IV. Theosophy and Christianity

David Friedrich Strauss began in the 1830s to examine the actual core of the Gospels from a historical perspective. And after he had attempted to clarify what such a historical core of truth is, he sought to develop his own image of Christianity. This image he created is indeed born of the spirit of his time, of a spirit that could not believe that something far beyond human beings, something originating from the heights of the spiritual, could ever have been realized in the world; something born of the actual spirit. What David Friedrich Strauss found is this: the real Son of God cannot be represented in a single personality. No, only the whole of humanity, the human race, the species alone can be the real representation of God on earth. The struggle of the whole of humanity, understood symbolically, is the living God, but not a single individual. And all that was formed in the times when Christianity arose in the stories about the person of Christ is nothing more than myths created by the imagination of the people. — Through his effort to represent the Son of God as the struggle and striving of the entire human species, David Friedrich Strauss has reduced the Son of God to a divine ideal.