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THEOLOGICAL LIBRARY.
N.B. The attention of Members is directed
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Library.
of
EDITED BY J. H. MUIRHEAD, M.A.
THE LIBRARY OF PHILOSOPHY.
THE LIBRARY OF PHILOSOPHY is in the first in-
stance a contribution to the History of Thought. While
much has been done in England in tracing the course of evo-
lution in nature, history, religion, and morality, comparatively
little has been done in tracing the development of thought
upon these and kindred subjects, and yet "the evolution of
opinion is part of the whole evolution."
This Library will deal mainly with Modern Philosophy,
partly because Ancient Philosophy has already had a fair share
of attention in this country through the labours of Grote,
Ferrier, and others, and more recently through translations
from Zeller ; partly because the Library does not profess to
give a complete history of thought.
By the co-operation of different writers in carrying out this
plan, it is hoped that a completeness and thoroughness of treat-
ment otherwise unattainable will be secured. It is believed,
also, that from writers mainly English and American fuller
consideration of English Philosophy than it has hitherto re-
ceived from the great German Histories of Philosophy may
be looked for. In the departments of Ethics, Economics, and
Politics, for instance, the contributions of English writers to
the common stock of theoretic discussion have been especially
valuable, and these subjects will accordingly have special pro-
minence in this undertaking.
Another feature in the plan of the Library is its arrange-
ment according to subjects rather than authors and dates,
enabling the writers to follow out and exhibit in a way
hitherto unattempted the results of the logical development of
particular lines of thought.
The historical portion of the Library is divided into two
sections, of which the first contains works upon the develop-
ment of particular schools of Philosophy, while the second ex-
hibits the history of theory in particular departments. The
third series contains original contributions to Philosophy, and
the fourth translations of valuable foreign works.
To these has been added, by way of Introduction to the
whole Library, an English translation of Erdmann's "History
of Philosophy," long since recognised in Germany as the best.
J. H. MUIRHEAD,
General Editor.
(ALREADY PUBLISHED.)
THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY. By DR. J. E. ERDMANN.
English Translation. Edited by PROFESSOR W. S. HOUGH, Minneapolis,
U.S.A., in 3 vols. Vols. i. and ii., each i$s. ; vol. iii. 12s.
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THEOLOGY IN GERMANY SINCE KANT, AND ITS PRO-
GRESS IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. By OTTO PFLEIDERER, D.D., Pro-
fessor of Theology in the University of Berlin. Translated by J. FREDERICK
SMITH.
LIST OF WORKS IN PREPARATION.
FIRST SERIES:
EARLY IDEALISM : Descartes to Leibnitz. By W. L. COURTNEY, M.A., Hon.
LL.D. (St. Andrew's), Fellow of New College, Oxford.
GERMAN IDEALISTS : Kant to Hegel. By WM. WALLACE, Whyte Professor of
Moral Philosophy, University of Oxford.
MODERN REALISTS : Herbart, Lotze, etc. By ANDREW SETH, M.A., Professor
of Logic and English Literature, University of St. Andrew's.
SENSATIONALISTS : Locke to Mill. By W. S. HOUGH, Ph.M., Assistant Professor
of Mental and Moral Philosophy, University of Minnesota.
THE ETHICS OF IDEALISM : Kant and Hegel. By HENRY JONES, M.A., Pro-
fessor of Mental and Moral Philosophy, University College, Bangor.
THE UTILITARIANS : Hume to Contemporary Writers. By W. R. SORLEY, M.A.,
Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and Professor of Philosophy in Uni-
versity College, Cardiff.
MORAL SENSE WRITERS : Shaftesbury to Martineau. By WILLIAM KNIGHT,
M.A., Professor of Moral Philosophy, St. Andrew's, N.B.
PRINCIPLE OF EVOLUTION IN ITS SCIENTIFIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL ASPECTS :
By JOHN WATSON, LL.D., Professor of Moral Philosophy, University of
Queen's College, Kingston, Canada. -,
SECOND SERIES:
THE HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY : Empirical and Rational. By ROBERT ADAMSON,
M.A., LL.D., Professor of Logic and Political Economy, Owen's College,
Manchester.
THE HISTORY OF POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY. By D. G. RITCHIE, M.A., Fellow
of Jesus College, Oxford.
PHILOSOPHY AND ECONOMICS IN THEIR HISTORICAL RELATIONS. By J.
BONAR, M.A., LL.D.
THE HISTORY OF ^ESTHETICS. By BERNARD BOSANQUET, M.A., late Fellow
of University College, Oxford.
THIRD SERIES:
THE THEORY OF ETHICS. By EDWARD CAIRO, LL.D., Professor of Moral
Philosophy in the University of Glasgow.
EPISTEMOLOGY, OR THE THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE. By JAMES WARD, D.Sc.,
LL.D.. Fellow and Lecturer of Trinity College, Cambridge.
PRINCIPLES OF PSYCHOLOGY. By G. F. STOUT, M.A., Fellow of St. John's
College, Cambridge.
PRINCIPLES OF INSTRUMENTAL LOGIC. By JOHN DEWEY, Ph.D., Professor of
Philosophy in the University of Michigan.
FOURTH SERIES:
SIGWART'S LOGIC. Translated by HELEN DENDY. 2 vols.
SWAN SONNENSCHEIN & Co., LONDON.
MACMILLAN & Co., NEW YORK.
ERDMANN'S HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY.
NOTICES OF THE PRESS.
"A SPLENDID monument of patient labour, critical acumen, and admirable
methodical treatment. . . . It is not too much to predict that, for the library
of the savant, for the academical student, whose business it is to be primed in
the wisdom of the ages, and for the literary dilettante, who is nothing if not well
up in * things that everybody ought to know,' these volumes will at once become a
necessity for purposes, at least, of reference, if not of actual study. . . . We
possses nothing that can bear any comparison with it in point of completeness."
Pall Mall Gazette.
" It is not necessary to speak of the great merits of Erdmann's History of
Philosophy. Its remarkable clearness and comprehensiveness are well known.
. . . The translation is a good, faithful rendering, and in some parts even
reaches a high literary level." Professor JOHN WATSON in The Week, of Canada.
" It is matter of real congratulation, in the dearth still of original English or
American work over the whole field of historical philosophy, that by the side of the
one important German compend of this generation, the other, so well fitted to serve
as its complement, is now made accessible to the English-speaking student."
Mind.
" It has been long known, highly esteemed, and in its successive editions has
sought to make itself more worthy of the success it has justly achieved. Erd-
mann's work is excellent. His history of mediaeval philosophy especially deserves
attention and praise for its comparative fulness and its admirable scholarship.
. . . It must prove a valuable and much-needed addition to our philosophical
works." Scotsman.
" The combination of qualities necessary to produce a work of the scope and
grade of Erdmann's is rare. Industry, accuracy, and a fair degree of philosophic
understanding may give us a work like Ueberweg's ; but Erdmann's history, while
in no way superseding Ueberweg's as a hand book for general use, yet occupies a
different position. Erdmann wrote his book, not as a reference book, to give in
brief compass a digest of the writings of various authors, but as a genuine history
of philosophy, tracing in a genetic way the development of thought in its treat-
ment of philosophic problems. Its purpose is to develop philosophic intelligence
rather than to furnish information. When we add that, to the successful execution
of this intention, Erdmann unites a minute and exhaustive knowledge of philo-
sophic sources at first hand, equalled over the entire field of philosophy probably
by no other one man, we are in a condition to form some idea of the value of the
book. To the student who wishes, not simply a general idea of the course of
philosophy, nor a summary of what this and that man has said, but a somewhat
detailed knowledge of the evolution of thought, and of what this and the other
writer have contributed to it, Erdmann is indispensable ; there is no substitute."
Professor JOHN DEWEY, in The Andover Review.
" It is a work that is at once compact enough for the ordinary student, and full
enough for the reader of literature. ... At once systematic and interesting."
Journal of Education.
" The learning shown in it is large, the arrangement orderly, the mental candor
unusual, the point of view that of Hegel clear and frankly acknowledged, the
style perspicuous, and without affectation. These are excellences enough to make
a book of solidity and serviceableness. Erdmann's is something more ; it is a book
of a certain distinction. Homely as it usually is, on every page we encounter
not the dry-as-dust compiler, but a freshly working mind, full of sympathies and
beliefs, individual in its attitude, its processes, and its terms of expression. Strength
and honesty of personality give a winning impress to large scholarship." Nation.
THE
DEVELOPMENT OF THEOLOGY
IN GERMANY SINCE KANT,
AND ITS
PROGRESS IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1828.
THE
DEVELOPMENT OF THEOLOGY
IN GERMANY SINCE KANT,
AND ITS
PROGRESS IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825.
BY
OTTO PFLEIDERER, D.D.,
Professor of Theology in the University of Berlin.
TRANSLATED UNDER THE AUTHOR'S SUPERVISION BY
J. FREDERICK SMITH.
LONDON :
SWAN SONNENSCHEIN & CO.,
NEW YORK: MACMILLAN & CO.
1890.
BUTLER & TANNER,
THE SELWOOD PRINTING WORKS,
FROME, AND LONDON.
PREFACE.
Two years ago I was asked by the Editor of the Library
of Philosophy to write the volume tracing the Development
of Theology since Kant. According to the more precise
statement of its scope, the work was to deal principally with
the History of Modern Theology in Germany, but it was
desired that it should include an account of the Protestant
Theology of this century in other countries, particularly in
Great Britain. Although I did not shut my eyes to the
difficulties of the task, I resolved to undertake it, with the
hope that I might thereby contribute a little towards a better
mutual understanding between the German and English
nations, especially towards the rempval of numerous prejudices
that still prevail in Great Britain with regard to the tendencies
of the German mind and make it difficult for Englishmen to
form a just view of our national character and aims.
But no sooner was the work actually taken in hand than
the necessity appeared of a reduction of its scope within
narrower limits in several respects. An account of theology
outside Germany which should be at all satisfactory seemed
to me impossible without a study of it on the spot in the
respective countries. On this account I was compelled
to leave entirely out of my survey the Theology of Holland 1
and America, and to confine myself to that of Great
Britain. With British Theology I had for years kept myself
so far in touch that a sojourn of some weeks in England
and Scotland was sufficient, with the kind assistance of
1 I have made an exception in the case of the critical labours of Dr.
Kuenen, of Leyden, which have had a decided influence on the progress of
German Theology. This scientific annexation of the distinguished Theolo-
gian of the Netherlands will, I hope, be considered excusable.
PREFACE.
friendly theologians there, to supply the gaps in my know-
ledge and enable me to make a survey of the develop-
ment of the Philosophy of Religion and Theology in Britain
during the present century ; though notwithstanding all the
pains I have bestowed upon the survey, I must fall back
upon the kind consideration of my British readers.
But even when the range of the work had been thus re-
duced, the extent of the matters to be dealt with exceeded the
limits of a volume of this series, so that I was obliged to lay
down definite lines in the selection of what really belongs to
my subject. As this is the development of theological thought,
everything that belongs to the department of practical church
life, such as ecclesiastico-political events and party conflicts,
or philanthropic movements of church societies, could at once
be excluded. It was more difficult to draw the line with
reference to non-theological science, particularly philosophy.
Philosophy has in various ways had so much influence on the
Theology of our century, that it is impossible quite to ignore
it in a history of the latter. I have therefore brought it
within the limits of my account so far, and only so far, as it
has exerted a direct influence on the development of Theo-
logy. From the nature of the case, the line drawn cannot be
so hard and fast that the concurrence of all readers in the
selection made is to be expected. And those readers who
may perhaps look for a more detailed treatment of the
Philosophy of Religion in Germany, may be referred to my
History of the Philosophy of Religion from Spinoza to the
Present Time, of which there is an English translation.
As regards the treatment of the materials, I have through-
out abstained from giving a complete, statistical enumeration
of all the writers and titles of books holding a place in the
theological literature of this century. Such a catalogue would
have served but little the purpose of this book. I have re-
garded it as far more appropriate to deal somewhat more
fully with the characteristic and important men and move-
ments, rather than by a mass of unimportant details to render
PREFACE. XI
the survey of the course of development difficult. Further,
I dislike above all things that method of writing history
which presents nothing but the writer's subjective judgment
of people, without so much as allowing them to say what
their own opinions and views are. To take all men as what
they show themselves to be, is the only way in which we can
pay due regard to historical justice.
I have found but very few books to help me in my work.
For the period under review Dorner's History of Protestant
Theology is much too meagre. The books of Carl Schwarz
and Landerer on Recent Theology, unlike as they are as re-
gards style, the first being as brilliant as the second is dry, are
very much alike in this, that both have much more to say of
men than they allow men to say for themselves. In the survey
of English Theology, Dr. Tulloch's Movements of Religious
Thought has supplied me with useful points of observation,
at all events for some parts of my sketch.
i
OTTO PFLEIDERER.
GROSS LlCHTERFELDE, NEAR BERLIN.
EDITOR'S NOTE.
Dr. Pfleiderers work is not a translation in the ordinary sense. It
has been written for the Library of Philosophy, and appears first in
English. This involves the disadvantage that the reader will not have
(as usually in translations) the original to which to refer in case of doubt.
For this reason special care has been taken to secure a clear and accurate
rendering. The Authors MS. has been translated into English by Mr.
J. Frederick Smith, whose work has been revised in proof by Dr.
Pfleiderer, by the translator, and by myself.
GENERAL EDITOR,
CONTENTS.
BOOK I.
THE BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY IN GERMAN IDEALISTIC
PHILOSOPHY.
PAGE
CHAPTER I. Kant 3
II. Herder 21
III. Schleiermacher 44
IV. Fichte 57
V. Schelling . . 62
VI. Hegel 68
BOOK II.
THE DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY UNDER THE
INFLUENCE OF IDEALISTIC PHILOSOPHY.
CHAPTER I. The Theology of the School of Kant .... 85
II. The Theology of the School of Schleiermacher . . 103
III. Speculative Theology 131
IV. Eclectic Theologians 154
BOOK III.
BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY.
CHAPTER I. New Testament Criticism and Exegesis. . . . 209
II. Old Testament Criticism and Exegesis . . . . 252
III. History of the Church and of Dogma .... 277
BOOK IV.
A SURVEY OF THE PROGRESS OF THEOLOGY IN GREAT
BRITAIN SINCE 1825.
CHAPTER I. The Schools of Philosophy in their relation to Theology 303
II. Parties and Movements in Theology . . ., . 355
INDEX 402
BOOK I.
THE BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY IN GERMAN
IDEALISTIC PHILOSOPHY.
G. T.
CHAPTER I.
KANT.
IN the year 1784 Kant wrote an essay upon the question,
What is Aufkliirung ? l In it he reviews the tendencies of
his age, and at the same time indicates in what sense he con-
siders them justifiable and is willing to further them. This
essay may be regarded as the programme of the task to
which German philosophy in Kant and his successors has
devoted itself.
1 * Free Thought," says Kant, "is the advance, of man
beyond the state of voluntary immaturity. By immaturity is
meant, inability to use his own understanding except under
the guidance of another. The immaturity is voluntary when
the cause of it is not want of intelligence, but of resolution
and courage to use it without another's guidance. Sapere
aude ! Dare to use thy own understanding ! is therefore the
motto of Free Thought. If the question be asked, * Do we
live in a free- thinking age?' the answer is, 'No; but we
live in an age of free-thought/ As things are at present,
men as a whole are very far from possessing, or even from
being able to acquire, the power of making a sure and right
use of their own understandings in religious matters without
the guidance of others. On the other hand, we have clear
indications that the field now lies nevertheless open before
them, to which they can freely make their way, and that the
hindrances to general Freedom of Thought, or the abandon-
ment of the state of voluntary immaturity, are gradually be-
coming less. In this sense the present age is the age of Free
Thought, or the century of Frederick the Great."
1 Aufklarung. Any translation of this terminus technicus may mislead.
From Kant's authoritative definition of the thing, it appears that our English
" Free-thinking" substantially represents it. Tr.
4 BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I.
It is only by slow degrees that the people generally can
reach Freedom of Thought. It is not by means of a revolu-
tion, which can never effect a real reform in habits of thought ;
a revolution only exchanges old prejudices for new, which
then, as much as the old ones, serve as leading-strings to the
unthinking crowd. The one proper method is the free use
of reason as a public right, whereby the wise are put in a
position to diffuse their superior intelligence and render it the
common property of all. To check the free public employ-
ment of reason, in the interests of any existing social institu-
tions or laws, would, in Kant's view, be " a sin against the
nature of man, the primary purpose of which consists in just
this advance in Free Thinking." Moreover, this public use
of reason by the learned, Kant argues, involves no danger,
inasmuch as it does not seek by any means to put an end to
the performance of civil duties or of the obligations imposed
on each man by his calling ; it was precisely under the veil
of severe civil discipline, as it existed in the State of Frederick,
that freedom of mind had more room to spread than is usually
the case where there is greater civil liberty. When once
however by freedom of thought the mental habits of a nation
have been so educated that it is rendered more capable of
freedom in action, this education finally reacts upon the
maxims of the government in such a way that it treats men
no longer as machines but in a manner suited to their true
dignity.
We see from this essay that Kant participated to the full
in the movement of his age towards Aufklarung, but that he
gauged its meaning otherwise and more profoundly than did
his contemporaries. He is no less opposed to the complacent
vanity of the German popular philosophers, who thought that
they already possessed Aufkldrung the truth in religion and
morals, than he is to the radicalism of the French party of
progress, who imagined that they could reach the goal by
means of revolution, by abjuring in theory and practice all
existing beliefs and institutions. Of course, according to
Kantj mankind is bound to be rationally free and enlightened,
but they are not so as yet ; and will not become so by merely
discarding old prejudices, but only by a " true reform in habits
of thought," whereby they will be enabled to " make a sure
and right use" of their own understandings. To educate
mankind for this true employment of the understanding is
Ch. I.] KANT.
the vocation of men of letters, and more especially of philo-
sophers, a task which was made possible in Frederick's State.
It is therefore not enough for men to learn to use their own
understanding ; they must also learn to use it rightly ; to help
them to do this is the primary and essential vocation of philo-
sophy as Kant understood it. But if we wish to ensure the
true use of the understanding by a method which is univer-
sally valid, we must first critically examine the laws which are
involved in the very nature of the understanding itself. For
the knowledge of a truth which is valid for every one is
possible only when based on laws which are involved in the
nature of the human mind as such, and have not been im-
ported into it from without through facts of experience which
must always be accidental and conditional. Kant is con-
vinced of the existence of such primary laws, involved in the
very constitution of the human mind. He looks upon them
as laws which do not arise from experience, but which are
rather prior to all experience, and, as determining its form, lie
at the root of all theoretical, practical, and aesthetic judgments
out of which the world of consciousness is built up. He
has thrown this conviction into a scientific shape in the three
critiques, namely of the Pure and of the Practical Reason,
and of the Faculty of Judgment. On the one hand, Em-
pirical Philosophy had held that all knowledge arises purely
from without, from experienced perceptions, but had not been
able to explain the fact that experience always conforms to
law. Rationalistic Philosophy, again, had sought to derive all
knowledge from the constitution of the mind itself, from its
innate ideas, but had left out of consideration its dependence
upon experience, and had confounded the empty creations of
thought with reality. Once more, both the rival schools of
Empirical and Rationalistic philosophers had agreed at least in
regarding all knowledge as something given whether from
without or from within and the knowing mind as only its
passive recipient. Kant, on the contrary, taught that all cogni-
tion rests upon the union of the mind's activity and receptivity;
inasmuch as the material is given us in the multiformity of our
perceptions, sensations, and sense-affections ; but the formation
of this material into a system of knowledge is the work of our
own activity, this activity, in accordance with its own laws,
giving to the material the form of rationality, which consti-
tutes the truth of our cognition. In opposition, therefore, to
6 BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I.
Rationalistic philosophy, Kant taught the dependence of the
act of cognition on the material supplied in experience in
space and time, and the impossibility of knowing the reality
(das Ding an sick) lying behind these facts of experience. In
opposition to Empirical philosophy, he taught that it is the
subject which, by means of its characteristic perception of
things under the forms of space and time and of the categories,
converts this chaotic material into the regular orderly world
called "experience"; and that in this respect the under-
standing itself is to be regarded as imposing law r s on nature.
It was this latter conception, viz., of reason, both in theoreti-
cal knowledge and in practical judgments, imposing laws upon
itself, which was the essence of Kant's thought and the open-
ing of a new era of philosophy. Of this there can be no
doubt in the mind of any one who recognises the connexion
between the different parts of the system, and its relation to
the theories which preceded and followed it. It has, how-
ever, been widely supposed for some time, and particularly in
theological circles, that the main point in Kant's philosophy is
the limitation of human knowledge to phenomena, and the
proof that we cannot know anything of the region lying
beyond them. Nor can it be denied that Kant himself laid
great emphasis upon this side of his teaching, inasmuch as
this limitation of the speculative reason seemed to him the
preliminary basis of the unconditional character of the prac-
tical reason. Nevertheless this view is obviously erroneous ;
were it true, it would be impossible to say what claim to
originality Kant's philosophy possessed, and how it could lay
down the lines for future development. For a glance at
English philosophy prior to Kant shows that Locke, Berkeley,
and especially Hume, had limited our knowledge to the phe-
nomena of consciousness, and had pronounced the reference
of these phenomena to a trans-subjective reality a supposition
incapable of proof, and likewise valueless, on account of the
incognisability of the problematical external object. In the
case of Hume this was the necessary consequence of his scep-
tical dissolution of the idea of causation, in which he saw only
the expression of the customary transition of imagination
from one idea to another, a subjective fiction which could not
possibly carry us from the phenomena of consciousness to
trans-subjective reality. If, therefore, this negative side of
Kant's philosophy the limitation of our knowledge to ex-
Ch. I.] KANT.
perience were the important part of it, it would have been
a repetition of that of his predecessor, Hume. Indeed, we
should be compelled to allow that, in point of consistency,
Kant was inferior to Hume, since he admittedly broke through
this limitation in several respects : he made things-in-them-
selves the causes of sensations or experience ; the freedom of
man's intelligible character the cause of actions in time ; God
the cause of the existence of the highest good, or of the unity
of the natural and moral worlds. He thus indisputably ex-
tended the category of causation to transcendental objects, in
spite of its presupposed limitation to the world of experience.
Such inconsistency would be quite incomprehensible if, as is
ordinarily supposed, this sceptical doctrine were the gist and
real object of Kant's theory of knowledge. The real state
of the case is as follows : Kant had been impressed by the
imposing character of Hume's sceptical philosophy, and had
adopted its doctrine of the incognisability of things-in-them-
selves ; this principle he had accepted prior to his own critical
inquiry into the forms of cognition inherent in the human
mind, but afterwards regarded as the result of this inquiry,
though, if he had undertaken the inquiry independently of
this preconceived opinion, he would have come to the oppo-
site conclusion. This timidity, which hesitated to leap, with
the aid of the idea of causality, the confines of the pheno-
mena of consciousness, and to lay hold of things-in-themselves,
was a legacy from the scepticism of Hume, from which Kant
was unable completely to free himself, even when, in oppo-
sition to Hume, he reasserted for the idea of causation its
rightful position as one of the fundamental a priori forms
of judgment. It was, therefore, net the desertion of Kant's
philosophy, but simply the true and necessary carrying out of
its speculative principle and most characteristic position, when
his successors rejected this sceptical limitation of our know-
ledge, and credited thought with the power of theoretically
conceiving Being, as well as of practically moulding it ; when,
in other words, they put an end to the Kantian dualism of the
Theoretical Reason, limited to the world of phenomena, and
the Practical Reason, dwelling in the world of the intelligible.
The Practical Philosophy of Kant is partly the complement,
partly the antithesis of his theoretical philosophy. In his theory
of knowledge he had aimed at proving that cognition is
governed by the a priori forms existing in the understanding,
8 BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I.,
independently of experience, but for that very reason limited
the action of the mind in cognition to merely the formal work-
ing-up of given conceptions. Similarly, in order that the law
of moral action may possess unconditional and universal vali-
dity, it must, in Kant's view, be independent of experience,
and belong to the reason a priori, i.e., must be autonomous;
it is as much the province of Reason as Practical to lay down
laws for action, as of the Speculative Reason to do this for
cognition ; but at the same time, if this practical law is to be
a priori, it must be limited to \htform of action merely, and
must not include any object of desire since the will can be
influenced by an object of desire, only by the expectation of
pleasure, a motive which acts differently in different individuals,
and belongs to the lower sense-faculty of desire and hence
can never claim universal or unconditional validity. All
material principles, whatever their contents, are, according to
Kant, equally eudsemonistic; they depend upon self-love, or the
lower faculty of desire, and have only a subjective and empiri-
cally conditioned validity ; they are therefore merely pruden-
tial maxims, not pure laws of reason. The autonomous law,
characteristic of reason, must accordingly relate solely to the
general form of action, without the slightest admixture of
material motives, which would only sully its purity ; its com-
mand as the " Categorical Imperative " is : Act so that the
rule governing thy will may also always serve as the principle
of a universal legislation.
Thus far Kant's doctrine of the legislation of the practical
reason seems to form a complete parallel to that of the specu-
lative reason ; but as soon as we look more closely at the rela-
tion of form and contents, an essential distinction becomes
apparent. In the sphere of knowledge, form and contents,
in spite of their different origin, are in no way really opposed,
but only exist for, and with each other ; we are compelled to
bring every object of sense-experience under the a priori
forms of intuition and of thought, and our sense-perceptions,
instead of being antagonistic to these forms, can only be
apprehended by their means. It is quite otherwise in the
sphere of action. The moral law is indeed the form of a
priori validity, which we can and ought to apply as a criterion
to every object of sense-desire i.e., to our empirical inclina-
tions and actions ; but we are by no means compelled to do
this ; we are able to follow the natural inclinations produced
Ch. I.] KANT.
by the contents of our sense-experience, which so little
submit without resistance to this a priori form, that, in Kant's
view, they are invariably opposed to the law of reason, and so
produce a never-ending struggle between duty and inclination.
Hence the moral law is the form which, on the one hand, has
need of the contents supplied _by the empirical desires, since
without them it would not reach action at all, and so the law
find no application ; but, on the other hand, this form is also
represented as involved in a ceaseless opposition and conflict
with their contents. This conception is plainly unrealisable ;
we cannot see how a moral law without contents, and simply
opposed to all empirical inclinations could ever become a
motive of action, or how definite obligatory actions could be
deduced from it. It is, no doubt, true that there is often a
conflict between duty and inclination, and that in this conflict
the claims of duty are the higher, and the only absolute ones ;
it is the great merit of Kant's moral philosophy to have
brought out this truth with all possible emphasis. But it is
equally certain that the letter of his theory is untenable. His
mistake lay in thinking that the law of reason must be made
purely formal to have unconditional validity, and in attributing
all actual motives of action, all inclinations, to sense-desire,
thus representing them as hostile to reason. In this way his
moral system acquired a harsh, ascetic character, exceeding
in rigour even that of the Stoics. The ground of this was
essentially the same in both cases : the absolute dualism
between reason and sensation, between man as an "intelligible"
being, endowed with freedom and reason, and man as a being
of sense endowed with natural desire. If the two are so com-
pletely disjoined as abstract anti-natural Idealism, which still
influenced Kant, maintained, we cannot understand how the
commands of reason could ever coincide with man's actual
wishes and actions. In order that anything may be a motive,
it must be a possible object of desire ; the moral law accor-
dingly can be a higher motive than single accidental inclina-
tions only by including a higher object, which, as uncondition-
ally valuable, is superior to all merely conditional ends. If,
however, the moral law includes a concrete end, it is no longer
purely formal ; it is no longer opposed to all inclinations, but
can itself become the object of reasonable inclination ; in that
case there is no longer the absolute dualism, asserted by Kant,
between man as desiring and man as thinking, and finally,
IO BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I.
there is from the first an inner connection between the sense-
world of experience and the " intelligible world," which warrants
the hope of the synthesis of both in human action and cog-
nition.
In Kant himself we find several hints of this correction
of the purely formal and dualistic character of his moral
philosophy ; and these hints only need working out in order
to render the rational principle of this philosophy supreme
in the sphere of ethics. Kant was at bottom really held back
here only by the same want of courage in working out his
speculative principle as is traceable in his theory of know-
ledge ; the hindrance there was the influence of the scepti-
cism of Hume, here it was the dread of sullying the purity
of idealistic ethical principles, by a compromise with empirical
principles. His demand of a purely formal ethical principle
was violated by Kant himself even in the definition of moral
philosophy as the science of the ends of pure reason, and by
the deduction of the supreme, unconditionally desirable end
from the dignity of man as a rational being ; whence he
derived the formula of his First Principles of the Metaphysics
of Ethics : " Act so as to use humanity, both in thine own
person and in the person of every other man, always as an
end, never solely as a means." To treat humanity in each
individual as an end in itself, clearly means the recognition
of a general end of humanity, and making its realisation in
each man our object. Thus the moral law acquires as its
contents a definite material end, from which the particular
moral ends also may be deduced. This deduction can, how-
ever, only be made by means of empirical observation, both
of the capacities and faculties involved in the natures of man,
and of their employment and development as gathered from
history. From the admission of this empirical observation
Kant was deterred for the reasons given above, and was thus
prevented from utilising in science this pregnant formula. In
his theory of virtue he did, indeed, try to deduce the neces-
sity of our own personal perfection and of the happiness of
others as the two main divisions of the virtues. But it is
clear that he could not do this consistently with his own
premises. If, as he is elsewhere never tired of insisting, any
appeal to empirical motives derived from the desire for happi-
ness is a pollution of morality, it is difficult to see how to
seek the happiness of others can be reasonably made a duty ;
Ch. I.] KANT. I I
for if happiness is in no respect a desirable moral end, the
happiness of others can no more than our own be such an
end ; while, conversely, if the happiness of others is to be
sought, it is not easy to see why our own should not be so
also, more especially in view of the Kantian principle of the
universal applicability of the moral rule "what is right for
the one must also be fair for the other." When we add that
Kant, in the explanatory justification of his principle, has
already emphasised the evil effects which every one would
feel if his selfish conduct were made into a universal prin-
ciple, we can hardly dissent from those who consider that in
working out his moral system he did not remain true to the
rigour of his primary principle, but fell back into that utili-
tarianism which he so greatly abhors. This inconsistency was
only the natural result of the excessive rigour with which he
insisted on his a priori principle, until it became a system
of forms without contents, the defects of which necessitated
a recourse to alien points of view.
Kant exhibits, however, surprising points of agreement,
not only with the strictly philosophical, but also with the
theological utilitarianism of his time. In the Critique of Pure
Reason he had shown that the ideas of Freedom, Immor-
tality (soul), and God could not be objects of theoretical
knowledge, inasmuch as insoluble contradictions arise when-
ever a proof of them is attempted. But what is denied to the
speculative, can, he maintains, be grasped by the practical
reason. Though to the former the world of noumena lying
behind phenomena is closed, to the latter it is directly re-
vealed in the moral law, which makes man a citizen of the
"intelligible world" of freedom. From this position the
above ideas may be established as " Postulates," i.e., as pre-
suppositions which we feel compelled to make, not in order
to enlarge our knowledge, but in order to render possible the
realisation of the moral law. In the first place, we thus gain
the postulate of freedom as the basis of the reality of moral
law, just as this law is the basis of the cognisability of
freedom ; for, inasmuch as we ought to do the good, it follows
that we can do it. Nevertheless the moral law is perpetually
obstructed by the motives of sense-desire. These obstructions
it is able and bound to overcome more and more ; but can
never do this so completely that the law will be fully realised
in finite time ; hence its realisation demands the infinite
1 2 BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I.
duration of the individual, or immortality. Finally, reason
as a legislative faculty demands the realisation of an absolute
end or supreme good, which must embrace both perfect
virtue and a corresponding state of happiness, and happiness
not included in virtue, but dependent upon natural conditions
beyond our control. Hence arises the demand for a supreme
Cause, capable of bringing nature into harmony with the
moral law of rational beings, or of connecting happiness with
the virtue that deserves it ; in other words, the supreme good
proposed by reason demands the existence of God as the
condition of its possibility. Thus the transcendental ideas
are the objects of a " moral faith " rooted in reason. It is true
that by this faith the speculative reason receives no addition
to its knowledge, but by its critical precautions it can render
at least the negative service of keeping these ideas free from
anthropomorphic impurities and superstitious abuse. It has
indeed always been with good reason maintained that this
mode of establishing belief in the existence of God can with
difficulty be harmonized with the main principle of Kant's
ethics. If the moral law is throughout to have nothing to do
with sense-desire or happiness, it is hard to see how, on the
other hand, happiness can be pronounced an integral part
of the supreme good aimed at by reason and a divine cause
be demanded to produce it. The affinity of this train of
thought to theological utilitarianism is so obvious, that many
have not unreasonably seen in it a retrogression on the part
of Kant to the eudaemonistic point of view of the popular
philosophy, 1 and that Kant's philosophical successors pre-
ferred to work out his speculative principle to its logical
results without his theological postulates.
Still, fully justified as these objections to the literal form
of Kant's postulate undoubtedly are, we cannot deny that
underneath it lay a true idea, which appears in a purer form
in the Critique of Judgment. Kant here tries to find
some connecting link between the intelligible and sensible
worlds, between freedom and nature, in the idea of a teleology
common to both. In order to explain nature we find our-
1 Jacobi, Fichte, Herder, Schleiermacher, unanimously rejected Kant's line
of argument, sometimes in very strong terms. Of more recent authors,
compare the criticisms of Dilthey (Leben Schleiermacher s, I. 127, seq.), Bieder-
mann (Deutschlatid im 18 Jahrh^ II. 902), Wundt (Ethik, 319, seq.).
Ch. I.] KANT. 1 3
selves compelled to combine the principle of teleology with
the mechanical principle or causality ; for in organic nature
we see that the parts are determined by their relation to the
whole, are means to the inner end of the organism. To the
question, how the teleological explanation can be harmonised
with that of causality, Kant's answer is, in the first instance,
that the conception of ends in nature is not of such value as
to add to our knowledge of facts, but is only a regulative
principle for our reflective judgment ; it is primarily owing to
the structure of our subjective understanding merely that we
cannot help regarding nature as governed by final causes.
But Kant cannot rest in this sceptical subjectivity ; he teaches
that if the two principles are to be harmonised, they must be
combined under one supreme common principle, viz., in a
super-sensible substratum, or actual cause of nature ; of this
cause we must form a corresponding intellectual intuition,
that is to say, we conceive it as not merely causal, but as at
the same time the primal intellect, whose thought is not like
ours discursive, but necessarily intuitive (thinking the whole
simultaneously with its parts). It is true he does, at the same
time, again sceptically confess that objectively we can neither
assert nor deny the proposition that a Being, acting with a
view to ends, as the cause of the universe, is behind what
we rightly call the ends of nature ; but he considers it is
certain that, if we are to form judgments according to the
conditions of our reason, we are absolutely compelled to
regard a rational Being as the condition of the possibility
of ends in nature. But the observation of nature's ends is
not sufficient to enable us to further define this intelligent
First Cause ; we must under the guidance of teleology go
beyond Nature. Nature presents not only individual pro-
ducts adapted to ends, but forms a system of ends which
point to a supreme or final end. This final end can only be
man, who alone acts with conscious purpose and uses all
creatures as means to his ends. But man is not a final end,
for in so far as man is a part of Nature, his sensuous, pleasure-
seeking ends, are again dependent upon natural conditions,
and are in no way the object of Nature's special regard. On
the contrary, man is a final end only as a moral subject, as
proposing to himself unconditional ends by his supersensible
freedom of volition. His existence involves the supreme end,
to which all Nature is subordinate as means. It is from this
14 BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I.
conception of man's moral nature, as constituting the supreme
end of creation, that the study of Nature's ends must be
supplemented, whereby the greater validity and definiteness
of the argument for a supreme First Cause are secured, inas-
much as we must now think of this supreme Cause not only
as Intelligence, and as a legislator for Nature, but also as the
supreme Law-giver of a moral kingdom of ends. It is evident
that this inductive method of arriving at the idea of God
contrasts favourably with that given above ; whilst by the
first, God was postulated only for the dubious object of adding
happiness to our autonomous morality, by the latter, His
existence is inferred from a comprehensive survey of external
and internal experience as the necessary condition of a teleo-
logical system of things, uniting the natural and moral worlds
as means and end. This is a clear speculative conception,
which, shadowed forth by Leibnitz, in various forms runs
like a golden thread through the whole of Post- Kantian philo-
sophy. A corollary of this thought is, that man, not only as
a natural, but also as a moral being, is dependent upon the
Divine Cause of the universe, and that his autonomy must
therefore at the same time be an actual (not merely sub-
jectively conceived) theonomy. But of this inference, affecting
the very foundations of his philosophy, Kant would know
nothing ; however obviously it is suggested by the above line
of induction, he refused to recognise it, through fear of im-
pairing his idea of freedom ; and instead of it he finally gave
to his ethico-theological proof the form in which we find it in
the Critique of the Practical Reason (viz., that God is neces-
sary for the attainment of happiness, or in order to supple-
ment our inadequate power over sensible nature), and which
is open to the most serious objections. Here again we are
expressly reminded that God is the object only of a moral
faith, which must not be confounded with theoretical know-
ledge, nor made the basis of morality upon which it really
rests.
Morality becomes religion when what it shows to be the
end of man is conceived as also the end of the supreme Law-
giver and Creator, or God. Religion is thus the recognition
of all our duties as divine commands. The distinction be-
tween revealed and natural religion is stated by Kant to be,
that in the former, I must know a thing to be a divine com-
mand before I can recognise it as my duty ; in the latter, I
Ch. I.] KANT. 1 5
must know it as my duty before I can consider it a command
of God. If a man holds revealed religion to be necessary,
he is a Supernaturalist ; if unnecessary, a Rationalist ; if
impossible, a Naturalist. As a fourth possibility, a religion
might conceivably be objectively natural and yet subjectively
revealed ; this would be the case if it were such that man
might have arrived at it by the unaided use of reason, but at
a later period ; hence revelation might be useful, or even
necessary for certain times and places, without being a per-
manent guarantee for the truth of the religion. The last is
Kant's supposition with regard to Christianity, as it had been
that of Lessing. But whence comes this, if only relative,
necessity for revelation? And. how are its contents to be
understood as in unison with reason ? These questions were
discussed by Kant in the works, Religion innerhalb der
Grenzen der blossen Vernunft (1793), and Ueber den Streit
der Fakultdten (1798), in a style, whatever our opinion may
be in other respects, which is at all events far superior in
depth to the Aufklarung of the popular philosophy.
What made Kant capable of a truer appreciation of the
doctrines of Christianity, was his deep moral earnestness.
The self-complacent optimism of the philosophy of the
Aufklarung had lacked the recognition of evil as a serious
power in human life, while Kant made it the starting-point of
his religious philosophy. He considered it as incontestably
a fact of experience, that in our race there is inherent a
" radical evil," or an original tendency to evil, viz., the pre-
ponderance of self-love over pure reverence for law. This
wrong bias cannot be the result of inheritance from our first
parents, since moral qualities cannot be thus transmitted, but
are inseparable from the person. The source of this radical
evil, according to Kant, is rather to be sought in an " intelli-
gible act of freedom," which is not to be further explained.
The question, then, is, how this evil disposition can be
changed into a good one, Kant answers, Not by a gradual
reformation, but by a fundamental revolution of the man's
whole habit of thought, by a new birth. The problem is, to
awaken in the mind the idea of the moral perfection for which
we are from the first made. For this purpose, nothing is
more effectual than the contemplation of this idea in an his-
torical example of it of such surpassing moral grandeur as
can be beheld in Jesus. For this reason, we may look upon
16 BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I.
him as if the ideal of goodness had been presented in him in
flesh and blood, though we have not on that account any
reason to regard him as other than a man born in the course
of nature. The question, too, whether his historical per-
sonality altogether corresponded to the eternal ideal, is one
which we neither can nor need answer ; for, in any case, the
real object of our religious faith is not this historic man, but
the ideal of a humanity well-pleasing to God ; and since this
ideal is not our own creation, but given us in our super-
sensible nature, it may be conceived as the Son of God come
down from heaven. Whoever believes in this ideal Son of
God, to whom Jesus holds the relation of the representative
example that is, whoever receives into his heart the moral
idea of a humanity pleasing to God, and lets it govern his life
may believe that he is justified in the eyes of the Searcher of
Hearts, since the fundamental Tightness of his disposition
covers the imperfection of the details of his life. Nor need
he have any anxiety with regard to the guilt of the past ; for
although the conception of the vicarious suffering of Christ as
a satisfaction for sinners is, if taken literally, untrue, inasmuch
as such a substitution cannot take place in the sphere of
morality, still the conception may be regarded as the sym-
bolical expression of the true idea, that in the daily pain of
self-discipline, obedience, and patience, the new man in us
suffers as it were vicariously for the old. Kant thus interprets
the Church's doctrine of the Atonement, as once for all made
by Christ, on the lines of Protestant mysticism, treating it as a
continual ethical process in the heart of the religious man an
interpretation, the germs of which may be traced to the
Apostle Paul. But while the Christian doctrine of salvation
thus becomes an inward subjective experience of the heart, it
is by no means Kant's intention to depreciate, from an abstract
subjective point of view, the importance of the community.
He sees very clearly that the supremacy of the good principle
in the individual can only be assured when it is maintained in
the community around him. But this can be accomplished
only by the establishment and spread of a society having the
laws of virtue both as its basis and its end. Such an ethical
community, or " Kingdom of God," is distinguished from all
civil States, by being founded, not upon the laws of civil justice,
but upon the laws of personal virtue, -and by having for its
sovereign, not a human potentate, but the Searcher of Hearts ;
Ch. I.] KANT. 1 7
and again by not being limited to a definite nation or country,
but embracing in principle the whole of mankind. Moreover,
this ideal ethical community is by no means identical with
historic ecclesiastical communities, for while it can be based
upon the faith of the reason alone, which is open to all alike,
the ecclesiastical societies are founded upon positive creeds,
which everywhere take different forms.
Having thus stated his view of religion, as it may be
ascertained within the limits of reason, Kant proceeds to the
critical investigation of the historical, or " statutory" forms
of religion. He here shows that he fully shared the unhis-
torical way of looking at things characteristic of the age of
the Aufklarung. The only explanation of the rise of the
positive religions he can give is the false notion of mankind,
that God demands special acts of ceremonial worship in
addition to the worship of a morally good life. This was the
origin of statutory religious regulations, which may for a time,
in proportion to their association with moral ideas, be useful
and even necessary as the means of inaugurating purely moral
religious teaching, but in the end become hindrances to
progress, and are therefore destined gradually to give place to
the pure religion of reason. In Kant's view, the abolition of
this servile belief, with the establishment of the sole authority
of moral faith, was inaugurated by Jesus ; but the real purpose
of Jesus was often misunderstood in the Church, and what he
originally intended to be simply preparatory means, was in
later times made fundamental ; whence arose much bigotry
and fanaticism. It was not until his own time, Kant thinks,
that the light at length fully shone forth after centuries of
darkness ; and he interprets the Christian hope of a final
consummation, when God shall be all in all, of this develop-
ment, then actually begun, of the true faith of reason out of the
wrappings of the historic faith. It is the duty of religious
teachers, Kant declared, to help on this development by
means of the interpretation of the Bible and a fresh inter-
pretation of the dogmas of the Church. At the end, he
turns to the criticism of special points, in which he thought
the danger of fanatical religious error and false worship
especially serious. The notion of divine " operations of
grace " he classes among those incomprehensible ideas of
which reason disputes neither the possibility, nor the reality,
nor even the necessity, but of which it can make no use
G. T. C
1 8 BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I.
either in speculation, owing to the impossibility of determin-
ing their characteristics, or in practice, since we can do
nothing to produce them. Elsewhere, however, he indicates
in what sense he is willing to accept the idea of divine grace,
viz., if it is understood to mean the supersensible principle of
good existing in our moral nature, which may be regarded
as a divinely imparted impulse towards the good, the capacity
for which has not been produced by our own effort, and which
can be thought of as grace. Similarly he distinguishes in the
means of grace between the true moral kernel and the ruder
husk. Prayer, regarded as a formal act of worship and the
statement of our wishes to a Being who needs no such state-
ment, he considers a vain superstition and fetishism ; but as
the expression of our heart's desire to be well-pleasing to God,
it is a valuable means of quickening good dispositions, and
especially as public prayer is an effective ethical observance,
calculated to awaken moral impulses in the members of a
community. In the same way, Baptism and the Lord's
Supper may be looked upon as ethical observances for the
public confession and quickening of the feelings of duty and
brotherly love in a community ; but to regard them as means
of grace in the sense that by these ceremonies the divine
favour might be flattered and won, would be a heathenish
superstition, and could only lead to contempt for virtue and
the greater influence of the priesthood as the dispensers of
grace.
In these utterances we cannot but recognise the lofty
moral earnestness which was the soul of the Kantian
philosophy and the main cause of its great and salutary effect
upon its time. But the same defects are here observable as
mark his moral philosophy : the onesidedness and inflexibility
of his speculative principle prevented him from being just to
those sides of man's nature which, while different from the
intellect, are not wholly irrational, and must on no account
be simply assigned to the lower sense-nature. I refer to the
emotions and the imagination. The religious life originates
and specially manifests itself in these very faculties of the
soul as its domain ; and we can therefore readily understand
why Kant could not take an impartial view of its natural and
characteristic phenomena. He was still held back by the
abstract intellectualism which was a universal failing of the
Aufkldrung. To correct this error and supply what was
"Ch. I.] KANT.
lacking was the work of that party which had already protested,
on the lines of Rousseau, against this worship of the intellect,
and had proclaimed the rights of nature, of the heart, of the
unfettered imagination, and of passionate enthusiasm. The
party consisted of those allies in the " Storm and Stress "
movement whose youthful excesses of enthusiasm were so
modified and transformed in Herder and Goethe as to become
a new and richer ideal of humanity.
Moreover, Kant's religious philosophy was unsatisfactory
on account of the indefiniteness and uncertainty of its attitude
towards the decisive question of man's relation to God. If
religion consists, as it teaches, in regarding our duties as
divine commands, the question at once arises, whether this is
a purely subjective conception, or whether it is based upon an
objective truth. In the former case, we have the anthropo-
logical theory of religion, since developed by Feuerbach and
recent Positivism and Agnosticism ; in the latter, there arises
the further question, How can we arrive at a knowledge of
the divine will ? Now, the idea of revelation remains in Kant
a non liquet ; he concedes its possibility, perhaps even its
necessity, and yet really leaves no>oom for it. If it is ad-
mitted, in the sense of an external announcement on the part
of God, as the theological Kantians wished, the fate of Kant's
fundamental principle of the autonomy of reason is at once
sealed. If, on the other hand, the divine revelation is con-
ceived as taking place within the human spirit, as in post-
Kantian speculation, it cannot reasonably be limited to the
practical and denied to the theoretical reason ; the human
spirit must then be conceived as standing generally as such in
so close a relation to the divine that the eternal nature of the
divine Reason must express and reveal itself in the regular
course of the mind's own activity. But this carries us not
only beyond the dualism of Kant's theory of knowledge, but
also beyond the moral abstraction of his merely rational faith,
and we are brought to an evolutionary idealism, as conceived
by Herder and Hegel, in which the manifold moral and
religious ideals of mankind take their place as integral mem-
bers in the process of the development of divine revelation.
Thus, in the Kantian philosophy there lay side by side the
germs of various tendencies of thought, which afterwards took
widely different directions. And it was precisely this wealth
of suggestions, which might be developed into totally distinct
2O BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I.
lines of thought, which constituted the vast importance of his
philosophy for his age, at the same time rendering the preser-
vation of its original form impossible. While no thinker of
the time remained uninfluenced by it, not one adopted it in its
entirety ; and it was precisely its most distinguished disciples
who advanced the furthest beyond it, and by developing its
principles and correcting its imperfections gained fruitful
points of view very helpful to a profounder understanding of
religion.
CHAPTER II.
HERDER.
IN the year 1784 appeared the beginning of Herder's Ideas
ton the Philosophy of History, which, together with Kant's
Critique of Pure Reason, gives utterance, as Julian Schmidt
justly considers, to the most important intellectual drift of the
century. In this book meet, as in a focus, the combined
results of Herder's various philosophical labours, labours which
opened up new and magnificent points of view especially in
those branches of study which were depreciated by Kant, viz.,
the emotional side of the life of the human soul and the
development of mankind under the combined action of
natural and spiritual forces in history. In England Shaftes-
bury's philosophy of the moral sense had been the counterpart
of Hume's intellectual scepticism, and in France Rousseau's
Gospel of Nature, that of Voltaire's Enlightenment ; in the
same way in Germany Kant's analyzing thought was supple-
mented by the synthetic intuitions of Herder, and subjective
idealism, with its limitation to the analysis of the conscious-
ness of the subject, by historical realism, with its eager atten-
tion to the laws of human nature in the whole course of history.
Each of these modes of thought is evidently the complement
of the other ; and the right combination and fusion of the two
was the problem bequeathed by the i8th century, then clos-
ing, to the philosophy of the iQth, a problem the solution of
which is still far from completed. In order to understand what
is really new in the thought of the 1 9th century, we must look
at it as the synthesis of these two contrary tendencies, which
occupied the second half of the i8th century.
A concise account of Herder's position it is not easy to give,
for two reasons ; firstly, because his style has more of the
poetical, emotional, and rhetorical element than the clearness
and precision of science ; and secondly, because his views,
especially on religious questions, underwent repeated modifi-
22 BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. 1.
cations in the course of his literary labours. One unvarying
drift does indeed pervade all these variations a protest
against the arrogance and poverty of the popular A ufklarung,
which would let nothing pass but what was amenable to the
calculations of the common understanding, and, without any
sense for appreciating the productive forces and manifold
phenomena of human history, sought to force all truth into the
meagre moulds of its abstract intellectual conception. As a
true disciple of Hamann and Rousseau, Herder abhorred this
arid, levelling rationalism ; he sought to understand the unity
of all the powers of man's soul and the special nature of his
habits of feeling ; hence what interested him in poetry and
religion was not the abstract rule, the artificial form of the
schools, the doctrines of the Church, but the living feelings as
they found natural expression in the songs of the people and
the poetical picture -language of the oldest religious records.
As in poetry he preferred the primitive strength and beauty
of the songs of the people to the classicality of the schools, so
in religion he set the strength and beauty of the Bible above
the dogmatism of the Churches ; for this very reason it was to
him insufferable to see the Rationalists trying to thrust their
rigid intellectuality into the Bible, and by their artificial inter-
pretations dilute and dissipate both its religious strength and
its poetic charm. Herder throughout remained perfectly true
to himself in rejecting the Rationalists' arbitrary and unnatural
treatment of the language of the Bible, and in demanding of
the reader a loving sympathy with the special characteristics
of the Biblical writers, so as to catch their enthusiasm and
reproduce their poetical picture-language. He thereby ren-
dered lasting service, striking the most decisive blow at the
subjective arbitrariness of the Rationalistic methods of inter-
pretation, and preparing the way for the really scientific,
objective, and historical methods of Biblical study followed in
our own time.
On the other hand, it cannot be denied that within the
boundary lines of this position Herder wavered. During
the earlier and later periods of his life (in Riga and Weimar
respectively), his appreciation of the aesthetic beauty and ideal
truth of the Bible never kept him from criticising it in the
same fashion as the poetical literature and religious legends
of other nations, or from explaining it in accordance with the
psychological and historical conditions of its origin ; so that
Ch. II.] HERDER.
he was compelled not to regard these legends, the rise of
which could be historically traced, as direct revelations of
God with objective truth. In one of his earliest works, the
fragment, Von Entstehung und Fortpflanzung der ersten Re-
ligion sbegriffe, he adopts Hume's view, that fear was the
mother of religion, and that the earliest religion consisted in
the superstitious worship of harmful and beneficent deities, to
appease the wrath and win the favour of whom, men felt
bound to offer prayers, sacrifices, and ceremonies. When,
however, mankind had provided for their most pressing
needs, they began to speculate about the origin of things,
and to embody their ideas in cosmogonies and genealogies ;
thus the first rude religion, the name of which is in almost
all languages derived from fear, was followed by a kind of
historico-physical philosophy. The question of the origin of
the world received a mystical answer ; these primitive legends
took a completely national and local form ; they were clothed
in the rich figurative language of the senses ; they became
mythological poems. It is the work of the science of religion
to study the spirit of these mythological poems as charac-
teristic products of the individual nations. As a contribution
to this object, Herder wrote his Archdologie der Hebraer,
which combined in a common view his researches in the
earliest history of poetry and in the origins of religion. He
nowhere speaks in this work of a supernatural revelation ; in
the first chapters of Genesis he sees a national religious poem,
which must be understood, like Homer, in accordance with
its original spirit and meaning without any dogmatic bias.
We must transplant ourselves into Eastern habits of thought
in order to understand this poetical philosophy of nature ; but
light is also thrown upon it by similar imagery in modern
poetry, in Ossian, Shakespeare, and Klopstock. To treat
this Oriental national poetry as dogma, is contrary to all
canons of taste and reason ; it involves a violation of the
natural difference in the various mental faculties, mutilates
the intuitive emotions no less than the reason, and confounds
together all classes of philosophy and knowledge. God gives
us no revelation concerning natural science or metaphysics,
except by means of the power bestowed by Him upon the
human mind, of penetrating by its own force ever deeper
into the nature of His creation.
While these views are identical with those of Herder's
24 BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I.
most mature works, written while in Weimar, they differ
appreciably from the position he held during the middle
period of his life (while in Biickeburg). From being the
aesthetic archaeologist of literature he then became more and
more the apologist of the supernatural. In his essay on
Die alteste Urkunde des Menschengeschlechts, which be-
longs to this period, he still regards the account of the
creation in Genesis as a poem r but now it is a divine, and
not a human poem ; it is no longer an Oriental myth, but a
divine revelation. He does indeed still lay great stress upon
the sense-intuition of nature, that is, the sight of the dawning
day, which was in the prophet's mind ; but in order that this
everyday image might be interpreted as the type of the
creation of the world, the prophet must also have heard
the voice of a teacher, which could only have been that of
God himself. Thus positive teaching of God is found at
the beginning of all human history, and remains the super-
natural spring from which all human wisdom and poetry take
their rise. Even language, the natural origin of which
Herder had himself expounded with much penetration, is now
attributed to direct divine revelation, to definite instruction
given by God. This original revelation is, in his view, the
fundamental fact, the antithesis, as he vehemently proclaims,
of all the artificial ideas and hypothesis of philosophy ; he
himself forgetting, however, that this so-called fundamental
fact is itself only an hypothesis, and is mainly distinguished
from others by boldly leaving the paths of sober empirical
investigation to take refuge in the region of miracle, where
imagination usurps the place of thought. With this essay on
Genesis we may compare a work which appeared soon after :
Erlauterungen zum neiien Testament aus einer nezieroffneten
morgenlandischen Quelle, in which the New Testament is
interpreted by the Zendavesta, Christ and his Apostles, as
Herder assumes, being versed in the wisdom of the Chaldees.
