Among the younger members of the Hegelian school during the 1830s it was Bruno Bauer whose scholarly interests and intellectual concerns most closely paralleled those of Strauss. Bauer, like Strauss, was a philosophical theologian and biblical scholar whose writings focused on the problem of defining the relationship between the historical truth, the representational form, and the universal, philosophically comprehensible, absolute content of the biblical revelation. Moreover, Bauer's successive attempts to construct a satisfactory resolution for this problem corresponded to the general stages in Strauss's development. Bauer began his intellectual career with the firm conviction that the Hegelian doctrine of the identity of content in the different forms of the religious Vorstellung and the philosophical Begriff provided a secure basis for the reconciliation of the orthodox Christian faith with modern philosophical consciousness. Between 1835 and 1838 he tried to revise and reconstruct the Hegelian identity of religion and philosophy in a manner that would take the historical criticism of the biblical writings into account. Like Strauss, however, Bauer abandoned this attempt to reconstruct the Hegelian identity in 1839-41 and asserted the absolute opposition of modern philosophical consciousness to both the form and the content of traditional Christian culture. Finally, Bauer, like Strauss, defined the model of cultural integration for the future, post-Christian era in totally immanent terms, not as the reconciliation of God and man in an actualized Kingdom of God on earth, but as the reconciliation of man with his universal human essence in a “state of humanity.”