Who was Rudolf Steiner, and what did he actually claim to teach?

Rudolf Steiner was born on February 27, 1861, in Kraljevec in the Austrian Empire (in present-day Croatia), and died on March 30, 1925, in Dornach, Switzerland. His early career, as recounted by Britannica and the Rudolf Steiner Archive, was conventionally academic: he studied natural science and philosophy in Vienna, was commissioned to edit Goethe's scientific writings for a standard edition produced in Weimar between 1889 and 1896, and earned a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Rostock in 1891 with a dissertation later published as Truth and Knowledge. His 1894 book The Philosophy of Freedom laid out an epistemology grounded in free ethical intuition that he later treated as the philosophical foundation for his spiritual work.

Steiner's turn toward esotericism accelerated after he moved to Berlin to edit a literary journal in the late 1890s. He joined the Theosophical Society and rose to head its German Section from 1902 to 1912, lecturing extensively on reincarnation, karma, and the spiritual worlds he said could be investigated through inner discipline. The break came in 1912-13 over the Society's promotion of Krishnamurti as the incarnate World Teacher, a claim Steiner rejected; he and most of the German membership left to found the Anthroposophical Society, formally established in Cologne on December 28, 1912, with roughly 3,000 initial members, and re-founded as the General Anthroposophical Society at Dornach, Switzerland, in 1923-24. There he built the Goetheanum, a monumental wooden building designed as Anthroposophy's spiritual and architectural center; the first Goetheanum burned down (in circumstances widely attributed to arson, never conclusively solved) on New Year's Eve 1922-23, and Steiner designed a second, concrete Goetheanum that still stands today.

Steiner was a prolific lecturer rather than primarily a writer in his later years: his collected works run to roughly 6,000 recorded lectures alongside his books, covering everything from Christology and history to education, medicine, and agriculture. He described his method as 'spiritual science,' claiming that trained inner perception could yield knowledge of supersensible reality with the same rigor he attributed to empirical method, though this claim has no standing within actual science. Theologically, his teaching retained the reincarnation and karma inherited from his Theosophical years and reframed Christ as a cosmic being who entered the man Jesus at baptism: a construction that separates 'the Christ' from the person of Jesus in a way orthodox Christology, which confesses one person, fully God and fully man from the incarnation, does not permit (John 1:1, 14; Colossians 2:9).