Tübingen School

a school of German Protestant theology that developed at the University of Tübingen.

The first period in the school’s history (1777–97) is associated with the work of G. C. Storr, who espoused a supernaturalism combined with ideas typical of the Enlightenment. This point of view was dominant when G. Hegel, F. von Schelling, and J. Hölderlin studied at the university’s theological institute. In 1830 the “new” Tübingen school emerged, founded by the Hegelian F. C. Baur. Baur’s followers, in attempting to reveal the dialectical opposition of certain currents in early Christianity recorded in the New Testament, subjected the texts to a criticism that went “as far as was possible for a theological school” (F. Engels, in K. Marx and F. Engels, Sock, 2nd ed., vol. 22, p. 473).

Representatives of the Tübingen school developed several approaches to biblical criticism that were subsequently adopted by the mythological school. These included the notation of contradictions among the different gospels, the hypothesis that the Gospel of Mark was the earliest of the gospels, the assignment of a later date to several of the Pauline epistles, and the interpretation of early Christianity as a synthesis of Stoicism and a Hellenized Judaism. The works of D. F. Strauss and B. Bauer, which influenced J. Renan and liberal German theology at the turn of the 20th century, were particularly important and were used extensively by F. Engels. Conservative theologians led by Hengstenberg opposed the Tübingen School, which, by the 1860’s, had lost its place of importance in contemporary theology.