The old faith and the new: does anything survive the criticism, and is what replaces it a religion?

David Friedrich Strauss, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

Christianity does not survive it. What remains is a feeling of dependence on the universe, grounded in Darwin and in the order the sciences disclose, and it is not Christianity under another name.12

Sources

  1. He insists that "'not for the sake of what he was but for the sake of what he was not" did he become the center of the Christian faith, namely, for the sake of a prediction that did not come to pass." Nor does Jesus' authentic teaching make him significant for us, for those ideas are also found elsewhere (par. 31).
    The Christ of Faith and the Jesus of History, p. 81
  2. More than this: as we perceive in ourselves the same disposition to the reasonable and the good which we seem to recognize in the Cosmos, and find ourselves to be the beings by whom it is felt and recognized, in whom it is to become personified, we also feel ourselves related in our inmost nature to that on which we are dependent, we discover our selves at the same time to be free in this dependence; and pride and…
    The Old Faith and the New, p. 181

Where the argument is made

  • Der alte und der neue Glaube: ein Bekenntniss (1872
  • Mathilde Blind's English translation, 1873)

How the argument was received

The most attacked of the works, and the one where the attacks were largely aimed at its tone.