts by Drews and Kalthoff to deny Jesus's historicity had acquired a following spoke to the lack of public trust in scientific theology, not only among ordinary people, but also among the learned. To be sure, theological scholarship would proceed apace with or without public trust, but in the short term it would be subject to repeated attacks from the “extreme right and the extreme left.”Footnote ¹³⁰ In Harnack's view, the only way to bring these “blasting tests” to an end was to increase the public's trust in the theological enterprise.

In light of what has been discussed thus far, Harnack's attempt to defend the project of scientific theology seems almost willfully naive and unselfconscious. Yet it anticipated the strategy of most liberal theologians during this controversy: an insistence on the superiority and necessity of scientific theology, a denial of the right of the public to intervene in matters beyond its comprehension, an exposure of the slipshod methods of their opponents, and finally a patient elucidation of the undeniable facts or “pillars” that undergirded belief in the historicity of Jesus. Still, it was a measure of Harnack's sense of discomfort that he appealed to Judaism for an affirmation of his Christian theological standpoint (and this may also be why Baeck, assuming he was familiar with Harnack's review, was not entirely forthcoming). That is not to say that these scholars were necessarily incorrect regarding the history of early Christianity, only that many of them seemed unable to grasp the politics of the moment.

Not every theologian would remain firm in the face of Drews's assault on the historicity of Jesus. This can be seen in the case of Wilhelm Bousset's lecture on “The Significance of the Personality of Jesus for Belief,” which was delivered at the Fifth International Congress of Free Christianity and Religious Progress, just six months after the Berlin Religionsgespräch. As Brent Hege has demonstrated, this speech marked a decisive shift in Bousset's position away from his earlier insistence on the historicity of Jesus.Footnote ¹³¹ Indeed, Bousset now argued that the power of Jesus's personality did not lie in the verifiable facts of his historical existence, but rather in his role as a symbol for the Christian community: “The symbolic approach lifts us above the difficulties that, in the approaches described above, arise from exact historical research. The question of existence and historical knowability no longer plays the dominant role here, because we no longer need to anxiously decide what in the image of Jesus is a creation or addition from the community and what is reality in the narrower historical sense of the term. We no longer need to fear that as a possible result of historical research this reality (in the narrower sense) will become, on several points, unknowable and irretrievably lost to us. Instead it depends on the symbol and the image itself, not at this point on final truth and reality.”Footnote ¹³² In effect, Bousset was emancipating himself from what was quickly becoming a tiresome debate over the historical validity of individual passages in the Bible and scattered statements by Josephus, Tacitus, and others. What is striking (and this a point overlooked by Hege) is the degree to which Bousset appeared to accept Drews's (and Kalthoff's) mythical solution even as he retained an (outward) grasp on Jesus's “personality.”

If Bousset sought to escape the cumbersome and uncomfortable details of the Christusmythe debate, Albert Schweitzer was more than ready to slog through them, which makes the second edition of his Quest for the Historical Jesus a touchstone for any attempt to rethink this event.Footnote ¹³³ Part of Schweitzer's eagerness derived from his contention that the Christusmythe controversy had demonstrated once and for all that the liberal Jesus was unsustainable; in this regard, Drews had performed a necessary and salutary function. At the same time, Schweitzer was contemptuous of Drews's actual attempts to disprove the historicity of Jesus and demolished them with sovereign ease. After all, Schweitzer's goal in the second edition was not just to make room for the “thorough-going eschatological” interpretation of Jesus, but also to reestablish the claims of legitimate historical scholarship against what he saw as the melodrama of Drews's public performances. This had been Harnack's agenda, too, but now it was being taken up by a scholar with a better sense of his adversary's intellectual strengths and weaknesses.Footnote ¹³⁴

One of these strengths, Schweitzer argued, was Drews's command of philosophy, evident in Religion als Selbst-Bewusstsein Gottes, a book he described as “required reading for every theologian, and very relevant for this particular time. Here we can see a real thinker at work, investigating the problem of the historicizing of religion. He deals with it from a philosophical standpoint, and does not go into the historical problem of the existence or non-existence of Jesus.”Footnote ¹³⁵ In all of the commotion of Die Christusmythe, this may have been the most charitable thing written about Drews by a professional theologian, but for Schweitzer it served two purposes. On the one hand, it allowed him to contrast the careful, erudite, and respectful approach of Religion als Selbst-Bewusstsein Gottes with the self-aggrandizing rhetoric of Die Christusmythe, in which Drews talked “almost as if the problem had never been grasped or discussed before” and presented old ideas as if they were shattering revelations that had been hidden from an unwitting public.Footnote ¹³⁶ On the other hand, it reinforced one of Schweitzer's broader contentions, which was that theology could only rejuvenate itself by moving beyond neo-Kantian historicism and opening itself up to new ideas in philosophy, including monism, just as it turned back from the “fabricated history” of liberal theology to “real history.”Footnote ¹³⁷ In this sense, Schweitzer can be seen as endorsing aspects of Drews's broader philosophical agenda, even as he dismissed the manner in which he sought to realize it. In any case, Schweitzer would send Drews a copy of the second edition of The Quest for the Historical Jesus and the two remained in correspondence for some time afterward.Footnote ¹³⁸