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Christian Gnosis: Christian Religious Philosophy in Its Historical Development
Baur published Die christliche Gnosis in 1835. It was his first great religio-historical study and the most important book on Gnosticism published in the nineteenth century. It is now recognized as having a pivotal status in Baur studies. In it Baur offers a unique thesis about a link between ancient and modern religious philosophy. Gnosis is a type of religious philosophy that contains ideas about the relationship between God, world, and human beings, as expressed in concrete religious traditions and practices. As such, it makes an important contribution to Christian theology. In the first part, Baur develops a concept of gnosis in dialogue with his predecessors and contemporaries. He classifies the gnostic systems in terms of how they conceive the relationship of Christianity to Judaism and paganism, and then describes them in detail (Valentinus, Ophites, Bardesanes, Saturninus, Basilides, Marcion, Pseudo-Clementines). Following transitional sections on the criticism of and reaction to gnosis in church history, the book ends with modern religious philosophy (Boehme, Schelling, Schleiermacher, and Hegel--Baur's first discussion of these major thinkers). This book was written over a hundred years before the manuscript discovery at Nag Hammadi, which awakened a lively interest in Gnosticism that continues to the present day.
- GenresChristianity
508 pages, Kindle Edition
Published June 18, 2020
About the author
Ferdinand Christian Baur
262 books4 followersFerdinand Christian Baur was a German Protestant theologian and founder and leader of the (new) Tübingen School of theology (named for the University of Tübingen where Baur studied and taught). Following Hegel's theory of dialectic, Baur argued that second century Christianity represented the synthesis of two opposing theses: Jewish Christianity (Petrine Christianity) and Gentile Christianity (Pauline Christianity). This and the rest of Baur's work had a profound impact upon higher criticism of biblical and related texts.
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September 2, 2026
Regarding ancient gnosticism, I found the sections on the Valentinians, the Pseudo-Clementine Homilies, and Clement of Alexandria quite useful. Regarding modern gnosticism, the section on Schleiermacher was most useful for me, probably because I am less familiar with his later work than with that of Schelling & Hegel.
I'd read some of Irenaeus' Against Heresies before, which is the main patristic source on the Valentinians, but Baur finds lots of other small fragments to really fill out the picture.
I'd never heard of the Ps-Clementine Homilies (Ps-Clement of Rome), but apparently they're an important text for understanding the Ebionites & what Baur, and scholars after him, have referred to as "Jewish-Christianity". This is a form of Christianity that strongly rejects Paul and the Epistle to the Romans, insisting that Christianity is a return to a pure form of the Jewish Law as given to Adam prior to Moses. It's also extremely misogynist, viewing good and evil as masculine and feminine, Adam representing all True Prophecy and Eve all False Prophecy, associating female menstruation with demonic magic and animal sacrifice.
Clement of Alexandria is crucial to Baur's broader argument - that Gnosis is fundamentally about religious philosophy/philosophy of religion, that is to say, philosophy goes beyond faith towards absolute knowledge via speculation about the relationship between Christianity, Judaism, Paganism, and perhaps other religions. He's clearly reading a lot of Hegel back into Clement, but I appreciate him giving many quotations of the relevant passages of Clement's large Stromata, so that I can avoid reading it. However, I think an argument could be made that much of what Clement calls Gnosis is really just Stoicism/Hellenic Philosophy, with little connection to the elaborate syzygies of the Valentinians or the extreme dualism of Marcion.
Baur seems unaware that this Clementine Gnosis/Theoria survives well into the middle ages in the guise of monastic contemplatio - a cursory search suggests that the links from Clement to Evagrius and Cassian that validate this survival were not known when Baur was writing. I don't think that this is too big of a threat to his overall thesis that the works of Boehme, Schelling, Schleiermacher, and Hegel are a form of modern gnosticism, though, since what he really argues sparks modern gnosticism is not contemplatio alone, but the Protestant Reformation's revival of the Pauline Law/Gospel distinction and the way that this reignites the debate about the historical and philosophical relationship between Judaism and Christianity. But it does mean that he misses much of the medieval Christian and neoplatonic aspects of Schelling/Hegel or unnecessarily attributes them to a gnostic tradition.
Unfortunately, his section of Boehme, while useful, makes a rather large mistake in suggesting the Boehme never engaged with question of the historical relationship between Judaism and Christianity. See Boehme's On the Earthly and Heavenly Mysteries, a short text which foreshadows much of Schelling's eschatological-historical analysis in the Freedom Essay. In general, I suspect a lot of what Baur considers as Gnostic survived in Christian Eschatology (in addition to the contemplative tradition mentioned above). But perhaps Baur is too much a part of the anti-apocalyptic stance of respectable Lutheranism to see this apocalypticism as anything but heresy.
I found the section on Schleiermacher's The Christian Faith pretty useful. Baur fleshed out my understanding of the role of the feeling of absolute dependence in Schleiermacher's system, the way in which it passes into an almost total subjectivism, and the way in which the Self-Consciousness/God-Consciousness relationship led to the Archetypal Jesus/Historical Jesus discrepancy that sparked David Strauss' Life of Jesus. Baur is also absolutely correct in saying that Kant and Schleiermacher are so opposed to any historical connection between Judaism and Christianity as to be modern Marcionites, despite the irony of Kant's Moral Law being, on the face of it, rather similar to the Jewish Law. Unfortunately, he misses the fact that Schelling should also be placed in this camp, despite noticing that Schelling never discusses Judaism in his Freedom Essay.