This work, like the last, contains a defence of the super-
natural element in the Bible on the lines of Lavater ; it main-
tains that all the miracles, from the miraculous birth of Jesus
to his ascension, were facts, though in such a way that
everywhere prominence is given to the spiritual truth of the
narrative. Herder did not reflect that this truth would not
be affected if the narrative were not actual history, but poetry
and legend ; the spiritual truth and beauty of a story was to
Ch. II.] HERDER. 25
him a direct guarantee of its historical reality, or rather
appeared indistinguishable from it to his poetical imagination,
which was then at all events without the checks of the critical
intellect. As his biographer, Haym, aptly remarks : " He
rightly insists that we ought to read the New Testament in
the spirit of the New Testament itself, with a feeling and
sense of the greatness of its contents. But the greatness, the
deep religious and moral power of these writings, is too much
for him ; it carries him away and overpowers him. He loses
in consequence all the freedom in regard to these writings
which he had allowed himself in regard to poetical works.
Here, as in the old Testament, he has failed to grasp the
critical conception intermediate between poetry and faith
the conception of the myth."
That in giving the rein absolutely to the anti-rationalistic
or mystical side of his nature, Herder could go so far as to
renounce his earlier scientific and critical views, can be easily
explained by his peculiar temperament and the influence of
friends, both male and female, while he was at Buckeburg ;
and it would be quite wrong to think, with Hettner, of any
conscious compromise from impure motives. We may, in
fact, say with Haym, that only by this " mystical and enthu-
siastic method of interpretation," was it possible to regain the
lost appreciation of religion as such, of the profoundly inward
force of the chief truths of Christianity, and of the original
meaning of the ancient words of our faith. Nevertheless, we
shall also do well to call to mind, with Julian Schmidt, the old
truth that all trifling with words must be avenged. This
mysticism of Herder's, in which aesthetic taste combined with
the noblest feeling and ideal pathos to drown the calm voice
of critical reason, was indubitably the beginning of that irra-
tional movement which was carried farther by Romanticism
and blossomed forth luxuriantly in the reactionary theology
of our century. But it is all the more interesting to observe
how Herder again rescued himself from this sandbank upon
which so many suffered shipwreck, and regained the right
track marked out for him by his true genius. It was under
the leadership of Lessing and Spinoza that he accomplished
this, though the altered surroundings of his position in
Weimar materially assisted the change. Herder had been
engaged in a friendly correspondence with Lessing for nearly
two years; and when, in February 1781, the news of Les-
20 BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I.
sing's death came upon him as a painful shock, he paid a
tribute to the memory of his friend, in which in enthusiastic
terms he eulogised him as "a noble truth-seeker, truth-finder,
and truth-champion," to whose nature no vice was so foreign
as cringing hypocrisy, false courtesy, or, above all, that weari-
some, sleepy rest in half the truth, which from the first eats
like rust and canker into men's minds, in all branches of
knowledge and inquiry. This was Herder's formal renuncia-
tion of theological fanaticism of every kind, not excepting
that which had disfigured his own writings of the Biickeburg
period. To the same date belongs the renewal of friendly
relations between Herder and Goethe, with its productive
mutual stimulus, as well as their study in common of the
philosophy of Spinoza.
Jacobi had hoped to gain Herder as an ally in the cam-
paign against Spinozism, having previously made a like
attempt with Lessing ; but the disappointment of his hopes
was even more decisive in Herder's case than it had been in
Lessing's. Herder confessed to him, that since he had busied
himself with philosophy he had become more and more con-
vinced of the truth of Lessing's saying, that as a matter of
fact no other philosophy than Spinoza's was quite consistent
with itself. Not that he could in everything agree with
Spinoza, whose ideas were always undeveloped whenever his
relations with Descartes were unduly close. But Spinoza did
not deserve the traditional prejudice against him, which rested
upon a misunderstanding of his philosophy. The first mis-
take of the opponents of Spinoza, is to suppose he looks on
God as a nonentity, an abstract conception. On the contrary,
Spinoza's God is the most real and most active unity, who
alone says to himself, " I am that I am, and shall be in all
the changes of my manifestations what I shall be." " What
you people mean by ' existence outside the world ' I do not
understand. If God does not exist in the world, everywhere
without measure, wholly and individually, he exists nowhere.
Outside the world there is no space ; space is an abstraction
from experience, and arises when a world arises for us.
Limited personality is not less inapplicable to an infinite
Being, personality being to our minds inseparable from limi-
tation. In God this illusion disappears ; he is the highest,
most truly living, and most active One. God is not the world,
and the world is not God ; of this there can be no doubt.
Ch II.] HERDEH. 2J
But nothing can be gained, it seems to me, from your extra
and supra. When we speak of God, we must forget all our
idola of space and time, else our best efforts will be fruitless."
The sense in which he himself wished Spinoza's philosophy
to be understood, and in which he could make it his own, was
expounded by Herder in a little treatise entitled, Gott: Einige
Gesprdche iiber Spinoza s System (1787). He admits, in the
first place, that the ideas inherited from Cartesius, of Sub-
stance, Attributes, and Modes are unsatisfactory, and that the
mathematical method of proof is a mistake. These ideas must
have life put into them by Leibnitz's idea of Force. God
must therefore be conceived as " the underived, original, and
universal force, underlying and including all forces, most active
Being " ; attributes, as organic forces in which the Deity
manifests himself; and all things, as the modifications or
active expressions, of the divine force. God, as the eternal
original Force, possesses not only infinite force of thought, but
also of operation ; in him, therefore, existence, operation, and
thought, or power, wisdom, and goodness, are indivisibly one.
He is therefore as far removed from blind necessity as from
any inoperative " deliberation and consultation, caprice, and
velleity." Anthropomorphic conceptions of this kind were,
with Leibnitz, merely the popular garb of his Theodicy, but
his successors made them of prime importance, and the basis
of all those physico-theological systems which resulted there-
from, which sought to reduce everything to the arbitrary will
of God, and to break the golden chain of nature, in order to
separate a few phenomena from the rest, and see, at this or
that point, an electric flash of arbitrary divine purpose. All
these delusions, in relation to which the holy name of God
ought not to be misused, are escaped by the modest student
of nature, who, though he does not divulge to us particular
measures decided on in the council-chambers of the divine
Will, observes instead the composition of actual things and the
laws implanted in their nature. While apparently forgetting
the purposes of God, he seeks and finds God in his totality,
in every object and point of creation, i.e., in everything an
essential truth, harmony, and beauty, without which it would
not and could not exist. Whoever could show men the laws
of nature, how what we see of the so-called animate and in-
animate creation works, lives, and acts according to an inner
necessity, the result of the interaction of forces in definite
28 BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I.
organs, would promote the noblest admiration, love, and
reverence for God, far more than the man who, as knowing
the counsels of God, preached that we have feet in order to
walk, and eyes in order to see, etc. Every true law of nature
discovered would thus be also a discovered rule of the eternal
divine Intelligence, whose thought alone can be truth, and
whose activity reality.
We thus see that Herder's conception of God is a combina-
tion of Spinoza's monism with Leibnitz's theism ; Spinoza's
substance becomes operative thinking force ; his modes of
substance become living forces, resembling Leibnitz's monads,
but operative as well as perceptive, whose harmony is there-
fore no longer, as in Leibnitz, pre-established, but is inherent
in the actual interaction of the forces. With Spinoza, Herder
rejects the external teleology of particular arbitrary purposes,
but with Leibnitz he recognises in necessity according to law
the internal adaptation of things to ends, in the laws of
nature the thoughts of God, in the golden chain of nature
the divine wisdom and goodness. Thus, Spinoza's natural-
istic mechanical system is transformed into a theistic opti-
mism, on the lines of Leibnitz and Shaftesbury. These two
thinkers are also followed in Herder's ethical demand " the
attainment of the law of noble and beautiful necessity," and
the performance of duty as if it were not duty but nature,
happiness thus being included in virtue. Finally, Herder's
doctrine of God comprehends also his doctrine of immor-
tality and his philosophy of history, becoming a completely
optimistic system. If all life is force, death must everywhere
be only apparent death, merely the destruction of some ap-
pearance ; in ceaseless motion and eternal palingenesia, force
and the interaction of forces carry on their work ; but the
persistence of force is inconceivable without progress. In
the kingdom of God there is no standing still, still less any
going back ; it is a necessary law, that chaos should become
order, and latent capacities forces in operation.
In these thoughts, which Herder gathered from the three
philosophers, Spinoza, Leibnitz, and Shaftesbury, as the
quintessence of their systems, he found a conception of the
world in which he could rest ; and he was strengthened in his
belief by the complete and unconditional assent of Goethe.
From the standpoint of these views, shared and continually
discussed by the two friends, Herder's principal work, the
Ch. II.] HERDER. 2Q
Ideen zur Philosophic der Geschichte (1784-1791), was
written. The leading thought of the work is, that man is
the connecting link of two worlds. On the one hand, he is
the child of earth, the highest of its organic products ; on the
other, a citizen of the spiritual world of freedom. The book
begins, therefore, with a description of the earth, of its posi-
tion in the universe, and of the stages of the operations of
its organic forces from the plant to the animal, from the
lower to the higher animals, and finally to man. With all the
great differences in these single organisms, nature seems " to
have formed them all after one chief type of organization ; and
man seems to be, as it were, the central figure of the animal
world, i.e., the most fully developed form in which the essen-
tial characteristics of all the species around him are exquisitely
combined." His upright carriage is man's most distinctive
characteristic, upon which depend the dexterity of his hands,
his power of language, and also his rationality ; for his reason
is not inborn like our instincts, but the acquired due propor-
tion between his powers, senses, and instincts. But if man
is the highest member of a progressive series of organic
forces, which have constructed the body as their organ, his
development cannot end with his appearance upon the earth ;
for the hiimanity to which we are destined is incompletely
realised upon earth, the end for which we exist points to
higher forms of development beyond our earthly life under
other cosmical conditions, for which we are to prepare our-
selves by cultivating the spiritual part of our nature, by
striving after truth, goodness, and godlike beauty. From
this glance at man's future development, Herder returns to
the description of his historical development on earth ; and the
stress which he lays on its dependence upon natural conditions
is so marked as to seem, if taken by itself, almost pure natural-
ism, to which, on the other hand, completely supernaturalistic
declarations form a strange contrast. Man stands in a double
relation of dependence, on the one hand to nature, and on
the other to the culture and traditions of society. But whence
came the fiYst germs of the latter ? Herder cannot find in
the natural development of man's rationality a satisfactory
answer to this question, but has recourse to an education by
higher superhuman influences ; the Elohim were the instruc-
tors of man, and from them he received language, the germ
of all culture. This transition from a natural to a super-
3O BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I.
natural explanation shows the insufficiency of that one-sided
empiricism, which will not, like Kant, regard reason as origi-
nating action, but only as a passive power of receptivity ;
hence it can only explain the first possession and employment
of reason by deriving it from foreign mystical sources.
Herder proceeds to depict the life of the nations in his-
tory, and shows how each nation strove to fulfil the common
destiny of man by attaining to humanity and happiness in the
special way determined by its natural character and geo-
graphical position. As to the details we need only draw atten-
tion to the strangely unfavourable judgment passed upon the
Jewish nation, whose religious superiority to other nations is
outweighed by its want of political culture and of any real
sense of honour and freedom. In the description of the
Greeks, on the contrary, prominence is given to the bright
points their services to art and science and all human culture.
So, too, in describing Christianity, Herder does indeed pay a
tribute of the warmest admiration to the person of Jesus as
the prophet of the truest humanity ; but on the other hand
he lays such great emphasis upon the human errors, abuses,
and corruptions incorporated with the Christian religion ever
since its first diffusion, he so decisively condemns the ecclesias-
tical system of dogmas and state Christianity, and in particular
takes so adverse a'view of the middle ages, as a time of the
darkest barbarism and inhumanity, that he almost seems to
have adopted in this connection the standpoint of the Aiif-
klarung, which he had before so passionately denounced.
The extent to which he still differed from it we shall see later
on, when we come to the final account of his religious views ;
but it is in any case undeniable that the point of view of the
Ideen is not the same as that of his earlier writings. This
may be corroborated by a glance at the general principles of
his philosophy of history.
Herder wishes us to look at the history of mankind as
" simply the natural history of man's powers, actions, and
impulses in relation to their time and place." Supernatural
forces and arbitrary fictitious purposes may no more be intro-
duced into the study of history than into that of natural
science ; in both alike all phenomena must be explained by
their causes, not by any hypothetical ends. " The God whom
I seek in history, must be the same as the God in nature ; for
man is only a small part of the universe, and his history, like
Ch. II.] HERDER. 31
that of the grub, is closely interwoven with the cell in which
he lives. In this history therefore all the laws of nature in-
volved in the nature of the case, must have validity ; and so
far from setting them aside, God, having established them,
reveals himself in them in their mighty power with a beauty
unchanging, wise, and beneficent." That things take place
from the necessity of natural law involves instead of excluding
an inner teleology. The most general law of nature, which
holds good also in history, is that out of confusion order should
arise, the conservative forces outweighing the destructive
ones. All life aims at producing a maximum and a proportion
of the forces that mutually limit each other, this being the
condition of the perfection and happiness of individuals,
nations, and the race. All disturbances of this effort to find a
condition of stable equilibrium are always in the end counter-
acted ; for in the struggle amongst the individual forces and
impulses, reason and fairness only last and are established by
the force of their own gravity. Hence we may hope " that
wherever men dwell, there will one day dwell rational and
happy men, happy not only by their own reason, but also by
the common rationality of all their brethren." According to
these views, the end of man's development, to be gained by
conflict and struggle, is a maximum and a rational harmony
of all his forces, together with the resulting happiness ; but
we also find other statements which seem to make the object
of nature to consist in that happiness which is found every-
where in every living thing, viz., simple consciousness of its
own existence. " If happiness is to be found upon earth, it
is in every sentient being. Nature has exhausted all possible
human forms upon the earth, in order that she might have
for each of them, in its time and place, some pleasure with
which to allure mortals through life. It is wrong to hold up
one ideal to mankind, as if all earlier generations before they
reached the ideal were to be branded with the stigma of im-
perfection. Nature everywhere contrives that with the need
there shall arise the possibility of its satisfaction. Those
nations to whom we think nature was but a cruel step-mother,
were perhaps the best-loved children ; cheerfulness, often
combined with thoughtlessness, a lively feeling of their own
well-being, constituted their happiness, destiny, and enjoyment
of life. Neither our head nor our heart was made for an
infinite variety of thoughts and feelings. How much too
32 BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I.
small would be the plan of creation, if every individual had
been created for what we call culture."
It cannot be denied that these sentences represent a na-
turalism like that of Rousseau, the logical result of which
would be to deprive culture of all value in comparison with
nature, and history of any divine purpose. But they do not
represent Herder's whole position ; they only contain a re-
action, carried to extremes, against the contrary one-sided
view of Kant. Kant had met Herder's Ideen with his own
Ideen zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbilrgerlicher
Absicht (1784), according to which, the end of history consists
in an ideal condition of single States and cosmopolitan so-
ciety, to be attained by means of the conflicts and sacrifices of
the generations ; he had himself felt it to be a difficulty in this
view that the older generations seem to perform their weary
labour only for the sake of those coming after them, the latest
only enjoying the good fortune of dwelling in the building
at which so long a line of their ancestors had worked with no
object in view. What accentuates the harshness of this view
is, that, according to Kant himself, the ideal goal is never to
be attained, reason being able to control but never to destroy
the tendency to evil in the race. We must acknowledge the
justice of Herder's dissatisfaction with this view of Kant's ;
the doom of men to the lot of Tantalus in this form, to be
ever striving after the unattainable with eternally fruitless
toil, would, Herder contends, be unworthy both of man, who,
as Kant also insists, ought never to be merely a means but
always at the same time an end in himself, and of the Creator,
who could not deceive us by holding out a mere dream of
purpose. On the other hand, Kant was indisputably right in
asserting (as against Rousseau and Herder) that the final end
of mankind can only be an ideal of moral culture, not the
physical happiness of a state of nature, which would not
essentially differ from the condition of animals. Kant was
right in conceiving the end of humanity as consisting in an
ideal of society demanded by reason and to be realised by
means of freedom ; but his view of this ideal was too much
an abstraction, the mere form of social life, and the mere
Thou shall to which no reality ever corresponds. Herder
rightly perceived that the ends of humanity cannot be external
to it, but must be realised in its exislence as a whole, so that
no part can ever be merely a means to an end outside it ; but
Ch. II.] HERDER. 33
he thus incurred the danger of taking too low a view of the end
and allowing the ideal of reason to sink to a life according to
nature. The solution of this antinomy can only be found in
the perception of the truth, that reason attains its absolute
ends in an infinite series of relative ideals, w r hich are each
realised in the proper place and produce corresponding rela-
tive forms of happiness, while their imperfections act as
incentives to the attainment of ever loftier ideals. By this
conception of a development of reason itself in the course
of human history, Hegel effected the synthesis of these con-
flicting views, a synthesis which Herder doubtless himself had
vaguely caught sight of. We see from this instructive
example how much critical idealism and historical realism (or
the theory of evolution) mutually need each other to supply
their defects.
The antagonism between Herder and Kant, which first
appears in the department of the philosophy of history,
Herder carried into all the chief points of the Kantian philo-
sophy in his later writings (" Metakritik" \ " Kalligone" \
" Von Religion, Lehrmeinungen imd Gebraiichen"}. It is
worth while to look at this a little more closely, as character-
istically illustrating the two sides of modern thought. Herder
wishes to substitute for Kant's critique of the reason a
physiology of the cognitive faculties, which would explain the
evolution of the higher from the lower faculties. He rejects
the distinction between a purely receptive sensibility and
a purely spontaneous understanding, as also that between
the simple matter of experience and the a priori forms of
perception space and time. These last, in Herder's view
the result of actual experience, being an abstraction from its
contents ; in themselves they are the objective forms in which
forces work and manifest themselves to us. Our sense-per-
ceptions are not given us as a chaotic multiplicity which our
spontaneity only afterwards and arbitrarily unifies without
reference to the object ; on the contrary, our senses, by virtue
of their own organic structure, give us a multiplicity reduced
to an ordered unity inherent in the object itself, recognised,
not created by us. Hence the understanding is not so spe-
cifically different from the sense-organism as Kant main-
tained, but operates as judgment and classification in all
sense-perceptions and in memory, not excepting even the
lowest sensation ; it is the same primary force of nature, show-
G. T. D
34 BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I.
ing itself here less clearly, there more distinctly and actively,
now in separate, then in a connected series of operations.
So too in the distinction between phenomena and noumena,
Herder can only see a delusion of the imagination, since the
true noumena must not be conceived as outside and behind
the phenomena, but as within and of them, viz., as the or-
ganising forces in organic processes ; to look for " the thing-in-
itself " behind the phenomenal world, is to look for the wood
behind the trees. Again, Herder is equally unable to follow
Kant in assigning freedom and necessity to the intelligible
and phenomenal worlds respectively ; on the contrary, the
two are the inseparable elements of the very nature of all
living force. In so far as forces act according to their own
nature, they are free ; in so far as they are limited by other
similarly free acting forces, there arise higher equations,
which we call laws of nature ; these do not destroy freely
acting forces, but presuppose them. Thus human freedom
also is only the highest force of our nature, which is free in
so far as by virtue of its self-determination it obeys our
nature's laws. On the other hand, it would be mere con-
fusion of thought to imagine a causality outside causality and
a nature outside nature. Specially emphatic is Herder's con-
demnation of the way in which Kant, in the dialectic of pure
reason, represents the idea of God as an illusion, which is
afterwards required again by the practical reason ; as if be-
sides the reason which proscribed this fiction there were a
second reason which could command its return from banish-
ment in the realm of the fabulous. This, says Herder, is
juggling with reason, and can neither lead to real conviction
nor to pure morality ; for a God thus postulated is no God at
all, but only a last resource for a destitute moral system, while
his existence is as problematical to the speculative reason as
the man in the moon. But to reason not divided against
itself God is certainly no problematical distant Being, whose
existence must first be artificially inferred, or, failing this, be
made a moral postulate. " On the contrary, he is the primal
Being, recognised by the reason as given in all being, the
primal force in all forces, the supreme reason of the world.
If there is a reason which is, and knows that it is, its own
cause, there is also a supreme reason which is and knows that
it is the cause of the unity of all things."
This is the same line of thought as we found in Herder's
Ch. II.] HERDER. 35
essay on Spinoza. It does not essentially differ from Kant's
suggestion, in his Critique of J^ldgment y as to the divine
basis of the reign of law and purpose in the natural and moral
worlds. A reconciliation of the two points of view would,
therefore, seem not impossible, especially when we remember
Herder's statement elsewhere, that natural science only leads
to the conception of nature as the totality of order and form,
not directly to that God whom the religious mind desires to
find in creation, because he would satisfy its longing for life
and well-being. This involves the admission that the re-
ligious ideal of God and the metaphysical idea of a first cause
answer to the needs of two different sides of our mind, which
must not be directly identified. This was the truth contained
in Kant's distinction between the ideal of the practical reason
and the speculative idea of the unconditioned ; Kant's error,
against which Herder with good reason protested, lay in
representing this valid distinction as a deep and apparently
impassable gulf. This is characteristic generally of the whole
antagonism between the two men ; the whole truth is nowhere
wholly on one side , each is strong just where the other is
weak. Kant's critical and analytical method was met by
Herder's bold, synthetical intuitions. In order to ensure to
the mind its active share in all cognition, Kant had ban-
ished its object to the dim, incognisable distance of das
Dingansich. Herder replied to this subjective theory by
maintaining that all cognition is only the recognition of what
is necessarily presupposed as given. Kant had separated
the various functions of the mind in cognition ; Herder
emphasised their unbroken connection as members in the
evolution of one and the same force. But Herder's theory
of cognition never ceased to vacillate in an ill-defined way
between a naive realism and a rational idealism. He slurred
over the antitheses, which Kant had laboured scientific-
ally to solve, by the help of an indefinite intermediate
idea. Herder's attempted correction of Kant could be
accomplished only by starting from his critical philosophy
and using its resources. This was, and still is, the task of
post- Kantian philosophy.
Having thus reviewed Herder's philosophical position in its
maturest stage, we come next to consider the form assumed
by his theory of religion in accordance with it. He expounded
his theory in a series of works, dealing partly with the Bible,
36 BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I.
partly with dogmatic theology, between the years 1793 and
1797. Their basal idea is much more nearly related to Kant's
philosophy of religion than Herder, in the heat of his polemic,
was able to see. The real difference is, that Kant's rational-
ism was softened by Herder's rich humanism, and brought by
the help of history nearer to ecclesiastical Christianity. Chris-
tianity is the ideal religion, and religion is ideal humanity*
This is the ruling idea in these theological writings of the last
period of Herder's life. But in order to effect this equalisation
of religion and humanity, he does not, like Kant, work from
above downwards ; he does not construct a religion " within
the limits of reason," but he works upwards by the method of
historical study. It had always been one of his fundamental
convictions that Christianity is a history, an actual fact, an
object of experience, and that it can therefore be only rightly
understood by the aid of its historical documents through the
Bible. Hence the study of the Bible is the Alpha and Omega
of all theological studies. This view he had expressed with
eager enthusiastic warmth in his early Notes on the New
Testament and his Letters on the Study of Theology. But
now, while still remaining quite true to it, and as before giving
an aesthetic interpretation of the Gospels which halts mid-way
between rationalism and supernaturalism, an unmistakable
change has taken place in his method of exegesis. His in-
terest in the Gospel narratives had formerly been that of the
religious apologist ; but he is now at the same time the critical
historian, investigating the origin of the Gospels and their re-
lation to each other. Herder thus followed Semler, Lessing,
and Eichhorn in that scientific examination of the documents
of early Christianity which was fraught with such important
consequences to the theology of our century ; and though he
was still prejudiced in favour of the traditional authors of the
Gospels, he is nevertheless rich in subtle observations, espe-
cially with regard to the chronological order of the Gospels.
His keen eye discovered in the Gospel of Mark the oldest
written form of the apostolic tradition ; next in order he placed
the Gospel of the Hebrews. Both of these were used as
authorities by the Hellenist Luke in writing his history ; and
only subsequently appeared the Greek Gospel of Matthew,
consisting of a free translation and amplification of the Gospel
of the Hebrews. Last of all came the Gospel of John, as
" the echo of the older Gospels in a higher key." In it the
Ch. II.] HERDER. 37
Apostle John wished not only to expound, but also to purify
the Palestine gospel-tradition ; hence he narrated only a few
miracles, and even these only as symbols of the permanent
miracle of the person of Christ. Whilst the earlier Gospels
had still represented Christ as the Son of God in the narrower
sense, John sought to teach the higher conception of the Son
of God and Saviour of the world, and for this purpose made
his whole Gospel systematically the Gospel of the Spirit.
This is really a just description of the Fourth Gospel. But
a Gospel written with a dogmatic purpose, and standing in so
close a connection with the speculative movements of its time,
as Herder shows to be the case with this, cannot be an his-
torical authority for the life of Jesus. Obvious as this infer-
ence is, it was drawn neither by Herder nor by Schleiermacher
after him ; and it may be added that the latter was inferior to
his predecessor in insight into the peculiar character of this
Gospel. The inability to draw this conclusion was due in both
cases to sympathy, as idealistic theologians, with the spiritual
Gospel which converts history into ideas and ideas into history,
and thus, in a sense, furnishes the modern theologian with a
pattern for his semi-allegorical, semi-a>ologetical interpretation
of the Gospel narratives as " symbolic facts." For this reason
Herder, like Schleiermacher, entertained a pronounced pre-
ference for John's Gospel, because, assuming its apostolic
authorship, he thought he found in it the justification of his
own procedure in interpreting the gospel history in harmony
with his free idealising feeling, and in attributing everything
repugnant to it to the national and temporal limitations of the
narrators. Herder does not, it is true, carry this principle
out so consistently as Schleiermacher. In relation to the
gospel miracles, he is still unable to get beyond a strange
vacillation between their symbolical interpretation and ad-
herence to their real historical character. He quite agrees
with Lessing, that the truth of a doctrine cannot be dependent
upon miracle. " Was it necessary for fire to fall from heaven
2000 years ago in order that we may now see the bright sun ?
Must the laws of nature have been then suspended, if we are
now to be convinced of the internal necessity, truth, and
beauty of the moral and spiritual kingdom ? " Nevertheless,
Herder still regards at all events the three miracles of the
Baptism, Transfiguration, and Resurrection of Christ " as the
three bright spots in the celestial authentication of the con-
38 BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I.
secrated one;" for, he characteristically continues, "they have
a secret advocate in the human heart." Since the stories of
the miraculous appealed to his feelings and aesthetic taste, he
suppressed the doubts of his intellect, which had embraced, as
we have seen above, a philosophical view of the world in
which there was no place for miracles. It is not allowable,
therefore, to explain this surprising hesitancy and want of
clearness in Herder's treatment of the Biblical miracles simply
on the principle of accommodation, or from his fear of the de-
structive tendencies of the time ; but the reason of it must be
found in his whole mode of thought. It was always such an
essential peculiarity of his nature to look at ideas and actual
facts in closest conjunction, that he was unable in the case of
Biblical traditions to critically separate ideal contents from
historical realities ; in fact, he could scarcely understand that
this was required by science. Instead of explaining the re-
pugnant points in the miraculous narratives and dogmatic con-
ceptions of the Biblical writers by reference to their psycho-
logical origin in the religious and poetical motives of the
narrators or the community, Herder had recourse to a time-
honoured substitute for scientific criticism ; involuntarily and
unconsciously he recast the language of the Bible in the mould
of his own, he allegorised. The result of this procedure was
essentially the same as the " moral interpretation of the Bible "
demanded by Kant. Herder's fierce opposition to this latter
only proves that he did not see the divergence of his rational-
istic interpretation from the original sense of the text. The
Christs of the Synoptists, and of John, and of Paul, freed
respectively from the outer coverings of Nationality, of Alex-
andrian speculation, and of Pharisaic dogmatism, were all
made together to teach his Christianity of humanity, because
he was under the honest impression that he was thereby only
translating the meaning of the Biblical writers into the
language of our own time. This self-deception, though fatal
to the scientific value of his Biblical labours, was really use-
ful, and perhaps necessary to the practical success of his
attempted reconciliation of ecclesiastical traditions and modern
culture. Moreover, with all this, Herder was the immediate
precursor and kindred spirit of Schleiermacher, whose in-
fluence in the reconstruction of dogma was also closely con-
nected with the weakness of his historical criticism.
Like Lessing, Herder drew a distinction between Christ's
Ch. II.] HERDER. 39
religion and the religion of which Christ is the object. Christ's
religion is the rule of salvation, supplied by the teaching and
life of Jesus in the perfect and universally valid form, viz.,
" The knowledge of God as the Father, of man as his instru-
ment, of man's weakness as an object of grace and help,
of the divine in man, of the strength, purity, and nobility,
which must be roused and nourished. Love, therefore, pre-
venient, pure, uniting, active, is the only way of deliverance
from all evils that oppress man, the only motive power capable
of establishing a kingdom of God among men." Precisely
this, according to Herder, was the ruling idea of Jesus, and
the object of his life. " In his heart was written : God is my
Father and the Father of all men ; all men are brothers. To
this religion of humanity he dedicated his life, which he was
ready wholly to offer up, if his religion might be that of all men.
For it concerns the fundamental nature of our race both its
original and final destiny. Through it the weaknesses of
mankind serve to call forth a nobler power ; every oppressive
evil, human wickedness even, becomes an incentive to its
own defeat. The truest humanity breathes in the few speeches
of Jesus which have come down to us ; it is nothing else
than humanity which he manifested in his life, and sealed by
his death, just as the chosen name by which he called himself
was the Son of Man. As a spiritual saviour of his race, he
sought to train up men of God, who would labour from pure
motives for the good of others and reign by their patience as
kings in the realm of truth and kindness. An object such
as this must evidently be the sole purpose of providence with
our race ; and all the wise and good on earth must and will
co-operate to this end, in proportion to the pureness of their
thought and endeavour ; for what other ideal could man have
of perfection and happiness on earth, save this universally
operative humanity ?"
According to Herder, therefore, the distinctive character of
Jesus was, that he bore in his heart the ideal of man as the
child of God, exemplified it in his life and death for our imitation,
and at the same time trained up men of God and established
a society of them, a kingdom of God among men, in which
will be realised the purpose of providence with our race. The
" Divine Sonship " of Christ is only another expression for
this ideal " man of God," who knows God as his Father and
all men as his brethren, and in self-sacrificing devotion to the
40 BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I.
good of men passively and actively fulfils the will of God.
Was not this fundamentally Kant's meaning when he de-
scribed Jesus as the pre-eminent representative example of the
idea of a race of men well-pleasing to God ? Herder, indeed,
strongly denounced Kant's theory as "a romance, a mass of
misleading fictions, an ignoble perversion of Scripture," etc. ;
but this denunciation was doubtless primarily due to the
mistaken notion that Kant had wished to substitute a
personified idea for the historic Jesus. Herder's mistake was
rendered possible by Kant's method of expounding his posi-
tion, as his constructive rationalism led him to start from the
idea, and to connect the historical person of Jesus with it only
as an example ; while Herder started from the historical
person as the source of the Christian religion of humanity, and
portrayed the idea as the essence of the manifestation of this
person. The latter method is undoubtedly more advan-
tageous from the theological point of view ; but we must not
deny the philosopher the right of starting from the idea, with
its basis in the reason, and of accentuating the distinction be-
tween it and the historical person in whom it is presented
for imitation, though it does not derive from him its ultimate
origin.
Again, just as Kant had distinguished the pure moral faith
of the reason from the "statutory" faith of the Church, so Her-
der distinguishes the religion of Christ, identical with the pure
religion of humanity, from the religion of which Christ was
the object, or the " doctrines" about the two natures in Christ,
the legal conflict between Christ and Belial, the satisfaction
made by Christ's death, etc. Of these ecclesiastical dogmas,
Herder speaks much more contemptuously than Kant, calling
them childish questions, old second-hand phrases, masquerade
and hypocrisy ; for Kant had found a meaning even in these
doctrines, by interpreting them as symbols of the inner pro-
cesses of moral feeling. Herder's harsh judgment is no doubt
to be partially explained by his practical experience as teacher,
which showed him how many continue to cling to these husks
of dogma, and so never reach the true kernel itself. But it
was more especially the consequence of the optimism inherited
by Herder from Leibnitz, Shaftesbury, and Rousseau, and
shared by Goethe ; he was convinced of the essential good-
ness of human nature, and could only look upon evil as a
shadow, a weakness, which would of itself disappear with the
Ch. II.] HERDER. 41
development of man's powers. Like Goethe, Herder was
incapable of appreciating the profound difference between idea
and actuality, duty and inclination, or the struggle of the good
and the bad principle, which was so important in Kant's ethics
and religious philosophy. Hence both of them found Kant's
doctrine of a " radical evil," which formed the basis of his
moral interpretation of the doctrine of the atonement and
justification, an incomprehensible stumbling-block. As the
natural consequence of this unqualified antagonism to the
dogmas of sin and salvation Herder found himself unable to
explain them; he regarded them as purely "arbitrary doc-
trines, having nothing to do with religion, which is an affair
of the heart," and even as " the tomb of religion." Herder did
not sufficiently consider that they could never have arisen and
influenced the Church, if they had not been the product and
the expression, however imperfect, of the heart's religious
energies, experiences, and needs ; and this to a large extent
explains the insignificance of Herder's direct influence on
theology. Schleiermacher, on the other hand, whose philo-
sophic views generally approached much more nearly Herder's
than Kant's, was nevertheless able to adopt and assimilate the
doctrines of sin and salvation, and was for this very reason
in a position to carry out that reconstruction of Protestant
theology at which Herder aimed.
Herder approaches Schleiermacher most nearly in his doc-
trine of the Holy Spirit, expounded in his discussion of the
third article of the Apostles' Creed, in the essays, Vom Geist
des Christenthiims, and Von Religion ^md Lehrmeimmgen.
By tracing historically the development of the idea of Holy
Spirit, he shows that its meaning in Christianity is nothing else
than the spirit of Christ, as animating and guiding the Chris-
tian Church and uniting all nations in the Kingdom of God.
He places it in contrast, not less to the dogmatic conception
of a personal principle inspiring man from without, than to the
philosophical idea of an autonomous legislation of the reason.
The idea of magical inspiration he had already strongly pro-
tested against in his Briefe ilber das Stiidium der '1 keologie.
Inspiration must not be conceived as either the depression or
as the wild exaltation of our mental powers. " Can He who
made the eye be compelled to blind us in order that we may
see ? Can the Spirit, who animates creation and all our
powers, destroy them in order that in their stead he may pro-
42 BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I.
duce light within us?" On the contrary, inspiration and en-
lightenment are the awakening of the noblest powers of the
mind ; perfectly undisturbed contemplation, calmest self-pos-
session, the most quietly effective truth, clear thoughts, en-
lightened views, happy resolves, pure actions these are the
noblest gifts of the Spirit. The purest stage of revelation is
to see things as they are, face to face, without figures and
dreams. Least of all may we look for dark fanaticism in the
revelation of him whom John calls light-giving Reason mani-
fested on earth. His revelation, i.e., the truth which he clearly
saw and uttered, was deliverance from everything unnatural,
the restoration of mankind to the full use of its powers.
Wherefore what we have to do is to turn from everything
unnatural, from all magic, all bibliolatry, to nature and truth,
which is also the spirit of the Bible.
But, on the other hand, it is precisely this nature and truth
which Herder cannot find in the abstractions of philosophy.
" That egoism which of itself issues commands and derives all
its power to obey the law from the might of its own proud
formal dictatorship, can hardly be the Spirit of God ; for in a
formal legislation without contents, there is neither might nor
blessedness, neither life nor spirit. But it is life that impels
thee to what thou oughtest to do and to be. As in the realm
of nature a universal law assigns to each impulse its limits,
the observance of which limits leads to enjoyment, their dis-
regard to discomfort ; so the same law must be operative in the
realm of man's spiritual impulses. Here too watches a bene-
ficent spirit within us, awakening our slumbering powers, aveng-
ing their misuse, and saving us from excess. You may call it
reason, conscience, etc. ; the wise have ever recognised it as a
voice of God." It was this pure impulse in man which was
aroused by Christianity, not by the inculcation of virtue, for
thereby no impulse is roused, but by awakening love. Every
man has within him a good spirit, a divine voice, a canon and
criterion of truth ; not as a universal legislation for all rational
beings, but, as a definite and perfectly individual ideal of what
he himself is and ought to be. To become conscious of this
ideal, to acknowledge it, to obey its active impulse and con-
trolling limitations, this is living virtue ; in it each finds him-
self united to others in a fellowship of mutual activity, for no
impulse acts in isolation, and the noblest characteristic in man,
the impulse of all impulses, is love, the basis of all social life.
Ch. II.] HERDER. 43
Herder therefore maintains that the Christian spirit is
neither the principle of magical inspiration nor simply the
legislative reason, but the inward impulse to truth and good-
ness, as the power of enthusiasm, truth, and love, which
does not merely command men to do the good, but is itself
operative, which does not issue a universal imperative, but
places before each his special individual ideal, and, as being
the purest impulse in men's nature, necessarily unites them
in social bonds. He opposed the abstractness and power-
lessness of Kantian ethics on the same lines as those on
which Schleiermacher, Fichte, Schiller, and others had tried to
remedy the incompleteness of the categorical imperative and
to restore to their proper place man's moral emotions and
impulses and individual needs. In conclusion, we may sum
up our view of the relation of Herder's philosophy of religion
to that of Kant in the words of Haym (Herder, II. 654) :
" Not only was Herder's religion of equity, goodness, and
loving-kindness larger-hearted than Kant's religion of rigid
duty, but it also fitted itself much better to the original docu-
ments, and, in fact, to the historical elements of Christianity
generally. Kant's religion of reason, with his principle of
moral interpretation, did violence to the words of the Bible
and the creeds ; Herder's religion of humanity put itself by a
little conciliation into accord with the words of Christ and
the apostles. Kant primarily impressed upon the intellectual
conceptions of the traditional religion a new moral form ;
Herder let intellectual conceptions alone, and, in opposition to
all dogmatic theology and all philosophical formulae, empha-
sised the inward contents of that religion, consisting in the
emotions and dispositions of the heart. Both aimed at purify-
ing and rationalising Christianity, the one by a morality of
pure reason, the other by a morality not less emotional than
rational."
CHAPTER III.
SCHLEIERMACHER'S PERIOD OF ROMANTICISM.
Two years after Herder's book on Religion und Lehrmein-
imgen, appeared the work of Schleiermacher, then a young
preacher in Berlin, Re den iiber die Religion an die Gebildeten
imter ihren Verdchtern (1799). The object of the two books
was essentially the same ; they protested against religion
being confounded with the opinions of the schools, whether
theological or philosophical, and against its being mixed up
with politics ; in a word, against dogmatic and politico-
ecclesiastical Christianity. They insisted, on the other hand,
on the inwardness of the religious life, the immediateness of
religious feeling, and especially on the free play of religious
individuality. But the Romanticism of the younger writer
led him so to exaggerate this common drift that it became
unhistorical subjectivism and an exclusively emotional mys-
ticism, which Herder's many-sided humanism and historical
insight could never have approved. But in spite, or rather
because, of this extreme one-sidedness, Schleiermacher's book
made a deeper impression upon its time than Herder had
been able to produce with his own more moderate writings,
designed to effect a compromise between the extreme views.
To-day, the mystical, poetical, rhetorical language of the Reden
is hardly to our taste; but to the educated classes of his own
time, whose thoughts and feelings were those of idealistic
Romanticism, this language was intelligible, and well calculated
to bring home to them the peculiar value of religion, and,
if not to accomplish the reconciliation of modern culture and
the ancient faith of the Church, at any rate to prepare the
way and show its possibility. Though we can find but little in
the paradoxical positions of these Reden which is permanent
and valuable as it stands, they are still historically important,
as containing the fertile germs, the refined and ripened
products of which we shall hereafter meet with in Schleier-
Ch. III.] SCHLEIERMACHER. 45
macher's great work on dogmatics, which accomplished the
reconciliation of Herder's religion of humanity with the
doctrines of the Church.
That Schleiermacher's system is much more akin to
Herder's than to those of Kant, Fichte, or Schelling, is an
indisputable fact, hitherto always overlooked only because
Herder, standing mid-way between philosophers and theolo-
gians, has had the misfortune to be ignored by both parties as
not belonging to either of them. In his attack on the chief
positions of Kant's theory of religion, the transcendental
postulates of freedom, immortality, and God, we find Schleier-
macher in his earliest writings fighting side by side with
Herder. As Herder had rejected a causality outside causality,
and held freedom and necessity to be combined in the nature
of the rational will, i.e., the will determined by its own law
(comp. ante, p. 34), so Schleiermacher, in an essay on
freedom, substituted for Kant's dualism a psychological
determinism, according to which the will is determined by the
nature of the conceptions at any time present in the mind
as a whole. As Herder had condemned Kant's procedure in
basing his postulate of God on the conception of the supreme
good, so Schleiermacher, in a subtle analysis of this idea, 1
showed the uritenability of Kant's definition of it as the
combination of virtue and happiness ; for happiness is by no
means a conception of the pure reason, being conditioned
by time and sensation, and hence cannot belong to
the " supreme good," either in a future world or in
this, for the "supreme good" means simply "the totality
of what is possible by the laws of pure reason." Moreover,
as Schleiermacher elsewhere remarks, according to Kant's
argument, which bases the belief in God and immortality
upon impure motives derived from the interests of happiness,
this belief must wane in good men as their motives wax
in purity. Further, as Herder had resorted to an idealised
Spinozism, as against the onesidedness of subjective idealism,
so Schleiermacher felt the necessity of combining, as mutual
correctives, Spinozism and the onesided idealism of Kant and
Fichte which made the universe merely the reflection of
our limitations, hoping thus to gain a " higher realism " as the
foundation of religion. Thus Spinoza's cognitio Dei intuitiva
1 In Dilthey, Beilagen, pp. 10-15.
46 BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I.
lies at the root both of Herders and Schleiermacher's
conception of religion. Herder teaches that our reason must
recognise God as the primal Being in all being, the primal
Force in all forces, the supreme Reason in the world ; he
speaks of "a feeling of the invisible in the visible, of the
one in the many, of power in its effects, as the root of all
ideas of the reason " to which we must trace back the origin of
religion. With this, Schleiermacher almost verbally agrees,
pronouncing the " contemplation of the universe," and "the
feeling of the infinite in the finite " the pivot of religion. But
at this point appears a significant difference. Herder failed
definitely to distinguish the intuitive perception and recog-
nition of the revelation of God in the world and in men,
either from thinking or in particular from moral willing and
action ; hence he gives so wide a meaning to religion that it
is in danger of being lost in the indefiniteness of ideal
humanity, and to a large extent becomes equivalent to
morality ; Schleiermacher, on the other hand, in order to
ensure to religion its special sphere, drew so sharp a line
between the immediate sight and feeling of the infinite and
reflective thinking and the moral life, that religion seems to
be confined to the mystical emotions of the individual, and
its influence on the thoughts and actions of men, and there-
with its power of forming communities, to be destroyed.
With both thinkers religion is a matter of the heart, but it
is so with Herder in the sense that the heart's emotion is
one with conviction and purpose ; with Schleiermacher it
is so in the sense that the heart with its emotions with-
draws into its own mystical depths, fearing any freezing
contact with thought and purpose. This is the point of
contact between Schleiermacher and Romanticism, in which
the subjective idealism of philosophy had become the practical
cultus of the ego, more specifically the apotheosis of the heart
with its noble or ignoble feelings. Novalis was only
expressing the views of Schleiermacher as he then was, when
he said, " Religion arises whenever the heart comes to feel
itself; when it makes itself into an ideal object, and all absolute
feeling is religious."
In order to discover the origin of religion within the soul,
Schleiermacher, in the second Rede, refers to the moment
prior to all definite consciousness, in which the universe comes
into contact with our sensibility, when sense and object are
Ch. III.] SCHLEIERMACHER. 47
still one, not yet separated respectively into perception and
feeling. In spite of the poetical description of this moment
as "the direct betrothal, too holy for error or mistake, of the
universe with the incarnate reason in creative, productive
embrace," we cannot understand why in it should lie the
origin specially of religious states of mind, since this moment
is simply that of the direct affection of the senses, which is
the source of all perception and sensation. This difficulty
is not solved by what follows : " So far as your feeling ex-
presses the life and being common to you and the universe,
it constitutes your piety ; your sensations, and the effects upon
you of all the life surrounding you, are all elements, and the
sole elements, of religion ; there is no feeling which is not
religious, save such as indicates an unhealthy condition of
life." Here, as in the words of Novalis just quoted, feeling
and religion are simply identified ; and the facts are over-
looked, which can escape no impartial student of the religious
life, that there are feelings which, without being unhealthy,
have nothing to do with religion, and that religion has an
active side of conception and purpose, in addition to a passive
side of feeling.
But Schleiermacher speaks not only of feeling but also of
intuitions (Ansehauungen)^ which in the first edition of the
Reden hold the first place, even though afterwards subordi-
nated to feeling. The relation of the two is not clearly stated,
but it is plain that Schleiermacher could not ignore the
intuitions if he wished to state the definite contents of the
religious consciousness, and not rest satisfied with the complete
indefiniteness of feeling, The object of religious intuition is
indeed the universe, yet not directly as such, but in its finite
revelations in nature and human life. In nature it is not
masses of natural or beautiful forms, but laws which reveal
the divine unity and unchangeableness of the world, and
which therefore affect us religiously. Yet there the question
arises, whether the aesthetic view of nature is really so im-
material to religion, whether it does not affect the mind much
sooner than the intellectual view ; further, whether the reign
of law in nature is an object of direct intuition and not rather
the result of reflective thought. The external world can only
be understood by the internal, and this again only by the
contemplation of self in the mirror of mankind at large ; whilst
the individual, when looked at from the moral point of view, is
48 BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I.
isolated and found wanting, as measured by the standard
of the ideal, religion discovers even here a characteristic life
and wonderful harmony of the whole. Leaving the whole
and contemplating himself, the devout man finds there too
the marks of the highest and the lowest, a compendium of
humanity. Further, even when intuition fails us, imaginative
presentiment can travel beyond nature and mankind, and
reach further forms of the universe. With these intuitions
are connected the religious feelings of humility, love, thank-
fulness, pity, remorse ; feelings which, Schleiermacher holds,
do not belong to morality but only to religion, since they do
not exist for the sake of some action, but are their own cause
and end, as factors of the highest and most inward life. These
feelings have a peculiar complexion in each religion, comparable
with the different styles and tastes in music ; and the character
of a religion is determined solely by this common element of
feeling, not by a system of propositions deducible from each
other and capable of logical concatenation. For this very
reason, everything in religion is equally true, as far as it is
the pure product of feeling and has not yet been moulded by
thought. The distinction of "true and false," therefore, does
not apply to religion at all ; every religion is true in its own
way, though it must not be forgotten that the whole realm of
religion is boundless, and can assume the most diverse shapes.
Religion is never intolerant, but only religious systems. The
mania for systems repudiates everything foreign to each,
while religion shuns the cold uniformity which would be fatal
to its divine profusion. It is only the adherents of the dead
letter, which religion rejects, that have filled the world with
the tumult of religious controversies : they who have had a true
vision of the Eternal were always peaceful souls, being either
alone with themselves and the Infinite, or, if they looked
around on others, gladly according to each his special
characteristics. To a devout soul, religion makes everything
holy and precious, even what is unholy and common, whether
corresponding to its own thought and action or not ; for
religion is the sworn foe of all pusillanimity and narrowness.
She cannot be held responsible for fanatical actions, simply
because she does not of herself impel to action at all.
Religious feeling is neither bound, nor permitted directly
to influence action ; it rather invites to peaceful, absorbing
enjoyment, than impels to external acts. Feelings and
Ch. III.] SCHLEIERMACHER. 49
actions naturally form two concurrent series, " nothing
should be done at the instigation of religion ; but every-
thing with religion ; religious feelings should accompany
active life without intermission like a sacred melody."
We see that Schleiermacher is here pleading the cause of
a mystical religion of the heart ; a religion which is satisfied
with the peaceful absorbing enjoyment of its own feelings, and
does not think itself called upon to formulate either an intel-
lectual truth or a consistent system of dogmas, or to take
an active part in the world's life, thus with large-hearted toler-
ance giving free play to the thoughts and ways of mankind.
With all respect for this large-hearted humanity, we are
compelled to ask two questions : Firstly, how far does the
actual history of religion correspond to the description of it
here given ? Has any vigorous religion ever actually abstained
from laying claim to the exclusive possession of the truth, or
rom giving expression to its emotions in corresponding deeds,
in energetic action upon the world ? Has not precisely the
early youth of all religions, when their enthusiasm was most
spontaneous and least controlled by reflection or confined in
systems, been marked also by the most" intolerant self-assur-
ance, the most narrow exclusiveness, and the most passionate
zeal in proselytising ? And is the vehemence, distinguishing
disputes about religious dogmas from other conflicts of opinion,
due really to intellectual thought, and not rather to the pathos
of the emotions finding expression in these dogmas ? If it be
rejoined that it was not Schleiermacher' s object to describe
the positive religions, but only the ideal religion, conceived
by him as the goal of historical development, this would at
once give rise to the further question, Can we accept it as
characteristic of the ideal religion, that it should be the self-
abandonment of each to the enjoyment of his individual feel-
ings, without seeking at all to influence the thought and action
of individuals, to say nothing of the community ? In fact, the
only conclusion to which we can come is, that this isolation,
favoured by Romanticism, of the emotional religion of the
individual heart is not less impossible, psychologically, than
unhistorical, inasmuch as it destroys all the social elements by
which religion has formed communities and become a power
in history. Schleiermacher, it is true, could not escape the
necessity of offering an explanation of the facts of the actual
formation of religious conceptions and religious societies, ac-
G. T. E
50 .BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I.
companying every (religion ; but the way in which he does
this serves rather to .illustrate than to obviate the error of his
principle.
The dogmas and propositions which experience shows to
be connected with religion, are, according to Schleiermacher,
simply the result of the comparison of the emotions, and the
means of their expression and communication to others ; for
religion itself they are not necessary, but are only an adven-
titious creation of reflection. A man may have a great deal
of religion without the aid of such concepts as " miracle, in-
spiration, revelation," but reflection on and comparison of his
religious feelings necessarily put them in his way. Hence they
have an unlimited right in religion, but only as religious ex-
pressions for subjective states of feeling, the meaning of which
must not be extended to the sphere of metaphysics or morals.
"Miracle" is the religious name for an occurrence; the re-
ligious man recognises miracles not in a few only, but in all
occurrences. " Revelation " is any original and new com-
munication of the universe and its inmost life to man, giving
birth to a special class of intuitions and emotions. " Inspira-
tion " signifies the feeling of higher enthusiasm and freedom.
" Prophecy" is the presentiment foreshadowing and anticipat-
ing the further course of a present train of events. All these
terms therefore denote subjective experiences essential to all
religious life, and therefore present in some degree in every
religious man. Hence, since each man can and ought to
experience these things for himself, faith must not depend upon
external authority, at any rate only temporarily. " Not every
man who believes in sacred Scriptures has religion, but only
he who has a living and direct understanding of them, and
who, therefore, so far as he himself is concerned, can most
easily dispense with them." Finally, Schleiermacher dis-
cusses from the same point of view the concepts, God and
Immortality. These, too, he holds, are not presuppositions
and conditions of religious feeling, but the product of reflection
on it. Hence the form given to the concept of God is of
secondary importance ; it depends upon the bent of the
imagination, whether we think of the Spirit of the Universe
as free personality, or give up the personal idea of the Deity,
in humble consciousness of the limitations of personality ; in
any case, whichever conception a man adopts, the main ques-
tion is, whether he has a feeling of God, and this feeling of the
Ch. III.] SCHLEIERMACHER. 51
Divine will always be better than his conception of it. (The
last point may certainly be conceded, although one may with
good reason urge against the rest, that our idea of God is
still of much greater importance to the content of religious
feeling, particularly to its ethical character, than Schleier-
macher was willing to admit.) To the ordinary idea of im-
mortality our apologist for religion is not so much indifferent
as hostile ; it seems to him irreligious rather than religious,
as betraying a clinging to the finite form of existence, whereas
personality ought rather even here to be renounced from love
to God, in order to live in the One and the All. " In the
midst of the finite to become one with the infinite, and to be
eternal in every moment, this is the immortality of religion."
(We may let the mysticism of this view pass without sup-
posing that the last, or even a decisive, word has been pro-
nounced on the question of immortality.)
The third Discourse draws a very dark picture of the age
of the Aufklqrung, the shallow utilitarianism of which stifled
all sense of religion ; and the fourth proceeds to speak of
Church and priesthood, describing religious fellowship both
as it is and as it ought to be. The actual Church Schleier-
macher considers to be only an association of those who are
still seeking religion, in which all are supposed to receive, and
only one to give. It is therefore opposed in almost every
respect to the ideal religious community. Though indispens-
able at present as an institution for scholars and learners,
it suffers under unavoidable defects ; the authority and the
method of the transmission of religious doctrines inevitably
produce sectarianism, superstition, adherence to ceremonies,
and the distinction of priests and laity. All these evils are
made intolerable, and the real ruin of the Church brought about
by the interference of the State in the Church's life. Left to
itself, its imperfect condition would have led to the separation
of the true Church, the living members uniting in small societies
around leaders chosen by themselves. But these true inspired
members were excluded by the connection of Church and State
from the leadership of the community, and their place was
unworthily filled by officially appointed teachers, whose duty
was to educate the citizens in the habits of thought favourable
to orderly government. Besides this, articles of belief were
settled, and ceremonies enjoined, and the whole degraded into
a political institution. This state of things cannot be main-
52 BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I.
tained. " Away with all such connection between Church and
State ! I shall continue, like Cato, to reiterate this oracle until
the end, or until I see the connection annihilated." With the
end of our artificial culture and social system will have come
a time when, as in the sacred youth of the world, no other
society will be necessary to help men to be religious than that
of the devout home. There will no longer be any distinct
office of teacher, no difference between teacher and congre-
gation ; the calling of the minister will be a private occupation,
the temple a private room, an assembly of likeminded friends
will form the Church. Then only will the exalted fellowship
of truly religious souls spread in all directions, as an academy
of priests pursuing religion as an art and a study, as a circle
of brothers united by the closest ties of sentiment and mutual
understanding. Such was the ideal Church of Schleiermacher
in his early years, an ideal in which Moravian mysticism is
combined with Romantic exaggeration in fantastic idealism.
Herder, notwithstanding his equally great dislike of an official
State Christianity, took a far more sober view of the functions
of the Church in the moral education of the people.
The fifth Discourse treats of the Positive Religions. As
something infinite, religion can exist in the world only under
a multiplicity of specific manifestations, that is, in the various
positive religions, and not as an empty abstraction, such as the
so-called " natural religion" would be. The preference given
to the latter in his time, Schleiermacher thinks, was due simply
to the fact, that those to whom religion in general was ob-
noxious like that form of it best which is really not religion
at all, and has the fewest of its characteristics. So-called
" natural religion" is commonly so refined away, and so nearly
akin to metaphysics and ethics, as to exhibit few of the cha-
racteristic traits of religion. On the other hand, every positive
religion has a specific individual character. The character of
such a religion is not determined by its share of the totality
of religious views and feelings, for these may all be met with
in some form in every actual religion ; but each individual
religion is produced when some special view of the universe
is made a centre-point, and everything else subordinated to it.
