Born in Landshut, Bavaria, Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach was the son of Anselm Feuerbach, the influential jurist and legal reformer. The young Feuerbach studied theology at Heidelberg and Berlin, transferring to philosophy in 1825 after hearing the lectures of Hegel. He received a doctorate at Erlangen in 1828, where he assumed a teaching position. In 1830 he published anonymously Thoughts on Death and Immortality, which charged that Christianity is an egoistic and inhumane religion. The essay caused a scandal, and when the identity of its author became known in 1837, Feuerbach was dismissed. He lived the remainder of his life on a small pension from the Bavarian government, the income from his… writings, revenues from his wife's investments, and in later years on the generosity of his friends. Between 1836 and 1843, Feuerbach collaborated with Arnold Ruge on a journal published in Halle, in which many of his writings first appeared. He broke with Ruge in 1844, when the latter joined Karl Marx in publishing the German-French Annals, though Feuerbach contributed to the first issue. While the young Marx admired Feuerbach and his work, Feuerbach's political views were liberal rather than radical. Feuerbach's chief writings are The Essence of Christianity (1841), Principles of the Philosophy of the Future (1843), The Essence of Religion (1846), and Theogony (1857). He maintained an extensive correspondence with admirers of his work throughout Europe. Feuerbach, a leading representative of the "Young Hegelian" or "Left Hegelian" philosophical movement, interpreted Hegel's philosophy in a radically humanistic way. He held that metaphysics, including Hegelian speculative philosophy, is only a later and more intellectualized version of religious consciousness, which must be seen through and abolished if humanity is to be free. According to Feuerbach, the real object of our idea of God is the human essence-the human species considered ideally and collectively as a social whole. In primitive religion this idea is grasped intuitively but naively projected outward in the form of one or more separate beings. In later and less innocent stages of human history, the alienated idea of a divine lawgiver and judge is used to confirm the tyrannical power of rulers and priests over human beings. Like other Young Hegelians, Feuerbach advocated the abolition of religious consciousness. He maintained that doing so would liberate humanity from alienation and point the way to a reformed society of equals. In such a society self-denial would be replaced by the affirmation of life, and the human (especially sexual) love that is repressed by religion would be recognized as sacred in its own right.
Karl Barth was born in Basel, Switzerland, in 1886. A theologian, Barth is considered to be one of the most prolific writers Christendom has ever produced. His Church Dogmatics runs well over 12,000 pages in English translation. There also is a great body of occasional writing. Barth would be worthy of note if only for his first published work, a commentary on The Epistle to the Romans. In 1918, when he published this study, Barth was a young pastor in his native Switzerland. The guns of World War I could still be heard, their angry shells destroying, perhaps forever, the liberal optimism of Continental theology. Where was the progress young Barth had learned about from Harnack in Berlin?… Where was human rationality, dispelling the noisome holes of ignorance and superstition, when the great leaders of Christendom descended to the barbarity of trench warfare? For answers Barth turned St. Paul's greatest epistle, as St. Augustine of Hippo and Martin Luther had before him. Barth obtained a post at the University of Bonn, but Hitler objected to his work with the Confessing Church (see Dietrich Bonhoeffer), and he was forced to return to his own country, there to produce all his great tomes. Turning theologians from their rational optimism, Barth has driven them to consider again the power of the Word of God-the acted, spoken, inscripturated, incarnated Word was always his chief theme. Against it, all human pride and pretension, all schemes for utopian societies, all theologies based on anything other than the Bible and Christ have proved transient. Barth's objectors reply that Barth's God is too far away like Soren Kierkegaard; that Barth spoke of the "infinite qualitative distinction" between God and man; that Barth ignores scientific advances; and that he cares little for dialogue with other religions. Yet Barth's oppposers never complain of a lack of erudition or ecumenical concern. To some Barth is the greatest theologian the church has produced. Barth died in 1968 as he had hoped-with his Dogmatics still unfinished.