The section on Hegel's gnosticism was a bit more annoying, since I found the parallels between Valentinianism and Hegelianism too sharply emphasized. He rightly points out that Hegel's monism contrasts with the general gnostic dualism, and so to draw out the gnostic aspects of Hegel he focuses on the themes of the self-alienation of God and his eventual reconciliation (Valentinian) and of the relationship between faith and philosophy (Clement of Alexandria). Baur's discussion of Hegel's controversial placing of Greek and Roman religion between Judaism and Christianity in some version of the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion was useful, although his attempt to rectify this by moving Greek and Roman religion into the sphere of lesser Nature Religions was rather hastily done. He almost totally misses the way in which Hegel's Philosophy of Religion depended on Aesthetics, though.
I'd read some of Irenaeus' Against Heresies before, which is the main patristic source on the Valentinians, but Baur finds lots of other small fragments to really fill out the picture.
I'd never heard of the Ps-Clementine Homilies (Ps-Clement of Rome), but apparently they're an important text for understanding the Ebionites & what Baur, and scholars after him, have referred to as "Jewish-Christianity". This is a form of Christianity that strongly rejects Paul and the Epistle to the Romans, insisting that Christianity is a return to a pure form of the Jewish Law as given to Adam prior to Moses. It's also extremely misogynist, viewing good and evil as masculine and feminine, Adam representing all True Prophecy and Eve all False Prophecy, associating female menstruation with demonic magic and animal sacrifice.
Clement of Alexandria is crucial to Baur's broader argument - that Gnosis is fundamentally about religious philosophy/philosophy of religion, that is to say, philosophy goes beyond faith towards absolute knowledge via speculation about the relationship between Christianity, Judaism, Paganism, and perhaps other religions. He's clearly reading a lot of Hegel back into Clement, but I appreciate him giving many quotations of the relevant passages of Clement's large Stromata, so that I can avoid reading it. However, I think an argument could be made that much of what Clement calls Gnosis is really just Stoicism/Hellenic Philosophy, with little connection to the elaborate syzygies of the Valentinians or the extreme dualism of Marcion.
Baur seems unaware that this Clementine Gnosis/Theoria survives well into the middle ages in the guise of monastic contemplatio - a cursory search suggests that the links from Clement to Evagrius and Cassian that validate this survival were not known when Baur was writing. I don't think that this is too big of a threat to his overall thesis that the works of Boehme, Schelling, Schleiermacher, and Hegel are a form of modern gnosticism, though, since what he really argues sparks modern gnosticism is not contemplatio alone, but the Protestant Reformation's revival of the Pauline Law/Gospel distinction and the way that this reignites the debate about the historical and philosophical relationship between Judaism and Christianity. But it does mean that he misses much of the medieval Christian and neoplatonic aspects of Schelling/Hegel or unnecessarily attributes them to a gnostic tradition.
Unfortunately, his section of Boehme, while useful, makes a rather large mistake in suggesting the Boehme never engaged with question of the historical relationship between Judaism and Christianity. See Boehme's On the Earthly and Heavenly Mysteries, a short text which foreshadows much of Schelling's eschatological-historical analysis in the Freedom Essay. In general, I suspect a lot of what Baur considers as Gnostic survived in Christian Eschatology (in addition to the contemplative tradition mentioned above). But perhaps Baur is too much a part of the anti-apocalyptic stance of respectable Lutheranism to see this apocalypticism as anything but heresy.
I found the section on Schleiermacher's The Christian Faith pretty useful. Baur fleshed out my understanding of the role of the feeling of absolute dependence in Schleiermacher's system, the way in which it passes into an almost total subjectivism, and the way in which the Self-Consciousness/God-Consciousness relationship led to the Archetypal Jesus/Historical Jesus discrepancy that sparked David Strauss' Life of Jesus. Baur is also absolutely correct in saying that Kant and Schleiermacher are so opposed to any historical connection between Judaism and Christianity as to be modern Marcionites, despite the irony of Kant's Moral Law being, on the face of it, rather similar to the Jewish Law. Unfortunately, he misses the fact that Schelling should also be placed in this camp, despite noticing that Schelling never discusses Judaism in his Freedom Essay.
The section on Hegel's gnosticism was a bit more annoying, since I found the parallels between Valentinianism and Hegelianism too sharply emphasized. He rightly points out that Hegel's monism contrasts with the general gnostic dualism, and so to draw out the gnostic aspects of Hegel he focuses on the themes of the self-alienation of God and his eventual reconciliation (Valentinian) and of the relationship between faith and philosophy (Clement of Alexandria). Baur's discussion of Hegel's controversial placing of Greek and Roman religion between Judaism and Christianity in some version of the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion was useful, although his attempt to rectify this by moving Greek and Roman religion into the sphere of lesser Nature Religions was rather hastily done. He almost totally misses the way in which Hegel's Philosophy of Religion depended on Aesthetics, though.
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