In so far as each man can do this for himself, there would
naturally be as many individual religions as religious indi-
viduals. And, in fact, Schleiermacher explicitly says, Any
man who can fix the date of the birth of his religion, and trace
Ch. II!.] SCHLEIERMACHETL 53
its origin to the direct action upon him of the Deity, i.e., to
" revelation," has his own special and real religion. Here
everything is life and freedom and true natural development,
whereas in " natural religion " everything is abstract, and its
strength lies in the negation of what is positive and character-
istic ; it is like the soul that refused to come into the world,
because it wished to be not a definite man, but man in general.
This subjectivism, which resolves all connection between his-
torical religions into accidental individual phenomena, was
afterwards abandoned by Schleiermacher himself when he
sought to combine the claims of individuality with the import-
ant functions of the social element.
The development of religion Schleiermacher conceives as
following the successive stages (then erroneously accepted)
of fetishism, polytheism, and monotheism. In this connection
he has occasion to speak of pantheism, which he does not
regard as a special form of religion,, but as a speculative
theory, quite reconcilable with true religious feeling, as long
as we do not understand by it a masked materialism. The
fundamental idea of Judaism Schleiermacher holds to be
retribution, which was only possible in the narrow field of
a limited national community; its importance as preparatory to
Christianity he rates very low. " I hate in religion this idea
of historical relations ; each religion has its own eternal neces-
sity, and has always its .own independent origin" a statement
characteristic of Schleiermacher' s want of historical insight, a
defect from which even eis later theology is never quite free.
The fundamental idea of Christianity he considers to be, that
die corruption of the world, consisting in alienation from God,
is put an end to and a mediation is effected between the
finite and God by individual points, scattered over the whole,
in which both the Divine and the human are united. " Ruin
and salvation, enmity and mediation, these are the two in-
separably connected fundamental relations underlying this
habit of feeling, and determining the shape of the entire re-
ligious content and form of Christianity." That presupposition
of universal ungodliness is the cause of the polemical character
and the sense of " sorrow" which, Schleiermacher thinks, are
special characteristics of Christianity. But since Christianity
at the same time discerns in history constantly new dispensa-
tions on the part of God for retrieving this ruin, ever higher
revelations and mediators with a view of uniting the Divine
54 BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I.
and the human, it makes the history of religion itself the
material of religion and so raises religion as it were to a
higher power (just as, according to Schlegel, the poetry of
Romanticism, by taking the given forms of poetry itself as its
material, raises poetry to a higher power.) Of the founder of
Christianity it is further maintained, that the wonderful thing
about him was not so much the purity of his moral doctrine,
which only expressed what is common to him with all men who
have attained to full spiritual consciousness, nor his character,
combining exalted power with touching gentleness ; what was
truly divine in him was the clearness of his idea of the neces-
sity of a mediation between everything finite and God, or of
the necessity of redemption for man imprisoned in the finite.
"His consciousness of the directness of his knowledge of God
and of his existence in God, and of his power of arousing it
in others, was at the same time the consciousness of his medi-
atorial office and of his deity." " But never," adds Schleier-
macher, " did Jesus claim to be the only mediator " ; he never
required men to accept his ideas for the sake of his person,
but only the latter for the sake of the ideas ; he never repre-
sented the views and feelings which he communicated as the
totality of religion, neither did his disciples ever wish to limit
the absolute freedom of the revelation of the spirit ; and so
neither does the Bible forbid any other book to be or become
a Bible too. Christianity will last for ever in so far as there
will never be a time when no more mediators are needed ; but
nevertheless it repudiates the claim to be the sole and sove-
reign form of religion ; it wishes to see other younger, and, if
possible, stronger and nobler forms of religion springing up
beside it, and a prophetic mind could perhaps even now indi-
cate the point which must be the centre of communion with
the Deity for future generations. This view of the possibility
of a more perfect religion than Christianity Schleiermacher
afterwards limited to a continuous development within Chris-
tianity itself, just as in his later Glaubenslehre he no longer
regarded Christ as one mediator among several, but as the
only one whose consciousness of God was perfect and of
unceasing efficacy for the whole race.
We can easily understand that so original and paradoxical
a work as these " Discourses on Religion" would arouse
much opposition on all sides; in the narrow circle of the
author s Romantic friends only did it meet with approval, and
Ch. III.] SCHLEIERMACHER. 55
even there it was qualified. Of the various criticisms none
was more common, or more just, than that Schleiermacher had
overlooked the essential connection of religion with morality
and the basis of its importance socially. But any one who
was inclined on this account to accuse our apologist for reli-
gion of lacking true regard for ethics, was at once corrected,
by the appearance of his Monologen (1800), supplying the
moral philosophy corresponding to the religious philosophy
of the Discourses. But the remarkable thing is, that while in
the latter he taught a religion independent of morality, in the
former he teaches a morality independent of religion. In both
cases the formal principle remains the same, viz., the self-
contemplation of the ego, freed from all extraneous hypo-
theses and limitations, the ego contemplating within itself the
forms of the spirit's life in their individual development and
also in their general laws. But in the first work the object
of self-contemplation was the ego as intuitive and emotional,
its passive relation to the universe being excited and de-
termined by impressions from it ; in the second, it is the ego>
so far as it is conscious of its absolute freedom and shapes its
internal as well as the external world by spontaneous actioni
In the one he teaches, with Spinoza, the complete dependence
of everything finite upon the One Infinite ; in the other he
makes, like Fichte, the ego itself the creative whole, of which
even the world is only the self-created mirror. Common to
both works is the individualistic form given to the ideal ; in the
one, it is required that every truly religious man should be
conscious of special revelations of the Dfeity, or feel himself a
special mirror of the universe ; and in the other that each man
should, in a manner peculiar to himself, represent in his own
person the nature of humanity and determine his inward
and outward action by the law of his own individual life with
a freedom unrestricted by anything external. Free and
harmonious culture by the independent development of our
own capacities and glad recognition of the peculiarities of
others, such is the principle of this theory of ethics, which
seeks to overcome the Kantian antithesis of duty and inclina-
tion by conceiving the moral law, not as a universal imperative,
but as arising in each individual as a special vital impulse
which need only be followed purely and uninterruptedly in
order to contribute a chord to the harmony of the moral
world. It cannot be disputed that this aesthetic and humanis-
56 BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I.
tic ethical principle, adopted also by the Jacobis and Herder,
Goethe and Schiller, embodies an important truth as against
the one-sided rigorism of Kant ; but it is equally indisputable
that it does not contain the whole truth, and, if exclusively
pursued, may lead to dangers of a different and more serious
kind than did the Kantian ethics, especially when we re-
member the practical fruits of this principle in the circles of
Romanticism, which cast their dark shadows even into
Schleiermacher's life. The defects of the whole school may
be stated in a few words : it fails to properly recognise the
dependence of the individual on its historic conditions and the
obligations of the individual towards the historic aims and
objects of society. This indicates what is needed to supply
subjective idealism with its true objective, i.e., social, comple-
ment, and to correct the strange separation of religion and
morals, as if unrelated to each other, inasmuch as religion
shows the possibility of the reconciliation of both, as present-
ing in God the common source of individual freedom and social
obligation.
The conversion of subjective into objective idealism was
carried out by Kant's successors in various directions ; by
Fichte in the direction of Ethical Idealism, the original ethical
atheism of which afterwards became a mystical pantheism ; by
Schelling in the direction of a philosophy of nature, which
was afterwards transformed into theosophy ; by Hegel in the
form of Logical Idealism, with the incorporation of the theory
of historical evolution. Since these systems as philosophical
theories, especially the two last, affected theology in various
ways, it will be necessary for us to take a brief survey of them.
CHAPTER IV.
j. G. FICHTE'S ETHICAL IDEALISM.
THE years at the close of the last century in which Herder
wrote his books against Kant, and Schleiermacher his Dis-
courses on Religion and his Monologues, witnessed also the
controversy on FICHTE'S atheism. This controversy was both
the occasion of the philosopher's removal from Jena, the strong-
hold of the Kantian philosophy, to Berlin, the stronghold of
Romanticism, and, at the same time, of the reconstruction of
his philosophy. It was provoked by Fichte's essay, Ueber
den Grund unseres Glaubens an eine gottliche Weltregierung
(1798), in which he affirmed that faith in our ethical vocation
and in the moral order of the world, 3.5 the necessary pre-
supposition for the accomplishment of our moral vocation in
the world, is the only true faith, maintaining at the same time
the impossibility of tracing this moral order back to God as its
cause. Fichte followed in Kant's footsteps, in so far as the
latter had based religious faith on faith in our moral vocation,
which is at the same time the vocation of the world ; but whilst
Kant made man's inability to bring nature into harmony with
his moral vocation the ground of the postulate of God, to supply
this want of human power, Fichte considered this postulate
not only as superfluous, but even as impossible, since a God
acting in the interests of happiness would appear desirable to
the physical man only, but would do dishonour to our moral
reason, and therefore be really an idol. Hence in his Ap-
pellation an das Publikum gegen die Anklage des Atheismus
(1799), Fichte declared that his accusers, who wished to have
a God for the satisfaction of their desire for happiness, were
the real atheists.
This rejection of Kant's dogmatic postulates was a necessary
consequence of the logical rigour of Fichte's idealism, both
practical and theoretical. From the autonomy of the practical
reason he inferred that it was itself sufficient to work out its
self-imposed aims, not needing to have its freedom supple-
58 BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I.
mented by divine aid ; and he gave full effect to Kant's asser-
tion that the understanding legislates for nature ; he set aside
the " thing-in-itself " which had in Kant confined the indepen-
dent activity of cognition by making it dependent on an object,
and declared it the self-imposed limitation of the active ego.
Thus the world which forms the content of our consciousness
was made absolutely, in form and matter, the simple product
of our consciousness, the unsubstantial image of our creative
imagination. And just as the active ego, by its acts of reflec-
tion, is the free creator of its world, so its freedom or, what is
identical with it, its moral vocation, is also the end and pur-
pose of this world. The world, says Fichte, is nothing but
" the material of our duty clothed in forms of sense," an object
which, in itself unreal, is only conceived by the ego as the
inevitable material for the action of its moral freedom. This
thorough-going subjective idealism is quite reconcilable with
ethical idealism as long as the non-ego created by the concep-
tion of the ego does not go beyond nature ; for whether this is
something real or only an unreal phantom of my imagination
matters very little to ethical purpose and action ; it might
even seem conducive to the moral grandeur of mind to strip
nature of its substantiality and degrade it to the unreal and
impotent product of the mind's representative functions. But
what if the non-ego include other human beings as well as
nature ? Are these also, as belonging to the content of my
consciousness, only the product of my consciousness, only the
self-imposed limitation and means of the employment of my
freedom ? Without doubt this pronounced " solipsism " would
be the ultimate logical issue of subjective idealism ; but it
would also be the end of all moral convictions, for to theoreti-
cal solipsism could only correspond an unqualified practical
egoism. It is extremely characteristic of Fichte's speculative
thought, that it was not any theoretical consideration, such as
the objection of unsophisticated common sense, but simply
and solely this moral abyss that quelled the proud daring of
his subjective idealism, and led to the introduction of a trans-
cendental object.
We first meet with this change of view in the treatise on
Die Bestimmung des Menschen (1800). In it too the final
result of the philosophy of pure knowledge is still asserted to
be, that the sense-world is only the conception in which all
finite rational beings agree, depending upon the common
Ch. IV.] FICHTE. 59
limitation of their reason. But, he goes on to ask, what could
limit reason except what is itself reason, and what could limit
all finite reason except the infinite reason ? This universal
agreement with regard to the world of sense, as the sphere of
our duty, and hence our necessary and antecedently given
starting-point, is as incomprehensible as our agreement with
regard to the products of our mutual freedom, and is the result
of the One eternalinfinite Will. But in that case belief in our
duty is really belief in God, his rationality and faithfulness ;
he creates in our minds the feelings, perceptions, and laws of
thought constituting the world of our consciousness. All our
life is his life, our thoughts, so far as they are good and true,
are thought in him. From this point of view the world too
is seen in a new light : though the earlier idealism remains,
with its negation of a dead mass, a material nature, and a blind
destiny, it is no longer the ego that creates the world by its
imagination, but it is the life of God that is visible to the
religious eye, no less in the outer than in the inner world; the
world is no longer the unreal shadow of my perfectly free and
absolute ego, but the manifold appearance of the one divine
life and light, of which I see the reflection within me and
without, in the whole realm of kindred spirits with like con-
ceptions and feelings. In this way subjective idealism is
transformed into a mystical pantheism, most nearly akin to
that idealised Spinozism found in Herder and Schleiermacher.
But what in Herder was put forward dogmatically in opposi-
tion to Kant's critical philosophy, is in Fichte the result of
the logical following out of critical idealism itself. Fichte's
philosophy fell in with the tendency of the time, and helped
on new developments of thought, whilst Herder's had the
stream against it and remained unnoticed.
Fichte's change of view necessarily gave quite a new shape
to his theory of religion. His former stiff moralism, accord-
ing to which the only possible creed is a cheerful fulfilment of
duty in active life, gave place to a religious mysticism quite
averse to active life. In his Grundziigen des gegenwdrtigen
Zeitalters (1804), where the stern condemnation of the Auf~
kldrung follows quite the track of Romanticism, religion is
said to consist, not in any form of action, but in the view of
the world as the differentiated manifestation of the one divine
Being, or a metaphysic of the supersensible with the corres-
ponding disposition of the heart ; the love of the religious
6O BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I.
man is rooted in the one divine basal life, and hence he is
raised both above the imperative laws and the low pains of
nature, and every moment he is in immediate full possession
of eternal life with all its blessedness. The nature of religion
is more fully expounded and more definitely marked off from
ethics and metaphysics in the work Anweisung zum seligen
Leben (1806). In it Fichte distinguishes five ways of re-
garding the world : the lowest is the ordinary realistic view of
the senses. The second is that of imperative law, finding
the ground and purpose of the phenomenal world in a regu-
lative law (Kant's position). The view of true morality ranks
higher ; according to it, the law is not merely imperative, but
also creative, a vital impulse constituting the man swayed
by it the image and revelation of the divine Being (position
of Jacobi and the great poets). The fourth view is that of
religion, which beholds in all manifestations of the true and
good, the one life of God, and, by feeling, has experience of
it, as the power of holy life and love. Lastly, the fifth view
is that of science, which raises the connection of the finite
with the one divine life, directly felt in faith, into a matter
of knowledge, and makes it the object of clear conviction.
Religion shares with this scientific view of the world the
characteristic of not being directly active but contemplative, a
peaceful view, remaining within the heart and not directly in-
citing to any definite action ; religion is, however, superior to
science in this particular, that it does not confine itself to con-
templation but becomes a practical energy, the will to do all
and every duty as the will of God for us and in us ; religion
is, in a word, the love of God, in which man feels God within
him as a quickening spirit, and surrenders his whole personality
to God. Fichte, it is true, describes this devout love of God,
just like Spinoza, as absorption into God, as being fused and
blended with him, so that it is really God's own love to
Himself, which becomes conscious in man in the form of
feeling. But even as this mystical oneness with God,
Fichte's ethical idealism remains in so far intact, that the
devout love of God is by no means exhausted in inactive
emotion or calm contemplation, but is represented as the
source of a joyful and active love of man ; "moral action
flows from it as quietly and calmly as the light from the sun."
But this love founded on religion does not love everything
in man without distinction ; it hates everything base and
Ch. IV.] FICHTE. 6 1
mean, but believes in the existence and the development of
the divine germ in every man, and so becomes the source of
glad and hopeful labour for the elevation of the human race.
Thus this warm and optimistic enthusiasm for humanity, based
upon religious feeling, formed in the end the meeting-point of
Kant's disciple Fichte and his opponent Herder ; and in pro-
portion as Schleiermacher rose above the aesthetic subjectivity
of Romanticism, he too ranged himself definitely on their side;
so that these three noble thinkers stand at the opening of
the century as joint prophets of that truth which was to be
the distinctive sign of the coming generations.
CHAPTER V.
SCHILLING'S PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE AND THEOSOPHY.
IN the same year as Fichte's work on Die Bestimmung des
Menschen, appeared SCHELLING'S System des transcenden-
talen Idealismus (1800), in which the objective idealism, first
suggested in Fichte's work, was reduced to a system. This
philosophy also claimed to be idealism, for it enunciated
the principle, that all knowledge must be deduced from
consciousness, by making the action of intelligence the object
of intellectual contemplation. But just as Fichte had dis-
tinguished the absolute from the finite ego, which he conceived
as the differentiated manifestation of the one divine life, so
Schelling's Intelligence, by whose action the world is to be
explained, is not only the human but the absolute Intelligence,
and its action is not simply to produce ideal conceptions but
to create the real world of nature and history. On the other
hand, this divine Intelligence must not be thought of as apart
from that of the human ego, but is related to it as the whole
to a part or the original to a copy ; and thus, Schelling holds,
we can regard the functions of consciousness producing our
ideal world as the copies and symbols of the forces and laws
conditioning the generative process of the real world. If
nature is visible spirit, and spirit is invisible nature, it appeared
possible to explain the genesis of the real world, or nature
outside us, by the contemplation of the action of the ego in
forming propositions and definitions, in the same way as
Fichte's theory of science ( Wissenschaftslehre) had explained
the genesis of the world of consciousness. This is what
Schelling tried to do in the first part of his System des trans-
cendentalen Idealismus. By the method of the Fichtean
deduction of consciousness a philosophy of nature is pro-
pounded, in which the genesis of nature is traced in an
ascending scale from the elemental forces of matter to the
production of organic animal and conscious life. The second
part supplies the corresponding practical philosophy, dealing
with the action of human freedom in history. But in this
Ch. V.] SCHELLING. 63
action of individual free agents law or necessity prevails un-
consciously, by means of which, from the play of the volition
of individuals, there is ultimately produced an harmonious
order, undesigned by them. This implies that all free action
is ultimately based upon some common element guiding the
orderly development of the whole. Such a synthesis, or pre-
established harmony, of the subjective and objective, of
conscious freedom and unconscious necessity, must depend
upon something higher than either, which can only be the
absolute identity of both. It is the " eternally unconscious "
which is the root of all intelligences and the basis of law and
order in their freedom, but which, being absolutely simple, can
never be the object of knowledge but only of faith. At no
point in history is it visibly manifested, but it is revealed con
tinually throughout its whole course. But can we not some-
where get a direct intuition of this harmony of freedom and
necessity ? Certainly, answers Schelling, following Kant's
Critique of Judgment, viz., in art. In artistic creation
conscious and unconscious action so far coincide that the artistic
product, though the work of freedom, is the end aimed at by
nature's necessity. The infinite harmony striven after in the
endless chain of historical acts, has become a finite manifesta-
tion in the beauty of the work of art. In aesthetic contem-
plation is objectively reflected the original identity of the
conscious and unconscious, of nature and freedom, underlying
all separations of them in consciousness.
When the absolute Identity had once been thus raised
above the ego and nature as their higher unity and common
basis, it was an easy step to formulate the new " Philosophy of
Identity," in which consciousness was no longer taken as the
starting-point, as in the transcendental philosophy, but the
Absolute implied in it. Moreover, in his form of treatment
Schelling went over from Kant to Dogmatism, as Fichte had
gone over to Spinoza. As Spinoza in his Ethics begins
at once without any deduction, with the definition of Sub-
stance, in order .to draw deductions from it, so Schelling now
starts with the proposition, that absolute reason is the in-
difference of subjective and objective. It is the end of all
antitheses, it is the world as the eternal and unchanging unity
of the real and the ideal. Hence the Absolute cannot be
grasped by reflection, by analytic or synthetic thought, but
only by " intellectual intuition," which, as the copy of the
64 BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I.
absolute, is likewise itself the unity of the ideal and real. By
this method, which he pronounces the only truly philosophic
one, Schelling attempts to derive differentiated Being from
the unity of the absolute Identity. That this attempt was fore-
doomed to failure is manifest ; if it lies at all within the range
of our powers of knowledge, to trace the genesis of the world
from the Absolute (which must be denied), this would in
any case be rendered least possible by the assumption of this
empty abstract conception of the Absolute as the simple in-
difference of opposites ; how by its means the rich variety of
the real world could be explained, is quite inconceivable.
This was felt soon after by Schelling himself, and it led him
to a theosophic reconstruction of his philosophy of Identity,
though he only replaced one error by another, or rather sub-
stituted mythological poetry for philosophic thought. Before
following this further step of Schelling's, we must glance at
his theory of religion, as developed from the more sober point
of view of the philosophy of Identity,
In his treatise Metkode des akademischen Studiums
(1803) Schelling has occasion to speak of religion, and treats
it, unlike Schleiermacher, not from the subjective and psycho-
logical, but from the objective and historical point of view.
In accordance with the then universally accepted philosophy of
history, he makes history begin with a golden age of inno-
cence, the unity of man with nature. Thereupon followed,
after a universal fall, the epoch of disruption between mind
and nature, of the painful consciousness of misery and guilt.
The reconciliation of this disruption by faith in Providence
began with Christianity, the central idea of which is God be-
come man, in the sense that ''the eternal Son, born of the being
of the Father of all things, is the finite itself as it is in the
eternal contemplation of God, and which appears as a suffer-
ing God subject to the conditions of time, who in his highest
manifestation, that is in Christ, closes the world of the finite
and opens that of the infinite, or the reign of the spirit." The
Incarnation must not, therefore, be regarded as an individual
event in time ; it would in that case have no meaning, since
God is above all time ; but it is an incarnation from eternity ;
and though Christ is its highest point, and so also the be-
ginning of its complete realisation, the perfect intelligibility,
as historical events, of the rise of Christianity and of the
person Jesus remains unimpaired thereby. Thus Schelling
Ch. V.] SCHELLING. 65
wishes in general clearly to distinguish the idea of Christianity,
which can only be known from its entire history, from its
first appearance as attested in the Biblical writings, and for this
very reason advocates the free historical interpretation of these
writings. Since the Christian idea is not dependent upon this
one event, but is universal and absolute, it cannot, says
Schelling, make any difference to its truth whether we
consider the books of the Bible authentic or not, whether
their narratives record actual events or Jewish myths, or
even whether their matter conforms to the idea of Christianity
or not ; if Christianity had not always been considered a
merely temporal phenomenon, we should have made much
more progress towards the historical appreciation of the
important documents relating to its origin. The task before us
cannot be to restore these original forms, as the Aufklarung
supposes, but to set the eternal idea free from the wrappings
which have hitherto enveloped it, and to enable its ideal kernel
to shape for itself new forms in the spirit of the present, a task
to which the existing relations of philosophy and poetry to
religion already point. In this distinction between the per-
manent idea in Christianity and its perishable envelope, and in
the demand for the free development of the former out of the
latter, Schelling is in complete agreement with Lessing and
Herder, Kant, Fichte, and Schleiermacher ; but whilst these
thinkers found the idea of Christianity in moral or religious
humanism, Schelling sought it in a speculative theory of the
relation of the finite to the infinite, and thus entered upon the
disastrous path of the intellectualistic theory of religion which
was further developed by Hegel. Connected with this was
Schelling's depreciation of the value of the historical side of
Christianity, especially of the early Biblical records, which
suffers him almost to sever all connection with ecclesiastical
Christianity. Herder, with a true instinct, had already pro-
tested against a similar error on the part of Kant ; and we
shall see later that Schleiermacher's theology was indebted to
this effort to effect a closer union between idea and history for
its superiority over the idealistic philosophy of religion and
for its profounder influence on the life of the Church.
The problem of the explanation of the finite from the
infinite never ceased to occupy Schelling after the formulation
of his philosophy of identity in 1801. The consciousness of
his failure to solve it is already betrayed in his treatise on
G. T. F
66 BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I.
Philosophic und Religion (1804), where the genesis of the
world from God is explained by the aid of the Platonic myth
of the declension of the ideas or souls from the divine unity.
That this explanation explains nothing is evident ; for the
possibility of a declension presupposes the existence of the
finite. The possibility of such a declension remained incon-
ceivable as long as the conception of the absolute was adhered
to as pure and simple identity. An alteration of this concep-
tion was therefore necessary on internal grounds, but it was
actually brought about by Schelling's study of the theosophy
of Jakob Bohme, one of the fundamental principles of which
was, that God is not a simple but a living unity, comprehend-
ing distinctions within itself. From this new point of view
Schelling wrote his Untersuchungen iiber das Wesen der
menschlichen Freiheit (1809). The indifference of opposites,
he now teaches, is not as yet God's actual being, but only its
primal source (or Urgrund, to use Bohme's term). This
unity differentiates God himself into the antitheses of nature
and intelligence, which only when combined constitute the
actual life of God. Moreover, nature in God, as in us, pre-
cedes intelligence as its Basis, and without it personality is as
little conceivable in God as in us ; for personality depends
upon the combination of a self-contained principle with an in-
dependent Basis. This nature in God is as such simply a
blind, unreasoning instinct. By it we can explain the residue
of reality never resolvable into reason, the irregularities under-
lying all order in the world, as a chaos never wholly subdued.
The desire for reconciliation on the part of this dark Basis
produces reason, which, when united with the instinct of
nature, becomes free, creative, almighty will, and reduces to
order the forces of chaos. But since the blind will of this
Basis continually reacts, and only gradually gives w r ay to
reason, the conversion of nature into spirit can only proceed
by degrees in the various grades of the natural world. All
beings, as springing from the dark Basis in God, have an
individual will of their own ; but, as also originating in God's
reason, a universal will. From the increase and disunion of
these two forces in man results evil, which has thus poten-
tially its origin in the Basis of God, but actually in man's own
act in separating himself from the Universal will by an act of
self-determination out of time, and by that act simultaneously
determining his individual character, which is manifested in
Ch. V.] SCHELLING. 67
his life in time. On the struggle of these two principles turns
the world's history. After the primitive age of natural in-
nocence, the will of the Basis, or natural self-will, obtains the
supremacy in the age of heathenism, till the divine light, or
the word of the divine Reason, appears in a personal mediator
for the restoration of the connection of creation with God.
Then the struggle between the divine and daemoniacal king-
doms reaches its height ; but in this struggle the physical glory
of the old world passes away, and God reveals himself in
the new world as the victorious spirit of the good. The goal
of history is the reconciliation of the natural self-will and the
universal will in love, which is the higher unity of both, and
by which alone God can really be all in all.
While we must acknowledge that this theosophy contains
profound ideas, which have influenced theological and philo-
sophical thinkers (Baader, Martensen, Rothe, Schopenhauer),
we still cannot deny that these ideas are mixed up with much
mythological poetry, which fails to satisfy either philosophical
thought or the religious consciousness. The notion of the
divine Intelligence issuing from a dark JBasis of nature and
blind instinct grates upon religious feeling as a reminiscence
of heathen theogonies, by which the spiritual and ethical
purity of the Christian idea of God would be marred. This
defect remains substantially uncorrected in the final form of
Schelling's philosophy, though on this point the philosopher
designedly adheres very closely to the terminology of ecclesi-
astical dogmatics. As this "philosophy of mythology and
revelation " was only published after Schelling's death, about
the middle of this century, and has had no influence upon the
development of theology, any account of it is foreign to our
purpose.
CHAPTER VI.
HEGEL'S LOGICAL EVOLUTIONARY IDEALISM.
HEGEL started from the earlier of Schelling's positions. He
agreed with his fellow Swabian and fellow-student that the
subject of philosophy is not merely phenomena, or the con-
sciousness of the ego, but the Absolute, which unfolds the
wealth of its content in the world of nature and history.
Hegel, however, conceived the Absolute, not as the " indif-
ference" of nature and spirit, but as spirit itself, which, as
the rational source of nature, must be prior to nature ; while,
as the self-existent spirit of the conscious subject, it must
have proceeded from nature. Spinoza had conceived the
Absolute as Substance, Fichte as Ego or Subject, while
Schelling had blended these antitheses in his neutral ''In-
difference." Hegel agreed with Schelling in his neutralisation
of opposites in the higher unity of the Absolute, but argued
that this unity must not be simply asserted without proof, "as
if shot from a pistol " ; but the thing needed was to show how
Substance, or self-existent Reason, can become a subject, by
evolving its correlate nature, and passing through it, generate
itself as a subject or self-conscious spirit. Passive " indif-
ference," excluding opposites, is thus changed into the self-
development of spirit, passing through its opposite to a unity
at once destroying and preserving the opposition. In con-
junction with this change in matter there is an alteration in
method. Hegel was indeed at one with Schelling as to the
unsatisfactoriness of the philosophy of reflection, which pro-
ceeded from the antithesis of thought and being, and was
accordingly incapable of apprehending being itself, and could
never get beyond the antitheses of finite and infinite, appear-
ance and actual being, world and God. But he was as much
opposed to the " intellectual intuition " which Schelling wished
to substitute for rational reflection as the sole philosophical
method. This intellectual intuition, which is really an aesthetic
condition of mind most nearly akin to Schleiermacher's reli-
Ch. VI.] HEGEL. 69
gious intuition of the universe, cannot, Hegel argues, be the
basis of philosophy, which is concerned with concepts, and
is therefore the matter of thought. Only philosophic thought
must not be something abstract, perpetuating the antitheses
in their hostile exclusiveness, but something concrete, resolv-
ing antitheses and tracing concepts in their process through
their opposite. If thought, according to the philosophy of
identity, is one with being, and if the essential nature of the
absolute Spirit consists in living development, then, Hegel
infers, the philosophic method of thought must also consist in
the dialectical development of concepts ; hence the philosopher
has to imitate in the dialectical method the self-development
of the absolute Reason ; or, more strictly, his attitude is that
of a spectator observing the objective active process of pure
thought, this self- development of the absolute idea through
the process of the world's self-genesis. All the capriciousness
of merely subjective thinking is thereby excluded ; it is the
logical necessity of absolute Reason, as it develops into reality,
which is reproduced in the philosophers thought. Herein,
according to Hegel, consists the only truly " rational " thought,
which combines the analytical reflection of the understanding
with synthetic intuition, in order to carry the absolute unity
of the one through the oppositions of the other up to the
derivative unity of the "concrete idea." Hegel thus supple-
mented and corrected Schelling's intuitive method by Fichte's
dialectical reflection ; from Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre he
took the general plan of his dialectic, the movement of thought
through Thesis, Antithesis, and Synthesis; but what in Fichte
was the movement of the subjective consciousness to the
formation of its ideal world, became in Hegel the movement
of absolute Thought, the self-development of which into the
world of actuality repeats itself in the movement of the dialec-
tical thought of the philosopher to the formation of his system.
Here, as in Fichte, the world is simply the product of the
development of togical thought, though not, as in Fichte, of
the thought of the ego, but of the absolute Spirit ; it is not
subjective, but absolute logical idealism. But in contradis-
tinction to Schelling, for whom the Absolute was passive
identity and intuition the method of philosophical knowledge,
Hegel's logical idealism is at the same time evolutionary in
two senses ; the actual is the evolution of the absolute Reason
in and through nature and history, and philosophy is the
70 BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I.
imitation of this evolution in the dialectical movement of
ideas.
The Hegelian philosophy was the most logical and most
fruitful working out of the idealism which proceeded from
Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, which made the understanding
the lawgiver of nature. It was natural that this philosophy
should produce an immense impression upon its time, and that
it should be looked upon as containing the solution of all
problems. It gave the thinking mind the exalted conscious-
ness of perfectly comprehending the world, of fixing the place
in its system of ideas for all the realities of nature and history,
and of constructing a priori all the laws of phenomena in
conformity with the laws of thought. And to the practical
mind it gave the reassuring certainty that its sublimest ideas
were not merely subjective postulates and imperatives never
to be actually realised, but the eternal truths of reason, which,
as the all-ruling Power, infallibly carries out its plans in the
world of reality, and has realised itself in the past, and will
continue to do so in the future. The proposition that the
rational is actual, and the actual rational, expressed a more
optimistic faith in the reign of reason in the world than any
other philosophical system since Leibnitz had offered. In
this ideal optimism a generation weary of endless discussion
found the longed-for reconciliation of the intense but unprac-
ticable and disappointed idealism of the i8th century with
the actual forces of history, whose awful realities idealistic
enthusiasts had been compelled, by the great events of the
time, to remember and respect. If reason is everywhere
the deepest basis and the guiding law of reality, it need no
longer be looked for, as Kant taught, in a Golden Age of
the future, in an Eternal Peace which seemed never coming,
in a perfect condition of civil and political society, not as yet
discovered ; and equally little in a Golden Age of the past,
in a happy state of nature, in which Rousseau and, to some
extent, even Herder, had revelled. From all such super-
natural and extravagant speculations, toward which an age
of enthusiasm had directed its gaze in hope or sorrow, to the
disregard of the historical world, Hegel called his contem-
poraries back to the firm ground of the historical life of man,
and showed them how a loving eye might there discover
undreamed-of stores of rational ideas and working ideals, in
which at all times and in every nation the sovereign Reason
Ch. VI.] HEGEL. 71
of the world had been able to attain its lofty ends, half uncon-
sciously to man himself ; though each end, as soon as reached,
must be seen to be but an imperfect stage in the development,
and must serve as means to a yet higher end. From this
standpoint a far profounder view could be taken of history,
and a far juster estimate formed of its varied phenomena. In
fact, no other branch of study owes to Hegel so much as
historical inquiry. The arbitrary treatment of details which,
in the case of Hegel and his immediate disciples, crept in,
under the influence of his philosophical idea, had of course to
be corrected by more exact historians ; but the lasting gain
is rich and manifold. It is a deeper insight into historical life
generally, as an orderly development of the one common spirit
of nations and ages, ruled by ideas, and aiming at necessary
common ends ; it is a more penetrating glance, through the
confused play of phenomena, into the essence of man and
things, into the dominant thoughts which are the controlling
motives underlying even the apparent discord of individual
passions ; it is the unprejudiced appreciation of the necessity
even of the oppositions and conflicts, the errors and passions
of men, because, as Hegel says, with Heraclitus, war is the
father of all things, and only through the strife of partial rights
and one-sided truths can the whole truth of the idea gradually
struggle into existence ; it is finally an intelligent reverence
for the heroic figures in history, in whom is embodied the
genius of nations or ages, who, as instruments of a higher
power, have roused the thought slumbering in the souls of all,
have given it clear expression, and in mighty deed have sum-
moned it to life. No such historians as Leopold Ranke, or
Thomas Carlyle, or Christian Ferdinand Baur are conceivable
without the Hegelian philosophy of history.
This profoundly suggestive conception of history has been
of especial service in the departments of religious and ecclesi-
astical historical study. Hegel teaches us to see in the
history of religion an orderly development of divine revela-
tion in man's consciousness of God, a development in which
no point is wholly without truth, though none has the whole
pure truth ; gradually divine truth reveals itself to the human
consciousness in ever greater purity, but always veiled under
imperfect conceptions and symbols. The positive religions
are accordingly neither inventions of human caprice and
cunning nor expressions of the accidental emotions of in-
72 BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I.
dividual devout souls ; but, like law and custom, art and
science, they are necessary creations of the peculiar common
spirit of the different nations, and can therefore be properly
understood only in close connection with the general history
of the development of human society. Christianity is so far
an exception, that in it the spirit, not of a single nation only
but of mankind as a whole, becomes conscious of its essential
relation to God, and it is thus the absolute religion of revealed
truth ; though in it, too, this truth is always clothed and en-
veloped in conceptions which are more or less inadequate to
the idea. When once the whole history of the pre-Christian
and Christian religions is conceived as the religious spirit in
the process of evolution, having divine reason for its source
and human reason, i.e., man's true consciousness of his rela-
tion to God, for its end, the opposition between rational faith
neglecting history and historic faith contrary to reason, which
was the point at issue between the Aufkl&rung and its
opponents, is then perceived to be a misleading abstraction
which must be replaced by rational historic faith and historical
rational faith. Thus Hegel's philosophy of religion, like his
philosophy of law and history, seeks to reconcile the claims
of personal freedom of thought with the claims of an authority
that has grown up in the course of history and acquired valid-
ity in society ; it seeks to mediate between subjective and
objective reason, between personal liberty and reverence for
the social forces of history.
We must not, however, omit to look at the dark as well as
the bright side of Hegel's logical idealism. The assertion of
the rationality of everything actual was so one-sidedly opti-
mistic as necessarily to produce the reaction of Schopen-
hauer's pessimism. Hegel's optimism led to a sluggish
conservatism, a passive tolerance of the existing state of
things simply because it exists ; it could be fair and tolerant
towards all historical phenomena except the Aufklarung and
its rationalistic criticism of tradition ; its dislike of abstract
subjectivism might be carried so far as to reinstate faith in
every authority, no matter how irrational ; and these results
of his system were so obvious that, though not intended by
Hegel himself, they at once showed themselves in his school
and disastrously perpetuated and increased the confusion of
ideas produced by Romanticism. But apart from these prac-
tical consequences, the question arises, Is the foundation of
Ch. VI.] HEGEL. 73
this absolute logical idealism sound ? Is the position tenable,
that thought and being are identical and the whole world only
the self-evolution of pure thought ? Hegel makes the transi-
tion from logic, the region of pure thought, to the world of
reality by means of the proposition that the idea externates
itself and evolves nature from itself as its correlate ; but this
is really a phrase that explains nothing, to which Schelling
(like Fichte) unanswerably replied, that it is impossible to
deduce the real from a mere idea. But if this proposition is
untenable, the whole foundation of logical idealism is cut from
under it, the identification of the real evolution of the world
with the logical evolution of ideas is made impossible, the
dialectical method based on the identification is a failure, the
whole system which stands or falls with this method is doomed,
and a radical reform of idealism unavoidable. To this extent
the reaction of post- Hegelian empiricism was fully justified,
provided only that it did not go so far as again to deny alto-
gether the ideal element in knowledge and philosophy, and
so surrender the lasting results of the Kantian critical philo-
sophy. We shall return again to this ^point in another con-
nection.
The exclusively logical character of Hegel's philosophy,
with its resolution of all life into conceptual relations and
processes of thought, is the ground of the weakness of Hegel's
theory of religion, viz., its intellectual character, its exclusive
accentuation of the religious concept, and its failure to see
that religion is essentially a matter of the heart. According
to Hegel, religion has the same subject-matter as philosophy,
yet not, like the latter, in the form of logical concepts, but of
intuitions ( Vorstellungen) in which the truth is conveyed for
the world at large ; religion is therefore to a certain extent
an exoteric philosophy for the general community, while philo-
sophy is the esoteric knowledge of the truth of religion. The
common content of both is " the knowledge possessed by the
finite spirit of its nature as absolute spirit," which also pre-
supposes " the absolute spirit's knowledge of itself in the finite
spirit," a self-communication or revelation of the divine spirit
in the human. But man's knowledge of the God revealing
Himself in him is not reached at once in a final and complete
form ; it is developed in a gradual advance of the conscious-
ness from the worthlessness and slavery of our natural existence
to the truth and freedom of a spirit at one with God. This
74 BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I.
necessary process of self-deliverance from bondage to nature,
of coming to oneself and becoming conscious of our divine
nature, furnishes the proof of the truth of religion and of its
foundation in man's nature. In his description of this de-
velopment of the religious consciousness Hegel distinguishes
three stages feeling, intuition, thought (Gefiihl, Vorstellung,
Gedanke]. Feeling he describes as the immediate form in
which a content of consciousness is made ours ; and he is far
from disputing that the true content of religion, in order to be
our personal possession, must be an emotion, must be in the
heart, as the permanent seat of feeling and willing. But this
direct form, feeling, must not be regarded as the whole of re-
ligion, or as its distinctive excellence. For this form can have
the most various contents, the basest as well as the highest, the
truest as well as the most worthless. " As the object of feel-
ing, God is in nothing superior to the worst thing ; the king-
liest flower springs from the same soil as the most rampant
weed." Feeling Hegel does not even regard as specifically
human, but as the sense-form of consciousness common to
men and animals ; in it only the individual subjectivity asserts
itself, desiring merely its own enjoyment, instead of forgetting
self and living in objective thought and action. Hence feel-
ing, though the necessary lowest grade in consciousness, is
one that must be overcome and superseded by intuition and
thought. (This view of feeling is clearly based upon a false
psychology, connected with the fundamental error of logical
idealism ; instead of recognising the co-ordination and inter-
action of the emotional and the rational side of our spiritual
nature, the former is made a subordinate stage of the latter,
which is plainly contrary to all experience and eminently pre-
judicial to a true appreciation of religious experience.)
By intuition, or inw r ard perception, consciousness, according
to Hegel's further description of the religious process, con-
verts the content, with which it was directly united in feeling,
into an object distinct from the subject. Intuition uses sense-
forms derived from direct perception, but in order to convey
spiritual truth, a higher rational sense ; it is therefore truth
under sense-symbols. It presents spirit, which transcends
time and space, as subject to the conditions of time and space
(e.g. in sacred history), or under a multiplicity of contradictory
conditions (e.g. man's freedom and dependence), each of which
taken by itself is accidental and irrational, since only in their
Ch. VI.] HEGEL. 75
unity can we perceive their truth as phases of the one Spirit.
Hence intuition is an inadequate form of truth, and must be
replaced by conceptual thought. But in thought Hegel again
distinguishes the reflection of the understanding from truly
rational or speculative thought. The former perpetuates the
opposition of infinite and finite, nature and spirit, etc., and
cannot effect their union. But thereby the infinite, conceived
as outside and beyond the finite, is itself limited and so made
finite ; and the ego, conscious of itself as the author of this act
of limitation, appears itself to be the Infinite ; the antitheses
change places, the humble consciousness of finiteness becomes
proud self-deification (comp. Feuerbach's anthropologism).
But religion demands a point of view which shall be both the
negation of the ego in its self-centred isolation and at the same
time the affirmation of its true self in God. These conditions
are fulfilled by speculative thought, which includes the finite,
as an element of the divine life, and the infinite, as the living
process by which it first becomes and then ceases to be finite.
If the absolute self-conscious spirit thus appears from our
finite point of view as a result which has^ been brought about
by nature and finite spirit, in reality it is the Alpha, the
necessarily presupposed basis of the finite world. God is
the unity of the natural and the spiritual, yet not such a unity
as to place the two on an equality, for the unity is spirit, not
some tertiumquid in which both are neutralised. God is, on
the one hand (as finite) one side of the antithesis, and again
(as absolute) that which includes the other side, and so is the
unity of both (nature and finite spirit). This clearly indicates
the difference between Hegel's speculative idea of God and
Schelling's Absolute as the identity of spirit and nature ; the
latter is the neutral identity in which both sides of the anti-
thesis are equally absorbed ; Hegel's Absolute is the spiritual
principle which creates and dominates the antithesis, not so
as to be related in the same way to both sides, but so as to
make nature, as its own correlate, an instrument for the pur-
pose of the spirit in which it reproduces itself. It cannot be
denied that this conception of God is at least more allied to
theism than to what is generally understood by " pantheism."
So far undoubtedly Hegel was to some extent justified in
maintaining that there was no material contradiction between
his philosophy and Christian dogma ; though we cannot deny
that he optimistically underrated the difference.
76 BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I.
Hegel's Philosophy of Religion most nearly approaches
Christian doctrine in the profound chapter on worship, which
he regards as the active union of man with God by the
voluntary surrender of himself to the divine revelation ex-
perienced within him. Worship is primarily an inward act,
or faith, this living communion of the ego with God. It may
begin from some external witness or authority, but then it is
only formal faith ; true faith has as its basis and subject-
matter nothing accidental or merely traditional, but the living
witness of the spirit. " The non-spiritual cannot by its nature
constitute the subject-matter of faith. If God speaks, he
speaks spiritually, for spirit reveals itself to spirit only." The
end and aim of worship is self-sacrifice, self-renunciation, and
the appropriation of the divine grace as the real strength of
our own goodness, as the Holy Spirit. This inward senti-
ment then finds its expression in moral action also ; hence
religious faith and worship have everywhere the profoundest
influence upon the habits and laws of society ; want of freedom
in religion leads to want of freedom in the State ; freedom in
the State and not in religion leads to conflicts, such as have
arisen between the modern State and the Catholic Church. In
this recognition of the historical and social importance of re-
ligion Hegel's religious philosophy compares favourably with
Schleiermacher's subjective mysticism.
After discussing, in the first part of his Philosophy of
Religion, the nature of religion in general, Hegel proceeds in
the second part to speak of " specific religion," i.e., religion in
its pre-Christian forms. These various positive religions are
partial representations of special elements in the idea of re-
ligion, not indeed adequate to it, but necessary stages in its
evolution. Hegel distinguishes immediate religion, or the
religion of nature, corresponding to the childhood of humanity ;
then the religion of spiritual individuality, corresponding to
the period of youth, or of growing spiritual freedom ; to this
class belong the religion of the sublime (the Jewish), of the
beautiful (the Greek), and of the expedient (the Roman).
Finally comes " the absolute religion," or Christianity, in
which the idea itself finds manifestation ; Hegel also calls it
" the revealed religion," because in it God is known as He who
reveals himself in our spirit as truth and love ; and again " the
religion of truth and freedom," because in it the spirit re-
cognises itself in its true nature and thus at the same time
Ch. VI.] HEGEL. 77
attains its freedom. In his account of Christianity he treats
of God, firstly, per se, as He is in eternity (kingdom of the
Father) ; then in His manifestation in history (kingdom of the
Son) ; lastly, in His return from manifestation into Himself,
in the process of reconciliation, or as the spirit of the Church,
which is the eternal in time. We must look rather more
closely at this philosophy of Christianity, as we shall often
meet traces of it in the history of theology,
Hegel regards the Church's doctrine of the Trinity as
supplying the stages of the speculative idea of God ; the self-
contained unity, self-differentiation, and the absorption of
the difference into the concrete identity of the differentiated
one. Of the three Persons, he expressly states that they
must not be taken literally, but as the figurative expression of
the true thought that God is not abstract unity, the identity
without difference conceived by the understanding, or the
supermundane omnipotence of the Jewish religion, but
" eternal love," which is itself when in its correlative. This
nature of God is a mystery to the sensuous mode of thought
and to the understanding, clinging to differences as final, but
not to the reason, which finds in all life a continual generation
and destruction of contradiction, and therefore an analogy of
the triune life of God. It is easy to see that this speculative
interpretation of the Trinity is nearly identical with that given
by Lessing and Schelling, according to which the Son is the
world as an object of the divine thought, the intelligible world,
called also in Philo the Son of God.
The element of difference, already implicit in the nature of
God, comes into definite existence in nature, the correlative
in which spirit alienates itself, and completes itself in man as
conscious disunion. The orthodox doctrine of the original
state and fall of the first man, Hegel says, must be taken as
the symbol of what holds of man generally as such. The
idea of man, his design and function, is to be spirit, to think
and to will rationally, to learn to know God and nature ; but
if this idea of man is imagined to be his original condition in
time, this is a mythical notion. For by its very nature spirit
cannot be actually existent from the beginning. At first it is
still absorbed in nature, and must, therefore, in order actually
to become rational thought and free will, withdraw itself
from nature and come into conflict with it. An original direct
union with nature, so far from being a condition of superiority,
78 BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I.
is the condition of barbarism and wild desire, unworthy of
spirit, and diametrically opposed to its higher vocation. To
this animal insensibility, to the want of moral consciousness,
must be ascribed the innocence of man as the child of nature.
The loss of this was therefore not at all an irremediable mis-
fortune, but a divine necessity. The ever-recurring history
of man's freedom is that of his progress from this insensibility
of his earliest years to the light of consciousness, or more
particularly, that he learns to know good and evil. This ad-
vance from naive consciousness to moral consciousness, with
its contradiction between will and duty, its guilt and remorse,
its discipline and labour, does indeed at first seem to be a
calamity ; but this is only one side of the matter ; the other
side is, that within this calamity lies the source of the remedy.
Evil therefore did not spring from the accidental act of the
first man, nor is it transmitted by inheritance to his descend-
ants, but is involved, without any mediation whatsoever, in
the freedom of each individual as the first mode of its
appearance. For freedom arises solely through consciousness,
and consciousness is the act of the disunion of the ego, as in-
dividual will, from the universal and rational will. In this dis-
union within, and in relation to everything else, both freedom
and evil have their seat ; it is the source of moral disease and
also of its cure, of the reconciliation of the contradiction.
Like the contradiction, the reconciliation can only take
place by a process within the human spirit. Still Hegel finds
a sufficient reason for its being conceived in the creed of the
Christian Church as the external history of the incarnation of
God in Christ, as the atoning death of the God-man. For
the reconciliation cannot be produced from within man
himself, by his subjective will and action, which never gets
beyond the contradiction ; but the consciousness must be
brought to look at and in faith appropriate the reconciliation
as a supposition certain in itself, as the objective truth of
mankind's actual reconciliation with God and by God as
reconciling love. Man can feel himself reconciled with God
and received into union with Him only when he sees in God
a being no longer foreign to himself and keeping mankind at
a distance, but Spirit and Love, in which man's nature as spirit
and free is also affirmed. But this unity of the divine and
human nature can become an immediate certainty in the
religious man only when it takes the form of God appearing
Ch. VI.] HEGEL. 79
to him as man and man as God, and indeed in the contempla-
tion of a concrete person in whom both are conjoined ; thus
the orthodox conception of the deity and humanity of
Christ, is explained as an inner necessity of the religious con-
sciousness in its Christian stage. Still Hegel is by no means
of opinion that the historical Christ was really a supernatural
being in the sense of the dogma of the two natures, but he
holds the historical Jesus to be essentially a man, who was
conscious of being himself one with the divine will, and in
this consciousness of union with God proclaimed, in the
language of inspiration, the highest religious truths ; by his
teaching and life he brought home to men, as the truth and
the necessary foundation of their religious consciousness, the
doctrine that God is not supermundane and far off, but
present in his kingdom, that He is love, and that the certainty
of this must be realised in each man's own breast. But it
was by faith only that the words of the man Jesus were
rightly and spiritually understood ; and this spiritual faith was
the fruit of Christ's death. His death was the crucial point
in the development of the Christian consciousness, when the
great transition was effected from faith in a mere man to faith
in the God-man, for it brought clearly before men's minds
the truth of the unity of the divine and human natures. And
it was just because this consciousness of the reconciliation of
God with the world, so fundamental to the Christian faith,
dawned upon the Church in its full spiritual significance only
after the death of Jesus, that Christians came to regard this
death itself as the central point of the reconciliation, and
beheld in it the absolute love, which in the finite itself over-
comes the finite death, and so negatives again this negation.
But though it was intelligible and, looked at historically,
necessary, that the Christian Church should contemplate the
idea of reconciliation in the form of a particular occurrence in
history, it was nevertheless an incongruity to conceive what
was really eternal and of universal validity as having happened
once only and in the case of one individual. This incongruity
was in the first instance partially corrected by the two addi-
tional doctrines of Christ's second advent and of the mission
and perpetual presence of the Holy Spirit. By these two
conceptions the limitation to one external event put upon the
idea of reconciliation in the history of Christ was removed,
the reconciliation being made universal, perpetual, and inward,
80 BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I.
just as the one fall of the first man was supplemented by the
idea of all men's inheritance of Adam's sin. This addition
was indeed only an external correction, one partial conception
being added on to another equally partial. The essential
thing, the real advance from the outward to the inward, can
only come to pass by individual Christians personally going
through this history or process, which they conceived at first
as a divine history external to them and enacted for their
sakes. By the enactment of the reconciliation as a subjective
process in individuals themselves is realised the Christian
Church. The Church is the institution having for its object
that men come to the truth, and that the Holy Ghost become
in them a living power, the knowledge and desire of the truth.
The means of attaining this object is doctrine, in which the
Church develops into conceptions (dogmas) the truth origin-
ally given as the direct witness of the spirit. Baptism
declares that the world into which the child enters is not a
hostile one, but the Church, in which evil is, as such, already
overcome and God reconciled. It only remains for the
individual to form himself upon the Church, by education and
practice, and to habituate himself to the goodness and truth
already existing in it. This constitutes his regeneration.
The spirit is not directly and without mediation what it is
designed to be ; the natural heart, by which man is held
captive, is the foe to be striven against. The work of the
Church is this very education of the spirit, so that truth may
become more and more inwardly one with the man, with his
will, and so his own personal knowledge and volition. Here
we have no mere naked obligation, progress without an end,
endeavour never to be fulfilled, as in the Kantian philosophy.
Here evil is known to be in itself already overcome in the
spirit (the Holy Spirit of the Church) ; and if the individual
only makes his own will good by means of this Spirit, by
believing in the reconciliation already accomplished, evil has
for him personally disappeared and sin is felt to have been
forgiven. This act is, on the one hand, the act of the
individual, who sacrifices his self-will (dies with Christ), on
the other, the act of the divine Spirit within him, which is the
spirit of the individual so far as he has faith. In the Lord's
Supper the Church celebrates this presence of God in the
immediate self-consciousness of believers. But this reconcilia-
tion, accomplished in worship, as an inward certainty in the
Ch. VI.] HEGEL.
depths of the soul, must make itself felt in the world of nature
and society. Moreover, the freedom of the spirit reconciled
to God must be active, not merely a negative, monkish re-
nunciation of the world, but must work positively, in permeating
all secular interests with the Holy Spirit, and in moulding the
world after the pattern of eternal truth. The harmonising of
true religion with true secularity is effected in morals and
science, which are the realisation of reason in the will and
knowledge of society.
Thus the Hegelian philosophy of religion ends as it began,
with the conviction that religion and Christianity, if taken in
a deep and free spiritual sense, so far from being antagonistic
to secular culture and knowledge, really form their source,
foundation, and motive power, and, on the other hand, find
in them their consummation, confirmation, and choicest fruit.
Kant's idealistic philosophy had started with the emancipation
of thought from the fetters of external authority, demanded
by the Aiifklarung, and with his sketch of " a religion within
the limits of pure reason." But even Kant, bold critic as he
was, had warned men not to confound Aufklarung with
radical revolution, but to seek it in a just and orderly use of
the understanding ; and he had arrived by his investigation of
the laws of reason at a point of view which was so far superior
in ethical depth to the popular philosophy, and so essentially
in touch with the Christian view of the world, that he was
even able in his theory of religion to undertake what was
really a defence of Christian doctrines, at any rate in respect
of their ethical contents. Herder and Schleiermacher did
justice to religious emotion and intuitive imagination, which
Kant had slighted, and at the same time attempted to connect
ideal religion more closely with the historical facts and the
Biblical records of Christianity ; still these thinkers (we are
here speaking only of Schleiermacher's early period of
Romanticism) were too much shut in by the horizon of a
subjective piety to attain to a full appreciation of the historical
development of Christianity. This was the side from which
Schelling attacked the problem ; like the ancient Gnostics, he
tried to explain Christianity, from the most comprehensive
point of view, as a phase of the general development of the
world, not however without falling again into the Gnostics
error of resolving religion into cosmo-mythological processes.
Hegel carefully avoided everything like Gnostic mythology,
G. T. G
82 BASIS OF MODERN THEOLOGY. [Bk. I.
but carried on the great task of applying an objective historical
method to the study of religion. Herein lay his strength and
his lasting importance, while he was weak in the psychological
analysis of the religious consciousness and the emotions in-
fluencing it. But though his theology, and even more that of
his disciples, needed to be supplemented in this respect by
the school of Schleiermacher, it was of great importance that
Hegel clearly pointed out that the history of religion is a
development of the rational spirit, under the guidance of ideas,
and a development in closest connection with all other sides
of social life. He thus accomplished what Herder had
demanded, and an advance of the abstract subjectivity and
the poor external pragmatism of the Aufklarung was thereby
finally checked.
