Arthur Drews - PDF Wikipedia Aug. 23, 2012 PAGES - Radikalkritik

amplifying and publicizing the Christ Myth thesis initially advanced by Bruno
Bauer,[1] which denies the historicity of Jesus.
The international controversy provoked by the Christ Myth was but one early
chapter in Drews's life-long advocacy of the abandonment of Judaism and
Christianity — both religions based on ancient beliefs from Antiquity, and
shaped by religious dualism[2] — and his urging a renewal of faith
[Glaubenserneuerung] based on Monism and German Idealism. True religion
could not be reduced to a cult of personality, even if based on the worship of
the Unique and Great Personality of a Historical Jesus, as claimed by
Protestant liberal theologians — which was nothing more than the adaptation
of the Great Man Theory of history promoted by the Romanticism of the 19th
century.[3]
Drews had wide curiosity, a sharp intellect, a trenchant style, and was a
philosophical gadfly most of his life. As a philosopher he kept encroaching on
the turf of other specialties in German universities: in theology, philology,
astronomy, mythology, music criticism, psychology. He was an irritant, his
interference not welcomed, and he remained resented as an outsider. Drews
was considered a maverick, a dissenter. Staid German academics didn't accept
his "dilettantism" [Abweichungen von der communis opinio, that is "straying
from the common opinions"]. Eduard von Hartmann, and his theory of the
"Unconscious" were not in vogue either, and Drews's dependence on his
mentor was another hindrance. In every field, Drews created more enemies
who wished him gone, than friends or followers. In spite of his prodigious
fecundity and his popular notoriety, his hopes of getting a University
appointment remained frustrated. He had to be content with his humble
position as a teacher in his "Technische Hochschule" in Karlsruhe for the rest of
his life.
Drews was a reformer, and stayed involved in religious activism all his life. He
was, in his last few years, to witness and participate in an attempt by the Free
Religion Movement to inspire a more liberal form of worship, and walked away
from the German Faith Movement, a venture trying to promote without success