ospel narrative in the first one. The
historical development of these has of itself effected their destruction:
the history of dogma is the objective criticism of dogma. Christianity and
philosophy, theism and pantheism, dualism and immanence, are irreconcilable
opposites. To be able to know we must cease to believe. Dogma is the
product of the unphilosophical, uncultured consciousness; belief in
revelation, only for those who have not yet risen to reason. In the
transformation of religious representations into philosophical Ideas
nothing specifically representative is left; the form of representation
must be actually overcome. The Christian contraposition of the present
world and that which is beyond is explained by the fact that the
sensuo-rational spirit of man, so long as it does not philosophically know
itself as the unity of the infinite and the finite, but only feels itself
as finite, sensuo-empirical consciousness, projects the infinite, which
it has in itself, as though this were something foreign, looks on it
as something beyond the world. This separation of faith is entirely
unphilosophical; it is the mission of the philosopher to reduce all that is
beyond the world to the present. Thus for him immortality is not something
to come, but the spirit's own power to rise above the finite to the Idea.
And like future existence, so the transcendent God also disappears. The
absolute is the universal unity of the world, which posits and sublates the
individual as its modes. God is the being in all existence, the life in
all that lives, the thought in all that think: he does not stand as an
individual person beside and above other persons, but is the infinite which
personifies itself and attains to consciousness in human spirits, and this
from eternity; before there was a humanity of earth there were spirits on
other stars, in whom God reflected himself.

Three decades later Strauss again created a sensation by his confession
of materialism and atheism, _The Old Faith and the New_, 1872 (since the
second edition, "With a Postscript as Preface"),[1] in which he continues
the conflict against religious dualism. The question "Are we"--the
cultured men of the day--"still Christians?" is answered in the negative.
Christianity is a cult of poverty, despising the world, and antagonistic to
labor and culture; but we have learned to esteem science and art, riches
and acquisition, as the chief levers of culture and of human progre