BOOK II.
THE EVOLUTION OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY UNDER
THE INFLUENCE OF IDEALISTIC PHILOSOPHY.
CHAPTER I.
THE THEOLOGY OF THE SCHOOL OF KANT.
THE Kantian philosophy influenced the whole theology of its
time, but in very various ways, according as the one or the
other of the tendencies of thought involved in it was followed
by theologians, whether it happened to be the sceptical, or the
moral and rationalistic, or the theological utilitarian side of
the system. The theological postulates based on utilitarian
considerations, in which Kant, sceptic and rigorous moralist as
he was, made conciliatory advances to popular thought, offered
both to the conservative supernaturalists and the Wolfian
neologists of the A^lfklarung a welcome means of approach-
ing this new philosophy and connecting^themselves with it.
In other respects the former of these parties adopted the
scepticism of Kant's theoretical critique, and made it the
foundation of their historical dogmatism, while they either
simply rejected or else greatly limited the autonomous rational-
ism of the practical reason ; the neologists, on the contrary,
adopted Kant's rational ethics and ethical theory of religion,
though they toned down the rigour of his ethics, on the lines
of theological and philosophical utilitarianism, and tried, with
more or less success, to bring the rationalism of his religious
system into closer connection with historical Christianity.
Hence originated the various shades of the Rationalistic theo-
logy derived from the school of Kant. It alone concerns us
here ; while the use made of the Kantian criticism in the cause
of ecclesiastical and Biblical orthodoxy was so foreign to the
spirit of this philosophy, and had so little influence on the
development of theology, that we are justified in dismissing it
with a passing mention.
We may notice as a curiosity that many theologians, both
Protestant and Catholic, beheld in Kant's distinction between
phenomena and noumena and his limitation of knowledge to
the former, the means of rescuing the orthodox system from
the onslaughts of neological doubt. Though in the world of
85
86 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. II.
phenomena three persons are not equal to one person, and
one person cannot have two natures, still, they argued, the
possibility of this cannot be disputed in the case of the Divine
Persons, since they belong to the noumena, of which we know
nothing except that in this realm everything is in all respects
different from what prevails in the case of phenomena. A
similar position was held by STORR and his colleagues and
disciples, the so-called older Tubingen school, who exercised
greater freedom with regard to ecclesiastical dogmas, but held
all the more strictly to Biblical supernaturalism, which they
rested upon the traditional theory of inspiration. They main-
tained their Biblical system against all the objections and
doubts of the Aufklaming by an appeal to the Kantian philo-
sophy ; since, according to the critical philosophy, reason itself
admits its inability to know anything of the supersensible, it
has logically no right to protest against what has been made
known to us concerning supersensible things by historical
revelation ; with regard to the practical reason, Kant himself
allows that it demands a requiting Deity for the satisfaction
of our desire for happiness, and is therefore in its own interest
called upon to receive upon authority the historical revelation
concerning God and his government of the world. Hence
the truth of the Biblical doctrines stands higher than the
critique of the speculative reason which confesses its own
incompetence, and accords with the demands of the practical
reason ; it has therefore nothing to fear and nothing to expect
from philosophy, but rests entirely upon the positive authority
of a supernatural revelation, which has only to be first histori-
cally proved and then reduced to a system. Storr did this by
putting together a dogmatic system, in the fashion of a mosaic,
from detached Biblical texts, without caring for any other
proof of his propositions, either by appealing to philosophy
or to the religious consciousness. We cannot but recognise
the strength of this position, which meets all rationalistic
objections by a sceptical depreciation of reason ; in all periods
this standpoint of faith, founded purely upon authority, has
been popular, but especially in those when philosophic thought
w T as at a low ebb owing to the overweening flights of previous
speculation. Its weak point is the unhistorical arbitrariness
with which individual passages of Scripture, torn from their
context, are used in proof of a system which is foreign to
them, because unknown to any of the Biblical writers. This
Ch. I.] KANTIAN RATIONALISTS. 87
method of using the Scriptures as one uniform code of doc-
trine quite ignores the peculiarities and variety of the religious
habit of thought of the Biblical authors, so different in point
of time, place, and character. Hence this Biblical dogmatism
could not survive a really historical examination of the Scrip-
tures, such as was undertaken by the later Tubingen school.
History had been the sole basis of the system of the older
Tubingen school, and by means of history it was overthrown
by the younger Tubingen school. Profound thinkers, like the
youthful Schelling, had, indeed, before this clearly perceived
how little this application of the Kantian philosophy to the
service of theological dogmatism accorded with its real mean-
ing and spirit ; his ridicule of these pseudo-Kantians was not
undeserved ; and dislike of this movement may well have
been one of the motives which soon began to lead Schelling
himself to subordinate, and this too absolutely, the critical to
the speculative side of Kant's system.
The thinker whose position was nearest that of Kant's
philosophy of religion was the theologian and philosopher
TIEFTRUNK. He held that the only possible foundation for a
religion with any claim to universal truth is the consciousness
of unconditional . freedom and autonomy, by which we raise
ourselves above the world of sense and become members of a
world of spirits, or, indeed, even gods, as he says in the
hyperbolical language of the then prevalent idealism, and
differ from God, the supreme head of all intelligences, only in
degree, not in kind ; we have the same will and the same law
as God, our existence and independent activity are alike un-
conditional, and we have by our own will an infinite object in
our holiness, wisdom, and blessedness, which is also the object
of God. But whilst God is pure intelligence and therefore
his power of good is equal to his will of it, we are at the
same time creatures of sense, and our power of execution on
that account falls short of our autonomous reason. Thus the law
of reason becomes a command to which both our sensuous
inclination and the external world of sense are often opposed.
Hence as intelligences we are supreme, and have no other
reason for obeying the moral law than the demands of the
dignity of our own personality. If we could satisfy this law
in its infinitude, we should be all-sufficient in ourselves and
have no need of a God. But as in reality it is our personal
worth only that wholly depends upon our own will, while our
88 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. II.
circumstantial well-being is not in our own power, inasmuch
as though we ought by merit to claim happiness we cannot
accord it to ourselves, we are led to acknowledge God, who
solves the contradiction between our ethical sovereignty and
our natural dependence by making all things subsidiary to the
end of created spirits and assigning them a natural condition
corresponding to their personal merit. Here, just as in Kant,
the existence of God and his government of the world are
postulated to make up for our want of power over nature,
while our moral nature, taken in itself, is conceived as so abso-
lute as in its self-sufficiency to have no need of God. It is
true that from this point of view faith in God, as thus estab-
lished, our reason itself, and its autonomy, are traced back to
a divine origin, but still the relation of the pre-supposed
sovereign autonomy to the divine legislation is not made
clear ; ethical idealism and the religious mode of thought have
no necessary connection, but move in parallel lines, sometimes
supplementing and sometimes restricting each other. Though
the idea of God cannot be established by speculation, its
certainty is grounded on ethical necessities of thought, for
it forms the condition of the possibility of the supreme good,
in which we are by our moral nature compelled to believe.
Nor, again, is the further determination of our idea of God
possible by the methods of ontology, but by those of ethical
analogy by our reasoning analogically from our own moral
causality to the relation of the divine causality to the world,
whereby we are able, at any rate symbolically, to describe the
action though not the nature of God, his moral attributes,
holiness, justice, goodness, and wisdom being first inferred,
and then the ontological ones deduced. The doctrine of the
Trinity is interpreted, with Kant, of the threefold relation of
God as Creator and Lawgiver, as Ruler, and as Judge.
Further, the belief in immortality is rested, in Kantian fashion,
upon its being the condition of the possibility of endless moral
progress.
These doctrines, according to Tieftrunk, make up the
essential contents of every religion, no religion being univer-
sally valid save as it rests upon the principle, cognisable by
reason, of freedom and the moral law. From this he infers
that Rationalism alone meets the requirements of religion ;
for religion does not originate in feeling, but solely in the
spontaneity of the knowing faculty, and is therefore valuable
Ch. I.] KANTIAN RATIONALISTS. 89
only when the product of perfect insight and thorough convic-
tion. " Religious feelings must be produced by knowledge, and
not vice versa ; the perception of the moral law, of the existence
of God, and of our own immortality, is the first step, and pro-
duces in us an interest, which, as resulting from our recogni-
tion of these truths, we can call a religious emotion." But
the theologian Tieftrunk could not rest satisfied with this
formal and self-sufficient Rationalism. He endeavoured to
find an opening for historical religion and its claim to
revelation. In the first place, he showed in general that a
revelation is logically conceivable and morally probable on the
supposition of a declension of human morality so profound as
to be remediable only by a direct divine proclamation of the
moral law, together with the necessary outward means of
securing its observance. Among the latter he includes mira-
cles wrought on nature, which are considered quite possible,
as the sensible effects of a supersensible cause, as our own
free will operates in the world of sense as intelligible causality.
When once supernaturalism, after its repulse at the hands of
arrogant Rationalism, had thus been re-admitted by a back-
door, it maintained its position, at any rate so far as the
Christian religion is based, upon the historical testimony of
the Biblical writings. Since these satisfy the moral criteria,
a priori necessary, of a divine revelation, their acceptance
may be regarded as rationally justified. Still, Tieftrunk is far
from constructing upon this foundation a positive system
of Biblical dogmas after the manner of Storr's. On the
contrary, he holds that the content of revealed religion is
the same as that of natural religion, inasmuch as the
essence of the teaching of Jesus consists in the love of
God and of our neighbour, which is equivalent to Kant's
"joyful recognition and observance of the moral law as a
divine command." He cannot however but see that even the
revealed religion of the Bible (not to speak of the theology of
the Church) contains some things beyond natural religion.
Though in what this addition consists, and what is its value
and importance for us, are questions to which this Rationalism
can give only confused and indefinite answers.
The Rationalists AMMON, BRETSCHNEIDER, WEGSCHEIDER,
and ROHR sought to keep in closer touch, to some extent, with
the historical theology of the Protestant churches, and were
thus enabled to exercise a more widespread influence on the
90 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. II.
thought of the churches. In their theological manuals it was
their custom to begin with an historical sketch of the develop-
ment of the various doctrines in the Bible, the Fathers, and
the Protestant creeds, and only then to state their own view
in the form of a final judgment. This method had several
advantages : in the first place, it involved a full historical
statement of the facts of the case, and thus put the student in
a position to form an independent opinion from his knowledge
of the actual materials ; and secondly, it brought clearly out
the mutability of dogmatic conceptions, and their dependence
in every case upon contemporary thought, and thus destroyed
a naive faith in the infallible authority of a particular form of
doctrine, and established the right of the present to form an
opinion, from its own point of view, on the dogmatic decisions
of past ages, and to restate them in more adequate forms.
This procedure constitutes both the justification and the his-
torical merit of these theologians, who have been too uncere-
moniously and disdainfully dismissed by the later conservative
theology. By their learned and impartial presentation of the
history of dogmas they trained up a generation of scientific
and liberal-minded theologians such as we do not afterwards
meet with in equal numbers. And with regard to the conclu-
sions they themselves drew from the history of doctrine, we
must recognise not only their intelligent clearness and manly
honesty, but also their profound moral earnestness, their sin-
cere piety, and their living trust in God ; in other words, a
disposition of mind which could justly claim to be Christian
piety, even though it did not adequately represent the specifi-
cally Christian doctrines of salvation, and on that account
could not satisfy profounder religious needs. In any case this
theological school has as much historical justification as any
other, and it is undeniable that its representatives in the first
half of our century presented Christianity to the great majority
of the German people in the form most intelligible to them,
and did better work in the cause of quiet, practical Christi-
anity than many of those who from the proud position of
a reactionary theology, artificially conformed to the creeds,
assumed the right to condemn these men.
By its juster appreciation of the importance of the historical
element in religion, this post-Kantian Rationalism contrasts
favourably with Kant's unhistorical Rationalism. While Kant
had held everything positive which goes beyond the moral
Ch. I.] KANTIAN RATIONALISTS. 91
faith of reason to be simply " statutory," the product of man's
imagination and caprice, Ammon pronounced the positive re-
ligion of the Bible divinely revealed, inasmuch as, while not
contradicting natural religion, it still did not originate solely
in the reason common to all men, but was imparted by divine
Providence through definite historical persons and events to
supplement and confirm the truths of natural religion. Hence
the relation of natural to positive religion resembles that of
the universal moral consciousness to the definite morals and
laws of individual nations, or that of the common constitution
of men as men to the special unfolding of it in history.
From this very useful point of view Bretschneider explained
the relation of a general and a special revelation : the former
lays the foundation of religious knowledge in the constitution
of the world and of our nature, the latter extends and de-
velops this foundation by gradually educating us to a higher
wisdom. The need of special revelation is owing to the
mind's need of education, or to the fact that our knowledge of
God, as well as our knowledge of the world, can only gradu-
ally arise and be made perfect. Revelation and reason come
from the same source the divine Logos, and hence cannot
contradict each other. But revelation is related to reason as
religious education is to the individual : it does not give
religious ideas all at once in their complete form, but at first
only in general outlines and without a clear perception of their
foundations, as truths to be received on authority ; but by de-
grees reason, led and growing strong in the leading strings of
authority, attains to a clearer and purer comprehension of
religious ideas, and to a perception of their inward truth and
agreement with the nature of the world and of man. The
very fact that immediate revelation harmonises with the uni-
versal revelation, and really develops further religious ideas, is
the final proof of its divine origin ; while its possibility cannot,
according to Bretschneider, be denied, since the Spirit of God
pervades all creation, including therefore the human spirit,
and hence is able to impart illumination to it, though this is
always conditioned by men's general culture and knowledge
of the world.
Whilst therefore Ammon and Bretschneider, neither of
whom remained uninfluenced by the advanced thought of their
time, held the idea of revelation in such a way as to avoid an
absolute antithesis between the divine immediateness and the
92 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. II.
historical medium, and so between the supernatural and the
natural, Wegscheider and Rohr, who were unable to escape
from the narrowing abstract rationalistic habit of thought of
the 1 8th century, pressed the antithesis to the point of direct
contradiction, denying altogether supernatural revelation.
Their reasons were psychological and metaphysical : man
possesses in his reason a power adequate for the knowledge
of everything required by his vocation. It is the renunciation
of the true dignity of man to suppose, with a denial of that
rational power, a foreign and supernatural authority. To call
in a supernatural cause contradicts the laws of our thought,
according to which we are compelled to trace all phenomena
to a cause within the natural connection of things, and are
unable to state any indications whatever of any other cause.
Any supernatural interference would be a magical disturbance
of the rational connection of our thought and of our mental
life generally, would expose us to all kinds of fanaticism, and
also in particular lame or destroy our moral activities, which
are based upon rational conviction. Finally, the supposition
of supernatural interference, by which the orderly course of
nature would be interrupted, is opposed to the true idea of
God his unchangeable omnipotence and infinite wisdom,
which have so arranged the world that it needs no miraculous
interventions and improvements. The notion of a super-
natural and direct revelation must be ascribed therefore to
men's way of regarding things, when they do not know the
natural causes of certain occurrences, and on that account deny
their existence, whilst improved knowledge shows in every
case that what was supposed to be supernatural can be quite
well explained from natural causes. The idea of revela-
tion is nevertheless retained, but it must be conceived as
mediate and natural, being founded in the constitution and
government of the world, in creation and providence. Thus
the true religion, Christianity, in particular, is based upon
an historical arrangement of divine Providence, under which
Jesus preached the idea of a reason inspired by true religion,
and personally represented, as it were in a mirror, the divine
reason. Accordingly between Christianity and Rationalism
there exists complete accord,
It cannot be questioned that these reasons for Rationalism,
if the antithesis between it and supernaturalism is once ac-
cepted in this absolute form, have been logically thought out,
Ch. I.] KANTIAN RATIONALISTS. 93
and they retain at all events their validity in opposition to
abstract supernaturalism, which sets aside the laws of reason
and the creation. The only question is whether that exclusive
conception of the relation of the natural and the supernatural
is required, and whether in it the characteristic experiences
of the religious life are taken into account. Or whether these
facts, when conceived as they are, do not rather point to a
view of God's relation to man and the world such as allows
man to experience the action of God within the natural and
spiritual order of the world, the supernatural and the natural
thus ceasing to be exclusive, and only different and comple-
mentary aspects of the religious relation. But the unyielding
intellectuality of a Wegscheider and Rohr was in its self-satis-
faction impervious to this deeper view of the matter which
might have reconciled the antitheses. And the unyielding
intolerance of the two men toward new and deeper tendencies
in theology (Schleiermacher, Marheinike, Hase) has done
much to discredit Rationalism in the public view, and to give
currency to an opinion of it which really did it injustice by
superciliously failing to recognise its relative truth. In this is
conveyed the lesson, which it is well to lay to heart, that the
religious consciousness of the churches has no sympathy what-
ever with the domineering arrogance of any heresy which seeks
to proclaim its own frigid intellectuality as the one valid canon
and the infallible authority in matters of faith. This will be
repeated in every period when a doctrinaire pedantry tries,
with the ridiculous claim of possessing the only true system
of doctrine, to force itself upon the churches. And we must
add that it is precisely true theological science which, perceiv-
ing the irreconcilability of any such claim with the proper
nature of theology, must most thoroughly justify the protest
and the practical consciousness of the churches.
The inspiration of the Scriptures Wegscheider finds in the
fact that their authors, under Divine guidance, committed to
writing their teaching on religion, which, like their good
thoughts generally, they traced back with devout feeling to
God's will and operation ; and these their writings, although
designed only for the readers of their day, are of such a nature
that the doctrines of the Christian religion can still be drawn
from them, even though they must be adapted to the en-
lightenment of a more educated age. Jesus himself (John vii.
17) declared that the doctrine communicated by him was
94 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. II.
divine, in so far as its divine nature can be readily perceived
and understood by the truly devout and upright. It is, how-
ever, divine also because it was first discovered and handed
down non sine numine. For the Omnipresent God is far from
no one who earnestly seeks him and is prepared to carry out
his counsels. And who was ever more deserving of his
help, or ever enjoyed more marked proofs of the favour of
divine Providence, than the founder of the Christian religion ?
As regards the person of Jesus, the Gospel story of his
supernatural birth must be considered a pious legend of Jew-
ish origin, having also its parallels in many other nations ; and
with it all assertions of the miraculous nature of Jesus fall to
the ground ; but this is not the case with the conviction that
his remarkable endowments and powers, as well as the con-
ditions of the age favourable to their development and em-
ployment, must be ascribed to God as their cause. Of the
ecclesiastical doctrine of the two natures in Christ, there are,
Wegscheider does not wish to deny, some germs in the Bibli-
cal writings ; but since in its developed form the doctrine
gives no assistance to virtue, and in fact is in the highest
degree detrimental to the influence of the example of Jesus,
which was given for our imitation, besides wholly contra-
dicting sound reason and some plain passages of Scripture,
it is best to adhere to the more simple form of doctrine by
revering and imitating Jesus as truly a Divine delegate, in-
terpreter of the Divine will, prototype of men destined to be
filled with true religion and virtue, who was himself full of
the Divine (numen, Qelov), and placed before us in this capa-
city a dignity not without God. Against the ecclesiastical
doctrine of the substitutionary satisfaction of the death of
Christ, the objections of a theological and moral character
which had been urged from the time of the Socinians are
brought forward, and to them others are added of a cosmo-
logical nature : it is difficult to suppose, he holds, that in the
second person of the Trinity God himself, the Governor of
innumerable sidereal systems, should have determined to
descend in a human form to this earth, such a tiny part of the
universe, to suffer death at the hands of the Jews, and there-
by to offer himself as a propitiatory sacrifice to himself. A
thought which gives expression to the undoubtedly just feel-
ing that the Christian consciousness has not remained unin-
fluenced by the Copernican theory, and must abandon anti-
Ch. I.] KANTIAN RATIONALISTS. 95
quated mythological ideas. Moreover, Wegscheider is suffi-
ciently unprejudiced to perceive that the doctrine of satisfaction
cannot by fair exegesis be wholly eliminated from the Scrip-
tures ; he looks upon it as conveying Christian truth in a form
suited to the times of the apostles, and to which a certain
pedagogical value still attaches for some minds, while on the
other hand more advanced minds are entitled, on the ground
of other forms of Scriptural teaching, to regard the doctrine
as a mere symbol, intended to indicate that by a faithful ob-
servance of the religion taught by Jesus and attested by his
death, we shall be pleasing to God without any further sacri-
fices and ceremonies. The doctrine of the atonement may
also be interpreted as a symbol of the love of God and Christ
to men, or of the consecration of a new religion as a new
covenant between God and men. With regard to these
criticisms of the doctrine of the atoning work of Christ, we
must allow, as undoubtedly just, that various religious motives
are represented in it which we can accept as valuable, though
we are able to give expression to them in another form.
Moreover, precisely the deepest religious element in the doc-
trine, which was also adumbrated in the Pauline germs of it, had
been previously much better expressed by Kant in his ethical
idealistic version of the dogma, than by any of his successors
amongst the theologians, who none of them penetrated so far
as he beneath the mere surface of the matter. The same was
the case with respect to the doctrine of salvation. Presup-
posing the fact of a " radical evil," Kant had pronounced not
merely a reformation of morals, but a change of mind and
principle, or a " regeneration" of the entire man, the condi-
tion under which we may hope to be regarded by God as
good, the Searcher of hearts accepting the good principles
instead of the actual perfect goodness which can never exist :
and with this Kant had connected the Protestant doctrine of
justification by faith. The theologians of the school under
consideration continued, it is true, to lay great stress upon
feeling and disposition as opposed to external and individual
acts, and looked upon this as the pivot of Protestant soterio-
logy ; but that this good disposition is something profoundly
different from the natural selfish mind, and is based upon a
radical transformation of the mind, they did not teach, because,
unlike Kant, they regarded men as by nature essentially good
and only in part morally enfeebled and impeded by sensuous-
96 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. II.
ness or bad example. By this view the Biblical and ecclesi-
astical distinction between the natural and the new man was
in their case softened down to a gradual moral reformation,
under which a man may feel assured of the Divine approba-
tion according to the measure of his worthiness. And it can
hardly be disputed that but poor provision is thereby made
to meet either the moral earnestness of ideal requirements or
the religious need of an assured salvation and a quieted con-
science two objects which the Protestant doctrine of justifi-
cation by faith is intended to secure. Kant's teaching was
more profound and was in closer touch with the Protestant
soteriology than the post- Kantian Rationalism ; as Fichte and
Schleiermacher show, a development of Kant's moral and re-
ligious philosophy in the direction of religious mysticism was
possible;; but from the Kantian Rationalists it was rather a
retrpgressive turn in the direction of the popular philosophy
that it actually received.
This school could not for long satisfy the newly awakened
and deeper religious feeling, and had accordingly to make
room for a more profound mode of thought. At the same
time, it had not merely done good service in its day in freeing
the churches from the curse of an intolerant dogmatism, but
there is conveyed a lasting lesson, worthy to be laid to heart
now not less than then, in the words of Wegscheider, in the
preface of his Institutiones Theologice : ''In the interpre-
tation and criticism of the opinions and doctrines of early
times, theologians ought to take greatest care to combine the
use of sound reason with the results of the learning of so
many centuries. Then only will they follow in the footsteps
of the great Reformers, who in their noble struggle against
so many injurious errors never claimed themselves to have
made -an end of all inquiry, and never grudged to their
successors progress in religious knowledge. The teachers
of the Church ought particularly to endeavour to communi-
cate to the people the teaching of Christ and his Apostles
regarding God and duty in all its purity ; to show that the
truth of this teaching does not depend on ancient dogmatic
formulas and pedantic interpretations of Biblical passages,
but is borne out by the properly developed nature of our own
mind ; to no longer try to defend forms of doctrine which
were adapted only for the thought of certain people and
times, but gradually to lay them aside and adopt a simple
Ch. I.] THE THEOLOGY OF DE WETTE. 97
form of teaching, such as is indicated in the New Testament
itself ; to permit the sparks of true morality and piety to flash
from the light of genuine Christian doctrine, instead of
offering the smoke of ancient opinions as the light of know-
ledge ! " We honour the genuine Protestant love of truth
which finds utterance in such words ; we still acknowledge
the vocation proposed to theology by those men ; but,
certainly, in the meantime we have learnt that the fulfilment
of this vocation is far more difficult than they thought, that it
presupposes both more thorough historical inquiry and more
profound insight into the facts and laws of the religious and
moral life than they could command. For this reason we
have not only grown more cautious in our criticisms of what
is old, but also more patient with its adherents, than was the
habit of the Rationalism of the Kantian school.
The transition from the rationalistic theology of the Kantian
school to the theology of Schleiermacher was made by DE
WETTE, who adopted the philosophic standpoint of the semi-
Kantian Fries, who desired to complete the Kantian critical
system in an anthropological direction. All our knowledge,
Fries and De Wette taught, is limited to the world of
phenomena, which is directly perceived in space and time,
and has to be reduced to concepts by the understanding.
But this " philosophy of the understanding " is not the true
one, for beyond it is the world of ideas demanded by the
reason ; these ideas are not objects of knowledge, but of
faith : namely, the idea of imperishable being, or of the soul, of
absolute independent power, or of freedom, and of the unity
of the absolute Whole, or of all-conditioning cause God.
These ideas have no connection which can be philosophically
proved with the phenomenal world which is the object of
our knowledge, but they are in complete contradiction to it,
since our experience presents everywhere only the finite and
incomplete, nowhere the eternal and infinite. Nevertheless
we feel that these ideas have full truth and unconditional
certainty. It is true they must never be assigned a place
in our philosophy of the understanding, which has to do
solely with the mechanism of finite causes and effects ; but
they form the foundation of our higher or " ideal philosophy,"
which arises when we, by means of emotional presentiment,
bring those ideas to bear upon the world, and judge of the
world aesthetically and religiously in their light. The religious
G.T. H
98 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. II.
ideas are of themselves, when conceived by the speculative
faculty, without life, inasmuch as they arise only by the nega-
tion of finite limitations, that is, by means of the abstraction
of reality ; but they obtain their positive significance, and
become of value in life when they are taken up by the
emotions, and clothed in the picture-language of the poetic and
symbolising imagination. All religious propositions with which
theology is occupied must therefore be carefully distinguished
from intellectual knowledge, as they are part of the ideal
view of the world, and only the symbolical expression of
surmising feeling. It is to the erroneous confusion of this
ideal philosophy, expressing itself in symbols, with intellectual
knowledge, that all dogmatism and scholasticism must be
ascribed. And dogmatism misunderstands as much the
nature of religious feeling as of knowledge, whilst to it is owing
the endless conflict between faith and knowledge, which can
be set at rest only if both are completely separated, know-
ledge being confined to the world of experience, faith being
directed to the ideal world, and comprehended under the
aesthetic view of things. In particular three kinds of aesthetico-
religious feeling must be distinguished : enthusiasm, kindled
by the idea of the personal dignity and immortal destination
of man, and also by the view of the beauty of nature, and of
the reign of purpose in history ; submission, which, under the
feeling of one's own imperfection, rises above the evils of the
world to faith in the higher spiritual realm of things, which
blooms in eternal undimmed beauty beyond the imperfections
and fragments of terrestrial things ; lastly, the feeling of
worship, which quickens the idea of God into the idea of
eternal Goodness, guiding all things for the best, and recti-
fying all confusion ; while for the understanding the idea of
God is nothing more than the empty form of absolute Unity.
To these three religious feelings, to which correspond, De
Wette holds, the aesthetic ideas of the epic, the drama, and
the lyric, all religious statements must be referred, in such
a way as to be symbols of the feelings, and find in them the
test of their truth. In this consists the true function ot
theology. It is not its business to substitute for dogmas its
own speculations or mere moral doctrine (after the manner
of the Kantians), but in the first instance to give an historical
account of them, and then to interpret them in accordance
with their religious symbolism. Figures and symbols must
Ch. I.] THE THEOLOGY OF DE WETTE. 99
not be dispensed with, for we always want them in the repre-
sentation of religious feelings, and do best to adhere to the
figurative language which we have inherited. But it must be
set free from the fetters of intellectual abstractions, and re-
stored to aesthetic intuition. This is the goal at which Pro-
testantism must finally arrive. When scientific criticism has
succeeded in releasing religion from the misleading influence
of the understanding, it leaves it to the rule of religious feeling
and its handmaid art.
De Wette has laboured to recast dogmatic theology from
this point of view in such a way that we cannot withhold from
him the praise of having done his best to reconcile the just
claims of religious feeling with those of rational thought,
although it must be confessed that his attempted reconcilia-
tion was led too much by subjective considerations of taste,
without the needed objective foundation, to hold its place
beside the theology of Schleiermacher, with its profounder
structure. At the same time, it is well worth while even now
to take a glance at his mode of treating the leading ideas of
dogmatic theology. 1
Divine revelation we find in every religious phenomenon
which so impresses us with the power of the religious truth
and beauty conveyed in it as to make us feel ourselves lifted
beyond ourselves and our own spiritual capacity. That Chris-
tianity is a divine revelation, is an ideal judgment, which
cannot be proved by evidence of the understanding, though
theological reflection has to show its general necessity ; just
as a judgment of taste regarding the beauty of a work of art
cannot be proved, though it can be so far established as to be
shown to satisfy the requirements of art. In doing this the
content of this revelation must be first examined, to see what
relation it holds to reason, with which nothing good and
beautiful can be in opposition, as otherwise man would come
into collision with himself. Inasmuch, therefore, as it will
be found that nothing has been prescribed in Christianity but
the eternal ideas of reason in their greatest purity and fulness,
the belief in it as a revelation is thereby justified. Rationalism
is accordingly itself nothing else than the philosophical view
of faith in revelation, in so far that we must acknowledge a
revelation in whatever furthers in an important degree the
1 We follow his work, Ueber Religion und Theologie, 2nd ed., 1821.
100 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. II.
historical development of the religious mind, such as has been
the case with Christianity in the very highest degree. The
doctrine of inspiration is likewise only a form of expressing
the fact that the Biblical writers were animated by holy
enthusiasm, without however possessing infallible wisdom,
which, moreover, is a matter belonging to the understanding.
Canonicity, in the religious sense, may be ascribed to those
writings which contain divine truth, and is therefore indepen-
dent of the historical view of the Biblical books.
The part of dogmatics which deals with general principles
must be criticised strictly in accordance with the speculative
and ethical ideas of philosophy. Definitions of the Divine
attributes must be referred to the philosophical ideas of God,
without sacrificing their virtue as popular symbols. The
Mosaic myth of the creation may pass as a figurative repre-
sentation of the truth that the world is eternally postulated
by the divine omnipotence. Angels and devils are mytho-
logical figures which may be retained in sacred symbolism
and art, though neither historical nor metaphysical truth may
be looked for in them. The doctrine of the Trinity must be
interpreted as the forms of the revelation of God, whether
in the world generally, when Son and Spirit can be referred
respectively to the formal and the real principle of the
universe, or in the Christian revelation in particular, the
doctrine then containing the truth of the different views of
God (though in the false scholastic conception of these views
as persons), giving expression to the superiority of Christi-
anity to Judaism and Heathenism. Of the anthropological
doctrines, the myth of the Fall must be regarded as a symbol
of what is always taking place in each man. On the one
hand, it is correct that we must look upon our propensity to
evil as guilt, and that we are unable, with all our moral effort,
to attain to inward peace, inasmuch as we cannot rise to true
holiness. On the other hand, it is a dogmatic exaggeration
to deny that man has any power to do good ; such a doctrine
overlooks the fact that there is in man an inward moral
power, which, it is true, requires to be aroused from without
in order to act. In so far, therefore, man stands in need
of salvation, of divine grace. Yet the Holy Spirit and
human reason must not be conceived as opposed to each
other, but the latter subordinated to the former ; grace and
freedom are two views taken from different standpoints, the
Ch. I.] THE THEOLOGY OF DE WETTE. IOI
former belonging to faith, the latter to observation and
reflection, while both are correct and are not mutually ex-
clusive. Election and reprobation is at the same time the
work of God and man, though God's not according to his
absolute will, but according to his relative operation within
the historical world of sinful men. The dogma of the two
natures in Christ as a conception is a contradiction, but easily
admits of reduction to these two views : in relation to nature,
Jesus is a man, but regarded aesthetically and in relation to
the ideal, he is God ; and as both ways of regarding him
are at bottom one, so he is but one person, the God-man, not
two persons. " Away, therefore, with those barren dogmatic
formulas, of which, moreover, the Bible and the people's
faith know nothing ! Let Christ be regarded as a divine
messenger, as God-man, as the image of God ; let us not be
too stingy with our glorification of him, let us not too anxiously
weigh our expressions ! At the same time, we must not
forget that we are dealing not with truths of the intellect,
but simply with religious ideality (Schonheit\ and whoever
speaks of this subject to the people, let him never do it with-
out the elevation and the warmth of devout enthusiasm."
While hitherto the history of this dogma has been occupied
with the conflict of truth with beauty, from this time forth
" the period must follow in which beauty will maintain its
claims side by side with truth." (De Wette correctly per-
ceives that the essence of Christological controversies is about
the relation of the historical and the ideal, but the problem is
not solved by the simple comparison of the intellectual, or true,
and the ideal, or aesthetic view.) The doctrine of the atonement
is only a beautiful, aesthetico-religious symbol of the thought
that Christ has restored to our sin-troubled hearts inward peace,
so that we can look up to God, the holy Judge, with confidence.
As in Christ all ideas take an historical and personal form,
so also this highest idea of atonement, in order that the whole
life of humanity might be mirrored in him. As in his death,
suffered for us, he represented the highest moral perfection
and the complete victory of the spirit over the flesh and sin,
we may make this our own by faith in him ; he raises us to
his own height, as we with him set ourselves free from the
rule of the flesh ; and this assurance gives us peace of mind,
so that we no longer dread God, but are sure of his grace.
The idea of sacrifice in this connection is to be understood
IO2 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. II.
only in the sense of a moral example and type of purified
and pardoned humanity. The doctrine of justification by faith
contains the religious truth, unrecognised by modern moral
theology, that man cannot be saved by his own merit, which
is as nothing before God's holiness, but alone by the grace
of God. The doctrines of eschatology must be interpreted
as symbolical mythology, which have at their basis the truths
of anthropology and soteriology (eternal life, the victory of
good in the kingdom of God).
It appears from these dogmatic views, as well as from the
excellent hints for practical theologians, that De Wette occu-
pied as free a position as the Rationalists with regard to the
literal authority of the creeds of the Church, but that he sought
to give their due value to the religious feelings, which the
Rationalists had not done, and, with a more unfettered mind
towards history, to maintain the connexion of the present life
of the Church with the past. It may be regarded as a defect
from the point of view of a scientific theology, that he tried to
effect this only by means of an aesthetical treatment of the
dogmas in question, which was often somewhat confused ; but
for the practical purposes of theology, which he always kept
in view, the advantages of his method of treatment may well
have exceeded its disadvantages. In this respect De Wette
occupies a position nearest to Herder in his relation to the
Rationalists ; and, of our contemporary theologians, Hase is
the spirit nearest of kin to him. And in the prosperity of the
churches of Thuringia lies the best proof that the prospects
of that church are not unpromising, which follows in the
course marked out by Herder, De Wette, and Hase.
CHAPTER II.
THE THEOLOGY OF SCHLEIERMACHER' S " GLAUBENSLEHRE "
AND HIS SCHOOL.
WHILST Rationalists and Supernaturalists carried on their
warfare with each other, without either side being able to
gain the victory, because both represented a partial truth and
shared false premises, a stronger than either came upon them,
who struck into new courses. I refer to SCHLEIERMACHER, from
whose work, Der christliche Glaube nach den Grundsdtzen der
evangelise hen Kirche im Ziisammenhang dargestellt ( i st ed. ,
1821 ; 2nd ed., 1831), dates an epoch in the history of modern
theology. The error common to both of these contending par-
ties had been that they conceived the Christian faith as a num-
ber of traditionary doctrines which appeared to stand in such
hopeless opposition to the rational thought of modern times
that one of the two must make room for the other ; the endless
contention being which of the two must yield, and how far ?
Schleiermacher took the ground from under this contention
by removing its main pre-supposition. The Christian faith,
as he showed, does not consist in any number of positive doc-
trinal propositions such as have arisen from intellectual reflec-
tion upon that faith ; this faith is not a doctrine, or a system
of doctrines, but a condition of devout feeling, a fact accord-
ingly of inward experience, neither produced by thought nor
depending on its existence, but, like all experience, simply an
object to be observed and described. He took up, therefore,
a position opposed to the standpoint of the Supernaturalists,
on the one hand, by conceiving the Christian faith not as a
doctrinal authority given us from without, but as an inward
condition of our own self-consciousness^ which must be con-
nected with the remaining contents of our consciousness and
the laws of our mind. On this point Schleiermacher occupies
completely the position of modern idealism, for which there
can be no truth that does not rise out of and answer to the
human mind. On the other hand, he maintained, in opposition
103
104 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. II.
Jo the Rationalists, the view that the Christian faith is not a
product of rational thinking, but a condition of the heart, a
feeling preceding thought and supplied independently of it ;
moreover, a feeling not of the devout individual only, but of
the Christian, or specifically of the Protestant, Church ; accord-
ingly a fact not merely of individual experience, but of the
common experience of a historical community ; an experience,
therefore, which, like all positive experiences in history, must
be received and intelligently described, while it cannot and may
not be reasoned away.
From the basis of religious experience, therefore, Schleier-
macher seeks to give an account of the Christian faith, sup-
posing all along that his own religious experience is essentially
the same as that of the Christian Church, at all events in the
Protestant form of it. That this supposition can be taken as
correct only with very considerable limitation, is what might
be expected in the case of a man whose religious nature had
been in his youth nurtured in the peculiar form of piety of the
Moravian community, and whose mind had been formed by
the study of Plato, Spinoza, Kant, Fichte, Jacobi, Schelling,
and who in his first work, his Discourses on Religion, had
appeared as a disciple of Romanticism, with its thoroughly
modern form of thought. It may be allowed that in the two
decades which lapsed between his Discourses and his Glaubens-
lehre, Schleiermacher had thrown off the extravagances of
Romanticism, and had brought his entire mode of thought
much more into accord with the faith of the Church : still, it
cannot be doubted, and his Glaubenslehre shows it most plainly,
that the varied elements of his rich education had a far-reaching
influence upon his religious consciousness ; so that his religious
feeling differed from that of the Church in some character-
istic points. Accordingly, in spite of all his honest effort to
harmonise and bring into one the individual and the com-
mon elements, his Glaubenslehre, which proceeds from this
subjective experience, retains everywhere a marked indivi-
dual character which could not make any direct claim to
general acceptance in the Church. However, we must not on
this account reproach Schleiermacher, when we remember that
the same objection would in some degree have to be made to
every attempt to give an account of the Christian faith from
the standpoint of the present ; in fact, it must be pronounced
really one of Schleiermacher's merits, that by his example he
Ch. II.] THE THEOLOGY OF SCHLEIERMACHER. 1 05
asserted the claims of individuality to a place in theology also, ,
and put an end to the miserable delusion of a sole and exclu-
sive possession of the truth. It is true that the perception
of this is yet far from being universal ; but I venture boldly
to assert that in future it will be regarded as a principal cri-
terion of true theological education, that the theologian should
remain conscious of the individuality of his way of looking at
things, and should renounce all claims to doctrinal authority of
universal validity.
The individual character of Schleiermacher s theological
system appears forthwith in his definition of religion, which
had great influence also upon his doctrine of God. Religion,
he teaches, is " the feeling of absolute dependence"; in our
relation to the world our consciousness is always divided be-
tween a feeling of relative freedom and a feeling of relative
dependence, according as our active or passive states of mind
predominate ; but when we rise above the interchange of these
relative states of feeling to the unity of the higher conscious-
ness, we get the feeling of an absolute dependence, which
is one with the consciousness of God ; inasmuch as the source
of this feeling, in which the antithesis of relative freedom and
dependence vanishes, can only be the unconditioned cause of
all conditioned interaction of beings, that is God. Acute as
this deduction is, it cannot be said that it describes accurately
or fully the nature of the religious feeling, particularly in its
Christian form. The religious feeling of reverence contains,
together with the sense of dependence on God, the sense of
obligation towards him, and of relationship and of exaltation
to him ; in this devout consciousness there is in addition to
the feeling of passive dependence also the feeling of moral
alliance, and accordingly of a free relation of the will ; where-
by the idea of God also obtains a much richer content than
that of mere causality ; at the same time the immediate reli-
gious feeling can receive a different qualitative characterisa-
tion, as the basis of the difference in relative value of the
feelings belonging to various stages of religion ; whilst in the
case of Schleiermacher's simple feeling of dependence nothing
more is possible than a quantitative difference in the degree
of strength possessed by the religious feeling in proportion to
the secular consciousness. But it is clear that a merely quanti-
tative estimate of the religious feeling, according to the strength
of its presence in consciousness, is not sufficient for the deter-
106 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. II.
mination of its qualitative value ; otherwise the devout feeling,
for instance, of a Mohammedan would be equal to that of a
Christian. If we ask how Schleiermacher came to give such
a meagre account of religious feeling, emphasising what may
be called the physical side of dependence on an infinite cause,
to the neglect of the moral side, represented in the feeling of
alliance with a voluntary power related spiritually to ourselves,
we can hardly be wrong in tracing the origin of this defect to
the influence of the philosophy of Spinoza, whose cognitio
Dei intuitiva is nothing else than the reference of all finite
phenomena to the necessary causality of God, that is, the feel-
ing of our dependence upon it. This supposition is confirmed
by Schleiermacher's doctrine of God, which is connected with
his imperfect theory of the nature of religion.
Having based his system of belief upon devout states of
feeling, of which he is conscious as a member of the Church,
for Schleiermacher the questions with which apologetics had
usually been occupied lose their relative importance and appear
in an entirely new light. Above all the Scriptures cannot, from
his position, be any longer regarded as the foundation of faith.
In the introduction to his dogmatic system, Schleiermacher
hardly comes to speak of them at all, but deals with them under
the head of the Church's means of grace. He regards them as
a product of the Holy Spirit in as far as the latter is the common-
spirit (Gemeingeisf) of the Church. This spirit has borne
witness to Christ in the apostolic writings, not essentially
otherwise than in later writings, only more at first hand, and
more under the immediate impression of the Apostles' per-
sonal acquaintance with Jesus, such as the men of a later
generation did not enjoy. On this account the writings of
the New Testament possess a special dignity as normative
for all subsequent accounts of Christianity ; but not so the
writings of the Old Testament ; since the connexion of Chris-
tianity with the religion of the Old Testament is, according to
Schleiermacher, only very loose and indirect. Speaking gene-
rally, it is not the reputation of the Scriptures upon which
faith in Christ rests, but this faith must be pre-supposed before
a special reputation can be assigned to the Scriptures. Least
of all may this reputation be based upon their inspiration, for
supposing even that the latter could be proved from the New
Testament writings, the conviction of it would still be very
far from Christian faith, and could by no means directly pro-
Ch. II.] THE THEOLOGY OF SCHLEIERMACHER. IO7
duce it, since this faith can proceed only from the total impres-
sion of the personality of Jesus. The normative dignity of the
New Testament writings rests solely upon the fact that that
impression can be obtained from them, that they, therefore,
truly transmit the image of Christ. On the other hand, the
reports they contain of external miracles, which Jesus is said
to have done or been the subject of, are matter for criticism.
The miracles cannot be regarded, according to the usual
habit, as supports of Christian faith, for the simple reason
that they presuppose the latter, and must be understood
by means of it. For as Christian faith finds in Christ the
highest revelation, miracles may reasonably be expected of
him (though they can be called such only relatively, as con-
taining something extraordinary for contemporary knowledge
of the connexion between physical and mental life), without
at all taking them out of the realm of the regular and orderly
phenomena of nature. Though Schleiermacher nowhere
offers an express critique of the traditional doctrine of miracles,
whether of the actuality or the possibility of the recorded
miracles, he still lays down the general principle that in the
interests of religion the necessity can never arise of regarding
an event as taken out of its connexion with nature in conse-
quence of its dependence on God. Even the miracles at the
beginning and the end of the life of Jesus, which are so often
looked upon in the Church as the foundation of faith in Christ,
do not form, according to Schleiermacher, an essential part of
faith in the person of Jesus, since his disciples already pos-
sessed this faith, although they still knew nothing of those
particular miracles.
At the same time Schleiermacher does not altogether reject
the idea of the miraculous, or the supernatural, or revelation.
All these terms represent in his view facts of religious experi-
ence which exceed ordinary experience ; but inasmuch as they
are experiences of the religious emotions, which, it must be
remembered, are part of human nature, they must also have a
side related to nature, and can accordingly be supernatural only
in a relative sense. By revelation he understands the origi-
nality of a religious phenomenon, whether it be in a personality
or in life, of such moment as to form the foundation of a reli
gious community : this definition excludes both external com-
munication and tradition, and also intentional invention and
reflection, while it includes divine communication and promul-
IO8 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. II.
gation. Only this communication must not be regarded as in
the first instance a didactic influence upon the mind in the form
of knowledge, but as the peculiar and extraordinary effect pro-
duced by the total impression of a personality upon the general
consciousness of those who come within its range ; which does
/not exclude direct instruction, but includes it only as one factor
amongst others. In heathenism, too, such personalities must be
looked upon as revelations of God, in whom the divine is like-
wise typically made known in an original manner, and such as
cannot be explained from the immediate historical surroundings.
Yet every such revelation is still only something relative, since
only the universe as a whole could be called the absolute reve-
lation, every individual phenomenon, however original it may
be, being intelligible only from the general condition of the
community to which it belongs. In any case, therefore, no
claim of absolute truth can be made for any revelation, since
this would involve a manifestation of God as he is in himself,
whilst an effective manifestation of him can only give expres-
sion to what he is in his relation to us. This is true also
of Christianity. Its origin in the person of Jesus is super-
natural in so far as the peculiar spiritual contents of his per-
son cannot be explained from the natural surroundings of his
life, but can have proceeded only from the general source of
spiritual life by a creative act of God. But this supernatural
origin is at the same time natural, in so far as the rise of a
higher original life must be conceived as the effect of a power
of development inherent in the race, a power which finds
expression, in conformity with divinely ordered laws, though
laws hidden from us, in certain men at certain points, that by
them the rest of mankind may be helped onwards. As the
highest development of the spiritual power of our race, the
unique phenomenon of Christ is not an absolute, but only
a relative miracle. In the same way, that which is " above
reason " in Christianity consists only in its transcending the or-
dinary human reason, not in its exceeding the rational faculties
of mankind at large, Christianity being in reality their highest
perfection. And, again, the doctrinal propositions of the
Christian faith are in so far beyond reason as their religious
content is not evolved from rational reflection, but is given as
a special experience, which, like every other similar experience,
can be received only by a love willing to behold it ; but they
are at the same time perfectly rational, in as far as they must
Ch. II.] THE THEOLOGY OF SCHLEIERMACHER. IOQ
conform to the same laws of logical thought to which all other
propositions are subject.
In these statements the relation of Schleiermacher to Ration-
alism and Supernaturalism is very plainly presented. With
the former he rejects the absolute miracle, and looks upon
Christianity as a product of human nature, of its original spiritual
energy, yet and thereby he goes over to the position of the
latter not as the product of ordinary thought and reflection,
but as an original creation of the highest development of
man's rational nature ; and moreover, as an unique historical
phenomenon, which is embodied in the person of the Saviour,
and has accordingly to be acknowledged as a positive fact of
revelation. Christian faith is, therefore, according to Schleier-
macher, not merely faith in universal religious or moral truths,
but in the historical person of Jesus as the Saviour, whose
characteristic influence is to produce in us the Christian con-
sciousness of salvation. And hereby the business of Christian
theology becomes for Schleiermacher even more positive than
for the Supernaturalists of that time : it has, according to him,
to describe faith in Christ as the Saviour, as given in the
Christian Church, and to draw it out connectedly into the
various doctrinal propositions therein implied : but it has
nothing to do with other sciences and philosophy. Dog-
matic propositions, he demands, ought to be " the outcome of
the observation of religious states of feeling," and ought on no
account to be mixed up nor confounded with speculative
propositions which are due to quite different interests. " Dog-
matic theology will never stand as firmly upon its basis as the
physical sciences have long done upon theirs, till the separation
of the two kinds of propositions is so complete that such a
strange question, for instance, as whether the same proposition
can be true in philosophy and false in theology, could not arise,
for the reason that a proposition cannot occur in the one in
the same form as it occurs in the other, but the difference must
be presupposed however great the similarity may seem to be."
" The Protestant Church is convinced that the special shape
peculiar to its doctrinal propositions is quite independent of
all schools of philosophy, and does not owe its origin at all to
any speculative interest, but solely to the satisfaction of im-
mediate self-consciousness by means of the genuine and
unadulterated institution of Christ." Neither will Schleier-
macher admit that at the beginning of the formation of
110 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. II.
Christian doctrine speculation had any influence on the subject-
matter of dogmatic propositions ; an opinion with which no
historian of the present day will agree, seeing the influence of
Greek speculation is plain enough in the theology of Paul or
John!
We have not here to ask whether the rigid separation of
theology from philosophy demanded by Schleiermacher is
possible, but whether he himself fully carried it out. So far
as the form of his doctrinal propositions goes, this is undoubt-
edly the case ; he carefully avoids all reference to philosophical
matter, and all direct and declared dependence on philosophical
schools and systems. Still, no one can fail to see that not
only his own philosophical education generally, but also a
definite philosophical system, exerted a profound influence
upon his theology. Nor could his critical distinction between
the form of ecclesiastical doctrine and its religious subject-
matter, his appeal from the traditionary objects of faith to
the religious subject's own inner life as the source of their
origin, be conceivable apart from the school of critical idealism.
And how could we explain the wide departure of Schleier-
macher's doctrine regarding God and the world from that in
vogue in the Church, and its close approach to the doctrine of
Spinoza, if it had really been deduced simply from the con-
sideration of the religious feelings of Christians ? Strauss,
we must allow, was right when he said, 1 " None of the leading
propositions of the first part of Schleiermacher's Glaubenslehre
can be fully understood save as they are re-translated into the
formulae of Spinoza, from which they were originally taken.
The relation of God to the world (which forms the basis of
his entire theology), according to which both God and world
are conceived as equal magnitudes, only that the former is the
absolute and undivided unity, while the latter is the unity divided
and differentiated, can be explained only from the relation of
the natura naturans to the natura naturata of Spinoza."
In a note in his Glaiibenslehre, Schleiermacher incidentally
throws out the passing but pregnant remark, that pantheism
is consistent with religion if it is only meant to represent
some form of theism, and the word is not simply a masked
materialistic negation of theism. " If we keep pantheism to
the customary formula, One and All, even then God and the
1 Charakteristiken und Kritiken, p. 166.
Ch. II.] THE THEOLOGY OF SCHLEIERMACHER. Ill
world remain distinct, at least in point of function ; and there-
fore a pantheist of this kind, when he regards himself as part
of the world, feels himself with this All dependent on that
which is the One." There can be no doubt but that Schleier-
macher has here characterised his own view of God and the
world, as it is presented best of all in his Dictlektik, but plainly
enough in his Glaubenslehre. At the beginning of his work,
in the deduction of the idea of God from the feeling of
dependence, Schleiermacher lays emphasis on the point that
the word " God" is only an expression for the " whence" of
our absolute dependence, but is by no means given or to be
conceived as an object : to conceive of God apart from the
world would be empty mythology. God is the correlative
unity to the multiplicity presented as the world. Creation and
Preservation are forms of expression for the eternal causality
or omnipotence of God, which is so completely represented in
the totality of being, that in the divine omnipotence there is
no excess of potentiality beyond the totality of the actual, nor
in the latter anything in excess of the former. Omnipotence
and the totality of natural causes are commensurate, the former
never coming in the place of the latter to meet a defect, but
everything exists and arises solely and wholly by means of the
natural system of things ; so that each thing existing by virtue
of all, and all things entirely by the divine omnipotence, all
things undivided subsist through one. This is, in fact, an
exact formulation of the " immanence" of God as taught by
Spinoza. But Schleiermacher holds not only Spinoza's theory
of immanence, but also his idea of substance, with its simple
unity of being and operation to the exclusion of all definitions.
In his view the divine attributes do not denote any distinc-
tions in God, or even so much as an objective difference in his
relation to the world ; which would be to conceive God as a
multitude of functions, and therewith, Schleiermacher thinks,
to bring God into the region of antitheses ; but they denote
only the various modes in which we refer our feeling of depen-
dence to God, different aspects in which God's causality (in
itself simple) presents itself to our consciousness. That is,
as neither in time nor space, but as conditioning both, this
divine causality is his omnipresence and eternity ; as in extent
one with the totality of natural causes, though differing in
form, it is his omnipotence ; as living or spiritual causality, it
is called his omniscience ; in relation to our moral conscious
112 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. II.
ness, it is his holiness or justice, inasmuch as together with
sin we have conscience, and connect the feeling of guilt with
evil and both in virtue of divine arrangement ; in relation
to the consciousness of salvation, the divine causality becomes
love and wisdom. All these distinctions, therefore, are con-
fined to the human consciousness of God, and have no founda-
tion in the objective nature of God, which does not admit of
any distinctive qualifications, as they would only contradict the
infinity of God, according to Schleiermacher ; in full agree-
ment with Spinoza's canon, Omnis determinatio est negatio.
An absolutely simple causality of this kind, in which there is
no distinction between posse and facere, facere and velle, velle
and scire, nor any succession of acts and states, but everything
is simply one eternal act, is at all events not a personality,
nor can it scarcely be thought of as spiritual being, having
nothing in common with anything which constitutes for us the
spiritual ; it is in reality simply operative power, like Spinoza's
substance. From the first it has been remarked that this
conception of God fails to meet the need of the Christian
religious consciousness ; nor was Schleiermacher able to bring
it into harmony with the religious consciousness in any other
way than by reducing the latter to the mere feeling of depen-
dence, thereby detracting from its moral side as we saw above
(p. 105). It is therefore certain that Schleiermacher cannot be
regarded as the unprejudiced interpreter of the universal, still
less of the Christian, religious experience, in his treatment of
the primary ideas of religion and God, but that he has reduced
them to the dimensions of his philosophical system.
And how did he possibly find a transition from this basis
to the Christian faith, and make the account of this, rather
Spinozistic than Christian, conception of God a description of
the religious consciousness of the Christian community ? By
identifying the antithesis between the consciousness of God
and sense-consciousness (answering to the opposition in
Spinoza of the reason to the imagination) with that between
sin and salvation of the Christian consciousness. This
identification was effected thus : the predominance of the
sense-consciousness over the consciousness of God, or the
hindrance of the latter by the former, becomes to us the
consciousness of sin and religious unhappiness, or the need of
salvation ; while, on the contrary, the predominance of the
God-consciousness over the sense-consciousness, in which
Ch. II.] THE THEOLOGY OF SCHLEIERMACHER. 113
every act of the latter is determined by the former, becomes
to us the consciousness of the removal of that hindrance, or
of salvation, of the strength and blessedness of the higher
self-consciousness. Between the one and the other of these
two states of feeling lies the entire life of the religious
consciousness. But while the condition of the hindered con-
sciousness of God is the general experience of mankind, the
condition of the delivered and unhindered consciousness is the
special experience of the Christian Church, and is the operation
of its Founder. Thus what is primarily a difference within
consciousness becomes likewise an objective difference between
mankind in its natural condition, as needing salvation, and
mankind as Christian and saved. It is easy to perceive that
these conditions, described by Schleiermacher as "sin and
salvation," are really what Spinoza described, in the last two
books of his Ethics as the servitus et libertas kumana, and
what is by Kant called the supremacy of the lower, sensuous,
and of the higher, rational, desires. The difference is simply
that the transition from the one condition to the other is in the
view of the philosophers made as a psychological and ethical
process within the consciousness and by virtue of its natural
human constitution ; whilst in the system of our theologian the
change appears as an historical process in the consciousness
of human society, having its origin and effective cause in a
definite point of human history. If it is true that the human
race is the macrocosmic type of individual life, the right to
identify the various states of the religious personal conscious-
ness with the different phases of the historical development of
humanity cannot be disputed ; but then neither can the logical
inference be avoided, that the same laws and forces which
condition the change of states in the individual will also
produce the analogous change in the historical life of the race,
without calling in the aid of special and unique causes alien
to all customary experience. We shall subsequently see
what treatment this inference met with in Schleiermacher's
theological system.
The antithesis of sin and salvation, or grace, is made by
Schleiermacher the basis of the disposition of the second or
special part of his treatise, after he had in the first part
treated of the religious consciousness without reference to this
antithesis, or the fundamental questions of God and the uni-
verse and the original perfection of man. In each part the
G. T. i
I 14 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. II.
materials are arranged so that the religious consciousness as
such is first described, and then the doctrines concerning the
world and God that are therein implied. As regards the
doctrine concerning God, there is the disadvantage in this
arrangement, that the doctrine is nowhere dealt with con-
nectedly, but only in fragments here and there ; which, it must
be allowed, offered the advantage of veiling the want of an
objective conception of God. In other respects this arrange-
ment involves a number of difficulties : for instance, the
Christology falls under the account of the Christian conscious-
ness, whilst it ought surely to have an historical object as its
subject-matter ; again, the doctrine of the Church is placed
under the declarations of the Christian consciousness regard-
ing the world. The eschatology is handled in loose connec-
tion with the rest of the work as a " prophetic article."
Sin, Schleiermacher describes as the opposition of the flesh
to the spirit, as the hindrance of the higher self-conscious-
ness, or God-consciousness, by the lower, sensuous or finite
consciousness. It has its natural rise in the priority of man's
sensuous development to his spiritual development, and of
his intellectual development to his power of will. It is there-
fore the inevitable outcome of human nature as such, and not
an external inheritance from Adam. By the first sin of the
first parents no alteration of the nature of the human race was
brought about, which would have been impossible, but that
first sin was only the first appearance of the sinfulness which
is a property of human nature as such, and was to be looked
for in the first parents. The ecclesiastical doctrine of two
consecutive states, status integritatis and status corruptionis,
must therefore be interpreted as the two sides of man's original
perfection, both of which always belong contemporaneously
to our nature, or of the endowment with God-consciousness and
of an original sinfulness, or sensuous weakness. Rational as
this re-interpretation of the traditional doctrines of the primi-
tive state and the fall undoubtedly is, it must be remarked that
Schleiermacher's view of the nature of sin is as unsatisfactory
as the essentially similar view of Spinoza, according to
which evil is only defective power in the reason over sense-
affections ; whereas a true analysis of the moral consciousness,
uninfluenced by philosophical prepossessions, will always
discover in evil a conflict of the selfish individual will with the
obligations of the law of the whole, and therein a self-contradic-
Ch. II.] THE THEOLOGY OF SCHLEIERMACHER. 115
tion within the mind itself, not merely a contradiction between
mind and. sense. With great dialectical acuteness, Schleier-
macher brings the other traditionary articles under this head
into accord with his totally different premises. He adopts
without reserve the position that the sinfulness inherent in the
nature of the human race must be regarded as a total inability
to do good, which, while it must not be exaggerated so as to
cancel the capability of salvation, is still so far infinite that it
cannot be completely removed even by the power of salvation.
Guilt must also, according to Schleiermacher, attach to original
or hereditary sin, it being reckoned not to each man in his
individual capacity, but to the race as the common guilt of a
common act ; so that the consciousness of it always involves
at the same time the general human need of salvation. Finally,
Schleiermacher goes even a step beyond the traditionary
doctrines in maintaining that actual sin proceeds to such
an extent from original sin, that in the entire sinful race
not a single moment occurs in which contradiction of the
God-consciousness is wholly absent. Accordingly the dif-
ference in point of merit amongst men must not, according
to him, be sought in the various degrees of their sin, but
solely in their nearer or more distant relation to salvation ;
an assertion in which appears the same subordination as
in Spinoza of the moral point of view to that abstract level-
ling conception of evil as the general malum metaphysicum
of the finite.
Schleiermacher's soteriology starts from the position, that
we are conscious in the Christian community that our God-con-
sciousness constantly advances so as to gradually overcome the
hindrances proceeding from the sense-consciousness, attended
by the corresponding approach to the condition of blessedness.
But since this advancement cannot originate in the life of sin
common to humanity, where nothing but unhappiness is
developed, it must, Schleiermacher argues, have its origin in
the new common life of the community founded by Jesus, and
be accordingly traced back to the saving activity of Jesus as its
cause. The question arises therefore, To be the cause of such
an effect, what must the person of Jesus have been ? The
answer is : Our experience as Christians of the increasing
strength of our God-consciousness could proceed from the
person of Jesus only if this consciousness was actually present
in him in absolute measure ; that is, only if the ideal type of
Il6 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. II.
religion was in him historical, and his entire life was that of
the religious model, person and idea in his case perfectly
corresponding. As this typical, model man, according to
Schleiermacher's exposition, Christ was distinguished from all
other men by his essential sinlessness and absolute perfection,
which excluded not only all actual sin, but also all possibility
of it, and accordingly everything like a moral struggle ; and
further, by his freedom from error, having never himself
originated an erroneous notion, nor adopted one from others
as one of his convictions. This perfect God-consciousness
of Christ must be regarded as properly God in him, and as
the one perfect revelation of God in the human race. In
this respect his person was a miraculous phenomenon in the
common life of sin, not to be explained by that life itself, but
only by a new creative act of God, which may be called a
second creation, or rather completion of creation, being really
one with the first creation, as part of the same universal system
of nature. It is this only that the phenomenon of Christ
had its cause in a creative act, or an original attainment of
the human race as unaffected by sin, which Schleiermacher
regards as the true essence of the doctrines of the supernatural
origin of his life ; while, on the other hand, the suspension of
the natural parental participation in the origination of his life
adds nothing of essential moment to the matter. In general,
the miraculous in the person of Jesus must not be conceived
in such a way as to negative the sameness of his nature and
ours. Though it may trace its origin to the miraculous (in
the above sense), the complete historical character of his
subsequent life must still be held fast. To this belongs the
gradual unfolding of his powers, including the spiritual ones,
save that this will have proceeded without contradictions and
struggles, as the constant and regular passage from the in-
nocence of childhood to full spiritual vigour ; further, his
specific nationality, the qualification of his ideas and actions
by the habits of thought of his nation and his age, although
it is not allowed that his personal activity, but only his re-
ceptivity, was subject to this limitation. In so far, Schleier-
macher grants that further progress in advance of the
historical form of the appearance of Jesus, as this was con-
ditioned by temporal and national limitations, is not only
possible, but a fact ; but this is not an advance beyond his
essential nature, which will, on the contrary, be only more
Ch. II.] THE THEOLOGY OF SCHLEIERMACHER. II J
and more fully brought out by the progressive development
of the Christian world. Schleiermacher thus makes evidently
the well-known distinction between the ideal principle which
was revealed in Jesus and the form the principle takes as a
historical phenomenon. In the communication of the principle
itself consists the work of Christ : his work as Saviour is
that of imparting to others the strength of his consciousness
of God ; his work as Reconciler is the communication of the
happiness of this consciousness ; effects which were at first
the immediate work of Christ, but subsequently could only
be produced by the continued operation of his spirit and
example in the mind of believers. To the ecclesiastical dogma
of vicarious satisfaction, Schleiermacher attaches the following
meaning : Christ made satisfaction in so far that a source of
inexhaustible blessing was opened in his person and activity
as Founder of the Church ; but this satisfaction is not vicarious,
inasmuch as the blessing of it belongs only to those who also
enter into fellowship with Christ ; to his sufferings, on the
other hand, a vicarious character attaches, since by virtue of
his sinlessness, his own person would have been beyond the
reach of the universal calamity connected with sin ; but this
form of substitution is not satisfaction, individuals in the
Christian community having, as we all know, still themselves
to suffer. In other words, Schleiermacher rejects the idea of
a transcendental reconciliation through the atoning sufferings
of Christ as the representative of mankind before God, and
puts in its place the historical view of the matter, according
to which Christ by the total impression of his personality
had such a strengthening and beatifying influence on men's
religious consciousness that they felt themselves saved and
reconciled, that is, delivered, or gradually being delivered,
from the hindering and miserable contradiction between the
higher and lower self-consciousness. It is this stronger con-
sciousness of God, proceeding from Christ, which, as the
consciousness of the Christian community, is the "holy Spirit."
As the God-consciousness of Christ is the divine in him, so
the holy Spirit " is the union of the Divine Being with human
nature in the form of the common spirit of the community, as
animating the collective life of believers." The holy Spirit,
therefore, is the same saving principle in the community that
primarily appeared in the person of Jesus in the form of an
individual life ; and the saving work of this principle is the
Il8 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. II.
production, in those individuals who open themselves re-
ceptively to it, of a life of invigorated and felicitated God-
consciousness similar to that which was typically present in
Jesus. In this consists "conversion and justification," the
two aspects of " regeneration," in which a new religious con-
sciousness is produced in the believer by the common Chris-
tian spirit of the community, and a new life, or " sanctification,"
is prepared for.
Looked at from this point, Schleiermacher's soteriology
does not in principle differ from Kant's philosophical doctrine,
and that of his followers, according to which the victory of
the good principle over the bad, or of reason over sense, is
effected by " faith in the ideal Son of God," that is, by the
reception of the divine idea of man into the heart and the
quickening of the divine spirit in man. In both systems
salvation is an inward process in man, the deliverance of his
higher divine being from the hindrances of his lower nature ;
and both agree also in regarding this inward deliverance and
renewal in the individual life as evoked and sustained by the
moral community, the foundation of which must be traced to
Jesus. There is, finally, agreement in regarding this common
spirit of the higher religious and moral life as having proceeded
from the Founder of this community with original energy and
purity, and as therefore to be beheld in his person as in a
typical example for imitation. But while the philosophers
generally go no further, and see no cause for supposing that
the relation of this ideal principle to the human personality in
the person of Jesus was essentially different from what it is
in other men, Schleiermacher feels obliged to trace the origin
of this common Christian spirit to a personality of unique
perfection, or sinlessness and freedom from error. But he
has failed to show either the congruity of this supposition
with the sameness of Christ's nature and ours or any good
ground for the logical necessity of the supposition itself. For
all that he alleges with regard to the experiences of the Chris-
tian community as to the common spirit of a strengthened
and felicitated God-consciousness experiences which con-
fessedly never go beyond a relative approximation to perfection
and felicity by no means presupposes an origin of absolute
quantitative perfection of God-consciousness, the psychological
possibility of which is exceedingly problematic ; but that
experience is fully accounted for on the supposition of the in-
Ch. II.] THE THEOLOGY OF SCHLEIERMACHER. I1Q
ward qualitative truth of the God-consciousness which is present
in the community as a fact of experience. Schleiermacher
had previously himself acknowledged that the inward quali-
tative truth of a religious principle must not be at once con-
founded with the personal perfection of its first preacher. In
his Discourses he had pronounced the confounding of the
fundamental fact in which a religion takes its rise with the
fundamental idea of this religion itself a " great mistake,"
which has misled almost everybody and given a false direction
to the view of almost all religions. But it cannot be denied
that this mistake lies at the basis of his own dogmatic theory
of the ideal person of Christ. That he could thus deceive him-
self on this point may be psychologically explained from the
peculiar personal wants of his religious nature, in which the
Moravian impressions of his early days continued to operate.
And for the practical value of his theological system that error
worked advantageously, without doubt, helping as it did
to bring it into line with ecclesiastical tradition. It is true
that what was in Schleiermacher's case an inconsequence,
based on individual peculiarities, was made by others the
principal thing and the starting-point of a positive retrograde
movement in dogmatics.
It remains to state the chief points of Schleiermacher's
doctrine of the Church, its essential characteristics, and its
origin and consummation. He rejects the traditionary distinc-
tion between the visible and the invisible Church, as contra-
dictory terminology ; for what is invisible is not actually the
Church, and what is the Church is not invisible. The proper
meaning of this distinction he finds very justly in the re-
lation of the operative Christian spirit in the Church to the
natural, sinful elements, or the world, still present in it,
that is, in the opposition of the spirit and the flesh, transferred
to the whole body of the Church. It is only to the first aspect
of the Church that the predicates of unity, universality, sanc-
tity, and infallibility are to be applied ; to the historical form
of it, on the other hand, only so far as it is actually approxi-
mating to its ideal. Amongst the means of grace, "prayer
in the name of Christ" is admirably handled. It represents
the common desire and will of the Church as directed to the
consummation of the kingdom of God, and its presentiment
of what is truly salutary, having in so far the promise of being
heard. But this must not be conceived as involving anything
I2O DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. II.
approaching a magical influence upon the divine will, such
prayer having simply a strengthening effect upon the pray-
ing community itself. The sacraments are treated from the
standpoint of the union of the Lutheran and the Reformed
(Calvinistic and Helvetian) confessions ; with a rejection of
extreme views, various forms of the idea of a sacrament are
admitted ; Schleiermacher's own view approaches most closely
the spiritual form of the Reformed confessions. Under infant
baptism, the addition to the rite, which has importance pri-
marily for the Church only, of a personal confession on the
part of the candidate on reaching the adult age (confirmation)
is demanded, as necessary for completing the sacramental
means of grace.
To the most subtle and acute portions of his work belongs
his treatment of the doctrine of election. As early as 1819,
Schleiermacher had published an essay in defence of the
Calvinistic doctrine on this head, the fundamental ideas of
which are worked out in his Glaubenslehre in a somewhat
modified form and with more of an eirenical than apologetic
purpose. The distinction between elect and non-elect is based
certainly upon " divine predetermination, which may not be
made dependent on foreknowledge, as thereby the divine
causality would be made conditional ; at the same time the
articles of predetermination and foreknowledge have equal
right to be retained side by side, inasmuch as they represent
simply different ways of looking at the same thing." (This
reminds us of the way in which Spinoza, in his Theologico-
Political Treatise, explains the divine determination as identi-
cal with the divine knowledge.) Nevertheless, Schleiermacher
relieves the harshness of the Calvinistic doctrine by limiting
the dualism of elect and non-elect to the historical form of
the kingdom of God, and denying its validity as the definitive
end of things. In the course of historical development, it is
a necessary law that all cannot be at the same time received
into the Christian community, but some are preferred to
others, who are for the time put back. This distinction is
founded on the general relation of the kingdom of God to the
world, and is accordingly presupposed in the divine order of
things. But it is not an absolute, but only a relative differ-
ence, between an earlier and a later reception into the sphere
of the operations of divine grace. This temporary difference
will sometime cease in a final universal salvation ; with this
Ch. II.] THE THEOLOGY OF SCHLEIERMACHER. 121
consolatory outlook faith rises above the apparent harshness
of the doctrine of election, without in any way letting go the
unconditionality of the divine decrees.
With these prophetic glances into the future of the con-
summation of the Church, " the prophetic articles," as
Schleiermacher entitles his eschatological sections, are occu-
pied more closely. At the commencement he makes the general
observation, that the description of the perfected condition of
the Church, since it does not arrive in the course of human
life on the earth, is directly of use only as the model towards
which we ought to approximate. He then proceeds to say of
the. belief in personal immortality, that it is not connected in
general with faith in God, for it was possible to expound the
latter without reference to it. It is also possible to conceive
a resignation of individual immortality based, not upon a
materialistic denial of the spirit, but upon a humble conscious-
ness of the limitation of all individual life ; with such a view,
the supremacy of the God-consciousness would be perfectly
consistent, while it would also require the purest morality and
spirituality of life. On the other hand, there may be an irre-
ligious, eudaemonistic form of faith in immortality : for instance,
" whenever the faith is postulated on behalf of retribution
only." "If, therefore, it must be admitted that the continu-
ance of personal existence may be rejected in a form prompted
more thoroughly by godliness than is the case with other
forms of its adoption, the connexion of this belief with the
consciousness of God as such cannot be maintained." But
though faith in immortality is not directly connected with
faith in God, it is still connected with faith in Christ, in
so far as Christ's promise of the lasting fellowship of his
followers with himself presupposes, not only his, but also
our own personal immortality (but this is probably only a
less simple form of the truth, that the hope of immortality is
based upon the Christian consciousness of the indestructible
salvation of the devout children of God). As regards the
conceptions of the Church as to the future life and the con-
summation of all things, in Schleiermacher's opinion, they
ought to have a place in dogmatic theology only as " ten-
tative efforts of an insufficiently authorised faculty of surmise
(Aknungsvermogen), in conjunction with the reasons for and the
considerations against them." The difficulties of the doctrines
appear to him especially that the conceptions formed of the
122 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. II.
consummated condition of the whole Church, and again of
the perfected condition of individual souls after death, nowhere
fully agree together ; it is as difficult to conceive of the con-
summated Church, after the analogy of the present one, as in
continual development, as it is to think of it as completed and
so without movement, the latter condition presenting no ends
for active work for one another. The only course left for us,
therefore, in this matter is to put the imagination, to whose
sphere all these things that are foreign to our present experi-
ence pertain, under the protection of exegetical science, and
to work up the materials which it supplies.
At the end of the work is added a section on the Trinity.
It follows of itself from what has already been said on
Schleiermacher 1 s doctrine as to the divine attributes, that he
could not acknowledge hypostatic distinctions in the Divine
Being. His dialectical critique of the ecclesiastical doctrine
of the Trinity is as admirable as the historical estimate of the
various motives which led to the construction of this doctrine
is unsatisfactory. It is undoubtedly correct that the doctrine
is not a direct utterance as to the Christian self-consciousness,
but only a combination of several of such, namely, of our
union with God by the revelation of Christ, and by the com-
mon spirit of the Christian Church. Schleiermacher explains,
therefore, the Trinity modalistically of the various forms of
the revelation of God, and justifies his procedure by an appeal
to the early example of the Sabellians.
The entire theology of the last half-century, as far as it seeks
at all to remain in touch with critical thought, has been in
some degree or other influenced by the theological system of
Schleiermacher. But of the numbers who called themselves
disciples of Schleiermacher, it has been only a very few who
have succeeded in maintaining that combination of keen logical
thinking, inward devoutness of feeling, and close sympathy
with the life of the Church, which constituted the chief char-
acteristics of the master. In the case of the majority, the
requirements of their personal devout feeling, and still more
regard to the real or supposed wants of the churches, pre-
vailed to such an extent as to lead them to put on one side
the critical element in the theology of Schleiermacher, and to
use his formulae rather for the purpose of hiding or modifying
the difficulties of the supranaturalistic theology than to en-
courage them to advance beyond the old standpoint along the
Ch. II.] THE THEOLOGY OF SCHLEIERMACHER. 123
new paths of the master. It is true this " positive mediating
theology " (positive Vermitthingstheologie] rendered the ser-
vice to Church life of softening the old antitheses, of bringing
parties nearer to each other, and, in opposition to the narrow-
ness of strict confessionalism, of giving effect in the Church
to a certain breadth of religious views, together with warmth
of devout feeling. But as regards scientific theology, it marks,
in general, not so much an advance beyond as a falling back
behind Schleiermacher, even though we must admit that in
some points its divergence from him was justified.
In the System der christlichen Lehre, by Carl Immanuel
Nitzsch, in the Dogmatik (left unfinished) of Twesten, in Ull-
mann's works on the Sinlessness of Christ and the Nature of
Christianity, in Julius Mliller's book on Sin, and in other
representatives of this school, the prevailing aim is to save as
much as possible of the traditional matter of the ecclesiastical
dogmas, while softening down their offensive features by forms
of expression borrowed from Schleiermacher's theology. Nor
in this effort was there wanting, on the part of the above-
named theologians, either learning or dialectical ingenuity :
what they lacked was critical power and simple thoroughness
and consistency of logical thought. The one amongst them
who possessed most independence of thought was NITZSCH ;
but his desire to be profound caused him to sacrifice clearness,
and his affected brevity often issued in oracular ambiguity.
He took as his starting-point the fundamental thought of
Schleiermacher, that religion is not doctrine but life, direct
consciousness, feeling. At the same time he sought to bring
religious feeling into closer connexion with knowledge and
volition than Schleiermacher had done ; he laid special stress
and justly on the recognition of a necessary and radical
union of religion with morality, treating both dogmatics and
ethics together accordingly in his System der christlichen
Lehre. In his exposition of the idea of revelation, the origi-
nality, the new beginning of a religious phenomenon in the life
of humanity, is made the prime feature, and then follows what
promises to be an extension of the idea so as to embrace
heathen religions, as far as they can be conceived as an
education for Christianity ; but, after all, this preparation for
Christianity was only negative and ideal, while the positive
and real preparation is to be found only in the facts and events
of Old Testament history. With the supranaturalists, Nitzsch
124 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. II.
places miracles and prophecies principally amongst the specific
facts of revelation. Miracles are to be regarded as super-
natural, creative acts ; yet not as unnatural or contrary to law,
but only as a higher nature in the lower one. Indeed, he does
not hesitate to say, " Miracles and nature, though distinct,
cannot be separated ; for the complete idea of nature involves
that of miracle, and the true idea of miracle that of nature."
Irreconcilable conceptions are to be reconciled by thus playing
fast and loose with words ! So with reference to prophecy, at
first the rational point of view is presented, that prophecy has
essentially to do with the divine in history and relates to the
kingdom of God as a whole, not to the details of outward
events. Nevertheless, prediction of single events of the
future, though only to a " moderate" extent, must not be
excluded from prophecy. The fulfilment of prophecy, how-
ever, must not be conceived as a complete " consequence,"
but as an analogical or typical correspondence, which admit
also of a repeated and gradual fulfilment. That is, we have
the confusion of two totally opposite points of view : on the
one hand, development in accordance with law, and on the
other, a supernatural prediction of accidental details. For
Scripture, too, Nitzsch demands a "completely unique union
of the divine word with the human, a quite peculiar economy,"
by which the miraculous character of an infallible authority
is secured to the Bible. Thus in his Prolegomena, to go no
further, the standpoint of Schleiermacher is absolutely put
back to that of the supranaturalists ; and the same thing
occurs in the body of the work, especially in his Ckristology.
TWESTEN, it is true, excels Nitzsch in the formal clearness of
his reasoning, though the material weakness of his incon-
gruous principles is thereby made only the more obvious.
His Dogmatik der Evangelisch-Luthtrischen Kir c he, of
which, however, only the first part, as far as the doctrine of
the angels, has appeared, is a surprising attempt to deduce the
ideas of the orthodoxy of the seventeenth century from the
religious feelings of the modern consciousness, in which
attempt not all the arts of a sophistic scholasticism avail to
bridge the wide chasm which parts the two points of view.
In JULIUS MULLER the scholasticism was carried so far as to
revive the ancient Gnostic theory of the fall of man before
all time, a theory which found no favour amongst his theo-
logical friends. Other representatives of this supranaturalistic
Ch. II.] THE THEOLOGY OF SCHLEIERMACHER. 125
Mediating Theology will come before us subsequently, either
amongst the apologists in opposition to Strauss, or amongst
the speculative eclectics.
The only theologian among the immediate pupils of
Schleiermacher who has taken up his ideas in their purity and
developed them with independence, is ALEXANDER SCHWEIZER.
The significance which he ascribes to his master's Glaubenslehre,
and the direction in which he seeks to further develop it, he
has clearly stated in the introductory paragraph of his own
Christ lie he Glaubenslehre nach protestantise hen Grundsatzen
(1863-73). " The distinctive nature of Schleiermacher's
theological system is a subjectivity open and free towards the
true objectivity, or an objectivity such as can really live in the
devout subject and make itself felt as the truth. That which
marks the present stage of our development in the Church,
which has been far more widely reached than is openly
confessed, is not Schleiermacher's person and his dogmatic
labours, but the freedom in appropriating traditional dogmas
which was evinced by him as an obligation upon our time
generally, and which has since Schleiermacher been still more
urgently imposed upon us as a duty. Unmistakably our age
needs and demands a free development of theology as well as
of piety, of congregations as well as of the Church, a free,
independent sphere for the religious life, a system of religious
belief which represents the faith that is really believed and
believable, a conscious advance beyond dogmatism and
dogmatics." Theology must not take its matter merely from
the Scriptures, nor merely from the ecclesiastical creeds, nor
again merely from the reason, in so far as it has not been
brought under the influence of Christian experience ; but from
the faith itself of the Protestant Church, that is, the devout
consciousness, as far as it has been brought under the influence
of the general experience of the Protestant Church in its
historical development. The common Christian life of the
churches is the sphere in which alone Christian experiences
can adequately arise. Our faith is based upon Christian experi-
ence. It is accordingly never merely feeling, but always like-
wise thought and impulse, i.e., tends to pass into doctrine and
action, especially as the feeling itself arises in consequence
of doctrine and action, or is produced and determined in
us as Christian feeling. Although religious feeling is the
primary and original element of subjective piety, on the ether
126 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. II.
hand it is neither an isolated thing, inasmuch as it can only be
made intelligible by its expression in doctrine and practice,
nor is it what it is save through the influence of the religious
practices and teaching by which we are surrounded. As little
as the non-ego can be construed from the pure ego can a
definite, clear, and complete system of faith be deduced from
the devout ego, that is, from the emotions of the ego which
we call feelings, without the incorporation, consciously or
unconsciously, of the objective experiences of the Church
which are represented in its doctrines. It is true that
Schleiermacher desired this, but he identified his own devout
feelings too much with those of the Church. It is an
excellence of Schweizer's Glaubenslehre that a definite dis-
tinction is drawn in it between subjective and objective faith,
and a mutual interaction and regulation of both is maintained.
Connected with this is a further difference by which Schweizer
gave fuller development to the theology of Schleiermacher on
the speculative side. If devout feeling is the source from
which doctrines are derived, it cannot be also the canon by
which these doctrinal statements are to be judged. For this
purpose devout feeling is an element too indefinite, variable,
purely subjective, with regard to which it is impossible to be
sufficiently certain either as to the measure of its agreement
with the feeling of the Church or as to its intrinsic truth.
Not only must its place in the development of Christian piety
be in each case proved, a condition which Schleiermacher did
not sufficiently observe, but it must also be determined from
another side than the historical one by the ideal of religion
itself, since we are by Christian experience placed in a position
to find and recognise that ideal. The moral and religious
perfection of man is an ideal which lives within our souls,
having been aroused and fostered by Christian experience
especially, and taking definite shape in our conceptions, it
helps to determine our religious feelings also. Whatever
contradicts this ideal in our traditionary religion cannot be to
us the truth ; Christianity, whatever impure and perishable
accretions may have sometimes accidently adhered to it, is
essentially one with the ideal of perfect religion, and must
therefore take the form called for by this ideal as well as by
Christian experience. As in objective knowledge generally,
the truth is established by the agreement of empirical
observation with the idea obtained by the speculative method,
Ch. II.] THE THEOLOGY OF SCHLEIERMACHER. 12J
so in religion certain truth is reached by the agreement of
experience with the religious idea. The excellence of
Christianity, which guarantees for it imperishable duration, is
that in its essential matter it coincides with the idea of perfect
religion, and simply seeks to realise it. Christianity comes to
its true self, not in the reason of rationalism, but in the ideal
of perfect piety. The one proper canon of truth, to be
followed by theology in its criticism of traditionary matter, is
to compare the historical form with the idea, and to require
the approximation of the former to the latter. It is precisely
the excellence of this canon of truth that it is not one so
definitely formulated as, for instance, the Apostles' Creed ;
for no period is in a position to produce an infallible formula
to serve as the canon of truth for all the future. This canon
must be itself subject to improvement, advancing with
universal and Christian knowledge. The ideal of perfect
godliness will be perceived more purely and fully in proportion
as Christian experience advances, since our ideals are brought
to life and full consciousness by means of the experience that
answers to them. Guidance into more truth takes place in the
interaction of progressive Christian experience and of the
ideal of absolute religion and morality, rendered growingly
perfect through that experience, so that whatever does not
satisfy that ideal cannot be genuinely Christian, however long
it may have dogmatic currency.
These are the principles of genuine Protestantism, and at
the same time of genuine modern scientific theology. The
ideal factor, the idea which lives within us of the perfect
religion, is recognised, together with the factor of experience
in the consciousness of the Church, as the canon of truth in
the construction of theological doctrines, and it is at the same
time acknowledged that this religious ideal is not always the
same, or to be put into an exact formula for all time, but
develops, advances, and deepens. Such principles cut the
ground from under dogmatism in every form, not only the
dogmatism of orthodoxy, but also of rationalism and specula-
tion, while they clear the way for a treatment of theological
doctrines which is both conservative and free, in which the
valuable elements of past development are preserved and the
course is opened and the direction shown for progressive
development in the future. Schweizer accordingly declines
to place dogmatic theology (as Schleiermacher desired) in
128 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. II.
the division of ecclesiastical statistics, as a historical science,
but assigns to it, no less than to ethics, as essential the duty
of preparing for and directing the future development of faith.
In accordance with these principles, Schweizer puts the
various doctrines in a form which is not less productive
religiously than rational. The dignity of Scripture, he
maintains, must be asserted in opposition to ecclesiastical
tradition, to fanatical claimants of special illumination, and to
abstract reason uninfluenced by Christianity. But if this
authority is carried to excess and urged against reason
generally, even when brought under the influence of Christian
experience ; or if it is applied to scientific matters, whether in
the department of historical criticism or of the physical world,
it must cease to serve the truth, and could only give rise to
error by presenting non-religious matters as religious, and
thereby promoting superstition. The Scriptures supply what
is necessary for salvation, in a form abundantly recognis-
able by the Christian community in its free development,
precisely when exegesis acknowledges no binding canon in
tradition. Nor is the authority of the Scriptures based upon
a mechanical, or any other supernatural inspiration of their
contents, but simply upon their recognisable value and the
historical position of their authors.
In Schweizer' s hands the doctrine of God likewise takes a
more satisfactory form than in Schleiermacher's system.
Instead of going back, as his master had done, to the philo-
sophy of Spinoza, Schweizer recurs to the theology of the
Calvinistic Church, in which the unconditioned and universal
causality of God, as the basis of the certainty of salvation, is
made the centre point of the theological system. Schweizer
had previously traced minutely the historical development of
the central doctrines of the Reformed Church, and makes use of
his historical and critical inquiries in his Glaubenslehre. He
defines God as the living cause whose operation is the founda-
tion of the world as one of law and order. The world of
nature and the world of moral order, with the life of salvation
in the kingdom of God, are absolutely dependent on God ;
and they are thus dependent as ordered worlds, so that their
order is never interrupted by their dependence on him, but
is caused and preserved thereby. In the order of nature,
God's omnipotence and omniscience, eternity and omni-
presence, are manifested ; in the order of the moral world his
Ch. II.] THE THEOLOGY OF SCHLEIERMACHER. I 29
holiness, truth, and righteousness ; in the life of salvation in
the kingdom of God, his paternal love and wisdom, which
called into existence by Christ the religion of salvation,
prepared for by the religion of nature and the religion of law,
and which guide and consummate its course in conformity
with a necessary historical order. The truth of the doctrine
of predestination is found in the unconditional dependence
upon divine grace of the entire course amongst men of the
Christian life of salvation ; but the Augustinian and Calvinistic
doctrine of the divine decrees, with its particularism and
definitive dualism, must be given up. For the grace of the
religion of salvation is in its object and effect designed for
all mankind, though it is made particular in its historical
realisation, not producing effect all at once upon all, and the
same effect upon all, since, as its operations are spiritual, it
exerts no compulsion, but allows of resistance. But notwith-
standing this particularism in its historical operation, the
divine grace, which is in itself universal, cannot suffer a final
dualism of the saved and the unsaved. This Judaistic con-
ception must not interfere with the Christian hope of the
perfect consummation of the appropriated salvation in eternity.
In this monistic consummation of the divine work of salvation,
Schweizer recognises the true logical consequence of the
position taken by Zwingli as to the preordination of sin in
the eternal purposes of God, in view of salvation, in support
of which Romans ix.-xi. may be quoted.
Schweizer's Christology is, like Schleiermacher's, based
upon the Christian consciousness, but with a much more
cautious use of the historical documents. He starts from the
position, that according to the supposition underlying our
Christian consciousness, Christianity is that historical religion
in which the idea of religion is presented and realised, so that
in that idea nothing is contained which could not be realised
in Christianity. Thence he infers that the idea of man as one
with God must be embodied in Christ, must shine unchecked
through his whole manifestation, so that with and in Christ
the ideal of religion is brought home to our consciousness.
" We behold in him the pure image of the divine life in
human form, without going so far as to identify absolutely the
ideal and the historical Christ." For the Hellenistic concep-
tions of a divine and human nature, and of three persons in
the Godhead, must be substituted those of our modern
G. T. K
I3O DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. II.
thinkers idea and manifestation, eternal and temporal, being
and historical realisation. If we apply these ideas to Christ-
ology and Pneumatology, our definitions will become much
more intelligible, harmonising both sides of the relation with-
out the surrender of the one or the other, or the confounding
of both. Not until dogmatic Christology and Pneumatology
have passed in our belief into an ethical and religious Christ-
ology and Pneumatology, will this problem, proposed from the
very first by the Reformation, find its solution. A special
point on which Schweizer worked out more definitely sugges-
tions of Schleiermacher's is the parallel between Christology
and Pneumatology, the Holy Spirit bearing just the same
relation to the Church as in Christ the idea to its manifesta-
tion. The Church then appears as the Christ widened into
the historical life of the community, Christ as the original
representation of the common spirit of the Church, or of the
ideal religion. When it is added that this religion was
founded and historically prepared for in mankind from the
beginning, it follows that in Christ the ideal destination of
humanity first reached full realisation, and that Christianity is
therefore essentially one with the ideal of human nature ; a
view to which Zwingli had already prophetically pointed, and
in which the thought of Protestant philosophers and theo-
logians is found in full accord.
CHAPTER III.
SPECULATIVE THEOLOGY.
HEGEL'S religious philosophy was from the first &Jamis bifrons,
from which accordingly the theology to which it gave birth
was developed in two contrary directions. The assumption of
the identity of religious and philosophical truth produced a
strongly conservative attitude towards ecclesiastical dogma ;
while if stress was laid on the distinction between them that
religion gives us truth only in the imperfect form of intuitions
or percepts, but philosophy in the perfect form of concepts,
the obvious inference was that religion, as the lower stage,
must be resolved into and replaced by the higher stage of phi-
losophy. The conservative attitude was -exclusively taken by
Hegel's school during the master's lifetime, and was predomi-
nant for long afterwards. " This school," according to Baur's
admirable critique, 1 "was enamoured of the opinion, which it
either entertained itself, or wished others at all events to enter-
tain of it, that between its philosophy and Christianity there
was an affinity and harmony such as no other philosophy had
been able to boast of. If this philosophy had its Trinity, why
should it not likewise have its Incarnate God, its Reconciliation,
and similar dogmas ? To speak of an Incarnate God sounded
to the Hegelian school speculatively as profound as it was
edifying to the Christian ; while Schleiermacher had spoken
only of a " Saviour," now the Hegelian school, as if conscious
of a certain priestly dignity, put its profoundest significance
into the doctrine of a " God-man." But how little the chasm
separating the God-man of philosophy from the God-man of
the Church was realised, may be best seen in the theology of
Marheineke. After speaking philosophically of the unity of
the divine and human nature, of the former as the truth and
the latter as the reality, he makes the transition to the his-
torical personage in perfect good faith, by simply saying that
1 Kirchengeschithte+vQ\. v. p. 378.
132 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. II.
" the unity of God and man was historically realised in the
person of Jesus Christ." So too in Daub's Theologumena, the
incarnation of God and the redemption of the world is in
the first place deduced as an eternal truth from the idea of
God in the following manner : God's eternal self-contemplation
must be identical with human reason, and God's eternal
activity consists in bringing back the world from its finiteness,
the result of its apostasy, to the unity of his infinite Being,
the world of nature by the natural method of the death of the
individual, but mankind by the spiritual method of religion, as
exaltation above the emptiness of the finite to the infinite.
The importance of Christ, Daub considered to be that he
exhibited this eternal incarnation of God and redemption of
the world in his own person, as an historical fact, on which
account he was himself the God-man in a unique sense, his
death the sacrifice redeeming the world, his life a continual
miracle and full of miracles. It was quite after the style of
this romantic and uncritical speculative method to connect the
metaphysical ideas, which had been arrived at by means of
philosophical dialectic, directly with the persons and events of
the Gospel narratives, thus raising these above the region of
ordinary experience into that of the supernatural, and regard-
ing the most absurd assertions as philosophically justified.
Daub had become so hopelessly addicted to this perverse prin-
ciple that he deduced not only Jesus as the embodiment of the
philosophical idea of the union of God and man, but also Judas
Iscariot as the embodiment of the idea of a rival god, or
Satan. We of this generation find the confusion of ideas
underlying such deductions so incomprehensible that it is hard
to avoid unfairness in our estimate of the individual theologians
of this class, especially when they carry their disdain of the
sound human understanding so far as to ascribe with Daub,
in the very title of his last book (1833), rational doubts
respecting the dogmas and legends of the Church simply to
criminal self-seeking.
The credit of having chased away the mists and clouds of
dogmatic illusions such as these, and of restoring to the critical
understanding its rights, belongs to the Swabian theologian,
DAVID FRIEDRICH STRAUSS. Two previous works upon Im-
mortality, the authors of which, Richter and Feuerbach, were
reckoned among the Hegelian school, had indeed, by the
radically negative conclusions therein reached by the appli-
Ch. III.] SPECULATIVE THEOLOGY. 133
cation of this philosophy, shaken the confidence generally felt
in Hegelian orthodoxy ; but since the other adherents of the
school were active in protesting against these negative infer-
ences, such isolated efforts produced no very important effect.
When, however, Strauss brought the heavy artillery of his
criticism, distinguished equally by learning and penetration, to
bear first on the historical foundations of dogma and then on
dogma itself, the unsubstantial fabric of Hegelian dogmatism
was within a few years completely destroyed. The first and
greatest shock was given by Strauss's work on the life of
Jesus, which will occupy us in the next book. As the polemi-
cal literature which his Life of Jesus provoked was chiefly
occupied with dogmatical reflections and speculation, rather
than with historical criticism, Strauss was induced to supple-
ment it by a further critical work on the history of Christian
dogmas, bearing the title, Die christliche Glaubenslehre in
ihrer geschichtlichen Entwickelung und im Kampf mit der
modernen Wissenschaft" (1840-41). The strong point of the
book is its acute and ingenious application of the principle
that the history of dogma is its destruction and the story of
the process of its dissolution. Strauss himself, in his preface,
characterises his method in the forcible words : " Individual
subjective criticism is a water-pipe which any boy may close
for a time ; objective criticism, as it is accomplished in the
course of centuries, advances like a foaming torrent against
which all sluices and dams are powerless." In the same pre-
face he thus describes the object of his work : " Its purpose is
if the profane figure is allowable to do for the science of
dogmatics what the balance-sheet does for a commercial house.
If the firm is not made directly the richer by it, it learns
exactly what its resources are : and that is often as valuable as
an actual increase of them. Such a survey of our dogmatic
property is in our days rendered the more urgently necessary
in proportion as the majority of theologians entertain the
greatest illusions on the subject. The depreciation of the old
theological stock-in-trade made by the criticism and polemics of
the last two centuries is greatly underrated ; and on the other
hand, the doubtful assistance supposed to be derived from the
emotional theology and mystical philosophy of the present
century is much over-estimated. It is generally imagined
that the greater part of the lawsuits which are pending with
regard to those depreciations have been won, and that there
134 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. II.
is certainty of the greatest profits from these newly opened
resources. But it is not impossible that these suits should all
be lost in a single day, and if then these new mines should
also disappoint expectations, failure would be inevitable.
Reason enough, surely, to know in time, after careful calcu-
lation, the relation of the credit to the debit side of the
account ! " The result of this balancing of accounts, Strauss
declares to be the complete bankruptcy of the Christian faith ;
neither is it merely the dogmatic formulae of the theology of
the Church that are subject to this process of dissolution, but,
Strauss holds, that with them the Christian religion must pass
away, and even religion in general. This marked precipitation
was only possible in the case of a man in whose nature
religious feeling was much weaker than critical intellect, and
who had besides grown accustomed in the Hegelian school to
that intellectualism which makes knowledge everything and all
other vital functions nothing, and in which particularly religion
was regarded only as theoretical and bound to stand or fall
with a particular theory. Strauss's study of Schleiermacher
might have preserved him from this gross error ; but great
as was his acumen in descrying Schleiermacher's dogmatic
weaknesses, he was quite unable to understand the importance
of Schleiermacher's theory of religion, and the justice of the
distinction between religion and theology. In general, the
overweening self-confidence of "absolute knowledge " fostered
in Hegel's school had materially tended to accentuate the
negative radicalism of Strauss's criticism. Whoever imagines
himself to possess the key to all the riddles of the world in the
formulae of his philosophical school, will very naturally pass a
much more negative sentence upon all attempts to form a con-
ception of the world from a religious point of view, than the
man who humbly recognises the relativity of all our knowledge
and is under no illusion with regard to the value of the for-
mulae of all systems. The absolute and irreconcilable an-
tagonism between philosophy and theology which Strauss
tries to show, in the case of each dogma, is the final result of
the historical process, arises unavoidably then only when
both the philosopher and the theologian make the same mistake
of embracing a dogmatism which propounds its formulae as
infallible truths. This is indisputably the case to a marked
degree with the Hegelian-Straussian philosophy of "absolute
knowledge." But since this dogmatism is the opposite of
Ch. III.] SPECULATIVE THEOLOGY. 135
scientific, the radicalism of Strauss's History of Dogmatics
evidently cannot decide the general question of the relation of
religion and science.
The final consequences of Strauss's position were inferred
by Feuerbach. Strauss did not go beyond an idealistic
pantheism, which, while it gave up the God of religion, at
least assumed a universal spiritual principle, an " idea" which
realises itself in the finite, evolves nature from itself, and
becomes conscious of itself in man ; and in this Feuerbach
recognised a remnant of mysticism which must be got rid of ;
the Absolute above man he declared to be an empty abstrac-
tion, the really Absolute or Divine is man himself. All and
every system of theology, not excepting speculative theology,
must therefore be superseded by anthropology. But if man
alone is divine, how can he come to believe in and worship a
God ? Feuerbach answers that the conception of God is an
illusion, formed of the wishes of the heart and of the poetic
imagination. The gods are Wunschwesen, i.e., the wishes
and ideals of the human heart objectified by the imagination.
In them man contemplates his own nature, not as it really is,
held in by the limitation of the world, but as he wishes it to
be, as the unlimited omnipotence of feeling. Religious faith
is the self-assurance of the heart demanding the satisfaction
of its desires. A miracle is the realisation (of course the
imagined realisation) of a supernatural wish. Christ is the
omnipotence of subjectivity, the reality of all the wishes of
the heart ; the conception of an incarnate God is the disclosure
of the truth, that the nature of God is simply man. So also
the Christian heaven means, just like the Christian God, the
fulfilment of all wishes. Immortality is the testament of
religion, in which it makes its last will ; as heaven is the
unfolded nature of the Deity, it is also the frankest declara-
tion of the inmost thoughts of religion.
Feuerbach stands at the head of those who hold religion
to be an idealistic fiction without actual truth, viz., the modern
Positivists and Agnostics. But while the latter with cautious
scepticism decline to deal with the metaphysical questions as
to the origin of the world and of man, Feuerbach only aban-
doned the idealistic dogmatism of his Hegelian school to
adopt that of materialism. He held that only what is cognis-
able by the senses, what is material, is real ; even in man the
spiritual is only an effect of the sensible, the sole reality ;
136 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. II.
" der Mensch ist, was er isst" man is what he eats, was
finally Feuerbach's watchword. It follows of course that
from this cynical point of view religion can only be regarded
as a foolish aberration, a kind of mental disorder ; but since
by the same hypothesis the other objects of man's spiritual
endeavour, morality, art and science, must lose all their mean-
ing and value, this position is really self-destructive. For if
man is only a material product of nature, like a plant or an
animal, it is inconceivable why he should come to form moral
ideas of any kind, or to propose scientific views on any ques-
tion. The naturalistic point of view adopted by Feuerbach
could logically lead only to the rejection of all ideas and
ideals, or to pure nihilism and solipsism, as is clearly shown
in Max Stirner's notorious book, Der Einzige und sein Eigen-
thum. The same holds good of the last book in which Strauss
laid before the world his final confession of faith, Der alte
und der neue Glaube, 1872. Like Feuerbach, he abandoned
the dogmatism of idealism for that of naturalism, undeterred
by the logical inconsistencies of naturalism and the difficulties
of Feuerbach's theory of knowledge. On the principles of
modern natural science, he now believed himself able to
explain the world as a mechanism of blind material forces,
without any final cause, and hence without any spiritual prin-
ciple ; nevertheless he sought to acknowledge reason and
goodness in the universe, and honour them with a certain
piety. Man he considered a part of nature, developed from
the ape by Darwinian selection ; nevertheless he required
him never to forget that he was man, and not merely a part
of nature, that in him nature had not merely striven upwards,
but even to surpass herself ; he must therefore be guided in
his action by the idea of the race, and by the consciousness of
mutual obligation seek to mitigate the cruel struggle for exist-
ence, although as a part of nature he cannot wholly avoid it.
It comes to this then, man is a part and again not a part of
nature ; the product of an aimless mechanical natural process,
and yet a product in which nature has striven to surpass her-
self! The struggle for existence, the right of the stronger, is
the only law ruling the world, and yet man is bound to be
guided by the altruistic principle of the idea of the race ! The
new creed which includes such gross contradictions, without
even attemping their solution, can hardly claim more scientific
importance than any one of the old confessions of faith. In
Ch. III.] SPECULATIVE THEOLOGY. 137
point of fact, both philosophy and theology soon passed from
Strauss's last book to the order of the day. His earlier con-
tributions to historical criticism ought not however to be
forgotten. We shall speak of them in the next book.
But neither the right nor the left wing of the Hegelian
school permanently enriched dogmatic theology, owing to the
weakness of the former in historical criticism, and of the latter
in the appreciation of religious facts. On the other hand, we
have to mention a number of men who, avoiding these two
extremes, tried to gain by the aid of speculative philosophy a
profounder conception of the Christian faith. The most im-
portant works in this connexion are three : Biedermanris
Christliche Dogmatik, Weisse s Philosophische Dogmatik, and
Rotke s Theologische Ethik. Their common feature is a
speculative theism and a theistic and theological view of
history, in which the facts as well as the ideas and ideals of
Christianity find a place.
At the time of ALOIS EMANUEL BIEDERMANN'S youth scien-
tific and ecclesiastical circles had been deeply stirred by the
Hegelian philosophy and Straussian criticism. Both pro-
foundly affected him and greatly enriched his thought, without
robbing him of his freedom and individuality. He never was
an Hegelian in the strict sense of the school, but from the
first regarded Hegel's characteristic method of a priori dialectic
as an error and as the untenable weakness of the system, and
tried to correct it by a less ambitious departure from experi-
ence. Still, he saw profound truth in the fundamental principle
of the Hegelian philosophy, that reason is in everything
which exists and occurs, and must, as the creative nature of
things, be comprehended by our own rational thought. He
likewise recognised the great importance of Strauss's critical
labours, although he early perceived that the limitation of
Strauss's powers lay in the fact that he could not rise above the
critical dissolution of the conceptions of ecclesiastical tradition
to the speculative recognition and presentation of the religious
truth contained in them, Biedermann regarded criticism, in
which he was equal to Strauss in point of rigour, as only one
half of the problem to be solved ; the other, and certainly not
less important half, being to formulate as conceptual know-
ledge the content of religious truth after it has been purified in
the crucible of critical analysis. To make this positive addi-
tion to Strauss's negative results, he regarded as his own life-
138 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. II.
work, to the accomplishment of which he devoted the labours
of his best years. The result of these labours is contained
in his chief work, Die Christliche Dogmatik, the first edition
of which appeared in 1868, and the second in 1884-5, en ~
larged by a philosophical introduction in which is expounded the
theory of knowledge underlying his metaphysics and theology.
This theory of knowledge occupies a peculiar position
intermediary between Hegel's logical idealism and Spinoza's
parallelism of extended and thinking Being as the two sides
of the one substance. Biedermann holds firmly to the He-
gelian principle that the substance of spirit is logical Being,
and hence can be wholly and entirely comprehended in logical
categories, both in respect of the infinite spirit, or God, and
of the finite spirit, or man. But he does not hold that the
logical Being of spirit includes within it all Being, and that
the world is only the development and manifestation of the
absolute logical idea ; nor does he think that we can construct
and logically deduce the world by means of an a priori dia-
lectic. On the contrary, he teaches that spiritual or ideal
Being is never given us other than with and in sensuous or
material Being, and only in such a way that they are by
nature antithetical the one, logical Being, is outside space
and time ; the other, material Being, spatial and temporal, but
both are combined with and in each other to form the one whole
reality. The problem of cognition accordingly is, in the case
of any content of consciousness, so to distinguish the ideal
Being from the material Being, in combination with which it
exists, as to make clear both the antithesis of their respective
natures, and at the same time the indivisible unity of their
substance. This abstraction of logical Being from material
Being, and the comprehension of the former, as the ideal
content of experience, in purely logical categories, is what
Biedermann means by " pure thought." This theory of cog-
nition is the foundation of his metaphysics ; from it follow,
in his view, the answers to the most important questions re-
garding soul and body, God and world. On this very account
we must not refrain from stating the grave objections to which
the theory is open. In the first place, we must observe that
the conception "ideal Being" is ambiguous, since it denotes
sometimes thinking Being 1 (spirit, consciousness), sometimes
1 denkendes Sein.
Ch. III.] SPECULATIVE THEOLOGY. 139
Being thought 1 (conception, relation, law). Now it is cer-
tainly wrong to say that thinking Being, i.e., being which
thinks, is merely logical Being, since the same Being which
thinks also wills and feels ; for this reason we cannot anteced-
ently expect that this thinking Being, or spirit, will be com-
prehended purely and entirely in logical categories. Neither
can we assent to the proposition that ideal or spiritual Being
is timeless, while temporal Being as such is physical or
material ; Being thought, as the idea of a triangle, of spirit,
or of history, is indeed timeless ; but thinking Being, or spirit
itself, is never given us in experience as timeless Being, but
always as the consciousness of our ego taking place in time.
Whether this peculiarity of occurring in time, which always
attaches to the Being of spirit in our experience, is accidental
and can be dispensed with in thought, is a difficult question,
and has been variously answered ; but whatever answer be
given, at any rate the identification of spiritual with timeless
Being can never be taken for granted as an unquestionable
axiom. Further, with regard to the fundamental principle of
this theory of knowledge, viz., the parallelism of ideal and
material Being as the two inseparable sides of one substantial
reality, I remark, firstly, that this view, derived from Spinoza,
cannot be deduced from the analysis of our consciousness,
since direct experience is always entirely a phenomenon of
consciousness, and hence ideal Being, from which we after-
wards mediately infer the existence of an external material
Being. Secondly, as a psychological hypothesis this theory
is not calculated satisfactorily to explain the relation of body
and soul without doing violence to the facts of experience.
Thirdly, as a metaphysical hypothesis it is equally unfitted to
explain the relation of the world to God ; for if the world
is both spiritual and material Being, we cannot see how it
should have its foundation in a purely spiritual God ; vice
versa, if with Biedermann we accept the latter hypothesis, we
should expect the reduction of material Being in some way to
spiritual Being, and not the co-ordination of the two as from
the first opposite in nature. Hegel's monism of absolute
Spirit, and Spinoza's dualism of Thought and Extension, are
theories too contradictory to admit of combination in a single
system. Biedermann most likely recognised the one-sided
1 gedachtes Sein.
I4O DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. II.
character of absolute logical idealism, and its need of amend-
ment from the side of actual experience ; but in having
recourse, with this object in view, to Spinoza's dualism of
thinking and corporeal Being, he grafted a foreign and an-
tagonistic shoot upon the trunk of idealism, and left unremoved
Hegel's fundamental defect, his abstract logical formalism.
Still, by this alteration Biedermann attained one object a
more definite distinction between God and the world, thus
the substitution of theism for pantheism, though still in too
abstract a form ; and to do this was an essential condition for
a right view of religion.
The investigation of the nature of religion was improved
in the second edition of Biedermann's work by the psycho-
logical description of it being placed before the inquiry into
its metaphysical basis. Biedermann defines Religion as the
endeavour of the human ego to rise above the limiting nega-
tions of the world as the scene of its natural life by appealing
to a Power raised above such limitation, in order by its help to
obtain deliverance ; it is produced by anything which discloses
the opposition between man's demands of life and the limita-
tion he experiences. The psychical form of this endeavour is
Faith, in which all the elementary functions of the personal
spirit are harmoniously combined : a feeling of dependence
and mundane limitation as the point of departure, and of
freedom as the goal of the act of appeal, a conception of an
infinite Power above man, a desire to rise to this Power, with
a longing for deliverance from the cramping limitations of the
world. This whole act of the man, theoretical and practical in
one, constitutes real "religious faith "; while "faith" in the sense
of mere theoretical belief is not a religious act at all. Precisely
because religious faith is something other than a mere form of
secondary knowledge, it can never be rendered obsolete and
replaced by any higher kind of knowledge, such as philosophy.
Philosophy can exercise a purifying influence upon the theo-
retical side of religion, on the various modes of conceiving the
contents of faith, but can never replace the distinctly reli-
gious act of faith itself the practical elevation of the man to
God. By this means Biedermann secured himself against the
Hegelian confusion of religion and philosophy, which had led
Strauss to the fatal step of annulling the former by means of the
latter, and strictly guarded the indefeasible rights of the reli-
gious life against all encroachments on the part of knowledge.
Ch. III.] SPECULATIVE THEOLOGY. 14!
But Biedermann does not end with the psychological de-
scription of religion. Though this has its proximate source
in the nature of man himself, as finite spirit, the appeal of his
soul to God is incomprehensible without the metaphysical
supposition of relations on God's part with man ; the fact of
religion presupposes the existence and self-revelation of God.
The legitimacy of this presupposition, of which the religious
consciousness has an immediate certainty, is shown by the
reasoning intellect in the " proofs of the existence of God";
and then the idea of God is put into a " pure " i.e., abstractly
logical formula, as follows : " The absoluteness of the spirit-
ual Being of God consists therein, that the actus purus of his
self-sufficient existence within himself is the non-te'mporal and
non-spatial condition, i.e., the eternal and omnipresent source,
of the temporal and spatial process of the finite world." God
is the source of the world, not by temporal act of creation out
of nothing, but in that by a non-temporal method he produces
from himself the material being of the world, and makes it
external to himself. The latter expression is intended defi-
nitely to provide against any pantheistic confusion of God and
world ; but, it must be confessed, the conception of the abso-
lute Spirit producing from himself, and making external to
himself, a material world, the nature of which is antithetical
to his own spirituality, is as unrealisable in thought as the
Church's idea of creation, which lays no claim to logical truth.
Moreover, in Biedermann's case this claim rests upon a de-
lusion ; the categories of (fnsu&seins) existence within self,
and making external to self (Aussersichsetzens], evidently be-
long to the intuition of space, and are therefore by no means
purely logical, but figurative expressions, which are not purer
but only much less significant than the expressions usually
borrowed from the analogy of the human spirit. Biedermann's
rejection of this one possible way of arriving at positive
(though, of course, always relative) statements about God,
ostensibly in the interests of " pure thought," which, it is said,
can lay claim to absolute appropriateness, was not the strength
but the weakness of his theology, betraying his bondage to
the logical formalism and dogmatism of the Hegelian school.
Biedermann discusses at length the nature of divine revela-
tion. It is a process within the human spirit, effected by God,
in which man's spiritual activities are not set aside but raised
above their finite limitation, so as to experience the divine.
142 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. II.
More particularly, we may distinguish three elements in the
divine revelation : it appears as the basis of man's spiritual life
in his bent to rationality ( Vernunftrieti], as the law of his
spiritual life in his conscience, and as the force securing its
normal realisation in his religious and moral freedom. This
latter is the properly religious revelation, which takes place in
the faith of the religious man as illumination, blessedness, and
sanctification. These inward experiences of the religious spirit
are the effect therefore of direct divine action or revelation,
and in this consists the only revelation properly so called ; on
the other hand, things lying behind or outside them, whether
external events or history or sacred scriptures or ceremonial
observances, are in themselves only phenomena of man s life
of faith ; though a natural confusion of the external and de-
rived with the inward and primary causes them to be looked
upon as direct divine revelations, and gives them in the faith
of the Church a position of unchangeable divine authority
given once for all. Hence we have the principle of super-
natural authority common to all positive religions, and their
tendency to strictly preserve anything traditional as having
ostensibly come directly from God. This failure of super-
naturalism to recognise the natural side of historical religion
is corrected by Rationalism, which calls attention to the natural
historical conditions of all religious phenomena, but on the
other hand exaggerates the truth of this observation by treat-
ing everything in religion as a merely natural product of the
human mind, and quite dispensing with the divine factor. The
problem of critical and speculative theology Biedermann con-
siders to be to preserve such a mean between the two ex-
tremes that the supernatural or divine, and the natural or
human come to be recognised as the two inseparably united
sides of every revelation and throughout the whole history of
religion. Biedermann has also applied this principle to the
Christian tradition and to the solution of the great questions
of Christology, of the nature and value of the Bible, and of the
creeds of the Church.
The Christian religion, he teaches, had its historical source
in the person of Jesus, while its essential nature or principle is
to be found " in the religious relation as it is presented to us
in the religious consciousness of Jesus as a new fact of revela-
tion determining his whole personality and at the same time
creating faith in that personality." We can therefore call the
Ch. III.] SPECULATIVE THEOLOGY. 143
religious personality of Jesus the essential principle of Chris-
tianity, meaning by this that the new saving influence on man-
kind with this new object of faith, was simply the characteristic
religious consciousness of this person, which took the form of
the consciousness of sonship to the heavenly Father. Un-
doubtedly this personal consciousness of Jesus points to a
divine revelation, and so far was miraculous, but only in the
relative sense, not as something transcending the constitution
of humanity, but as itself the highest fulfilment of the religious
and moral destiny of the race ; in Jesus the religious truth that
we are all called to be sons of God became, with immediate
freshness and force, the content of our knowledge and feeling
and a motive-power in our will ; in this sense he is the Son of
God and the Saviour /car' e^o-^v. But when the Church con-
verted this relative miracle of the original religious personality
of Jesus into a miracle pure and simple, the superhuman person
of the God-man from heaven, it did so in consequence of the
above-mentioned psychological " law of identification," ac-
cording to which the divine source of revelation gets directly
identified with the human means of its manifestation. Bieder-
mann considers it to be the business of dogmatic Christology
to correct this optical illusion from which all its difficulties
spring, to discriminate between the person of Jesus and the
Christian principle, the spirit or the ideal of life, the idea of
Christianity, and to do this in such a way as neither to con-
found the two nor to abstractly separate them, but rather to
present the person as the historical embodiment of the prin-
ciple, and the principle as the ideal significance of the person.
In this idea of the business of Christology, Biedermann is in
substantial accord with the theory of Alexander Schweizer
above noticed, though the theories are somewhat differently
formulated.
Our theologian adopts a similar course in describing the
Reformation. Here too he distinguishes the principle from
its historical manifestation in the formation of the Reformed
churches. The former consists in a fundamental tendency of
the Christian spirit, which always exists in the Church, be-
cause belonging to the essence of Christianity the tendency
to react against its own misrepresentation in the Church, and
to maintain its peculiar truth in contradistinction to the lower
stages represented by the religions of nature and of law. The
Reformation gave dogmatic expression to this tendency in the
144 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. II.
" formal principle" of the sole authority of the word of God,
and in the "material principle" of justification from grace
alone and through faith. But when the Churches of the Pro-
testant confessions were formed, it was only the practical
religious importance of this principle that was recognised, and
the consequences involved in it were not worked out. It was
indeed historically unavoidable and justifiable in itself to go
back for a knowledge of Christian truth behind the tradition
of the Church to the Scriptures as historically the original
source of this knowledge. But this historical appreciation of
the Scriptures did not suffice; they were regarded as " the
word of God " absolutely, and infallible divine authority was
consequently ascribed to them. Thereby the traditional
Catholic theory of authority was in principle still adhered to,
and only the form of the authority changed, though in a way
which might be regarded as an advance. But there was only
a relative difference between the Protestant's principle of
Scripture and the Catholic's principle of tradition. Equally
opposed to the essence of Protestantism was the elevation of
ecclesiastical forms of doctrine of historic growth to the posi-
tion of symbolic statements of unconditional authority. What
is really Protestant is simply the continual regeneration of
doctrinal theology out of the living principle of Christianity by
means of the scientific criticism of the previous development
of dogma.
This is the task of theological science which must not be
hindered by any theory of inspiration. On the contrary, theo-
logy has to distinguish in the Scriptures, no less than in the
creeds, between the ideal truth as the lasting kernel and the
historically conditioned wrappings in which it appears in the
Biblical and ecclesiastical forms of doctrine. Biedermann
has sought to do this. He gives an account first of the whole
system of Biblical theology, and next of the theology of the
Church with its central christological dogmas ; he then pro-
ceeds to critically analyse these dogmas, and finally presents
their pure ideal content in a systematic form. This mode of
treatment has the advantage of furnishing a strictly objective
account of the Biblical and ecclesiastical doctrines, the histori-
cal account being kept separate from the theologian's own
critical and speculative estimate of it ; but it combines the
double disadvantage, that each individual doctrine is treated of
in various parts of the book, thus rendering a connected view
Ch. III.] SPECULATIVE THEOLOGY. 145
less easy, and that the positive result, the pure logical
essence of the historical subject-matter and its critical analysis,
proves to be very much too meagre and vague to help the
Church of the present day to understand its faith. It is true
that this defect is the consequence, not only of the form of
treatment, but also of the theory of knowledge before con-
sidered. The metaphysics and psychology based upon this
theory exercise also an influence for evil upon the matter of his
eschatology : a consequence of it is the denial of the immor-
tality of the soul, since according to this theory the soul must
be conceived only as the ideal side of the body and together
with it, but not as an independent entity. It is clear that the
Christian Church cannot accept this theory without cutting
itself off from its whole past history ; and such a demand may
be the more readily rejected in proportion as it is also
scientifically inadmissible, for it depends upon the unde-
monstrable assumptions of a philosophical dogmatism. This
dependence is the weak side of Biedermann's work, which in
other respects contains so much that is excellent.
CHRISTIAN HERMANN WEISSE also belonged at first to Hegel's
school, but probably perceived the error of logical idealism, and
tried to correct it in a manner which bears close resemblance in
many respects to the theosophy of Schelling's later years and
of Baader, while his system is not without the originality of
genius, and contains an abundance of profound and fertile
thoughts. The fact that his Philosophise he Dogmatik oder
Philosophic des Christenthums has notwithstanding had no
important influence upon theology, may be explained partly by
Weisse's heavy style, partly by the little sympathy his purely
deductive method meets with in the bent of our time towards
empirical induction. To do Weisse justice, it must not be
forgotten that his speculative reasoning, in all departments, in-
cluding religion, commands a wide knowledge of the empirical
subject-matter, and that he succeeds in working up this into
his deductive statement in a most suggestive manner.
Weisse's Philosophise he Dogmatik begins with a specula-
tive construction of the nature of God, in which his departure
from Hegel's logical idealism at once becomes apparent. The
divine Reason, in which the eternal and necessary truths of
reason are contained as an intelligible world, is, according to
Weisse, not the whole nature of the Deity, but only the first
element or stage of it, the primary possibility of all Being, but
G. T. L
146 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. II.
not as yet reality. To reason and its necessary thoughts we
must add the divine Heart (Gemiitti), in which the divine life,
as sentient and perceptive, begets a profusion of forms which
prefigure the ideal types of the world ; and from this profuse
creation of inward thoughts and figures there arises, thirdly,
the divine Will, which freely works upon this given material,
and so actualises the nature of God as personality and love.
The identification of these three elements, or stages, with the
Persons of the Trinity is a concession to dogmatic theology
for which Weisse could quote precedents from the history of
dogma ; but the conception of the self-realisation of God as
a process in time preceding the creation of the world, is open
to graver objections, and reminds us strongly of Gnostic
mythology. The creation of the world, too, Weisse represents
as a series of acts beginning and continuing in time, the first of
which was the formation of matter, or the chaotic fundamental
forces, which proceeded from the divine Will by its action on
the ante-creative products of his " nature " (or his heart), and
formed the material for God's further organising and shaping
activity as creator. From the nature of matter thus conceived
Weisse explains the metaphysical necessity of evil in the world.
The matter of the world, as the externalised will of God, which
has put itself in antithesis to his personal will, possesses a dis-
tinct spontaneity of creature-existence which passes into a real
antagonism to the inwardness and blessedness of God, and
hence is the common root of both physical and moral evil.
Just as matter, though generated by God, presents notwith-
standing, as something relatively independent, an antithesis
to his personal will, so God cannot all at once and by a fiat of
will put an end to the evil involved in matter, but can only
gradually end the misery unavoidably involved in every fresh
birth of living creatures, by the progressive creative activity
of his loving will, and transform it into gladness. To this pre-
human evil, having its final metaphysical source in the self-will
of the creature as such, Weisse refers ideas commonly held of
the devil. Similarly the first origination of sin in the personal
creature is, according to him, not to be sought so much in
conscious acts of will, as in the genesis before time of the per-
sonal will out of the natural spontaneity of individual beings.
These are, at any rate, profoundly suggestive thoughts, which
a serious and earnest theology cannot pass over with indiffer-
ence.
Ch. III.] SPECULATIVE THEOLOGY. 147
The process of creation, which reaches its climax in the
generation of rational creatures, is continued in the process of
the history of civilisation and religion, which must be regarded
as a continual " incarnation of God," in the sense that human
nature is transformed from earthly nature to one in the image
of God, and the ideal " Son-Man " is realised in the human
race. The history of religion Weisse conceives as beginning
in a consciousness of God, which in its essence is spiritual and
with an ethical content, but vacillates between unity and plu-
rality, spirituality and a sensuous form. From this undeter-
mined beginning, either monotheism or polytheism might be
developed. The fact of the priority of the latter development
in heathen national religions is explained by the psychological
law that the activities of the imagination and the heart are
earlier in the ascendant than those of the conscious will. Pro-
gress in the mythological age consisted partly in the refine-
ment of the aesthetic form of the myths in conjunction with
the general development of each people partly in the ethic-
ising of their religious contents. From jhe first the physical
and ethical permeated mythology, it is true ; but while at the
beginning the physical predominated, the emphasis was after-
wards laid on the ethical ; the sensuous materials of the intui-
tive imagination were more and more freely melted down into
the form of their ideal content, quite independent of the direct
phenomena of nature ; the gods of nature were personified
and brought into connection with man's moral life. Hence we
cannot deny the moral and religious value of the mythological
religions, particularly the Grecian ; Weisse does not hesitate
to say that in them was already at work the same power of
God to save and sanctify which ecclesiastical dogmatism wishes
us to regard as the sole property of the so-called revealed re-
ligions in the stricter sense. And he rightly adduces in favour
of this broad human view the early Christian doctrine of the
pre-Christian mission of the divine Logos. Though the re-
ligion of the Old Testament is a revelation in a higher sense,
yet it is not this in such a way as to justify the exclusion of
the polytheistic religions from the common idea of the incarna-
tion of the divine. But what from the first distinguished ths
Hebrews' conceptions of God was their subordination of the
imagination, the source of myths, to the ethical power of will,
the source of history. The legislation of Moses was a typical
act of liberation, inasmuch as it showed mankind that its
148 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. II.
divine vocation was to rise above nature to a moral order of
life. This conception of God was then freed from its national
limitation, and the universal religious ideal prefigured in the
teaching of the prophets, which may be compared to the
teaching of Greek philosophy and of the Mysteries ; for this
too had risen in the Platonic " Idea of the Good " to the rank
of a monotheistic principle, and in the doctrine of immortality
of the Mysteries to an ethical spiritualisation of religious hopes
and ideals.
This universal historical process of the incarnation of God,
or the realisation of the " Son- Humanity," is consummated in
Jesus, who combined and gathered up the historical conditions
into an act of personal consciousness. This permeation of the
human nature by the divine, whereby the man Jesus became
above all other mortals the instrument of the highest revelation
of God, the personal " Son-Man," must not be understood
mythically as a physical event, but as an ethical miracle accom-
plished in the soul of this unique personality. The peculiar
characteristics of the personality of Jesus may be summed up
by saying that he was endowed with genius in the highest
sense of the word, analogous to that of all those historical per-
sonalities who have been originators in the realm of religion,
in particular the prophets of Israel, though in the case of Jesus
we must suppose an extraordinary intensification of the gifts
of talent and genius. Religious experience was intensified in
him to the absolute power of an inward revelation which first
raised the historical revelation of God in the human race to
its summit of perfection ; for this revelation, for the first time
concentrating in consciousness the whole truth of the idea of
God, completely permeating the heart and will of the entire
personality, presented a person before the eyes of the world,
who, within the limits of humanity, exhibited purely and com-
pletely the image of God. This is the same Christology as
that of A. Schweizer and Biedermann, above described ; with
the latter Weisse shares the speculative framework of his
Christology, and with the former the more definite delineation
of the historical character ; common to him with both is the
rejection of the mythically supernatural, and the translation of
it into ethical ideality in the domain of history.
Very closely allied to Weisse's speculations is RICHARD
ROTHE'S TAeologischeEtkik(iste&. 1845-8 ; 2nded. 1864 sq.).
His method also is deductive construction by means of specu-
Ch. III.] SPECULATIVE THEOLOGY. 149
lative ideas, resulting in a Christian system of philosophy,
to which the supernaturalism of the Bible, the theosophy of
Schelling and Oetinger, and the theology of Schleiermacher
have been made to contribute. The combination of these
diverse elements in a systematic whole forms a work of art of
too peculiar a character to admit of its being used as a general
authority, but the charm of which consists in its being the
product and reflection of a rich and noble mind, a profound
thinker, a vivid imagination, and a truly devout soul.
Rothe himself describes his method as follows : speculative
thought, when engaged in speculation, closes its eye abso-
lutely to everything without, and looks solely into itself; it
follows only the dialectical necessity under which every idea
produces new ones from its own fertility. It is not till after-
wards, when speculation has completed its construction, that
the consideration of reality has to be added, as the test of the
conformity or nonconformity of the results of speculation with
the actual condition of the world ; if the latter be the case,
the mistake must be looked for in the manipulation of the
ideas. Rothe therefore fully shares the formal principle of
the Hegelian school its dialectical method ; his results how-
ever differ widely from those of this school, and approximate
very closely to Schelling's theosophy and Schleiermacher's
theology ; and this is owing partly to the peculiar distinction
drawn by him between philosophical and theological specula-
tion, according to which the contents and drift of the latter
are from the first quite different from those of the former.
Philosophical speculation must, Rothe thinks, start from the
pure consciousness of the ego, from this formal act of thinking
self, abstracted from all content ; theological speculation, on
the contrary, must start from the consciousness of God, which
in its immediate certainty is co-ordinate with self-consciousness,
and is therefore adapted to be the starting-point of an indepen-
dent system of speculation entirely parallel to the philosophical
one; an assertion which is exposed to the objection of being an
unfounded petitioprincipii, and has nowhere found acceptance.
We must however see how Rothe constructs his system on
the basis of this principle professedly free from assumptions.
The conception of the absolute as the " self-determined "
involves the distinction of potentiality and actuality. Hence
we must think of pure potentiality, indeterminate and indif-
ferent Being, as the first thing in the Deity. From this hidden
I5O DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. II.
source the actuality of God springs in the double form of per-
sonality and nature ; and originally Rothe had made nature
in God the cause and therefore the antecedent of his person-
ality ; but in his second edition he makes God's personality
rise directly from his potentiality and determine the further pro-
cess of his self-actualisation ; though, it must be acknowledged,
that a clear conception of this is impossible, since we have no
analogy in man's personality to guide us. The similarity of
this speculative conception of God to that formulated by
Weisse is at once evident, though Rothe does not wish,
like Weisse, that the three elements or stages of the divine
nature should be identified with the three Persons of the
ecclesiastical dogma of the Trinity, but pronounces the con-
nexion to be altogether remote and unessential. From God's
affirmation of himself as ego, Rothe further deduces his simul-
taneous affirmation of his non-ego, at first, as existing in-
voluntarily in thought only ; but when God actualises this
imagined non-ego by a free act of will, it becomes pure matter.
This is for God a limitation of his absoluteness (though created
by himself), which as such he strives to abolish, but cannot
simply negative, since it is necessarily implied in his ego.
Hence his active relation to matter can only consist in intro-
ducing spirit into it, thus raising it to the position of his alter
ego, created spirit. This fashioning of undivine matter into
the organ of the divine spirit is the continuous process of
creation, which may be conceived as the continuous " becoming
of the world " ( Weltwerdung), or, in relation to its goal, as
more definitely " the incarnation (Menschwerdung) of God
within the limits of material existence." But inasmuch as
this creative activity in organising matter is at each stage
dependent on the previously created things as its means, and
in the last instance on matter as its substratum, it cannot be
purely absolute. This is the ground of the want of complete-
ness in every stage of the world, and of the imperfection of its
condition at all times. All evil in the world, including moral
evil or wickedness, has its final source therefore, according to
Rothe as well as Weisse, in the never wholly vanquished
antagonism which the distinct life of matter presents to the
will of God. And this is true not only of the present epoch
of the world, but of all future ones ; for every new period of
creation will again have to contend with the dross of matter
inherited from the one before it. Hence Rothe, like Origen,
Ch. III.] SPECULATIVE THEOLOGY. 151
maintains that the end of the world is always followed by a
new period of creation.
Rothe's conception of the ethical vocation of mankind is
closely connected with these cosmological speculations. Just
as the spiritualisation of material elements is the purpose of
the perpetual creative work of God, so the ethical vocation of
the personal creature is the appropriation of material nature
by means of his self-determination determining nature. Man
is by self-determination to become a personal character, but at
the same time by cultivating nature he is to become lord of
the world. Hence if God's purpose with the world is identical
with the progressive civilisation of historical humanity, the
normal ethical action of the latter must be identical with
religion, for it is action performed in fellowship with God,
who influences and directs man's growing personality, and for
the purpose of God, whose will is to occupy the world as
personality. From this Rothe infers that morality and piety
in their normal development are co-extensive, and that a piety
without morality would be an abstract, phantom piety. In
particular, " Christian piety is absolutely identical with pure
and complete morality," and hence its community, the Church,
is identical with the ethical community, the State. At present,
it is true, as the moral has not reached its true normal condition,
and the ethical community has not yet fully developed into
a universal organism of states, this is only an ideal to be aimed
at, and not immediately realisable ; but even now it must be
the final end determining our moral and religious develop-
ment.
These fundamental principles of his theological speculation
Rothe consistently followed out in relation to practical church
politics. He opposed every form of ecclesiasticism that lacks
moral stamina, that pietistically shuns the world or is hier-
archically hostile to it, and insisted on practical Christianity ;
with fine breadth of mind he recognised all that is true and
good in modern culture, in art and science, in the intercourse
of nations, and in cultivated society ; Christianity and true
humanity ought not only to form a close alliance, but Chris-
tianity ought to become absolutely moral and human, and
humanity absolutely religious and Christian. Undoubtedly
noble principles, which in any case retain their truth, even if
we object to the formula of the " absolute equivalence and
coincidence of religion and morality, Church and State," on
152 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. II.
account of the psychological and social difference of the two
spheres, and though we regard Rothe's eschatological forecast
of the future as a transcendental fiction.
For in spite of the rationality of Rothe's view of the moral
vocation of mankind, he still distinctly accepts the super-
naturalism of the Biblical and ecclesiastical doctrines. Though
regarding sin as an unavoidable passage in the course of the
moral development of personality out of nature, he still believes
that pre-Christian humanity fell a prey to an abnormal develop-
ment, to sinful depravity, from which it could only be delivered
and restored to its normal moral condition by a miraculous
act on the part of God, resuming the interrupted creation and
beginning it afresh, viz., by the sending of the supernatural
person of the second Adam in Jesus of Nazareth. This
second Adam, Rothe held, had necessarily to come into the
world in a purely supernatural way, springing indeed from
natural humanity, yet not called into being by its own develop-
ment and in the ordinary way, but by a creative act of God
upon it, which was absolutely miraculous ; the Saviour had to
be born of a woman, though not begotten by a man, but
created by God. Only thus, Rothe thought, could he be the
second Adam and begin the normal moral development of
mankind. He was not indeed from the first actually a divine
person, but became such in the course of his life in consequence
of his supernatural birth. For from the first moment of his
personal life God entered into a relation of real union with
him, in order by means of his moral development to dwell in
him in ever closer approximation to absolute unity. The
course of his life was therefore a continual process of Man
becoming God and God becoming Man. This was completed
in the resurrection and the elevation of Christ to the divine
sovereignty of the world, which he at present exercises by his
spiritual presence in Christendom, until on his visible return
to earth he will establish the perfect kingdom of God.
Together with Christ will appear the saints, clothed then
with a spiritual body, the bodies of the pious upon the earth
will be made spiritual, while the ungodly will be given up to
judgment, i.e., to total destruction. Finally, the terrestrial
world will also be spiritualised and placed in communication
with the heavenly spheres. Thus the kingdom of earth be-
comes the kingdom of heaven.
We shall not here inquire how far these doctrines are con-
Ch. III.] SPECULATIVE THEOLOGY. 153
sistent with the speculative premises of the system. It is
certain that Rothe's heart and imagination clung as firmly to
this miraculous world of faith as his energetic ethical mind
insisted on moral action and the reconciliation of Christianity
with the culture of our time. We may say there dwelt two
souls within his breast ; yet the two were united in him so
as to form a complete harmonious personality, and it was just
this which enabled him to generously tolerate and acknow-
ledge the very various tendencies of the Christianity of to-
day. " To the pure all things are pure," and Rothe was
one of the purest.
CHAPTER IV.
ECLECTIC MEDIATING THEOLOGIANS.
UNDER this head I include a series of theologians, belonging
to the most recent past and the present, who in spite of the
difference of their results possess the common characteristic of
trying to reconcile the faith of the Church with their own
thought and that of their contemporaries, without making their
faith dependent upon the hypotheses and formulae of a definite
philosophical system. At this point I wish expressly to pre-
mise that I do not in any way use the adjective " eclectic " in
a derogatory sense. In philosophy, it is true, the word has
usually such a sense, because from a philosopher we are wont
to demand a harmonious system based on a definite funda-
mental principle, and giving a scientific account of the world,
and hence we regard the eclectic method of philosophising,
which tries to combine thoughts derived from various quarters,
as defective. Even in the case of philosophy, however, we
might object, that precisely the most important and fruitful
contributions to it have derived the most varied elements
from previous philosophers, and have never been more than
partially successful in thoroughly combining them ; so that
even in philosophy our unfavourable judgment ought not to
condemn the eclectic method as such, but only unsatisfactory
attempts to reconcile contrary modes of thought. Much more
will this hold in the case of theology, which is not intended
to construct systematic scientific explanations of the world, but
to exhibit the belief of a particular Church for the practical
purposes of its ministers at a particular time. If we consider
that the theology of the Church is the product of its history
during eighteen centuries, enriched with contributions from
the most various minds, we must admit at all events that here,
in a much greater degree than in philosophy, systematic unity
can never be more than an approximately attainable ideal. If
we further consider that the needs of the Church of to-day,
for which the theologian must work, are of the most various
Ch. IV.] ECLECTIC MEDIATING THEOLOGIANS. 155
kinds, and that their variety grows with the Church's wealth
in individual religious life, we shall come to the conclusion,
that a theology sacrificing this diversity of religious interests
and forces in an attempt to work out in systematic form a
definite and limited principle, fulfils its task worse than a
theology maintaining an eclectic attitude towards the various
philosophical systems, and contenting itself with rendering
the Church's belief intelligible and useful to the general edu-
cated thought of the day. This is confirmed by experience.
In proportion as a theology is dependent upon one particular
philosophical system, it is certain to be wrecked upon the
limitations of the latter, for its influence is confined to the
narrow circle of the adherents of the system, and to the short
period it is in vogue. The more, on the other hand, the theo-
logian succeeds in giving expression to the religious and
ethical ideal existing in the mind of the Church with a breadth
of view and a freedom of treatment which recognises fully the
(relative) justice of the claims of the various existing modes
of thought and belief, the greater will be his success in pre-
senting to extended circles the means t)f a common religious
understanding, a symbol therefore of the community of faith,
which always exists in spite of all differences. It is, however,
evident that the theological works which aim at eclectically
reconciling the old and the new, according to the needs of the
Churches of to-day, must not be measured by the standard of
strict theological science. These theologians are right in so
far as they succeed in finding for the faith of the fathers an
expression intelligible and acceptable to the present genera-
tion ; where they are wrong is when any of them confounds the
conditional truth of his dogmatic statements with an uncon-
ditional and universal truth, and in his dogmatic arrogance
disputes the equal justification of other presentations of it. I
shall therefore, I think, be justified in confining myself to an
objective review of the characteristic opinions of the individual
theologians of this class, without attempting a critical estimate
of them. I also purposely refrain from arranging them ac-
cording to their dogmatic schools : the only difference of a
general nature among these mediating eclectics is that with
some of them a conservative fear of breaking with ecclesias-
tical tradition is predominant, and with others a free recasting
and development of this tradition. But this is an altogether
indefinite distinction ; for even the conservative reproduction
156 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. II.
of ecclesiastical dogma necessitates in some measure a recast-
ing of its original meaning, and even the liberal development
of it is not intended to break the continuity of the historic
growth of the Church's creed, and involves therefore to some
extent an " accommodation " to tradition. I shall begin with
those mediating theologians who have the greatest affinity
with the speculative theologians already discussed, while
differing from them in that their speculative thinking is not
so much an end in itself as the form in which the given
ecclesiastical dogmas can be best exhibited with such modifi-
cations as the times demand.
The most important of these theologians, and the type of
the whole school, was indisputably ISAAC AUGUST DORNER,
who possessed a deeply reflective Swabian nature, profound
religious earnestness, and a vivid sense of the need of sounding
by thought the depths of the truths of Christianity dear to his
heart. His youth was passed during the time of the great
disturbance in the Church created by Strauss's Leben Jesu.
While he was repelled by the negative result of this criticism,
his love of truth and fairness was equally opposed to the
tumultuous mode in which its opponents replied to it, with
their superficial apologies, or even appeals to ecclesiastical and
political force. His view was that the business of scientific
theology is to bring the Christological problem, propounded
by Strauss, nearer to a solution. From the historical re-
searches undertaken for this end came his great contribution
to the history of Christology, Entwicklungsgeschickte der
Lehre von der Person Christi (1856), a work in which the
author's profound learning, objectivity of judgment, and fine
appreciation of the moving ideas of history were shown, as
was universally acknowledged. This book was followed later
by another important historical work, his Geschickte der pro-
testantise hen Theologie (1867). Like Alexander Schweizer,
Dorner developed and elaborated his own convictions by his
diligent and loving study of the history of the Church's
thought and belief. He gave these convictions permanent
form in his two principal treatises, Christ lie he Glaubenslehre,
and Christ lie he Sittenlekre, the former of which appeared
shortly before his death (1879-81), while the latter was post-
humously edited by his son (1886).
Dorner's Glaubenslehre is a work extremely rich in thought
and matter. It takes the reader through a mass of historical
Ch. IV.] ECLECTIC MEDIATING THEOLOGIANS. 157
material by the examination and discussion of the various
opinions of ancient and modern teachers, and so leads up to
the author's own view, which is mostly one intermediate be-
tween the opposite extremes, and appears as a more or less
successful synthesis of antagonistic theses. Of his method,
Dorner speaks as follows: "The method of Christian dogmatic
theology must be not simply productive, but rather reproduc-
tive ; still it must not be merely empirical and reflective, but
also constructive and progressive. When the enlightened
Christian mind is in harmony by its faith and experience with
objective Christianity, which faith knows to be its own origin,
and which is also attested by the Scriptures and the scriptural
faith of the Church, then such a mind has to justify and
develop its religious knowledge in a systematic form." This
is practically the same principle as that adopted by Alexander
Schweizer ; and the considerable difference in the results of
the two men only proves that this method, while a very
valuable one, allows great latitude of individual opinion
as to what constitutes objective Christianity, and from the
nature of the case must always do so^ The arrangement of
Dorner's book is singular. After a lengthy introduction, a
kind of religious phenomenology, leading successively through
the different points of view of doubt and of hesitation to that
of Christian faith, there follows, in the first part, the discus-
sion of the general fundamental Christian doctrines God,
his nature and relation to the world ; man, his nature and
original condition ; and finally, religion, as the unity of God
and man, resting on divine revelation, realised in the his-
torical religions, and perfected in the historical appearance of
the God-man Christ. Then comes, in the second and special
part, the doctrine of sin, its nature and origin, and its con-
nection with the devil and death, and of Christian salvation,
based on Christ's person and work on earth and in heaven,
realised in the Church or the kingdom of the Holy Spirit, and
to be consummated in the eternity beyond. It is character-
istic of Dorner that he treats the doctrine of Christ as the
God-man among the general fundamental doctrines, placing it
before the special doctrines concerning the historical Christ
and his work of salvation. The incarnation of God (Gott-
mensckheif) he regards as a speculative idea of the nature of
an a priori truth, following from the nature of God and man,
which would necessarily have been realised in history, if there
158 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. II.
had been no abnormal development of mankind in sin, which
was not therefore the condition of the appearance of Christ
the God-man, but only of his historical mission of salvation.
This arrangement has, however, the disadvantage of breaking
up the doctrine of man, the accounts of his original state and
of his sin being separated by the description of the historical
development of religion and revelation until the appearance of
the God-man.
The doctrine of God is treated by Dorner with special
thoroughness, and contains valuable thoughts. He rejects
the idea of the complete cognisability, as well as of the abso-
lute incognisability of God ; our knowledge of God is always
incomplete, growing, and relative, but is not therefore untrue.
Again, the scientific examination of our belief in God is
neither impossible nor unnecessary ; what is indeed primarily
an immediate religious certainty, can and ought to be raised
to a conviction with a scientific justification. This falls to
be done in the section treating of the so-called proofs of the
existence of God, though these must be so presented as to
contain at the same time the doctrine of the divine nature and
attributes. At each stage of the line of proof the idea of God
is enriched with some new element, from the metaphysical at-
tributes of infinitude, omnipresence, and eternity, to the wisdom
involving moral purposes, while each successive aspect thus
gained of our conception of God is also shown to be the
determining principle of some particular religion the pro-
cesses of dialectic and history being thus made to run parallel,
evidently owing to Hegelian influences. Of the details we
must notice Dorner's view of the eternity of God, which he
says must not be so conceived as to imply that for God time
does not exist, making history a mere semblance without
truth ; but the unchangeableness of God's nature does not
exclude a changed relation to changes in time, a variation
of his knowledge in the course of time ; the immutability
(Sichselbstgleichheif) of God must not be understood in so
abstract a sense as to negative his life. Of the spiritual
attributes of God justice is placed first, and defined as
God's maintenance of his honour, which, as the absolute
standard of all value, is the source of right in the world ;
God's justice consists in the ethically good as the absolutely
valuable, and secures for it its absolute and unique rights.
Absolute intelligence, or omniscience and wisdom, is repre-
Ch. IV.] ECLECTIC MEDIATING THEOLOGIANS. 159
sented as derived from ethical perfection, to indicate that,
like everything else, intelligence in the last resort is only a
subordinate instrument of moral goodness. The question as
to the compatibility of God's self- maintenance, as absolute
intelligence and personality, with his self-impartation and
immanence in the world, leads to the doctrine of the divine
Trinity, which is precisely the Christian synthesis of this
antithesis of transcendence and immanence, or of God's just
self-maintenance and his loving self-impartation to the world.
The essence of every religion is expressed in its conception of
God, and thus Christianity by its doctrine of the Trinity has
secured itself against both the abstract monotheism of Judaism
and the polytheism and pantheism of heathendom. The two
Unitarian heresies, Arianism and Sabellianism, were the
effects of the imperfections of Jewish deism and heathen poly-
theism, the former denying the true communion of God and
man, the latter the holy exaltation of God above the sinful
world. Christian Gnosis rose above both these errors by its
conception of the holy love of God, of which the doctrine of
the Trinity is the exposition. From this point of view Dor-
ner constructs an ethical Trinity : the ethically Necessary, the
ethically Free, and the Love uniting both, form the three aspects
of the one absolute Personality ; each of these three " modes
of being " participates in the personality of God, but is not
itself a separate personality, for the absolute personality can
only be one. In this way the ecclesiastical dogma of the
Trinity is interpreted from the point of view of a speculative
theism, bearing the closest resemblance to that of Weisse.
The eternal love of God creates a free world, distinct
from God, to establish a communion of love with itself.
Being an organism with varied elements, this world is
intended to be the copy of the triune life of God. The
creation out of nothing means that the matter and form of
the world are alike wholly derived from God ; but this
derivation must not be conceived as having had a beginning
in time. The conceptions "creation" and "preservation"
must neither be confounded nor separated from each other.
Preservation is the continued action of the divine creative
will, though in such a way that the secondary causality
imparted to the creature itself becomes the means for its own
self-reproduction, so that the created world, by reason of the
all-pervading omnipotence, is also the cause of itself. If we
l6o DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. II.
define creation and preservation ideologically, they lead to
the conception of a Providence partly ruling existing things,
partly creating new ones. Its final end is a kingdom of moral
spirits, governed by holy love ; the freedom of the creature,
not fettered by the universal plan, but, as foreknown, is made
a part of that plan. Man, on the one hand belonging to
nature, and on the other rising above nature as an immortal
spirit, is in the image of God, partly as his original birth-
right, and partly as his true destination ; he cannot therefore
be a mere product of nature, but his existence presupposes a
fresh creative act of God. Man, though good by his original
creation, became the cause of evil by an act of freewill, of
which no further explanation can be given ; the evil became
the permanent corruption of human nature, and as such was
by the laws of heredity transmitted from the first parents to
all mankind. This inherited racial sin involves a general
need of salvation, but is not personal guilt, and does not
decide a man's definitive merit or final destiny, which depends
upon his personal decision. The restoration of the image of
God, marred by sin in the human race, was only possible by
the incarnation of God in the Son.
But this incarnation, as the completion of the revelation of
God, was also necessary in itself independently of sin, since
mankind was from the first created to arrive at perfection by
communion with God. Hence Dorner had previously con-
nected with the doctrine of man's nature, as created in the
image of God, the doctrine of the unity of God and man in
religion. God being love, imparts himself to man, and man
is spiritually able to receive the communication ; the reality of
this impartation and reception affirmed as a unity is religion.
Religion is primarily realised not in one of the spiritual
faculties, but in the man as a whole, or in the heart ; as Dorner
very characteristically seeks to prove, not by psychological
considerations, but from the fact that God as personality is an
indivisible spiritual whole. To God's manifestation of himself
in his sovereign power and his will, there corresponds on
man's side a primary consciousness of absolute dependence
upon God and devotion to him, by reason of which man is
filled with divine life in knowledge, freedom, and blessedness.
Since religion is not simply a subjective action, but pre-
supposes an approach of God to man, it implicitly contains
the idea of revelation. Revelation is a creative act of God
Ch. IV.] ECLECTIC MEDIATING THEOLOGIANS. l6l
upon the human heart, and its distinctive marks are originality
or novelty, constancy and universality, positiveness and
gradual growth. The ideas " supernatural " and " natural,"
" immediate " and " mediate " in relation to revelation must
not be thought of as exclusive and contradictory, but, as
from Schleiermacher's point of view, as the two aspects of
every revelation. As regards its form, revelation is partly
the outward manifestation of the divine power as interfering
in the system of nature (miracles), partly its inward working
upon the human spirit (inspiration). The possibility of
miracles must be conceded for the sake of the freedom of God
in relation to the world, and in virtue of the breadth and
elasticity of natural law ; their necessity follows from their
importance in authenticating revelation. Very characteristic
of Dorner's mode of thought, which is emotional and poetical
rather than strictly intellectual, is the sentence, " Every
uncorrupted soul rejoices in the miraculous. It is the part of
prose to hate the miraculous, of poetry to love it ; of true
poetry, of course, which does not create vain phantoms of the
imagination, but loves to contemplate the realised ideal, the
higher, more perfect, and therefore poetical stage of spiritual
freedom, when it is in harmony with nature :" a sentence which
reminds us of the utterances of Romanticism, e.g., the " magical
idealism " of Novalis. Inspiration is the spiritual miracle
performed on the spirit as a whole, increasing its strength and
purity, or, more particularly, it is enthusiasm (Begeisterung)
and enlightenment with regard to truth, for the purpose of
establishing permanent religious fellowship. The primary
seat of inspiration must not be sought in books, but in men,
and must not be separated from the general history of
revelation. But though no specific difference can be proved
between men endowed with the spirit and inspired men ; still
of the latter it is a distinctive and indeed unique characteristic,
by virtue of their being vehicles of revelation, that without
being personally absolutely incapable of error, they are yet
preserved from it in their teaching and preaching, and
proclaim only unerring truth, even in historical details, as the
word of God. Thus after approaching a freer rational view,
Dorner returns to the old ecclesiastical doctrine of the absolute
inspiration and infallibility of the Bible, a concession to eccle-
siastical dogma which was fatal to his position with regard
to scientific Biblical criticism.
G. T. M
1 62 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. II.
Revelation, and therefore religion too, reaches in the first
instance perfection in a single being, who, as the " absolute
God-man," is the Revealer pure and simple ; but as the
perfect man after the image of God, is the instrument of
securing the perfection of the world, The necessity of the
incarnation does not depend merely upon sinful humanity's
need of redemption, but is demanded apart from it by the
vocation of mankind to reach full communion with God, and
to form a united organism under a central head ; for such
a universal head, in whom all the limitations of human
individuality are done away, can only be a man in whom
God's communication of himself to mankind is absolutely
and universally realised, or in whom God as Logos has
become man. Indeed, the God-man, as the absolute
pneumatic personality of universal spiritual power, is not
merely the head of men, but also of angels, his kingdom
includes all ranks of spirits, and perfects their conscious
unity. Finally, Christianity claims to be the absolute religion,
which necessitates an absolute God-man as the permanent
centre of this religion. That this intrinsically necessary
incarnation actually took place in Jesus of Nazareth is
historically proved by his holy personality, his witness to
himself, and his work, as well as by the changes still being
wrought in mankind by his influence. The question as to the
manner in which God's incarnation in Jesus must be conceived
as taking place, is the business of theological speculation
to answer. On the basis of the historical development of
Christology, Dorner constructs a theory of his own, of which
the following is an outline. The subject of the incarnation
is "God as Logos," i.e., not a personal Logos hypostatically
distinct from God the Father, but God himself in his loving
will to reveal and communicate himself to mankind. That
the Logos " became flesh " must not be understood to mean
that he assumed human flesh as a garment, or even changed
himself into a man, for he would then only have acted the
part of a man, without having become a man ; it rather means
that God, as Logos, bestowed not merely his own power, but
his absolute self, upon the human person of Jesus, from the
moment of his birth in ever-growing measure, while the
personality of Jesus received this impartation of the divine
life with increasing power and receptivity in the course of
his free personal life, becoming ever more completely
Ch. IV.] ECLECTIC MEDIATING THEOLOGIANS. 163
possessed and filled by God, till his human being became at
last absolutely and indissolubly one with the divine mode of
being of the Logos. The conscience and the Christian
witness of the Spirit that is, of course, the moral and
religious consciousness in its Christian ideality is mentioned
as having analogy to this union of human knowledge and
will with the divine : whence we might infer that the person
of Christ must be conceived as the first and archetypal
manifestation of the Christian ideal of piety and morality. But
this inference, however natural, would not quite represent
Dorner's view, according to which Christ is not a mere
individual like others, but differs from all empirical individuals
in representing the general idea of the human race, freed not
only from sin, but also from the limitations and incomplete-
ness of other individuals ; in a word, he is ''the central in-
dividual," ordained to be the centre, not only of humanity, but
also of the whole realm of spirits, being in consequence the
eternal celestial sovereign, and the personal judge of the world
at his second coming to consummate the kingdom of God.
The motives of this Christology of Dorner are plain ; he
wishes to do fuller justice than is done by the ecclesiastical
doctrine to the human and ethical side of the person of Christ,
and at the same time retain as much as possible of its
transcendental metaphysics ; whether he has satisfactorily
accomplished this, in particular whether a central individual
coincident with the idea of the race is conceivable in actual
history, is a question I will in this place only suggest. The
same holds good of Dorner's treatment of the doctrine of
the work of Christ, in which he follows the ecclesiastical
tradition still more closely than in his doctrine of Christ's
person, not only formally in the doctrine of three offices, but
materially, especially on the central point the atonement by
vicarious satisfaction. Dorner teaches that when Christ put
himself in the place of mankind, in order, in his own feeling
of pain, to bear the divine displeasure against the guilt of
the race, he made himself an offering for us to the punitive
justice of God, and thereby became for the world the perfect
surety, for whose sake God can grant, not only freedom
from punishment, but even blessedness. That Christ's three
offices are perpetuated in the corresponding offices of the
Church, is a valuable remark of Dorner's, which might
naturally have suggested a retrospective modification of his
164 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. II.
doctrine of Christ's work. Finally, we must mention that in
his doctrine of justification, Dorner defended the strictly
Lutheran theory against Hengstenberg's more rationalistic
form of it. We can, however, trace a certain hesitation on
Dorner's part with regard to the decisive question, whether
the ground of justification is the objective merit of Christ to
which the believer's relation is simply receptive, or not rather
subjective faith itself, as the frame of mind pleasing to God,
and, therefore, in principle, the beginning of a new life.
Dorner's concern as a churchman for the objectivity of the
work of redemption, inclines him to the former view ; his
personal concern for the ethical conception of the Christian
life of faith to the latter.
On the latter point characteristic words of Dorner's are
found in his correspondence with Martensen : " The ethical
idea is now all-important. . . . More and more I see
Schleiermacher's peculiar greatness, and his unique position
among modern princes of science, in virtue of his thorough
blending of ethics and dogmatics. This will be a mine of
wealth for the times which are now at hand." What Dorner
commends in Schleiermacher characterises also the fundamental
principle of his own theology ; he tried to blend dogmatics
and ethics, and renovate theology and the Church by the
ethical idea of personal freedom in God. In this he is in
complete accord with Rothe. The excellence of this object,
and the purity and fervour of his devotion to it, will keep
Dorner's memory in honour, however we may judge of the
success of his attempts at dogmatic mediation and the tenability
of his particular doctrinal views.
The Danish theologian MARTENSEN, with whom Dorner was
connected in a long and close friendship, represented a similar
mediating speculative position, but differed from Dorner in
his way of treating theological doctrines. Dorner had arrived
at his results by the process of dialectical reflection upon the
various forms of doctrine of ancient and modern theologians ;
but in Martensen the historical method is put quite into the
background in favour of independent speculation, which indeed
everywhere presupposes the ecclesiastical dogmas, specially
those of Lutheranism, but tries to skilfully combine them with
the ideas of Bohme's and Baader's theosophy. The problem
of dogmatic theology Martensen holds to be the synthesis of
the Christian consciousness of redemption and revelation, or
Ch. IV.] ECLECTIC MEDIATING THEOLOGIANS. 165
the reproduction of revealed divine wisdom In our conception
of the Christian idea of truth, which ought to comprehend
the subjective and the objective, the human and the divine
side of Christianity. This idea dogmatic theology has to grasp
and develop, showing not only the coherence of its given
matter, but also its possibility and basis, and logically recon-
ciling the antitheses in the unity of the idea. This method was
suggestively pursued by Martensen himself, though we cannot
deny that his efforts at reconciliation often suffer much from
obscurity of conception, owing to the want of a rational intro-
ductory criticism. We often get the impression of brilliant
speculative fireworks, throwing a peculiar light on the Church's
dogmas, without making obscure questions really plainer.
With the antitheses of nature and spirit, ethical and cosmical,
personal and impersonal, he presents a dialectical exhibition
which rather confuses than instructs the sober understanding.
A few of the chief examples will serve to characterise this
method,
On the one hand, the fact is specially emphasised that Christi-
anity is an ethical, historical religion, belonging to the world
of spirit, language, conscience, freedom, and personality.
Christianity is essentially Christ himself. But on the other
hand, Christ must not be conceived as essentially an ethical
(or, to use our author s usual term, moral) and historical being
simply, not as simply the new Adam, but as the centre of the
whole world, of all spirits, and of nature. Schleiermachers
error lay in overlooking Christ's trinitarian pre-existence and
his cosmical position. The Logos is, it is true, primarily, in
Martensen as in Philo, simply the ideal world of the divine
consciousness ; but he maintains that the superiority of Christi-
anity lies in its making this idea as thought into a thinking
principle side by side with God, into the second hypostatical
ego of the Son ; just as the will, which raises the necessary
content of thought to the freedom of love, must be conceived
as a third ego, the hypostasis of the Spirit. Thus the Trinity
is constructed by the discrimination of different elements in
the divine life, and the transformation of them in the process
into independent persons. Dorner had proceeded more
cautiously.
In his doctrine of the creation, Martensen well remarks that
we must combine the heathen point of view of cosmogony, or
the world's evolution of itself, with the Jewish view of its free
1 66 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. II.
creation ; the world is both nature and creature ; regarded as
the former, it is eternal and necessary ; as the latter, it had
a beginning in time, and was the product of freedom, so that
in its further development also it is exposed to the free inter-
ference of divine miraculous power. How this conception
of the supernatural side of creation can be combined in thought
with the idea of nature, or the self-evolution of the world,
Martensen did not succeed in explaining.
Very characteristic is Martensen's doctrine as to angels and
devils. They must not be conceived merely and primarily as
personal, but as ideas and powers in the life of nature and of
peoples, intermediate between imagined personifications and
real personal beings, but sometimes becoming real persons,
ministering spirits in the kingdom of God. In particular, the
devil is really the universal principle of cosmical self-existence
in its antagonism to God ; being a .principle, he has not a
self-existing personality, but has only a nascent personality,
which " as such is intermediate between existence and non-
existence, personality and personification, actuality and possi-
bility, ' being ' and * signification.' ' The principle only reaches
personality in individual creatures, though not merely in
human, but also in superhuman spirits ; among the latter is one
in whom the principle of evil is so hypostatised as to make him
its central revelation, and therefore the personal centre and
head of the kingdom of evil the personal devil or Antichrist
of the Bible. He may be regarded as the younger brother
of the Son of God, Christ, and his personal rival throughout
the history of revelation. In the snake of the Garden of Eden
he was still as it were in swaddling clothes ; then his strength
grew more and more, until simultaneously with the revelation
of the Logos in Christ, he gained possession of the sovereignty
of this world. Although already conquered by Christ, he will
continue to exercise his power and craft until the last decisive
struggle with the returning King of heaven. Thus our Gnostic
theologian regards the personifications, by means of which
the poetical imagination vividly realised the warring forces of
the world's history, as objective realities, though he cannot
quite forget their origin in the creative power of the imagina-
tion ; the " hovering " of these strange figures between
personification and personality is the mark of this theology,
with its oscillation between poetical imagery and really definite
thought.
Ch. IV.] ECLECTIC MEDIATING THEOLOGIANS. 167
The temptation of the first parents in Paradise he explains
psychologically, by the antagonistic fundamental impulses of
human nature, and also metaphysically, by the contrary super-
human powers God and the cosmical principle. The Mosaic
account of the Fall we must regard as "a combination of history
and sacred symbolism, a figurative description of an actual
fact," that is, not merely as the symbol of a general, ever-
recurring event, but as an historical fact from the earliest
times ; though, again, not as this fact itself, as it actually
occurred, but only as an emblem or symbol of it. This justi-
fies the free allegorising of all the individual features of the
narrative, while still preserving its character as traditional
history in opposition to the mythological interpretation in
current criticism. How these two conceptions are to be united
is however not made clear.
In his Ghristology, Martensen vigorously demands the
reality of the incarnation of God and the union of the two
natures in the God-man, as against all mythical and mystical
rationalism and idealism. But in order to secure the unity
and gradual development of the person of Christ, Martensen
revises the ecclesiastical doctrine, partly by postulating (with
Liebner) an act of self-renunciation (kenosis] on the part of
the Logos, whereby his divine attributes were reduced to
the measure of the human, and partly by maintaining (with
Dorner) a gradual growth of the germ of divine life planted
in the human child from the unconscious possibility to the
conscious reality of an ego at once human and divine. This
certainly avoids the stumbling-block of the ecclesiastical doc-
trine of the two natures, a twofold life in Christ, but substitutes
for it a "twofold life" in the Logos, in that "as the pure
Logos of the Deity it works throughout nature, which is filled
by its presence," and at the same time, as the Logos incarnate
in Christ, has a humanly limited form of existence, and only
gradually rises from the unconsciousness of the potential ego
to the consciousness of itself. It is not clear how this life that
is humanly developing and that life eternally existing are com-
bined in the unity of the same personal Logos ; but the pur-
pose of this artificial reasoning is to show that we must
recognise in Christ not merely an ideal man, but the " centre
of the universe," the cosmical mediator of the consummation
of the whole kingdom of nature and of spirits, which is of
importance to our author on account of his doctrine of the
1 68 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. II.
sacraments and his eschatology. He further teaches that
Christ's birth was both truly human and also a true super-
human miracle ; that his life as man cannot be conceived with-
out a national colouring, but that he was without the natural
limitation attaching to every nationality ; that, since he was
subject to human temptation, we must assume the possibility
of his sinning, though, on account of the divine source of
his life, this possibility could never become actual, and was
therefore in fact equivalent to the impossibility of his sinning.
The work of reconciliation belonging to Christ's high priestly
office must be interpreted not merely as a reconciliation of
man to God, but as a reconciliation of God himself. Recon-
ciliation may be defined as the removal of an antithesis in
the process of God's revelation of himself, viz., the antithesis
between his love and his justice. " Although these attri-
butes are essentially one, there is on account of sin a certain
disagreement between them in the divine nature. For, in
spite of God's eternal love of the world, his actual relation to
it is not one of love, but only one of holiness and justice, an
antithetical relation, since the unity it involves is hindered
and kept down." This contradiction can be removed only by
the vicarious satisfaction of the Son of God. The necessity
of such an objective vicarious expiation is, it is true, again
rendered problematical by the subsequent discussion, according
to which the subjective consciousness of reconciliation is the
effect of the new birth, and of faith, which Martensen regards
as the germinal beginning of the new man. Accordingly, the
actual reconciliation appears as a psychological process in
consciousness, in consequence of the ethical change in the
human mind ; so that, after all, the necessity for a reconcilia-
tion once for all by Christ's satisfaction is not made clear.
The same hesitation between an ethical and non-ethical
point of view recurs finally in a specially surprising form in
Martensen's teaching on the Sacraments. Baptism is primarily
the pledge of divine grace in view of future faith ; but it is
more than this : it is also, in truth, the beginning of the
Christian life, since it " involves, not indeed personal, but
substantial and essential regeneration." It is an objective
mystery, in which creative grace establishes a new relation of
being between God and man, " incorporating" the latter's
unconscious nature " into Christ, not psychologically merely,
but organically, not figuratively only, but essentially." Since
Ch. IV.] ECLECTIC MEDIATING THEOLOGIANS. 169
in the case of a child this cannot, of course, be done by
ethical means, a physical influence is the only remaining
method, and accordingly Martensen does not hesitate to speak
of "a holy nature-mystery." How this mystery is to be con-
ceived without having recourse to magic is not explained.
In the same way, Martensen sees in the Lord's Supper " the
inseparable union of a holy spirit-mystery, and a holy nature-
mystery," since not only Christ's spirituality, but also his
corporality is offered as food, not only for the soul, but for
the whole new man, accordingly for that future man of the
resurrection also, who is already germinating in secret, and
this food is received by all, including the unbelieving. To
the old objection of the Zwinglian school, that we cannot
think of Christ's body as omnipresent, he returns the not very
luminous answer, that we must conceive of heaven as where
the glorified Christ is; not as a material place, a "where"
according to the ideas of our present sense-perception, but
still as " a more definite ' where,' " where cosmic life is com-
pletely filled by God.
We see that Martensen's method^ of speculation never
belies its character ; it dazzles by its brilliant antitheses and
bold syntheses, but generally leaves us wholly uncertain as to
how we are actually to combine the contradictory sides in
thought ; dogmatic thought and imaginative contemplation
combine to form a Romantic twilight, from which the critical
understanding departs unsatisfied.
Of much greater value than his Dogmatik, is Martensen's
Ethik, in two volumes, in which the versatile theologian's
wide knowledge of life and the world is shown in an
attractive form. The general lines of this book are best
characterised in Martensen's own words in a letter to Dorner :
" The onesided views against which we have to contend are
those of onesided ecclesiasticism, and onesided individualism.
Both negative the great problem of the modern age the
living union of Christianity and humanism. For a nomistic
ecclesiasticism which suppresses all intellectual, and especially
all scientific freedom, and an individualism which tries to
isolate Christianity, and separate it from the varied spheres
of human life, are alike un-Christian and inhuman. The
problem will continue to be the presentation in life and
doctrine of this union and combination of Christianity and
genuine and free humanity."
I /O DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. II.
From Martensen, we pass to the theologian most nearly
resembling him in spirit, JOHANN PETER LANGE, a man of rich
imagination and varied culture, who tried to defend and
renovate ecclesiastical dogma by theosophical speculation.
His Dogmatik (1849-51) contains many fruitful and sug-
gestive thoughts, which, however, are hidden under such a
mass of bold figures and strange fancies, and suffer so much
from want of clearness of presentation, that they did not
produce any lasting effect. He affirms the true principle that
theology must start from a knowledge of man's nature. But
his procedure consists rather in an ingenious playing with
analogies than in logical inference from ascertained facts.
In the pneumatic, or regenerate man, he finds a threefold
consciousness, and therein a copy of the Trinity, the Persons
of which are to be conceived as threefold forms or centres of
consciousness ; each form of consciousness is the whole con-
sciousness of the divine nature, yet each is fundamentally
different from the others ; regarded ideally, it is another
person, but regarded really another form of personality.
Since religion is deducible from our conceptions of God and
man as their real interaction for the purpose of their union,
the incarnation is an eternal truth which influenced the whole
history of mankind, being as it were gradually realised, until
it found its absolute reality in the individual God-man Jesus.
Hence, in order rightly to understand the religious importance
of this person, we must consider his historical life altogether
in the light of the absolute idea. The possibility of the in-
carnation must be explained from the nature of man : " Man
in the God-man is not an individual man, but the man who
takes humanity up into himself, just as humanity has taken
nature up into itself. Only so does he come into coincident
relation with the divine as self-conditioned, and as the Son
of God with human conditionality. The man in the God-man
comprehends the eternal Becoming of the whole world, as it
proceeds from God, according to the potentiality of his nature.
He is, therefore, essentially the real transition of the process
of being through the completed Becoming to absolute Being,
and hence the fit organ of the Son of God after his ideal
entrance upon absolute Becoming. He is conditioned
unconditionality, which is identical with unconditioned con-
ditionality, the divine man who takes up into himself the
human God." It cannot be said that this explanation makes
Ch. IV.] ECLECTIC MEDIATING THEOLOGIANS. I J I
the matter very plain. Peculiar to Lange's Christology, is
the reference to the psychological distinction of " day and
night consciouness " and the related idea of "genius." Genius,
he well remarks, is a permanent form in which the "day
consciousness" receives inspirations from the "night con-
sciousness," which, as a rule, is a closed world to the ethical
" day consciousness," and makes its existence known only in
certain special influences. The application of this analogy
from the general theory of the soul to the person of Jesus
was calculated to explain several points ; but Lange leaves
the matter in considerable obscurity, when he says, " The
ethical consciousness of Christ's human development was
based on the infinitude of his night consciousness, like the
lotos flower on the lake ; and this latter consciousness was
not the eternal form of consciousness of the Logos per se,
but it was the night side of the universal human consciousness
which the Logos had assumed with his incarnation. It was
the infinite plastic educative thought of the Son of Man in
his personal conditionality, that is, the human form which
the eternal Son could assume, without suffering any obscu-
ration of his eternal consciousness." In spite of all analogies
from general experience, in spite of all the ideal and real
preparation and mediation, Lange leaves the individual per-
son of the God-man Jesus as "the absolute miracle," and his
life on earth as a series of miracles. Lange deduces seven
chief miracles from the seven-fold miraculous nature of the
God-man. In discussing them he lays stress on the ideal,
spiritually symbolical meaning of the narratives, but insists
equally upon their proper historical character, because, as he
holds, the ideal would otherwise be conceived in a false
abstraction, without the real. He follows the same method
in the case of the Old Testament legends. The garden of
Eden, for example, is ideal nature in general, but at the
same time a definite place ; the tree of knowledge in the
garden is an actual historical tree, no less than an ideal
symbol of the seductive charm of the pleasures of nature ;
the cherub with the flaming sword was both a real angel, with
an ethereal celestial body, and a symbol of lost innocence ;
and in general, Christianity presupposes, not only the
subjective, but also the objective truth of the appearances of
angels and demons. The devil, in Lange's, as in Martensen's
view, is an ambiguous term : on the one hand, the symbol
172 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. II.
of absolute evil as a principle, and on the other, a personal
evil spirit, or fallen angel, and as such not absolutely evil,
but only evil in a great and ever-increasing degree. The
Apocalyptic eschatological world-drama is, of course, inter-
preted by our theologian quite realistically.
In Dorner, Martensen, and Lange, speculation and
ecclesiastical dogma preserved a certain equilibrium. But
neology spread among members of those circles which had
undertaken the defence of ecclesiastical, and in particular of
Lutheran, dogma; so that they too must be included, to some
extent, among the Eclectics. It is especially on the doctrines
of Christ's person and work that the Erlangen Lutheran
theology deviated from orthodoxy.
The perception of the inconceivability of the complete
humanity and human development of Jesus on the sup-
position that the divine Logos in his full personality was
present in him, led the Erlangen theologian THOMASIUS to
the so-called " Kenotic Christology." He held that with the
incarnation, the Logos renounced the relative attributes of
deity, which he considered as not necessarily belonging to the
divine nature omnipotence, omnipresence, and omniscience,
in order to assume the limited form of the existence of Jesus ;
only in the course of the life of Jesus did the Logos make an
actuality the absoluteness of action and knowledge which had
been voluntarily surrendered or reduced to an inoperative
potentiality. But inasmuch as during this kenosis the Logos
is supposed not to have given up his personal ego, nor ceased
to form part of the Trinity, we get the difficult conception
that, though in Jesus the divine self-consciousness of the
Logos existed, it was not as divine, because it is supposed
not to be omniscient and almighty. Hence Gess was more
logical in maintaining a kenosis on the part of the divine
Logos to such an extent that he completely renounced his
self-consciousness, and converted it into the human soul of
Jesus. By virtue of his subordination to the Father he was,
it is said, able to surrender to him his personality, and by
virtue of his kinship with the human soul, which is in the
image of God, he was able to convert himself into such a
soul, which potentially bears within it the fulness of all the
divine powers, but can only by a gradual development
become actually able to use them. Jesus, therefore, was
from the first a potential but not actual God, and was con-
Ch. IV.] ECLECTIC MEDIATING THEOLOGIANS. 173
sequently capable of a human development. During this
development, his Logos-consciousness occasionally flashed
through the human limitations, in recollection of his pre-
existence, but ordinarily it remained only the latent ground
of the development of his human consciousness, which rose
step by step to complete identity with the divine Logos-
consciousness, whereby, and not before, the man Jesus
was received into the complete unity of the life of the
Trinity. The opponents of this theory rightly remarked that
it deviated widely from the orthodox doctrine of God and
Christ, in representing the life of the Trinity as interrupted
and deprived of its second person by the conversion of the
Logos into the human soul of Jesus during the latter's life
on earth, and in regarding Jesus as only a potential but not
actual God-man ; but for us the chief interest lies in the fact
that the theory is evidently on the point of quite breaking
away from the ecclesiastical dogma, and taking the side of the
speculative theory, according to which the universal capacity
for the divine, the innate destiny and vocation of every
human soul, was typically realised in Jesus.
Still further removed from orthodoxy was the teaching of
the Erlangen theologian, CHRISTIAN VON HOFMANN. His
doctrine of the Atonement was the most prominent though
not the only instance of his heterodoxy, and hence was the
first object of attack on the part of orthodox theologians.
Hofmann, indeed, only wished to teach old truth in a new
form, but a glance at his system shows the serious extent of
the neology in his teaching. A vein of modern Rationalism
runs through his theology, but it is concealed, by means of
an artificial dialectic, behind a supernaturalism rather Biblical
than ecclesiastical. His theological system is given in his
two chief works, Weissagung und Erfilllung and Der Schrift-
beweis (1852-56), to which may be added his collected Schutz-
schriften, containing an exposition and defence of his system
against ecclesiastical attacks.
Hofmann, exactly like Schleiermacher, bases his theology
upon the inward experience of the facts of personal Chris-
tianity. This experience he attempts to develop into a
system of organically connected statements, in which every
individual fact is to find its definite and necessary place as an
historical presupposition or inference. And the Schriftbeweis,
or proof from Scripture, he holds to consist precisely in show-
174 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. II.
ing that Biblical history and doctrine as a whole finds its
proper place in the systematic development of the facts which
make us Christians ; it is not that certain dogmatic proposi-
tions are to be proved by individual texts of Scripture, but
the Biblical history of revelation as a whole, from the creation
to the consummation of the world, is to be explained from the
point of view of the necessary premises of our experience of
Christianity, and inferences from it. It need not be said that
the subjective conception of Christian experience thus acquires
fundamental importance in the interpretation and explanation
of the history, and that arbitrary and violent expedients are
not always avoided in the case of important points. At
bottom this Schriftbeweis is the supernaturalistic counterpart
of Hegel's Philosophy of History ; both pursue the same
method of deducing history from a priori ideas, philosophical
ideas in the one case, theological in the other ; both connect
historical events with transcendental relations : the one, with
the movement of the idea through the antithesis of its ele-
ments to the unity of the concept and of reality ; the other,
with the movement of the Persons of the Trinity through
antithetical modes of existence to the unity of love and
blessedness.
The fellowship with God into which we know that we have
been admitted through Christ has, Hofmann teaches, the
divine Trinity as its eternal condition. For the self-deter-
mination of the divine love beyond itself, having for its object
the gradually evolving man of God, i.e., historical humanity,
presupposes an eternal self-determination on the part of God
within himself, having as its object the eternal man of God,
or the Son of God (who is accordingly not really God at all,
or a Person in the Trinitarian nature of God, but the pre-
existent ideal man, something like the Pauline Christ). God's
eternal will of love, or his inward divine relation to his Son,
is accomplished in the history which transpires between him
and mankind. This history has a threefold beginning : one
given to it by God, one given to it by itself, and one a fresh
beginning, annulling the latter and completing the former,
God having appointed his Son for this. Since the final end
of the divine will is the man Jesus, mankind necessarily began
in a single man, Eve being taken therefore from her husband.
The original state of mankind was a state of actual and true,
though only incipient, holiness and blessedness, not excluding
Ch. IV.] ECLECTIC MEDIATING THEOLOGIANS. 175
the possibility of self-determination in opposition to God.
The source of the first sin, however, did not lie in man, but
outside him, in the temptation of Satan, who was able to
deceive the woman. This brought mankind into a state the
reverse of life from God, under the necessity of death and
the seductive influences of Satan. Still there existed the
possibility of divine counter-influence, prophetically testified
to in the revelation of God to Israel, and fully realised in the
incarnation of the eternal Son. His entrance into the humanity
derived from Adam was for it the realisation of God's eternal
will of love, since he was the beginner and originator of per-
fect fellowship with God for the same humanity which had
in its sin made a beginning opposed to the holiness of God,
and frustrating God's work of love. At the same time, how-
ever, his inward divine relation to the Father became involved
in the most extreme antithesis possible to it without cancelling
itself. For as having become a member of Adamite human-
ity, the Son was bound to an obedience to the Father which
involved undergoing the consequences of God's anger inflicted
upon the sinful race. But the sinfulness of the human race
inherited from Adam could not possibly be shared by the Son,
from the fact that his incarnation was a deed of holy self-
determination, to the accomplishment of which nothing was
necessary on man's part except obedient faith in the divine
word of promise on the part of the woman destined to con-
ceive him. His human action could then only be the con-
tinuation, by means of a sinless human nature, of the holy
self-determination by which he had become man.
The acquisition of righteousness for mankind by Jesus was
the effect of his entire holy life, from his incarnation to his
death. It began by his assuming human nature in a sinless
state as his own, thus making a new beginning in opposition
to the sin of Adam. It was continued in the harmony of all
he did with the will of God, expressed in consequence of sin
in the form of the law, which demanded obedience to the
various ordinances of man's social life. It was consummated
by enduring the enmity of men in his fidelity to the divine
will, preserving his holiness to the end in suffering as well
as in action. The death of Jesus was therefore not a
vicarious atoning sacrifice to the divine punitive righteousness,
but an " occurrence " resulting from the historical position of
affairs, and which became the deed of Jesus by virtue of his
176 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. II.
voluntary submission to it. But just as this thing which hap-
pened to him was not the suffering of what sinful humanity
would have had to suffer, so the thing which he accomplished
was not what humanity ought to have done, but it was the
obedience of the divinely ordained Saviour to his own voca-
tion. The abandonment of the Son by the Father to the
hostile power of men and the devil brought the history trans-
acting between God and the second beginner of mankind to
a conclusion, which was at the same time the conclusion of
the previous history of mankind conditioned by sin. For in
his maintenance of the office of mediator in opposition to the
enmity born of sin lay likewise his deed of satisfaction for the
sin of Adamite humanity, that is, the actual realisation of the
relation to God which had been desired and brought about by
God, a relation for which sin no longer exists, and which is holi-
ness alone. This whole act of God we call the redemption of
mankind, irrespective of its effects upon individuals, because
it sanctified and glorified human nature in the person of Christ.
Its sanctification was its salvation from sin ; its glorification
its salvation from death. This glorification was accomplished
by the raising of Christ from the dead, by which he entered
upon a new kind of human life, in which his human nature
was the perfect instrument of his unconditional fellowship with
the Father. Christ's work of salvation was an expiation of
sin, not in the sense that the Triune God had claimed some-
thing as a recompense for the wrong done him, but in the
sense that for the benefit of the human race he displayed his
eternally holy love, which seeks not its own, but what is
another's. The salvation of the world is not based upon the
Triune God having been appeased, but upon the Son having
accomplished that in relation to the Father which only the
Holy One was able to accomplish, but not sinful mankind for
itself. Only in this sense can his work be called vicarious.
The result of this history, commencing with Christ's incarna-
tion and completed by his death and resurrection, is that the
relation of the Father to the Son is henceforth also the relation
of God to the humanity beginning anew in the Son, a relation
which is henceforth not determined by the sin of the race of
Adam, but by the righteousness of the Son. But participa-
tion in this new relation to God is open to us only when, by
virtue of the working of the Holy Ghost, which makes us
certain of this change accomplished once for all, we are re-
Ch. IV.] ECLECTIC MEDIATING THEOLOGIANS. 177
solved to belong to the humanity begun afresh in Christ, and
therefore to make our own, not only the forgiveness of its
sins, but also its life unto God. It is the righteousness of the
Son which renders mankind the object of the divine approval;
and it is by acting up to the relation to God existing in his
person that the individual man becomes certain of its existence,
and its existence for him. What he thus becomes certain of
is the beginning of a new humanity, though this only becomes
such for him by his attaching himself to it as soon as he is
certain of its existence.
The near kinship of this theory of salvation to that of
Schleiermacher will be at once perceived. The fundamental
principles are the same as those recurring in all rationalistic
theology since Kant, only here they are, by a somewhat arti-
ficial dialectic, so interwoven with Biblical supernaturalism as
to appear to be the result of the Schriftbeweis. We may even
admit that they have points of support in Biblical teaching,
although not exactly in accord with true Pauline doctrine.
At any rate, we must admit the theologian's right to em-
phasise some sides of Biblical teaching ileglected by ecclesias-
tical theology, and to make use of them for his own rational
conception of the dogma. But Hofmann's opponents were
quite right in asserting the essential difference between his
theory of the Atonement and that of Anselm and Luther ; and
Hofmann's wish to represent his teaching as essentially in
accordance with the dogma of the Confessions can only be
called a piece of strange self-deception. But this want of
honesty towards himself and others, this concealment of the
heresy of which he was really guilty, is so general a weakness
among theologians, that we must not press it too much in
relation to individuals.
The lines of Hofmann are followed by DANIEL SCHENKEL in
his Dogmatik (1858-9), though he is a step further removed
from ecclesiastical dogma. He starts from man's self-con-
sciousness as involving the three fundamental facts of man's
need of salvation, the divine bestowal of salvation, and the
completion of salvation in the Church, these facts being
directly given in experience. He blames Schleiermacher for
emphasising the subjective side of the truth of salvation, the
facts of the religious consciousness, to the detriment of the
objective side, the facts of God's personal bestowal of salva-
tion. (Though how the " facts of salvation," which are only
G. T. N
178 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. II.
historically known, can at the same time be directly given
in the religious consciousness, Schenkel does not explain,
and throughout his book we can trace the effects of this
failure to distinguish between direct facts of the religious
consciousness and their conditions, which are only indirectly
inferred or historically knowable.) The truth of the facts of
salvation can be established in three ways : first, by their
answering to a human need of salvation ; secondly, by their
containing a fresh communication of himself by God to man ;
thirdly, by their being the basis of a progressive develop-
ment of the Christian community with regard to salvation.
Above all Schenkel, not without reason, maintains that
theology requires a thorough revision of the idea of religion,
which lies at the root of all its propositions. In spite of
Schleiermacher's great merit in distinguishing religion from
knowledge and conduct, his definition of religion is unsatis-
factory, as confusing the religious and aesthetic functions by
the identification of religion with emotion, and so overlooking
its ethical character. Schenkel, for his part, thinks he has
discovered a specifically religious organ in the conscience,
quite distinct from reason, will, and emotion ; for while in the
latter our self-consciousness involves only relation to the world,
in the conscience we are conscious of ourselves in primal and
direct relation to God. The primary religious function of
conscience is the consciousness that God is personally present
in us, but that our original normal relation to God is dis-
turbed by the distracting consciousness of the world, and that
we therefore stand in need of the restoration by God of our
normal relation to him. It is plain that this theory represents
religious convictions of a very complicated origin as the
original content of conscience, and from the first substi-
tutes dogmatic presuppositions for a psychological analysis of
facts ; but, setting aside his totally inadequate deduction, we
must recognise the justice and value of Schenkel's attempt
to show "the synthesis of the religious and ethical factors"
from the nature of the religious spirit itself, and thus to
secure from the first the indissoluble connexion of religious
and moral truths.
In treating of revelation, Schenkel complains of the want
of a distinction in the older dogmatic theologians between
the act and the record of revelation ; for while the former
is a direct working of God on the human conscience, this
Ch. IV.] ECLECTIC MEDIATING THEOLOGIANS. 179
absolute divine act of communication becomes, by its incor-
poration with human activity, a human and historically con-
ditioned record of revelation, which on that very account
can never be absolutely perfect, nor completed in past history,
since God's revelation of himself is always continued in the
historical development of salvation. Of " miracles," Schenkel
speaks very variously : on the one hand, he says, with
Schleiermacher, that from the religious point of view all
phenomena depend upon the divine causality, while from
the rational point of view they are at the same time explic-
able from the uniformity of nature, thus doing away with
miracles in the proper sense ; on the other hand, he main-
tains that specific miracles are creative modifications by God
of the uniformity of finite nature, mysteriously introducing
something new into the world, though it afterwards obeys
natural laws, since, e.g., the loaves miraculously multiplied
stilled the people's hunger like ordinary bread. Schenkel
was evidently not clear as to the essence of the question ;
his objection to Schleiermacher is unmeaning. Of inspira-
tion, Schenkel says that it originates directly from God, but
is continued through human instrumentality, so that we must
admit the imperfection of the individual inspirations during
the formation of the whole record of revelation. Still it is
not enough to say that the Scriptures contain the word of
God ; we must also say that they are the word of God, though
not all the individual words of the Bible are this, but the
Bible as a whole. Schenkel' s method of proof from Scripture
corresponds to this conception of its authority ; he interprets
the passages in the Bible so that they agree with the affir-
mations of his " conscience," and where that is impossible,
he has recourse to the supposition of the Biblical teacher's
accommodating himself to the conceptions of the people, e.g.,
in the doctrine of the devil; an unprejudiced historical estimate
of the Bible is unknown to Schenkel.
Accordingly the historical truth of the whole Biblical his-
tory from the creation of the world onwards is maintained by
Schenkel for conscience' sake. In speaking of the Fall he
does indeed quote Nitzsch, to the effect that it is "a true
but not an external history "; nevertheless it must be regarded
as having taken place as an external fact at some time. In
particular the belief in the historical trustworthiness of the
Gospel narratives of miracles, from the supernatural Birth
l8o DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. II.
to the Ascension, is represented as a demand of " conscience,"
and thus historical criticism is indirectly charged with want
of conscience ! Schenkel does indeed, as a fact, allow himself
several departures from Biblical statements of doctrine, but
he always endeavours by artificial interpretations to produce
the appearance of complete agreement (e.g., in the case of
the Johannine Christology, of the Pauline doctrine of sin and
atonement). On the other hand, he in many points openly
and expressly opposes ecclesiastical dogmas, and censures
others, e.g., Hofmann, for trying to conceal their heterodoxy,
forgetting that he is himself in precisely the same position
with regard to the Scriptures.
Schenkel sees the fundamental error of the ecclesiastical
Christology in the fact that it has never been able to acknow-
ledge the real humanity of Christ ; and the source of this error
he holds to be that it assumed the personal Logos, the second
Person of the Trinity, to have been the principle constituting
the person of Christ. Hence he begins his reconstruction
with the doctrine of the Trinity. It is not a triple personality
in God which is testified to by conscience and Scripture, but
a triple relationship of God to the world, and hence a triple
consciousness of God in relation to the world. " God as
the Father rests in the eternal source of creation ; as the
Son he issues from his absolute source and enters the life of
the world, without himself becoming finite, and reflects the
eternal image of the world within himself ; as the Holy Spirit
he transforms the life of the finite back into his absolute
source, in such a way that this life ceases to be solely for the
finite and comes to be for God, i.e., for divine and eternal
purposes." The Logos is therefore not a person, but the idea
of the world eternally thought in God's self-consciousness,
reaching its highest form in the idea of a perfect man. Only
in this ideal, not in a real personal, sense can we maintain
Christ's pre-existence, and only in this sense must we under-
stand the Biblical statements with respect to it. " Christ
had indeed an eternal pre-existence in God, in so far that
the Father had chosen him from all eternity to represent the
idea of man within the limits of the historical development
of the human race. The Logos, as the eternal, conscious,
divine idea of humanity, really became flesh, i.e., had historical
existence as a human person." The perfected archetype of
humanity and the complete image of the deity realised them-
Ch. IV.] ECLECTIC MEDIATING THEOLOGIANS. l8l
selves historically in Christ. In respect of his personal
nature, Christ did not differ from other men, as would have
been the case if he had had within him the personality of
the Logos with absolute attributes. Still he is as an indi-
vidual different from others, in that he is the spiritual centre
in which mankind is eternally one ; in him God conceives
and contemplates mankind from all eternity as a whole, as a
logical and ethical unity. Hence in the conception of Christ's
true humanity is involved that of his true Deity. For just
as it is the prerogative of every man to be historically in
time related to God in his conscience, so it is Christ's pre-
rogative above all other men to be eternally directly related
to God, and to be conscious of himself as the man in whom
the idea of humanity is realised as it was known and willed
in God before all time. In this sense we may say that God
himself, and nothing less, became man in Christ, because he
is the self-revelation of the eternal God, that is, of his eternal
will directed towards the world and humanity. As the self-
revelation of God within the limits of a human life, he is the
representative of Deity to mankind ; as "the personal exempli-
fication of a true and perfect man, he is the representative of
mankind in relation to Deity ; in conjunction with both, he is
the eternal mediator and surety, binding mankind to God and
assuring it of salvation.
The atonement wrought by Christ consisted in the restora-
tion of the fellowship of mankind with God, disturbed by sin,
and the cancelling of the effects of sin, guilt, and punishment.
This result was only possible by the manifestation in his own
person of the ethical perfection of human nature, and especi
ally by his condemnation of sin in its weakness, and revealing
his divine self-sacrificing love in all its glory by his suffering
and death. God regards this ethically perfect sacrifice not
simply as an individual act, but as the common deed of man-
kind generally as represented in Christ, and hence looks
upon mankind in general as if the normal development begun
in it by Christ were already finished ; which is the more
natural as this atonement was eternally willed and historically
accomplished by God himself. Thus Schenkel rejects, with
Hofmann and Schleiermacher, the ecclesiastical doctrine of a
vicarious satisfaction made to the punitive divine justice, and
holds that the atoning element was rather that Christ by
his holy life, attested by his death, made amends for the sin
l82 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. IT.
of mankind, i.e., actually overcame it and destroyed it at its
root, and thereby gave God the pledge of a life of humanity
well-pleasing to him. This triumph over the supremacy of
sin put an end to the cause of the discord between God and
mankind, and rendered it possible for God to look upon
mankind as if the new development of life, begun in principle,
was already actually accomplished. Christ's deed was vica-
rious only in the sense that his suffering and action exempli-
fied by anticipation what we are bound to suffer and do in
fellowship with him. But when the work of atonement has
once been comprehended, "with the help of the conscience,"
as a truly ethical deed, salvation, i.e., the individual appro-
priation of the effects of the atonement on the part of each
individual, must necessarily also be ethically conceived.
Salvation can no longer be supposed to consist in the impu-
tation to a man of another's merits, faith being merely the
passive acceptance of this justifying sentence of God. On
the contrary, the new life won, in principle, for mankind by
Christ, must be practically realised in each individual ; and
this is done by faith, inasmuch as faith is the central activity
of man's conscience in relation to God. Faith is the subjective
condition of justification, inasmuch as the man by virtue of
this change in his conscience, participates in the atoning per-
sonal life of Christ, and has received into his heart the new
divine principle of life exemplified in Christ. This beginning
of a new life in the believer, God imputes to him as if it were
already completed ; he regards it on account of the perfection
of the principle active in it (the personal life of Christ),
proleptically, as if it were itself already perfect.
The close connexion of this doctrine of atonement and of
justification with the fundamental principles of Kant's philo-
sophy of religion is very plain ; the difference is only that what
Kant called the ideal of a humanity pleasing to God, Jesus
being the conspicuous example of it, is here identified with
the ideal person of Christ ; but in both cases it is by receiving
this ideal into his own heart that the man becomes good in
principle, and thus righteous before God, in spite of his
as ting empirical imperfection. That Jesus was not only the
model but also the creative cause of this ethical and religious
process, while the society which he founded was its social
mediate cause, is the theological addition to the Kantian
theory made as early as Schleiermacher, and which we have
Ch. IV.] ECLECTIC MEDIATING THEOLOGIANS. 183
met with in various phases in the discussion of this group of
theologians.
Most nearly akin to Hofmann and Schenkel is the theo-
logian ALBRECHT RITSCHL ; with Schenkel he lays special
stress on the ethical element, with Hofmann he emphasises
the historical and social element, and claims with him to be
a true Lutheran ; he is distinguished from both by the peculi-
arity of his epistemology and his method, which he eclectically
derived from Kant and Lotze. In his book, Metaphysik
und Theologie, he very emphatically opposed the " bad episte-
mology and metaphysics" of previous theology, and offered
his own as the foundation of an altogether new theology. .
On a closer inspection, however, this, his famous theory of
cognition, is seen to be only a dilettante confusion of the
irreconcilable views of subjective idealism, which resolves
things into phenomena of consciousness, and common-sense
realism, which looks upon the phenomena of consciousness
as things themselves, admitting no distinction between
phenomena as perceived by us and the being of things in
themselves ; a confusion to which the nearest parallel is the
semUidealistic, semi-materialistic theory of the Neo- Kantian
Lange, author of the Geschichte des Materialismus (2nd ed.
1873), which enjoyed a brief celebrity as having supplied, it was
thought, a justification of the sceptical tendencies of the time.
We may, moreover, conjecture that Ritschl did not make
this theory of cognition the basis of his theology from the
first, but rather propounded it subsequently, in its defence.
In spite of its intrinsic worthlessness, it is well calculated to
furnish this theology, in its wavering between the subjective
dissolution of the objects of theology and the affirmation of
their objective reality, with an appearance of scientific justifi-
cation having a certain attraction at least for amateurs in
these questions.
Ritschl expounded his theological system in the third
volume of his principal work, Recktfertigung und Versohnung,
of which the first and second volumes had contained the
history of the dogma and its Biblical-theological premises
respectively. The third volume appeared in three editions,
between 1874 and 1888, differing in some points from each
other. Indeed, a careful comparison of the later presenta-
tions with the earlier shows an increasing advance in the
direction of speculative scepticism and historical dogmatism.
184 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. II.
Religion was defined by Ritschl in the first edition as the
" common recognition of the dependence of man on God,"
or, more precisely, "as our view of the world from the basis
of the idea of God and our estimate of ourselves from
our sense of dependence upon God in relation to the world."
The peculiarity of the religious view of the world he
holds to be that it involves the conception of a whole,
while theoretical knowledge in philosophy and the special
sciences is limited to the general and particular laws of nature
and spirit, and cannot by its methods of experience and
observation attain to the conception of the world as a unity
and a whole. Wherever philosophy has claimed by its methods
to construct a view of the universe, we should rather discern
an impulse of religion, which philosophy must distinguish as
specifically different from its own object of systematic know-
ledge. Conflicts between religion and science are to be avoided
by religion retaining as its privilege the right of viewing the
world in its unity, and by science limiting itself to the particular
phenomena of the world. Afterwards, on the other hand,
Ritschl admitted that philosophy also treated of the world
as a whole, with the object of comprehending it under one
supreme law. Hence the distinction between religious and
scientific knowledge is not to be sought in its object, but in
the sphere of the subject, viz., in the difference in the attitude
of the subject towards the object. For religion, he now
states, " is occupied with judgments of value ( Werthiirtheile)"
i.e., with conceptions of our relation to the world which are
of moment solely according to their value in awakening
feelings of pleasure or pain as our dominion over the world
is furthered or checked. "In all religion, by the help of the
sublime spiritual Power which man adores, the solution is
attempted of the contradiction in which man finds himselt
placed as a part of the natural world and as a spiritual person
ality with its claim to sovereignty over nature. For in his
position he is a part of nature, in subjection to it, dependent
upon and checked by other things, but as spirit he is moved
by the impulse to maintain his independence against external
things. In these circumstances arises religion as a belief in
superior spiritual powers by whose help the deficiencies in
mans own power are supplied." All religion seeks to supple-
ment, by means of the idea of God, man's sense of personal
dignity in the face of the hindrances of the world; this idea
Ch. IV.] ECLECTIC MEDIATING THEOLOGIANS. 185
of God is "the ideal bond between the particular view of the
world and the vocation of man to attain goods (GiUer) or the
highest good (happiness.)" * The thought of God must be
treated in Christian theology solely as a judgment of value, or
as a conception valuable for the attainment of goods. This is
the same theory of religion as the well-known one of Feuer-
bach: the gods are the " Wunsehwesen" invented by man from
his practical need of a supplement to his own powerlessness
over nature. But while the pathological explanation of the idea
of God by motives of human feeling was intended by Feuer-
bach to deny the truth of this idea in an objective sense, and
to affirm its purely imaginary character, the theory is directed
by Ritschl to the exactly opposite conclusion, that the
emotional value of the conception of God for the preservation
of man's sense of personal dignity is also the warrant of its
truth. That this warrant is not sufficient to insure to
theology a knowledge of speculative truth and the character
of a science, had indeed been formerly fully recognised by
Ritschl himself, who had therefore in his first edition still
held the necessity and possibility of ah independent proof
of the existence of God, founded upon the general data of
the human mind ; as such he had regarded the ethical proof
as stated in Kant's Critiqiie of Judgment, and had expressly
declared that the "acceptance of the idea of God on that proof
was no practical belief (as Kant had thought), but an act of
speculative cognition," by which the general rationality of the
Christian view of the world is established and thereby the
possibility of a scientific theology secured, while such a theo-
logy would be impossible if the idea of God could not be
established to the satisfaction of speculative knowledge also
as its necessary basis. In the third edition, on the other
hand, this position is altogether abandoned ; we now read
" this acceptance of the idea of God is, as Kant remarks, a
practical belief, and not an act of speculative cognition." In
justification of this change of view, it is alleged that it is
the work of theology to preserve the distinctive character of
the idea of God, that it is allowable to use it only in judgments
of value. Hence theoretical proofs of the idea of God are
doomed to failure, "because their professed results, even if
true, do not accord with the Christian thought of God, in that
1 Seligkeit.
1 86 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. II.
they fail to express its value for men, in particular for men as
sinners." Thus while Ritschl formerly recognised that a
scientific and universally valid justification of the belief in
God, and consequently of theology, cannot consist merely in
an inference from the religious view of the world to its inner
coherence, but must be based upon independent and univer-
sal data of the human mind, he now, on the contrary, pro-
nounces the theoretical method of proof objectionable in not
being confined to Christian judgments of value, or in aiming
to be not only simple practical belief, but also independent
theoretical knowledge. We see from this how, from the sub-
jective conception of religion, is deduced the limitation of the
science of religion, or theology, to the sphere of judgments of
value, or subjective truth, and the abandonment on principle
of all attempts to attain objective truth valid for the knowing
mind in general.
In accordance with his principle that the Christian thought
of God must be put forward only in judgments of value,
Ritschl teaches that God should be thought of only as love.
All metaphysical statements regarding God's absoluteness, his
existence through himself, in himself, and for himself, must be
rejected as " heathenish metaphysics," connected with the false
theory of knowledge which maintains the existence of things
irrespective of our conception of them. The idealistic subjec-
tification of the idea of God on the lines of Feuerbach seems
a necessary consequence of this. Such is not, however,
Ritschl's intention ; on the contrary,, he seeks to conceive of
the personality of God as objectively real. That this involves
the assertion of an absolute existence of God in himself, as
distinguished from his existence in relation to us, or his love,
is plain, but is not admitted by RitschL He says that the
attribute of personality is only the form for God's love. If
this proposition were taken strictly, it would finally come to
mean that our conception of the personality of God is the
form under which we personify love as " God," which is the
view of Feuerbach and the Positivists. But Ritschl does
not mean this ; indeed, he speaks also of an " intrinsic purpose
of God," x into which God takes up the purpose of the world,
or which he realises in the education of the human race for
the kingdom of God. But such a purpose is a relation of the
1 Selbstzweck Gottes.
Ch. IV.] ECLECTIC MEDIATING THEOLOGIANS. 187
will to itself, and therefore presupposes a being which is not
solely love, that is, existing for others, but exists also as a
subject in and for itself. This inner self-subsistence of God,
with his loving communication of himself, is not merely a
necessary metaphysical conception, but also of great religious
importance, since it is the foundation, as Dorner has well
remarked, of the Biblical conception of God's holiness and
righteousness, which in the teaching of the Bible and the
Church is inseparable from that of his love. But this side of
the idea of God is altogether neglected by Ritschl. He
says : "In comparison with the conception of love there is
no other of equal value. In particular this holds of the con-
ception of holiness, which in its Old Testament sense is, for
several reasons, not valid in Christianity, and the use of which
in the New Testament is obscure." And with regard to God's
righteousness, in which, according to Biblical doctrine, his
holiness is actively shown, Ritschl (like Hofmann) considers
that it is "his action for the salvation of the members of his
religious community, and is identical in fact with grace."
This is connected with Ritschl's peculiar doctrine of sin.
He altogether rejects the idea of original sin, because it
assumes that there is a will previous to its individual acts ; an
assumption related to the false doctrine of things in them-
selves, and because the hypothesis of an innate evil tendency
makes both responsibility and education impossible. The
latter demands the exactly opposite hypothesis, " that the
general though still indefinite impulse towards good exists in
the child, although it is not guided by a general insight into
the good, and not yet tested by the various relations of life."
For the conception of original sin we must, therefore, substi-
tute that of the " kingdom of sin," i.e., of the collective unity
of free actions opposed to the purpose of the kingdom of God,
and of the inclinations acquired thereby. The law of sin in
the will is not a natural loss of its freedom, but is a consequence
of the necessary reaction of every act of the will upon the
direction of the power of volition. Accordingly the unchecked
repetition of selfish determinations of the will produces a ten-
dency to selfishness, and the sin is then transmitted from one
individual to another by the interaction of their conduct in
society. Ritschl has not indeed shown how any selfish deter-
minations of the will at all can be explained, if there exists in
the child by nature only an indefinite impulse towards good ;
1 88 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. II.
for the attempt to explain it from ignorance is certainly un-
satisfactory. Ritschl holds, namely, that ignorance, as ex-
perience proves in the case of children, is "a very momentous
factor in the origination and development of sin ; " and further,
that it is " the essential condition of the conflicts of the will
with the order of society as the rule of goodness, and also the
condition of the fixity of the will in its resistance to this order."
It may easily be seen how little this explanation accords with
experience, of which a very different account is given even by
the heathen poet (Nitimitr in vetitnm), and above all by the
Apostle Paul (Rom. vii.). In Ritschl's case also, this treat-
ment of sin as ignorance is not so much the result of actual
observation as a postulate of his doctrine of God and recon-
ciliation. To the regulative conception of God corresponds,
he says, the distinction between the two stages of sin an im-
perfect stage, not excluding the capability for redemption, and
a completed stage, consisting in a final purpose of opposition
to the known will of God. Since the latter is only a hypo-
thetical possibility, of which we can nowhere assume the
reality, all actual sin of mankind is confined to the former
stage, and this is regarded by God as " the relative stage of
ignorance." The artificial method by which Ritschl tries to
harmonise his theory with the statements of the Bible, may be
here passed over as valueless.
The correlative to the love of God is the kingdom of God,
inasmuch as it is the union of men for mutual and common
action from the motive of love, which action, as correlative to
the purpose of God himself, and as the specific operation of
God, is the perfect revelation of the fact that God is love. In
the precise development of this thought there is again a
noticeable difference between the first and the later editions
of Ritschl's work. In the first the Christian idea of the king-
dom of God is the highest stage of ethical society among men,
though removed from the earlier preparatory stages to no
greater degree than these from each other. It is more perfect
in virtue of its greater extent, but is not essentially different
in kind, since the pre-Christian forms of society (family, friend-
ship, nationality) originated in love. And since, as is then
stated, this union of men, wherever realised, must always be
regarded as dependent upon God, and as the effect and reve-
lation of His love, the conception of a universal revelation of
God throughout all human history is evidently presupposed,
Ch. IV.] ECLECTIC MEDIATING THEOLOGIANS. 189
since this history has never been without ethical fellowship
and love. In the later editions, on the other hand, the com-
parison of the Christian kingdom of God with the preparatory
stages of ethical society in history is omitted, and the love of
God is exclusively confined to the historical Christian Church,
which, by acknowledging Christ as its Lord, itself comes to
stand in the same relation as he to God. Whereas it was
formerly maintained that " God loves the human race from the
point of view of its vocation to the kingdom of God," we are
now told that " God is love as revealing himself through his
Son to the Church founded by the latter in order to educate
it for the kingdom of God " ; and whereas we were then told
that all ethical union originated in love, and that all action
from love must always and everywhere be regarded as de-
pendent on God, and as the effect of the revelation of his
love, it is now stated that " All love of man originates accord-
ing to Christian ideas in the revelation of God in Christ."
From these statements it would directly follow that before
Christ there was neither a revelation of God nor an ethical
association of men. If that be so, from what source were
religion and morality in pre-Christian humanity derived ? This
Ritschl has never explained. Simply to deny that it had any
religion or morality, would lead to a pessimism more extreme
than that of Augustine, and would strangely contradict Rit-
schl's optimistic view of the goodness of human nature.
Finally, it is evident that the limitation of the divine revela-
tion solely to the person of Jesus, whose historical connection
with the religion of Israel is undeniable, verges close upon
the denial of revelation altogether. Thus ultra dogmatism in
the end leads to the opposite extreme, as has actually been
exemplified in Ritschl's disciple, Bender.
In his Christology, Ritschl starts from the principle that in
a personal life what is real and actual consists of spiritual
effects and nothing else. By this means the Christological
problem is much simplified. Not only the dogma of the two
natures, but the whole metaphysical background of ecclesias-
tical Christology is thus got rid of, even more decisively than
in Schleiermacher's theology, and replaced by an historical
view of the subject. In strange contrast with this, Ritschl
nevertheless continues to speak with orthodox theology of the
deity of Christ. It is true this term has for him an altogether
different meaning. It is the expression of our estimate of
DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. II.
Jesus, of our trustful acknowledgment of the unique value
of what his life effected for our salvation, but is not meant to
predicate any metaphysical characteristic of his nature what-
ever, or any transcendental unity of his nature with God. The
predication of the deity of Christ sums up his unmistakable
importance as the perfect revealer of God and as the manifest
type of spiritual supremacy over the world. Our religious
estimate of Christ must be tested by the connection of his
action in the world with his religious convictions and with his
ethical motives. It has no direct reference to his presumptive
possession of innate qualifications and capacities, for Christ
does not influence us thus, but morally and religiously only.
Jesus is the representative of the perfect spiritual religion,
standing in a reciprocal relation of union with the God who is
the originator and final end of the world. This involved his re-
cognition of God's divinest purpose, the union of men by love,
as the task of his own life, whereby he experienced that in-
dependence of the world which the members of his Church
ought to come to share with him. The peculiar value of his
life on earth gains the character of a permanent rule by serving
as a pattern for our religious and ethical vocation. This
authority, which either excludes all other standards or else
subordinates them to itself, and which is also the ultimate regu-
lative principle of all human trust in God, is equivalent in value
to his deity. On the other hand, metaphysical attributes of
deity cannot be ascribed to him for the simple reason that they
are altogether outside the religious method of cognition, which
is concerned only with judgments of value. So too the passages
of Scripture from which Christ's personal pre-existence has
been inferred, are only to be understood in the sense that, in
the thought and will of God, Christ from the beginning was
the head of the community of the kingdom of God, which is
the object of the world. The Johannine formula of the Word
becoming flesh, means that the Word, which is the general
form of divine revelation, became in him a human person, i.e.,
that he is the perfect revelation of God.
While it follows from this that the doctrine of Christ's work
must not be separated from that of his person, Ritschl further
rejects the usual dogmatic distinction of his threefold office as
prophet, priest, and king. In order to form a single compre-
hensive conception of Christ's work, we must regard it from
the point of view of his vocation. Now, this vocation was the
Ch. IV.] ECLECTIC MEDIATING THEOLOGIANS.
foundation of the kingdom of God, or of the universal ethical
association of men as the divine object of the world. But
since, as the founder of the kingdom of God in the world, or
the representative of God's moral sovereignty over men, he is
unique in comparison with all other men who have received
from him the same purpose, he is the factor in the world in
whose intrinsic purpose God, in a creative way, gives effect
to, and manifests his own intrinsic purpose, so that all his
actions in fulfilment of his vocation constitute the revelation of
God, present and perfect, in him ; or, in other words, he is one
in whom the Word of God is a human person. This theory
gives the consistent ethical and religious estimate of Christ,
and thus the christological problem of theology is solved. It
is not the business of theology to inquire how the person of
Christ came from God, and came to be that which is the sub-
ject of our ethical and religious estimate, especially as the
problem lies beyond the possible range of inquiry. The
grace and faithfulness of Christ in the fulfilment of his voca-
tion, and the elevation of his spiritual aims beyond the limited
and natural motives of the world, constitute the elements of
his historical appearance which are comprehended in the
attribute of his deity. Looked at with reference to man, this
patience and faithfulness of Christ is the result of his devotion
to his calling of realising the kingdom of God among men
as their supermundane destination, supported by his special
knowledge of God ; with reference to the divine Being, this
human life appears as the completed revelation of God, since
the final purpose of the world, to which Christ's life is de-
voted, is founded in God's inner purpose, or in his will of love.
For the complete definition of Christ's deity the further sup-
position is required that his grace and faithfulness and world-
subduing patience have produced as their effect the society
of the kingdom of God, with analogous attributes. This is
evidently equivalent to saying that the " deity " of Christ con-
sists in the original exemplification and communication of the
same true piety and morality in which consists also the
" deity," or better, the fellowship with God, the divine son-
ship and divine likeness of Christians. This is the same
thought as that found in the whole of Schleiermacher's school,
except that the latter usually express it more simply, being less
painfully anxious to keep to the ecclesiastical term, to which
from this position, really no just claim can be made.
DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. II.
There can be no such thing as special priestly functions on
the part of Christ whi'ch are not included in those of his
general vocation. If Christ is to be conceived as priest, he
is so fundamentally because as the Son of God he stood in
the closest communion of purpose with God, and carried this
out in every moment of his life, since every act and word in
his life's work, until his voluntary and patient suffering of
death, sprang from his religious relation to God. The juridical
conception of a satisfaction of God's punitive righteousness
offends against the design of religion, since law and religion
are contradictory standards of action, and the assumption that
in God righteousness and grace tend in opposite directions,
is irreligious, the unity of the divine will being the inviolable
condition of all trust in God. Even if we agree with Ritschl's
rejection of the theory of satisfaction, we cannot approve of his
unsympathetic judgment of the Pauline and orthodox doctrine
of the atonement ; we cannot but see in this an illustration of
that Rationalistic dogmatism which is neither able nor willing
to appreciate objectively, from a given religious point of view,
the historical and psychological conditions of dogmatic con-
ceptions, or to admit their relative validity for such a point of
view. In respect of this intolerant dogmatism, Ritschl's
theology marks a return to the weakest side of that Rational-
ism which he has so severely censured.
Not specially the death of Christ, which is only the com-
prehensive term to express his religious union with God, as
preserved throughout his life, but his work in his vocation
generally, brings about the forgiveness of sins, or justifica-
tion, or atonement. These synonymous conceptions are
predicable of the Christian society in the sense that in it
there exists a union of men with God, in spite of their sins and
of the accentuation of their feeling of guilt. The standard
and historical source of this union is Christ's union with God,
which he preserved in the faithful execution of his vocation to
found the kingdom of God. For the grace and faithfulness
of God, which is the ultimate efficient cause of the forgiveness
of sin, is made manifest solely by the purpose which controlled
all Christ's work of conducting men into such a relation to
God as should save them from ^in and gather them under the
moral rule of God. From this* point is first deduced the
formula, that God makes the union of the members of
Christ's Church with Christ the condition of admitting them
Ch. IV.] ECLECTIC MEDIATING THEOLOGIANS. 193
to a union with himself. But this proposition (which agrees
with Schleiermacher's doctrine of salvation) receives forthwith
in Ritschl an important modification. He maintains (though
on the basis of very arbitrary exegesis) that it is historically
certain that Christ conceived not individuals but the society
to be founded by him and represented in the twelve apostles,
as the direct object of the forgiveness of sins which he was to
grant. Hence he pronounces Schleiermacher's formula wrong,
that in Protestantism the relation of the individual to the
Church depends on his relation to Christ, while in Catholic-
ism the converse holds good ; for in the case of Protestant
Christians also the right relation to Christ is conditioned, not
only historically (which is self-evident) but ideally, by the
fellowship of believers, since no action of Christ upon men is
conceivable except in accordance with the antecedent purpose
of Christ to found a society. Schleiermacher's formula is only
the reflection of the pietistical disintegration of the idea of a
church, which dated from the individualistic theory of salvation
in the Lutheran theology, but was not in harmony with Luther's
own view (according to his Short Catechism). As in the pur-
pose of Christ the guarantee of a universal forgiveness of sins
and the foundation of his Church were equivalent ideas, so in
the result of his work it is the same thing to be certain of
having one's sins forgiven and to belong to Christ's commu-
nity. The forgiveness of sins or reconciliation is possessed
by the individual only as a member of the religious society of
Christ, in consequence of the immeasurable interaction of his
own personal freedom and the determining influence of the
society. It is not by an individual imitation of Christ that
we become assured of salvation, as pietists and mystics
held, including Schleiermacher and his followers, for all
imitation of Christ in the proper sense is rendered impos-
sible by the difference of the special conditions of his life from
those of the members of his Church ; but we are warranted
in the assurance of being children of God by belonging
to the society founded by Christ. Moreover, love to God
and Christ is not an apt description of the religious function
of the individual, for we might understand by it "an imagi-
nary private relation to God and Christ," bearing the char-
acter of indifference to the world or of fleeing from it. In
these statements Ritschl's social positivism and his dislike of
the mystical element in religion is carried to such extremes
G. T. O
194 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. II.
as plainly to do violence to essential interests of Christian
piety.
The justification possessed by the Christian as a member of
Christ's community is attested practically by his freedom or
dominion over the world. This is not to be understood in
the empirical sense but ideally, though not therefore any the
less a reality. It is, in general, in faith in God's providence
that the religious dominion over the world is exercised ; for
in the view of the world as a unity, under the idea of God as
our Father, and in the corresponding estimate of ourselves, all
things and events are regarded as means to our good. Under
this Christian belief in providence Ritschl appears to include
also the hypothesis of " miracles." He puts both in contrast,
as the general teleological and the miraculous view of the uni-
verse, with the scientific view, and he seeks to deprive the oppo-
sition of the latter (which is however not directed against the
teleological, but only against the miraculous view) of its force
by reference to the incompleteness of our scientific knowledge
of the world and to the immediate certainty of the feeling of
personal worth expressing itself in the belief in providence.
He warmly opposes the view of the theology of the Aufklar-
nng, that the belief in providence is a part of natural religion
or of general scientific culture. He holds that, on the con-
trary, confident trust in God is exclusively the contribution of
the Christian religion, since it - rests upon the assurance of
Christ's Church of our reconciliation to God ; a statement
which, considering the innumerable expressions of trust in
God in non-Christian religions, particularly in the Old Testa-
ment, requires considerable modification ; it is related to the
statement above considered, that God has revealed himself as
love only in Christ ; in this case, as in others, a difference of
degree is made an exclusive peculiarity, which is simply un-
historical dogmatism. There are however several good points
in Ritschl's detailed account of the Christian belief in provi-
dence : as that it must approve itself in patience and humility
amid all the vicissitudes of life, and that it is shown in Chris-
tian prayer, which is chiefly thanksgiving or humble recogni-
tion of the divine rule. Finally, the moral perfection of the
community of the kingdom of God is deduced from its re-
ligious view of the world, and it is shown that it manifests itself
primarily in the faithfulness of the individual to his calling,
since moral action in a calling is the form of each man's total
Ch. IV.] ECLECTIC MEDIATING THEOLOGIANS. 1 95
contribution to the kingdom of God. In this way freedom
is realised in law. But freedom is identical in kind with the
religious functions of belief in providence, patience, humility,
and prayer, in which, in consequence of the Reconciliation,
the individual becomes assured of his value as part of a
whole in comparison with the world. The two spheres of
morals and religion are so connected that neither can exist
without the other. In the religious dominion over this world
lies the present blessednesss of eternal life. But the moral
formation of character also has eternal life for its object, since
the certainty to the person of the indestructibility of spiritual
existence is always connected with the experience of the
value of the ethical and religious character. Thus it is equally
important to assert that the eternal life is given by God in
the reconciliation through Christ, and that the completion of
our salvation is attained by the development of the ethico-
religious character and by the perfection in its kind of our life-
work in our vocation. In spite of all this the moral and the
religious sides of Christianity are not brought into a perfectly
harmonious unity by Ritschl, as is seen in the remarkable
statement that we must take both points of view alternately
(viz. that of moral freedom and that of dependence upon God),
an evident admission that the two are mutually exclusive.
This is the inevitable consequence of his conception of re-
ligion as supplementing our freedom. The external dualism
between moral freedom and the religious feeling of depen-
dence thus introduced from the first runs like a red thread
through the whole of his theology, and is in particular
the real cause of his dislike of religious mysticism, in which
freedom is felt in experience to be realised not along with but
in dependence, the difference of the two being thus brought
into a harmonious unity.
Among the opponents of Ritschl's theology, LIPSIUS oc-
cupies a prominent place, and all the more that, to a certain
extent, he shares Ritschl's epistemological principles. He
maintains with Kant the limitation of our knowledge to the
realm of experience, to our external and internal perceptions
and their logical combination so as to form regular relations
of natural and spiritual existence ; and he denies the possibility
of a metaphysical knowledge of the transcendental, which, he
holds, inevitably involves contradictions. But while Ritschl's
school constructs an insurmountable barrier between our
196 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. II.
theoretical knowledge of the universe and our ethico-religious
certainty, Lipsius demands a connected and consistent theory
of the universe, which shall comprehend the entire realm of
our experience as a whole. He rejects the doctrine of dualism
in a truth, one division of which would be confined to "judg-
ments of value," and be unconnected with our theoretical
knowledge of the external world. The possibility and neces-
sity of combining the results of our scientific knowledge with
the declarations of our ethico-religious experience, so as to form
a consistent philosophy, is based, according to Lipsius, upon
the unity of the personal ego, which on the one hand knows
the world scientifically, and on the other regards it as the
means of realising the ethico-religious object of its life. The
former is effected by the study of the causal connection of
external and internal events, and the latter by referring them
teleologically to the ethical subject and its vocation. Neither
of these modes of looking at things can be reduced to the
other, neither employed indifferently to supplement the de-
ficiencies of the other ; only in their mutual relation do they
yield the whole of reality for us. Moreover, they must not
be placed externally side by side in such a way that the one
would be limited to the life of nature, and the other to that of
history, but the sphere of teleology extends likewise into nature,
and that of causality into history. Nevertheless, it is the
sphere of the historical and ethical life of humanity which first
elevates the teleology imperfectly traced in nature to the
position of a prime factor in the construction of our philosophy
of things. No one can be compelled by the method of scien-
tific proof to recognise the teleological unity of the world ; it
is the personal feeling of moral obligation which leads to the
belief in a moral order of the world superior to the order of
nature. But this ethical certainty must not be allowed to make
us indifferent to the natural conditions of the moral life, which
can only fulfil its vocation by their means. This justifies the
rule as to method, as rigidly keeping the causal, or empirical,
and the teleological, or ideal, view of the world clearly distinct, as,
again, of connecting them as the two sides of the same thing.
By the application of this method by Lipsius to dogmatic theo-
logy, it assumed in his hands the form of an ethico-religious phi-
losophy of life and the world, which as such is throughout teleo-
logical, but which must also remain in thorough harmony with
the empirical or causal point of view of theoretical science.
Ch. IV.] ECLECTIC MEDIATING THEOLOGIANS.
Lipsius defines religion as the solution of the riddle pre-
sented by the contradiction of our empirical determination by
nature to our ethical vocation. Religion does not primarily
concern society, but the individual, though the individual only
in virtue of his necessarily seeking religious fellowship ; it is
thus the most individual and at the same time the most uni-
versal of man's concerns. Its empirical motive lies in man's
instinct of self-preservation, which seeks help from a super-
natural power, and for this purpose enters into a personal
relation with it, ranging upwards from reverent dread to child-
like trust and thankful love. But the ultimate source even of
the elementary form of the feeling, as well as of its advance
from natural to ethical religion, is the supersensible nature of
man, or his " transcendental freedom," which both determines
the entire course of his ethical development, and also leads
him to enter into religious relations. For this freedom can
only be realised in a transcendental dependence upon a free
Will, such as contains both the creative source of man's
capacity for transcendental freedom and the power to realise
it by rising above the determination by nature. Inasmuch
as the religious man, by rising to a Will above nature, becomes
conscious of the action of this same Will in his own spirit, we
have here the root of all belief in revelation. On its meta-
physical side, therefore, religion is a real mutual relation
between God and man, the home of which is the personal
spiritual life of the latter ; revelation and religion are therefore
convertible terms. The reality of this mutual relation consists
in a personal fellowship of faith, experienced in the intercourse
of prayer ; its manner lies beyond the analysis of the under-
standing, and constitutes the mystery of religion. As stages
of religion, Lipsius distinguishes natural religion, ethical re-
ligion in its legal form, and the religion of salvation, in which
the divine Will is revealed not merely as an imperious law,
but as love delivering from sin and evil. This highest stage
is realised in Christianity.
In Christianity we must distinguish between the character-
istic fundamental religious relation and the fundamental his-
torical fact ; the former is made actual by the latter, that is,
in the historical person of Christ ; but the value of the latter
to us lies in its being the vehicle of that fundamental relation,
that is, the sonship of man to God, which as such involves
his participation in the kingdom of God as God's final purpose
198 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. II.
for the world. His sonship to God is subjectively conditioned
by penitence and faith, and is objectively based upon God's
reconciling and redeeming grace. This is, therefore, the
specifically religious good, to the acquirement of which Chris-
tianity is the vehicle, and it is primarily the highest good for
the individual. The ethical association of men under the idea
of the kingdom of God, which is the ethical and social side of
Christianity, is subordinate to its religious and individual side.
The Christian's religious experience of his sonship to God is
the subject-matter of the Christian faith with regard to God,
man, and the world ; this contains no theoretical truths as to
the objective nature of God and the world, but primarily only
descriptions of the experienced relations of God to the religious
man and to his world, though including declarations as to the
supersensible realities of which faith is assured. This faith,
with its declarations, is derived from the teleological contem-
plation, peculiar to the Christian, of the divine action in nature
and history, and the course of his own life, a way of regarding
the divine activity which, though it does not rest on speculative
(causal) knowledge, must not be inconsistent with it. Theo-
logical doctrines are therefore not mere descriptions of sub-
jective devout states of consciousness, nor mere judgments of
value, with no corresponding judgments of being ; but they
are descriptions of objective relations between God, man, and
the world, based upon subjective religious experiences, which are
associated with the feeling of their being of the highest value
for the subject.
All the declarations of the Christian faith have their objec-
tive foundation in the revelation of God in Christ, of which
the New Testament writings are the documentary authorities.
Revelation is God's manifestation of himself for man. It takes
place by various stages in the order of nature, in the moral
order of the world, and in the order of salvation, which stages
must be conceived as included in God's eternal plan of the
world. The subject-matter of the highest, or Christian revela-
tion, is not the kingdom of God, the announcement of which
was not brought by Christ as something new, but it is God's
saving and reconciling designs towards man, including the
ethical idea of the kingdom of God as the necessary conse-
quence of the fellowship of love between God and his children.
Nor does the guarantee of the truth of the Christian revelation
consist in the individual being a member of the community
Ch. IV.] ECLECTIC MEDIATING THEOLOGIANS. 1 99
which possesses reconciliation and redemption, but in his per-
sonally appropriating by faith these saving blessings revealed
in the Gospel, and thus obtaining the immediate personal ex-
perience of his reconciliation to God. This immediate personal
certainty of salvation, in virtue of its resting upon the witness
of the spirit, is the true centre and heart of Christian piety,, its
mystery not to be theoretically proved, but practically ex-
perienced, like the experience of the moral law, which is
equally undemonstrable empirically, and yet is the foundation
of the whole moral life. Still, the individual certainty of sal-
vation is preserved from the suspicion of being subjective self-
deception by its known agreement with the similar experience
of the whole Christian society.
These are the fundamental principles of Lipsius' theology,
as expounded in his Abhandlungen zur Dogmatik, and in his
work, Philosophic ^md Religion. From his more special trea-
tise (Lehrbuck der evang.prot. Dogmatik, 1876 ; 2nd ed., 1879)
we may here notice his treatment of the dogmas * of God+
Christ, Justificdtion, and the Chzirch.
The divine Trias of revelation must^have its foundation
in the divine nature. But our thought has no possible means
of arriving at any logically tenable conclusion as to internal
distinctions in the transcendental divine nature, much less as
to personal distinctions in the Trinity. All such attempts lead
to mythological conceptions. Similar difficulties arise from
the application of the idea of the Absolute to the Christian
idea of God. It is, it is true, an unavoidable necessity of our
thought to conceive God as in fact absolute, i.e. as raised
above the world of time and space ; only as the absolute cause
is he the almighty creator and ruler of his world. But the
ethical view of the world demands, again, that we should con-
ceive the absolute source of the world as personal, i.e. accord-
ing to the analogy of our human consciousness. For the
source of the world of nature and of spirit cannot be less than
spirit, and real spirit is personal, self-conscious, and self-
determining spirit. Nevertheless, it is impossible for our
thought to show how personality can be consistent with ab-
soluteness. Personality is arrived at via eminentice, absolute-
ness via negationis ; but these two methods yield no coherent
1 I do not give his exposition of these doctrines in the words of the text
of the above work, but according to the author's most recent personal explana-
tions.
200 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. II.
conception, but a double series of statements, which we cannot
see how to bring into unity. A personal consciousness and
will, not confined by the limitations of time, is as inconceivable
to us as it is impossible for us, on the other hand, to think of
the divine knowledge and will as conditioned by time. Space
and time are indeed the forms in which God reveals himself,
and which are therefore for him no more mere appearance
than the variety of his particular acts of will. But our thought
cannot reconcile the participation of the divine knowledge
and action in the temporal and spatial distinctions of earthly
life with the elevation of the divine nature above the world
and time. The pretended speculative solutions of this and
similar difficulties are only apparent. We can therefore apply
the conception of the absolute to God only as a critical canon
or rule which serves to prevent us, in our figurative use of
human analogies, from making finite our idea of God, by con-
tinually reminding us of the purely symbolic validity of these
statements about God. The idea of an infinite consciousness
and will remains indeed a necessity of our thought, but is only
a Grenzbegriff, a conception containing no adequate know-
ledge of God's nature and attributes. The religious value of
the theological ideas of the divine attributes consists, on the
other hand, in their being descriptions, based on religious
experience, of the action of the divine Will upon us and our
world. The Christian faith regards the existence and course
of the world from the teleological point of view as the means
of securing the divine purpose of the world without prejudice
to the scientific causal theory of the world. The same course
of the world must be placed entirely under the point of view
of natural causation, and also entirely under that of a divine
purpose, since the divine teleology manifests itself as the power
immanent in the course of nature. This distinction between
the causal connection of all events and their teleological con-
trol by the overruling divine Will justifies also the religious
belief in miracles, which as such are never empirically demon-
strable, but from the teleological point of view are an actual
proof of a special divine intervention. The belief in provi-
dence is indeed inseparably connected with every religious
theory of the world, and therefore not peculiar to Christianity,
but it reaches its perfection only by means of the Christian
consciousness of salvation. Not that the Christian was the
first to refer every event to the purposes of the divine king-
Ch. IV.] ECLECTIC MEDIATING THEOLOGIANS. 2OI
dom that was done in the Old Testament but because he
first recognised the infinite value of every human soul as an
object of special divine care.
In the doctrine of the person and work of the Saviour, the
empirical must likewise be distinguished from the religious
mode of regarding them. The former regards the Saviour
as the historical founder of the Christian religion, the personal
representative and source of the new religious principle ani-
mating the Christian Church. The latter recognises in him
the personal revelation of God's will to save the individual
and human society. For the former, Jesus Christ is only
historically important ; for the latter, he has also a direct
religious significance. The object of faith is always primarily
the eternal good which God, by Christ, gives to believers as
their own. It is not, however, an eternal idea or truth of the
reason that is illustrated in the person of Jesus, but God's
eternal will of love become in Christ an historical act of love.
The revelation of saving and reconciling grace in Christ is
not merely a proclamation but a revelation by deed. The
reconciliation is not simply the liberation of the human
spirit from its mistrust of God, arising from its ignorance, but
primarily the reconciliation of God to man, an actual new
relation entered into by God with mankind, and revealed by
him in the consciousness of believers. This new relation is
eternally based upon God's plan of salvation, the goal to
which the divine governance of human history has always
been directed ; but it was only historically realised when the
historical conditions were given. These were on the one hand
the actual realisation of a perfect life of harmony with God
(perfect righteousness), and on the other, humble submission
to the connection between sin and misery established by God
for the common life of the human race, and the consequent
recognition of the divine sentence upon sin (perfect satis-
faction). The Christian faith affirms both to have been
vicariously accomplished in Christ's sufferings and death, not
in the sense of legal substitution, but in the sense of action
and passion on the part of the new humanity in its personal
head. As the head of the new humanity, Christ is its repre-
sentative with God ; mankind is reconciled to him in so far
as it enters by means of faith into communion with Christ.
On the other hand, Christ, in virtue of the reconciliation of
God and man being actually accomplished in him, is the repre-
2O2 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. II.
sentative of God in relation to men, the bearer of the divine
revelation to them, proclaiming as a fact the reconciliation
actually accomplished by him. This position of Christ as
mediator between Gocl and man is described in ecclesiastical
tradition by metaphysical statements about the union of the
divine and human natures in Christ's person, and about a
transcendental work of reconciliation accomplished by Christ
in relation to God, by which God himself was delivered from
a conflict between his mercy and justice. In both points these
theories transgress the limits imposed upon human know-
ledge ; and it is of minor importance that the philosophical
means used to establish these theologoumena were borrowed
partly from Platonic eclectic speculations, partly from the legal
conceptions of the middle ages. These theologoumena must
be employed in theology simply as figurative expressions, and
any higher claim necessarily turns them into mythology. The
Christian faith is content to speak of God being in a unique
manner in Christ, in the sense that in his personal con-
sciousness and life-work was actually accomplished the revela-
tion of the love of God as seeking the salvation of mankind.
Historically considered, Christ's life-work must be regarded
from the ethical point of view of his personal vocation to
found the society in which is realised the kingdom of God, by
life in harmony with God gradually overcoming the power of
sin. Reconciliation thus appears as the consequence of
salvation. But the Christian faith is not content with this.
That the founder of the society is its pattern has not been
historically demonstrated, the " sinlessness" of Christ remains
from this position a mere possibility. On the other hand,
from the teleological point of view it is simply included in the
statement of the belief that Christ is the personal revelation
of the divine love. For God can be perfectly revealed only
in a man religiously and ethically perfect, and one, therefore,
altogether fitted to be the pure organ of his revelation. This
holiness of Christ is the specifically religious miracle. God
reconciles the world to himself by creating in Christ a new
man, in whom mankind appears in the perfection desired by
God, and therefore as reconciled to God. This reconciliation
involves salvation, viz. the foundation of a new moral and
religious life of humanity, in which the power of sin and the
world is gradually vanquished.
The appropriation of salvation is accomplished from the
Ch. IV.] ECLECTIC MEDIATING THEOLOGIANS. 203
empirical point of view as a psychological ethical process,
the chief elements in which are penitence and faith. The
religious and teleological description of this process is that it
is the self-attestation of the divine spirit in the human spirit,
which the latter experiences as the communication of divine
comfort and strength. As distinguished from the idea of the
kingdom in the Old Testament, the society of Christ's king-
dom is based upon the believers personal sonship to God ; to
make his personal state of grace sure is the first concern of
each individual believer, membership in the kingdom of God
being involved in this. In the state of grace justification
denotes the religious side, the appropriation of reconciliation ;
regeneration the ethical side, the appropriation of salvation.
Justification, regarded as a divine act, is the declaration of the
will of God that the penitent and believing sinner shall not
be excluded from communion with him ; but this act of
justification is identical with the consciousness of justification
in the soul of the believer ; these are the two inseparable sides
of the same process, which consists in the acceptance of the
Gospel message of grace. Regeneration, as the fundamental
ethical renewal of the man, is logically, though not tem-
porally the consequence of his justification. From the
psychological point of view, a change of mind must have
begun before the faith to appropriate justification could exist ;
nevertheless we are right in teleologically regarding regener-
ation as the fruit of justification, viz. as the inward working
of the same spirit of God that had before assured man of his
sonship to God ; for only from this assurance can spring the
power of joyful fulfilment of the divine will and the religious
freedom of elevation above the world. The witness of the
Holy Spirit, and being led by the Holy Spirit, are connected
as cause and effect. The fellowship of the believer with
God, viewed empirically, is simply a harmony of will, but
teleologically considered, it is the actual indwelling of the
divine spirit in man, unio mystica.
With regard to the Church also we must distinguish
between the empirical or historical conception of it, as the
society of those confessing the Christian faith, organised in
external forms, and the religious and teleological idea of the
communion of saints, which is an object of faith. The identi-
fication of the former with the latter is the fundamental error
of Roman Catholicism. The Church can never be called a
20A DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. II.
divine institution in any other sense than that of being a
community in which the Spirit of God, by means of the word,
produces and fosters the Christian life of salvation. As the
educator of individuals into the Christian faith, she is the
mother of believers. Only those who, under her educating
influence, have attained to a life of personal communion with
Christ and God, are living members of the community of
believers ; thus (Ritschl notwithstanding) Schleiermacher's
statement holds good, that according to the Protestant faith,
communion with the Church is conditioned by that with
Christ, and not vice versa. In the ministration of the word
and sacraments we have from the empirical point of view,
ecclesiastical functions which are signs and symbols of the
faith animating the Church. From a religious or teleological
point of view, they are signs and pledges of divine grace, by
means of which the Holy Spirit produces faith, and com-
municates the blessings which the signs signify. The kingdom
of God is primarily a divine gift, and only secondarily a
human vocation ; it is, therefore, not an empirical but a religious
conception. The peculiar blessing possessed by the members
of the kingdom is sonship to God, attained by justification
and regeneration ; the personal certainty of this brings with it
participation in the kingdom of God, but membership in the
Church is not identical with membership in the kingdom of
God. In actual history, the kingdom of God appears in the
advancing moral organisation of the w T hole of human life
under the guiding principle of love to God and the brethren.
Beyond the historical and always relative realisation of the
kingdom of God, faith pictures the ideal of its eternal con-
summation, both for the individual and for the race. As to
how this is to be, we can have no conception, and therefore
no possible knowledge. Individual immortality can be scien-
tifically neither proved nor refuted. But viewed teleologically
the belief in immortality has its roots in the same self-
assertion of the ego in opposition to the forces of external
nature as gives birth to both the moral and the religious
theory of the universe.
The similarity of Lipsius's theology with that of De
Wette is obvious ; Lipsius, thanks to a profounder analysis
of the religious spirit, presents, however, a more subtle and
satisfactory method of harmonising the two distinct methods
of looking at the phenomena than did his predecessor. The
Ch. IV.] ECLECTIC MEDIATING THEOLOGIANS. 2O5
reconciliation of our present knowledge of nature and history
with the religious faith handed down in the Church, and
imparted to us in our education, will remain in the future the
perpetual problem of theology. It is evident that its for-
mulae, from the very fact of their having this practical object,
cannot claim to be scientific propositions, valid universally
and for all time. A sound tact, giving prominence to what is
for us religiously essential, and putting into the background
what is antiquated, will, perhaps, prove better able to solve
the problem than a rigorously systematic method. In this
respect, we must finally mention Hase's Evangelisch-protes-
tantische Dogmatik, the six editions of which are sufficient
proof of its usefulness. Its value lies partly in the full
and judiciously chosen historical materials prefixed to each
dogma, and partly in the skill, caution, and tact, with which
the permanent religious significance of various dogmas is
discussed. This allows, it is true, large latitude to the
personal taste of the author, with his high religious and
scientific culture. But where was this otherwise with a
theological manual, which was not intended to be a mere
book of the symbols of the Church ? The proper and strictly
scientific work of modern theology does not and cannot lie
in the field of dogmatic theology, but in that of historical
research.
BOOK III. ,
BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY.
CHAPTER I.
NEW TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND EXEGESIS.
THE year 1835 marked an era in our scientific knowledge of
the Biblical foundations of Christianity. In it appeared David
Friedrich Strauss's Life of Jesus, Christian Ferdinand Baur's
work on the Pastoral Epistles, and Wilhelm Vatke's history
of the religion of the Old Testament, three works containing
the germs of the researches of our own day into the Old and
New Testament writings. These works did not of course
come down from heaven, but were to a certain extent the
result of the labours of older critics. Still, the difference
between them and earlier works is so fundamental, the new
element in them is so predominant and of such moment, that
we are justified in dating from them the special character ot
the Biblical criticism of to-day. We shall first take a brief
glance at the state of New Testament criticism in the first
three decades of this century.
The principle enunciated by Semler, Lessing, and Herder,
that the books of the Bible must be read and criticised as
human productions, was systematically applied by Eichhorn.
He saw that the New Testament epistles were not all written
by the apostles whose names they bear, that 2 Peter and Jude
are not genuine, and that the Epistles to Timothy and Titus
do not come direct from Paul. Of special importance was his
hypothesis as to the synoptic Gospels. The problem as to
how their frequent verbal agreement in conjunction with their
discrepancies can be explained, he believed himself able to
solve by the hypothesis of a primary Aramaic Gospel, of
which various translations and editions were at first current,
and from which at a later time sprang our canonical Gospels.
Instead of this primitive written Gospel, Gieseler regarded
oral tradition as the common source, an hypothesis which
explained the differences between the Gospels more easily but
made their agreement in details more difficult. Schleiermacher
combined both hypotheses, by assuming along with the oral
G.T. 20 p
2IO BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Bk. III.
tradition a number of small written accounts (^ Diegeseis"\ by
the collection and combination of which our synoptic Gospels
were formed. The Gospel of Matthew even does not, in his
view, come directly from the Apostle Matthew as its author,
but is only based upon a collection of speeches made by him
(the Xoyia of Papias). The Gospel according to Mark is
derived from Matthew's and Luke's Gospels, both of them
being used alternately. The Johannine Gospel only is the
authentic production of one author, and was composed by
John the apostle and eye-witness ; and as the earliest
authority for the life of Jesus it is always to be preferred to
the synoptists. The authority of the great theologian Schleier-
macher secured for this theory for a long time wide acceptance.
It must however be remarked, that of all conceivable com-
binations it is the most erroneous, and is a complete subversion
of the real state of the case, since Mark's Gospel is not the
latest but the earliest, and John's Gospel not the earliest but
the latest, and throughout dependent on Mark and Luke.
Historical instinct was not Schleiermacher's strong point, and
his preference for the Fourth Gospel did not rest upon historical
grounds but upon his theological postulates and his sympathy,
as one of the Romanticists, with the Johannine idea of Christ.
Schleiermacher ought to have learnt better from Herder, who,
though he regarded the Fourth Gospel as apostolic, still
possessed enough historical insight to see in it "the echo of
the earlier Gospels in a higher key," while he regarded Mark's
Gospel and that of the Hebrews as the earliest, from which
was derived first Luke's and then Matthew's Gospel (after
the destruction of Jerusalem), and finally, a generation later,
the Gospel of John. Herder was, in my opinion, perfectly
right in this determination of the order (though not of the
date) of the Gospels ; that his view was ignored by theo-
logians was a great hindrance to the clearing up of this im-
portant problem ; on this, as perhaps on other points, that
Herder was eclipsed by the overwhelming authority of
Schleiermacher had injurious effects upon the healthy de-
velopment of German theology. So too Schleiermacher's
denial of the genuineness of the first Epistle to Timothy,
while he accepted the second and the Epistle to Titus as
genuine, must be considered a very doubtful service to science,
when we remember that Eichhorn, and still more De Wette,
had a truer perception of the un- Pauline character common
Ch. I.] NEW TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND EXEGESIS. 211
to the three plainly connected epistles. De Wette was, after
Semler and Herder, the most important Protestant Biblical
critic before 1835. He was the only critic quite free from
dogmatic prejudices, and unequalled for profound learning,
keen insight, and fine linguistic perception. Yet neither was
he able to arrive at satisfactory and thoroughly consistent
results. His critical method was too purely subjective and
formal, founded upon matters of taste and individual con-
siderations such as might be met by others of pretty much
the same weight ; he paid no proper regard to the general
character of a book and its place in the history of the early
development of Christian doctrines. Hence he generally
remained in doubt, unable to arrive at any final result ; this was
the case with the problem of the gospels. Ephesians and the
Pastoral Epistles he considered as certainly not genuine, as
also the Apocalypse and 2 Peter ; but what was the advantage
of knowing that these works do not come from the authors
whose names they traditionally bear, if nothing positive was
ascertained as to their date, or character, or the ecclesiastical
circle to which they belonged, or the -purpose they were
intended to perform for their time and surroundings? In
fact this critical method, which was employed by De Wette
in its best form, was purely negative, and was therefore
only preliminary to the main aim, a positive insight into the
historical origin of the various New Testament writings and
their importance in the history of primitive Christianity.
This was accomplished by the critical labours of Baur
and the investigators directly or indirectly stimulated by
him.
Along with the investigation of the origin of the New
Testament writings, a critique of the Gospel narratives was
carried on by Rationalistic theologians. But neither was this
more satisfactory in its method or its results. Dr. Paulus, the
best known representative of the Rationalistic interpretation
of the Gospel narratives, started from the principle that in the
Gospels we must look for nothing but actual facts, not for
poetry or legends, and that these facts were natural and not
supernatural events, and that they had acquired the appear-
ance of supernatural occurrences, or miracles, partly through
the errors of commentators, partly through the erroneous
apprehension and judgment of the narrators. The task of
the scientific commentator is to get rid of this false appearance
212 BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Bk. III.
and to see in the stories of the evangelists simple events with
natural causes. The execution of this task by Dr. Paulus
himself was such that w r e do not know whether to wonder
most at his learning and ingenuity or his ineptitude and want
of taste. He turns the finest of the Gospel narratives, the
blossoms of the noblest religious poetry, by his " natural '*
interpretation, into the most trivial, commonplace incidents,
without any deeper meaning or religious significance. Indeed,
in not a few places he is even guilty of an absolute meanness
in his interpretations, almost on a par with the notorious
theories of a ''priestly fraud." Thus the narrative of the
supernatural birth of Jesus is reduced to a deception cun-
ningly practised upon the Virgin Mary. The occurrence at
Christ's baptism was that the clouds just then accidentally
opened and a flying dove appeared in the blue sky. The
devil that tempted him in the wilderness was an agent pro-
vocateur sent out by the Pharisees. The plan of Jesus was
essentially the political one of restoring the temporal splendour
of the Israelitish theocracy and placing himself as the Messiah-
king at its head ; it was not till after the failure of this attempt
that he confined himself to an ethical kingdom of God. His
miracles of healing were successful cures, the medical means
applied being generally ignored by the narrators. The in-
stances of restoration to life were only from apparent death.
The walking of Jesus on the sea was his walking by the sea
on the shore. The miraculous draught of fishes was the
result of the good advice given by Jesus to the dispirited
fishermen. The multiplication of loaves at the feeding of the
multitude in the wilderness was the effect of the good example
of Jesus in giving away his store of food, which was followed
by the rest of those present who had any. The change of the
water into wine at Cana was a marriage jest, Jesus giving the
present of wine he had brought for the married pair in this
humorous way. The resurrection of Jesus himself was an
awakening from an apparent death by tetanus ; his ascension,
his retirement in his subsequent illness into the summit of
the mountains, the mist serving to take him from the sight
of those beholding his departure.
That this interpretation of the Gospels, which everywhere
retains the husk and surrenders the religious kernel, was
countenanced even by orthodox theologians in many instances,
and accepted, at any rate partially, by Schleiermacher too in
Ch. I.] NEW TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND EXEGESIS. 2 1 3
his lectures on the " Life of Jesus," can only be accounted for
by remembering the difficult position of the theologians of
that time, whose general culture made a naive belief in the
reality of actual miracles impossible, while their historical
criticism was still fettered by the supposition that at least one
or the other of the Gospels came direct from an eye-witness
and had therefore to claim an historical character for all its
narratives. The rescue of theology out of this blind alley by
a thorough and consistent, instead of a halting criticism, getting
rid of the fettering suppositions and clearing the way for a
scientific study of the origins of Christianity, was the work of
Strauss.
In the preface to his Leben Jesu, STRAUSS places his own
position as the "mythical" in contrast with the positions of
orthodoxy and Rationalism in the following terms : " Orthodox
exegesis started with the twofold assumption that the Gospels
contained firstly history, and secondly supernatural history ;
then Rationalism rejected the second of these assumptions,
only to cling more firmly to the first that these books had in
them pure, though natural, history. Science cannot stop thus
half-way, but the first assumption also must be dropped, and
the question examined whether and how far we stand in the
Gospels upon historical ground." The mythical theory, he
continues, had already been variously applied to the gospel
history, but neither in its pure form nor to its full extent ; too
much history was always expected in details, in spite of the
acknowledged mythical character of the Gospels in general.
Moreover, the application of this theory had always been too
limited ; mythical elements were, indeed, admitted in the
narratives of the childhood of Jesus, and again at the close of
his life, but not in the intermediate narrative, the history
of his public ministry. This limitation is untenable ; it is not
permissible to enter the evangelical history by the splendid
portal of myth and leave it by a similar one, and for what lies
between rest satisfied with the crooked and weary paths of a
natural explanation. " The author's method is to apply the
principle of myth to the whole extent of the story of the life
of Jesus, to find mythical narratives, or at least embellishments,
scattered throughout all its parts."
In justification of this method, Strauss appeals to the similar
allegorical interpretation in the ancient Church, e.g. in Origen.
While the method of natural explanation of the Rationalists
214 BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Bk. III.
and Naturalists sacrificed the divine content of the sacred
story and clung to its empty historical form, the mythical, like
the allegorical, method prefers, on the contrary, to sacrifice the
historical reality of the narrative and keep its absolute (eternal
and spiritual) truth. If Supernaturalists cannot make up their
minds to this, they only prove that, like children, they much pre-
fer the painted historical shell, even if emptied of all divine con-
tents, to the richest content when divested of its coloured cover-
ing. He then goes on to defend this method against objections
which were partly due to misconception of the nature of myth,
as if it were an artificial product of intentional invention,
and partly based on the supposed incredibility of unhistorical
legends becoming incorporated in Gospels composed so early
and in part by eye-witnesses. This objection would, Strauss
says, be a serious one if the assumption as to the Gospels were
correct. But the assumption rests neither on internal nor on
external grounds, since neither in the case of the first nor of
the fourth Gospel do we possess testimony early enough to
assure us of their authorship by the apostles Matthew and
John. In the absence of such testimony we are at liberty to
assume an interval of at least thirty years between the death
of Jesus and the origin of our Gospels ; and that this interval
is sufficient to explain the rise of myths is placed beyond all
doubt by the actual analogy of profane history (e.g. Herodo-
tus). If any one still insists that an historical period like that
in which the public life of Jesus was passed renders the forma-
tion of myths concerning it impossible, the reply is, that a
great personality, especially if connected with a revolution pro-
foundly affecting the life of man, soon becomes the centre of
an unhistoric halo of mythical glorification, even in the most
matter-of-fact period of history. " Conceive a recently estab-
lished community, revering its founder with all the more
enthusiasm on account of his unexpected and tragic removal
from his work ; a community impregnated with a mass of new
ideas which were destined to transform the world ; a com-
munity of orientals, chiefly unlearned people, who therefore
could not appropriate and express those ideas in the abstract
conceptual forms of the understanding, but only as symbols
and stories in the concrete fashion of the imagination. When
all this is remembered, one can perceive that under these cir-
cumstances there must necessarily have arisen what actually
did arise, viz. a series of sacred narratives fitted to bring vividly
Ch. I.] NEW TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND EXEGESIS. 2 I 5
before the mind the whole mass of new ideas, started by Jesus,
and of old ones, applied to him, cast in the form of particular
incidents in his life. The simple historical structure of the
life of Jesus was hung with the most varied and suggestive
tapestry of devout reflections and fancies, all the ideas enter-
tained by primitive Christianity relative to its lost Master
being transformed into facts and woven into the course of his
life. The most abundant material for this mythical ornamen-
tation was furnished by the Old Testament, in which the first
Christian community, composed chiefly of Jewish converts,
lived and breathed. Jesus, as the greatest prophet, must have
gathered up and surpassed in his life and deeds everything
that the ancient prophets had done and experienced ; he, as
the restorer of the Hebrew religion, could not be in anything
inferior to the first law-giver ; in him, finally, as the Messiah,
must have been fulfilled all the Messianic prophecies of the
Old Testament ; he had inevitably to meet the ideal of the
Messiah as already conceived by the Jews, so far as the de-
partures from this ideal which were made in known historical
actions and speeches allowed. It ought in our time to be
unnecessary to remark that this transference of what was ex-
pected into the history of what actually took place, and in
general the mythical embellishment of the life of Jesus, was
not the work of premeditated deceit and cunning invention.
The legends of a people or of a religious sect are in their
genuine elements never the work of a single person, but of the
generalised individual of the community, and hence are never
consciously or intentionally produced. The imperceptible
growth of a joint creative work of this kind is made possible
by oral tradition being the medium of communication."
I have given Strauss's description and defence of his method
in his own words, in order at the same time to give a speci-
men of the lucidity and beauty of his style and exposition.
This mastery of form has no doubt contributed much to the
profound and far-reaching effect of the book ; this was, how-
ever, much more clue to the inexorable logic with which the
critic worked out his task in all parts of the gospel history.
" In this book all previous critical researches into the life of
Jesus meet ; but they are at the same time completed, more
exact, more pointed, and reduced to one fundamental prin-
ciple. This iron necessity of the method, carried through like
a process of nature, this cold, passionless objectivity, in which
2l6 BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Bk. III.
the author is sunk in his work and is only the calculator setting
down and summing up the various accounts before him, was
what made the book so impressive, or perhaps rather so
terrible. It had about it the cold indifference of fate ; in the
criticism of the gospel history the balance had been struck,
and the verdict was bankruptcy. The gospel history had
from all sides already felt the teeth of. criticism ; it was here
shown that its very heart had been reached. The effect of
this work was immense." l
Such an effect Strauss himself had not anticipated. The
panic of the theological and lay world, which saw in Strauss's
criticism nothing less than the destruction of the Christian
faith, was all the more surprising to him as he had not in-
tended anything of the kind. According to his assurance
in the preface, which deserves full credit, his conviction had
rather been that the inner kernel of the Christian faith was
quite independent of his critical investigations. "Christ's
supernatural birth, his miracles, his resurrection and ascension,
remain eternal truths, however much their reality as historic
facts may be called in question. This certainty alone can lend
to our criticism calmness and dignity, and distinguish it from
the naturalistic criticism of former centuries, which thought to
overturn the religious truth with the historic fact, and had
therefore inevitably a frivolous character. The dogmatic
content of the life of Jesus will be shown to be untouched in
an appendix to this work. In the meantime, may the calm-
ness and coolness with which in the course of it criticism
undertakes apparently dangerous operations, be attributed
solely to the assured conviction that none of these things
harm the Christian faith."
The appendix to the second volume, thus announced, under-
took the dogmatic restoration of what criticism had destroyed.
Unlike the naturalist and freethinker of earlier times, the critic
of the nineteenth century should be filled with reverence for
every religion, and should in particular be conscious of the
identity of the highest religion, the Christian, with philosophi-
cal truth. There then follows a critical sketch of the historical
development of Christological dogma, the truth contained in
w T hich is finally given in the following speculative form :
" When mankind is once sufficiently developed to have as its
1 Schwarz, Zur Gesch. d. neuestcn ThcoL, p. 97, sq.
Ch. I.] NEW TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND EXEGESIS. 2 17
religion the truth that God is man and man of divine race, this
truth, since religion is the form assumed by truth for the
ordinary mind, must be shown in a manner comprehensible by
all as a sensible certainty, i.e. a human individual must arise
who is regarded as the present God. Inasmuch as this God-
man unites in himself the heavenly divine nature and the
earthly human ego, he .can be said to have the divine spirit as
his father and a human mother ; inasmuch as his ego reflects
itself not in itself, but in the absolute substance, seeks to be
nothing for itself, but to exist for God alone, he is the sinless
and perfect one ; as a man of divine nature he is the power
over nature and the performer of miracles ; but as God
in human form, he is dependent upon nature, subject to its
wants and pains, is in the condition of humiliation. Will he
have to pay nature the last tribute also ? Does not the fact
that human nature is subject to death falsify the belief that it
is one with the divine ? No ; the God-man dies, showing that
God has not shrunk from becoming man fully ; that he does
not disdain to descend to the lowest depths of the finite, since
he can find the way back to himself even thence, and in the
most complete self-abnegation can yet ^remain identical with
himself. More precisely, since the God-man as man's spirit
reflected in its infinitude, stands in contrast to man as cling-
ing to his finiteness, this involves an opposition and conflict,
and the death of the God-man is necessarily made a violent
one at the hands of sinners, physical suffering being thus sup
plemented by the moral pain of insult and accusation of guilt.
If God thus finds the way from heaven to the tomb, there
must also be a way to be found for man from the tomb to
heaven ; the death of the Prince of Life is the life of mortal
man. By his very appearance in the world as God-man, God
showed himself reconciled to the world ; or more exactly, by
laying aside in death his subjection to nature, he showed the
way by which he eternally accomplishes the reconciliation,
viz. by emptying himself and voluntarily assuming subjection
to nature, and then annulling it to remain identical with him-
self. Since the death of the God-man only puts an end to his
self-abnegation and humiliation, it is really his elevation and
return to God ; thus in the nature of things death is followed
by resurrection and ascension."
We can well understand that Strauss, as the disciple of
Hegel, could honestly believe that by this allegorical interpre-
2l8 BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Bk. III.
tation of Christ's appearance as a figure of humanity and its
metaphysical relation to the Absolute, he had restored " dog-
matically what he had destroyed critically," but we can under-
stand equally well the energetic protest of the Christian world
against such a compensation for its loss. Strauss had in fact
deluded himself, and his case had in it a tragic element, in that
he shared this delusion with the chief philosophy of his time,
and cannot therefore be made personally responsible for it,
while its disastrous consequences were borne by him person-
ally more than by any other man. It was the fundamental error
of the Hegelian philosophy to suppose that the truth of re-
ligion consists in the logical consciousness of metaphysical
relations, thus totally overlooking its actual nature, consisting,
as it does, in emotional and volitional processes ; and this
error led Strauss to think he had found the essence of faith in
Christ in metaphysical statements about the human race, which
really did not so much as touch the sphere of religious faith,
much less exhaust its highest truth. Strauss's mistake did not
therefore lie in regarding the gospel stories of miracles as
symbols of ideal truths that they are really this could be
easily proved from the New Testament itself ; but his mistake
lay in looking for these truths outside religion, instead of
within it, in metaphysical categories of doubtful value for
knowledge, instead of in the facts of the devout heart and
moral will, in which the saving and gladdening effects of our
religion are found. If he had paid more regard to these
religious and moral truths, the " deliverances of the devout
consciousness," as Schleiermacher called them, this would of
itself have led him to see further, that the historical Jesus was
not merely an accidentally chosen type and example of these
truths, but their original creative type and their historic source.
If the historical Jesus had been thus brought into an inner and
essential relation to the religious and moral idea of Chris-
tianity, as its pioneer and prophet, justice would have been
done to his religious importance, which is quite lost sight of in
Strauss's allegorising, since there is no sort of inner connec-
tion between the philosophical ideas in which he looked for the
essence of the belief in Christ and the person of Jesus himself.
However, if Strauss, after the critical disintegration of the
legends of miracles, had given us a positive picture of the
ideal life of Jesus as a religious and ethical character, and had
offered this to Christendom as the permanent kernel in place
Ch. I.] NEW TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND EXEGESIS. 219
of the husks which criticism had destroyed, his scientific work
would of course still have been attacked, but not with that
passionate bitterness which proved so disastrous not only
to Strauss's outward life, but also to his inner development,
alienating for ever from Church and theology a man of great
talent and a courageous spirit of inquiry. We of to-day,
separated by half a century from those years of the Straussian
movement, can only look back upon it with unfeigned regret
at the tragic fate dooming such a powerful and noble mind to
failure, partly because the time was not ripe properly to receive
what was true and valid in Strauss's critical labours, partly also
because he was himself still fettered by the false, and in this
case fatally mistaken, assumptions of the philosophical intel-
lectualism of the time.
Of the mass of polemical literature evoked by Strauss's
work, only three books are important for our purpose :
Neander's Leben Jesu (1837), Ullmann's Historisck oder
mythisch ? and Weisse's Die evangelise he Geschichte, kritisch
nnd philosophisch bearbeitet (1838). The first two of
the writers just mentioned belonged to the mediating school of
Schleiermacher, which, with all its supernaturalistic leanings,
made too many concessions to criticism to be able to condemn
Strauss's line of procedure unconditionally. Strauss offered
as a motto, aptly descriptive of Neander's book, the words,
" Lord, I believe, help thou my unbelief." NEANDER, unable
wholly to accept or to dispense with miracles, takes refuge
in an emasculated conception of miracle ; a miracle he holds
to be not anti-natural but supernatural, as resting on higher
laws, at present unknown, the sign of a higher order of
creative forces acting in our nature, which the ordinary
order of nature has by the divine wisdom been eternally pre-
destined to receive. We must also assume various degrees
of the supernatural, a less degree in miracles of healing than
in some other kinds. Yet even these latter are a little
softened down. The water at Cana was not changed into
actual wine, but properties merely like those of wine were
imparted to it, in the same way as mineral waters have them.
In the cases of raising the dead there is always (even John
xi.) the possibility of only an apparent death. The miraculous
star of the Magi is explained as a natural conjunction of
planets, which only gave occasion for the journey, but did
not show the way. The phenomenon at the baptism of Jesus
22O BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Bk. III.
is represented as a vision, the story of the temptation as an
allegory. In this way the most striking miracles were either
partially or entirely got rid of, though others were still
retained, in particular the resurrection of Christ himself. Such
an illogical method of procedure was evidently no refutation
of Strauss's criticism ; the book was important only as showing
how impossible a naive belief in the gospel narratives had
become for a theologian affected by the thought of the time,
and how important it had therefore become for theological
science to take up a fresh position with regard to these
records.
ULLMANN penetrated more deeply than Neander into the
heart of the question. He admits that in the Gospels legends
of an essentially symbolic character do occur, but it does not
follow from this that everything is mythical ; it is precisely
the problem to determine exactly the boundaries of the his-
torical and the mythical. Ullmann holds and without doubt
rightly that Strauss's work failed chiefly in not doing this,
but in confining itself to the mere negation of the traditions.
Strauss's net result, as Ullmann acutely remarks, amounts to
this, that the Church invented Christ ; but this makes the
history of Christianity incomprehensible. We ought rather
to infer from this actual fact, which has changed the course of
the world, that there was a corresponding cause, which can
only be found in the personality of Christ, the Founder of the
Church. Strauss, Ullmann argues, had underrated or ignored
this personality, because his own philosophical assumptions
involved the antecedent conviction that the idea does not
fully manifest itself in a single individual, but is only un-
folded in the race as a whole. In reply to this assumption,
it must be urged, that as an historical fact geniuses do appear
from time to time in all departments of mental life, in whom
ideas are embodied typically and perfectly, the idea of art,
for example, in some of its forms. In a Homer, Sophocles,
Dante, Shakespeare, Raphael, Handel, etc., the idea of their
respective arts is fully given in a single example, and a
supreme standard is set up for all who come after to aim at.
Much more must this be possible in the sphere of religion.
Though revelation may be common to all nations and times,
it necessarily tends to concentrate itself at one supreme point
of the religious development of mankind, and this point is
the ideal, sinless Christ.
Ch. I.] NEW TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND EXEGESIS. 221
Amongst all the books written against him, Strauss treated
that of Ullmann with the most respect, making, in fact, some
not inconsiderable concessions to it. To the dilemma pro-
pounded by Ullmann, whether Christ created the Church or
the Church invented Christ, Strauss replied, not without
reason, that the alternatives are not mutually exclusive ; even
if the Church had been created by the power of the person-
ality of Jesus, it might still, in return, have transformed and
adorned the idea of Christ by the aid of its mythical concep-
tions and hopes. Nevertheless, in his book, published shortly
afterwards, Vergangliches und Bleibendes. Zwei friedliche
Blatter (1838-39), Strauss allowed the justice of Ullmann's
objection so far as to admit that man's religious life is
related to the rest of his life as the centre of a circle to its
circumference, and that in religion Christ was supreme, and
was so far above other founders of religions as to be un-
surpassable for all time. For it was in him that the unity
of the divine and human first became a matter of conscious-
ness, and this with such creative power as to supply the need
of all who came after him. He therefore now, with Ullmann,
recognised Christ as a religious genius historically unique,
only he refused to follow Ullmann and Schleiermacher in con-
verting this uniqueness of genius into absolute perfection,
thus raising it altogether above the plane of history. But
assuming that this position of Strauss was in itself a tenable
one, its weakness lay in his method of proving this grandeur
of Christ ; for it is clear that the philosophical consciousness 01
the unity of the divine and human can scarcely be ascribed to
the Johannine Jesus, and at any rate not to the historical Jesus
of the synoptic Gospels. The error, which was bound to prove
fatal to this eirenical position, lay in the attempt to find Christ's
greatness in a philosophical idea, instead of in the unique
character of his religious and moral consciousness and work.
And in order to be able to ascribe that philosophical conscious-
ness to Christ with an appearance of historical justification,
he was guilty of the blunder of admitting the possible genuine-
ness of the Johannine Gospel and of treating it as an his-
torical authority. This produced a wavering uncertainty in
the third edition of his Leben Jesu, in unpleasing contrast
to the unflinching logic and clearness of the earlier editions,
while the possibility of thus creating a favourable impression
upon the theological public was lessened by the not unfounded
222 BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Bk. III.
suspicion that personal motives of expediency had helped to
produce these partial concessions. Strauss himself retraced
this false step in the fourth edition, which appeared shortly
after, and thus brought the question back to its original posi-
tion. But this wavering had at any rate shown the totally
inadequate treatment by Strauss of the fundamental question
for a life of Jesus, as to the historical value of the documentary
sources, and their relation to each other. The necessity there-
fore was shown of a scientific investigation of the question.
This was first supplied, and in a very thorough manner, by
HERMANN WEISSE. He says in the preface to his Evan-
gelische Geschichte (1838), that he had from the first welcomed
Strauss's work as not an injurious one but a helpful contri-
bution to true Christian knowledge and insight, which belongs
not to the past but to the future, inasmuch as the book had
carried through the unpleasant task of destructive criticism
so thoroughly as to give us all the more courage for the
attempt to substitute something positive for what criticism
had swept away. With this view, Weisse starts with a
detailed investigation of the literary relations of the Gospels,
and comes, to his own surprise, to the conclusion that Mark's
Gospel must be placed before the others in point of origin-
ality and age ; a conclusion so opposed to the then universal
view that it required considerable courage to make it the
basis of an account of the gospel history. The same view
was simultaneously defended by a compatriot of Weisse, the
Saxon clergyman Wilke, in an exhaustive treatise. Still the
view could only slowly and with difficulty make any way at first
against the twofold prejudice in favour of John and Matthew,
and afterwards against that in favour of Matthew ; it has
now been accepted by the majority of theologians ; and the
acceptance of the priority of Mark and the late origin of the
Gospels of Matthew and of John as among the assured
results of Biblical criticism is apparently only a question of
time. Notwithstanding Weisse' s success in determining the
relation of the synoptic Gospels to each other and to that of
John, he took up an untenable half-way position with regard
to the latter. He considered it to be the work of a disciple
of the apostle John, having no claim to direct historical
accuracy, but still based, in its speeches at any rate, upon
historical reminiscences of the apostle, which, however,
received a strong subjective colouring both in the apostle's
Ch. I.] NEW TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND EXEGESIS. 223
mind and in the process of literary composition by his disciple.
The unity and symmetrical plan of the whole composition
of John's Gospel w r ere not recognised by Weisse ; Baur's
indication of them sealed the fate of Weisse's semi-critical
hypothesis. But while Weisse was certainly corrected by Baur
on the question of the Fourth Gospel, he was as certainly
superior to Baur in taking the right view of the synoptists.
In his estimate of the evangelical narratives Weisse fully
agrees with Strauss in the negative conclusion, that every-
thing really miraculous, in which the laws of nature, valid for
all history, are alleged to have been broken by the absolute
spirit, is to be regarded as unnatural and on that account as
unhistorical. " Before an act of the Deity completely viola-
ting the laws of nature and history, before a miracle in this
properly unhistorical and anti-natural sense, we could only take
up an attitude of vacant unreasoning resignation." Weisse,
too, believes that in these narratives we must look for religious
myths. But he is by no means satisfied with Strauss's ex-
planation of them ; they are not to be explained, as Strauss
thought, by a mechanical transference to the Messiah Jesus
of conceptions and legends already given in the Old Testa-
ment, but they are the special product of the religious spirit
of Christianity, which expressed in them symbolically its
ideal truth, as the fulfilment of all previous Jewish and
heathen anticipations. Thus Weisse interprets the stories of
miracles purely as religious allegories, involuntarily invented
by the imagination of the primitive community, which did not
distinguish between the poetic form and the ideal content.
Weisse rightly urged that this method of exegesis is much less
offensive than Strauss's to the religious feeling of the present
time. " For whatever is illustrated in a legend permeated
with the true subject-matter, with the idea of the sacred
history, must be itself religious, essentially sacred. The
historical revelation of God in the Gospels loses not a whit
of its sacred content if a part of this content ceases to be
regarded as an immediate fact of such a kind that the Deity
appears in it as treating his own noblest work rather in jest
than in earnest. On the contrary, this revelation gains when
the Gospels are recognised as the productions of rich spiritual
genius, in which the circle of men, to whom the divine reve-
lation of Christianity was first addressed, deposited a pro-
ductive, creative consciousness of the divine spirit, descended
224 BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Bk. III.
into their midst, and of the manner of his working. It was
a consciousness such as this which found its thoroughly
appropriate expression in the sacred legends." It is certain
that this way of looking at the Gospel narratives, in con-
junction with a penetrating investigation of the literary rela-
tions and value of the authorities, first indicated the course
by which theology might hope to leave behind it Strauss's
purely negative criticism and obtain a positive understanding
of the Gospels. The further pursuit of this method by the
Tubingen School led to very important results.
The best, most just and most thorough estimate of Strauss's
book was that given by his Tubingen teacher, the famous critic
and ecclesiastical historian, FERDINAND CHRISTIAN BAUR, in
the introduction to his book, Kritische Untersuckungen ilber
die kanonischen Evangelien, ihr Verhaltniss zii einander, ihren
Charakter ^ind Ursprung. Baur finds both Strauss's strength
and his weakness in his thoroughly logical negative criticism,
which revealed the baselessness of our supposed knowledge of
the Gospels, and showed us our ignorance of the real historic
truth, thus preparing the way for true knowledge. To quote
his own words, " Like all works of true originality and genius,
Strauss's book has the great merit of being before and yet the
child of its time. It gathered up the critical inquiries on the
life of Jesus with their results from every quarter, in order
to present their naked ultimate issue and form them into a
single whole, by a more vigorous method of proof, by defining
what had been left indefinite, and by supplying existing
deficiencies. Thus the book became the living centre of the
whole critical movement of the time, which alone explains its
immense effect. Strauss was hated because the spirit of the
time could not endure its own picture, which he held up to it
in faithful, clearly drawn outlines. In this reflection of itself the
age became conscious of much of which it before had had no
distinct idea, coming to perceive its contradictions and incon-
sistencies and false assumptions ; in a word, its complete want
of true knowledge. Let us frankly admit the facts of the case,
and rest assured that, instead of going on for ever with vague
and empty polemics, it is time to look at Strauss's criticism as
a product of its time, and to understand how, in the then
existing stage of criticism, it was not only a possible but also
a necessary phenomenon. What result could be reached
from the investigations then carried on into the origin and
Ch. I.] NEW TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND EXEGESIS. 225
mutual relation of the Gospels, except a purely negative one ?
One opinion was opposed by another, taken together the
opinions were mutually contradictory and destructive, and any
certainty was impossible. It was, in fact, just as Strauss
himself said, in the darkness produced by the extinguishing
of all supposed historical lights by criticism, the eye had
gradually to learn to distinguish individual objects. Strauss' s
work was intended to begin this process, by leading men out
of the general darkness into the clear day of historical know-
ledge. But it introduced a new era not in virtue of this
positive but of its negative side ; its chief merit lay not in
the knowledge which it brought to light, but in the want of
knowledge of which it made men conscious. This is the
truly historical importance of Strauss's critique. Its greatest
merit will always consist in having shown the condition of
historical knowledge of the gospel history at th'e time, and in
having done this from a pure love of truth, without prejudice
or assumption, without mercy or consideration, and it must
be allowed with cold severity. Every step the work takes
beyond this seems to lie outside its true province. But the
spirit of an age resists with all its might the proof of its
ignorance in a matter of its knowledge of which it had long
been so certain. Instead of recognising what had to be
recognised, if any progress was to be made, all possible
attempts were made to create fresh illusions as to the true
state of the case, by reviving long antiquated hypotheses, by
theological charlatanism, by using all the motives of a false
party spirit. But a higher certainty as to the truth of the
gospel history can only be attained by recognising, on the
basis of Strauss's criticism, our previous knowledge as no
knowledge at all. When all our previous knowledge is self-
contradictory and self-destructive, certain knowledge can only
come from the examination and classification of details. But
these details formed the limit of Strauss's criticism."
In order to get beyond Strauss's negative results, the
criticism of the gospel history must become the criticism of
the documents which are the sources for this history. And
if this is not to continue to consist of mutually exclusive
hypotheses, but is to be placed upon a firm basis, the special
characteristics of each Gospel must be exactly ascertained, the
literary features and objects of its author must be investigated,
and its relation determined to the general circumstances of
G. T. Q
226 BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Bk. III.
the time out of which it arose. This had been attempted,
after a fashion, before F. Chr. Baur by Bruno Bauer, Weisse,
and Wilke, who put the evangelist Mark in the place of a
general indefinite tradition, as the original evangelist, and
derived the other Gospels from him. This view was carried
to the most extreme lengths by Bruno Bauer, who regarded
Mark not only as the first narrator, but even as the creator
of the gospel history, thus making the latter a fiction and
Christianity the invention of a single original evangelist. In
spite of the evident absurdity of this " phantasmagorical view
of history," we must recognise a grain of truth in Bruno
Bauer's opposition to Strauss, when he asked whether the
mysterious myth-creating consciousness of the community
could produce its Gospels without having hands wherewith to
write, or taste to compose, or judgment to connect related
and exclude alien matter ? This touched, in fact, a weak place
in Strauss's method, viz. his ignoring the subjectivity of the
authors of the Gospels. But it was precisely this subjectivity,
as F. Chr. Baur remarks, which deserved the primary atten-
tion of historical criticism. " Since all history, before it
reaches us, passes through the medium of a narrator, in our
criticism of the gospel history, the first question is not,
What objective reality is possessed by this or that narrative
per se ? but rather, What is the relation of the narrative to
the mind of the narrator, through the medium of whom it
becomes for us an object of historical knowledge ? " We
must, therefore, in the first place know the aim and purpose
of the writer, his motive in writing as he does, and the
influence of this motive on his account ; and this question can
only be answered by as exact an investigation as possible of
the historical conditions under the influence of which the
author wrote. Every author belongs to the time in which he
lives, and the greater the importance of his subject for the
struggles, parties, and interests of the time, the safer the
assumption that he must bear the impress of his age, and that
the motives determining the form of his narrative must be
sought in the circumstances of the time. This holds also of
the Gospels ; hence the first question in the criticism of them
will be, What was the aim and purpose of each of their
authors ? Thus only can we gain the firm ground of con-
crete historical truth. Since a special motive (Tendenz) is
most apparent in the fourth Gospel, Baur took this Gospel,
Ch. I.] NEW TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND EXEGESIS. 227
which had hitherto offered the stoutest resistance to all
the attacks of criticism, as the point of departure for his
inquiry.
But before we trace this inquiry further, we must glance at
his previous critical works. I have begun with the above
discussion in the introduction to his book on the canonical
Gospels simply in order to make clear his relation to Strauss.
Baur himself, which is characteristic of his method, started
not from the Gospels, the most complicated problem of New
Testament criticism, but from the Pauline Epistles, where
the questions are comparatively simpler. As the fruit of his
exegetical lectures on the Epistles to the Corinthians, he
published in 1831 the essay, Die Christuspartei in der
korinthischen Gemeinde, der Gegensatz des paulinischen imd
petrinischen Christentkums in der altesten Kirche, der Apostel
Petrus in Rom. He had here proved that Paul had to con-
tend in Corinth with a Jewish Christian party, which disputed
his apostolical authority and wished to set up a particularistic
Jewish Christianity, in opposition to his universal Christianity.
He had then pursued the traces of the same division of parties
in the post-apostolic age, down to the Clementine Homilies,
and attempted to explain by its means the legends of Simon
Magus and of the episcopate of Peter in Rome. In these in-
genious, if at times rash, theories lay the germs of his later
view of primitive Christianity, but his literary criticism had
not yet reached an independent position. The full and unique
importance of this was first seen in the work, Uber die
sogenannten Pastor albriefe, which appeared in the same year
as Strauss's Leben Jesu (1,835). His researches into the
Christian Gnosis, published- in the same year, had led Baur
to look for traces of this phenomenon in the New Testament
also, and he then discerned that the false teachers opposed in
the Epistles to Timothy and Titus could be no other than the
Gnostics of the second century, in particular the Marcionites.
This gave a firm footing of objective historical value for the
criticism of these epistles in place of the previous vague sub-
jective hypotheses. Other peculiarities of these epistles, in
particular those respecting ecclesiastical offices and arrange-
ments, were set in a clearer light by the circumstances of the
second century, and this at the same time served to support
the hypothesis based on his characterisation of the false
teachers. Individual critics, such as Eichhorn and De Wette,
228 BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Bk. III.
and also Schleiermacher, had previously doubted the authen-
ticity, at any rate of i Timothy, and not only were these doubts
now fully justified by Baur, but, what was the main thing, the
positive result was reached that these Epistles originated in
the opposition of the Catholic Church to Gnosticism in the
middle of the second century, and w r ere intended to establish
the Church's tradition and hierarchy against heretics. The.
importance of this work of Baur's went far beyond the
question directly treated of, inasmuch as it substituted for
the first time objective criticism, based on a wide general
conception of the conditions of primitive Christianity, for the
subjective criticism hitherto adopted a new method, of the
great importance of which Baur in his preface shows himself
well aware. This critical method he applied during the
following years to the Pauline epistles and to the Acts of the
Apostles, and collected the results of these researches in the
work, Paulus, der Apostel Jesu Christi, sein Leben und
Wirken, seine Brief e und seine Lehre (ist ed., 1845 ; 2nd
ed., 1866). In the first part of this work, Baur describes the
life and work of Paul, as the apostle who first gave Christi-
anity its universal historical importance, and freed it from
Judaism, which was not accomplished as was hitherto held in
conformity with the Church's tradition with the concurrence
of the elder apostles and the primitive Church, but in op-
position to and in conflict with them. He here subjects the
account given in the Acts to a thorough critical investigation,
which leads to the result that this book differs from the
authentic testimony of the Pauline epistles in so many and im-
portant points that it can be regarded as of only quite second-
ary historical value ; the author's aim was not to write
history, but to give " a defence of the Apostle of the Gentiles
against the attacks and accusations of the Judaisers." With
this view he represented Paul as quite a different man from
the actual Paul of the genuine Pauline Epistles ; he minimised
his divergence from the Jewish Christians in the same way as
he made Peter more Pauline than was really the case. The
writer's motives for doing this must be looked for in the cir-
cumstances of the time, in which " Paulinism had been so put
in the background by Jewish Christian efforts as only to be
able to maintain itself by entering into a compromise with
the powerful Jewish Christian party, and by an attitude of
conciliation softening down all the harshness and directness
Ch. I.] NEW TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND EXEGESIS. 22Q
of its opposition to Judaism." 1 The second part of the work
gives an analysis and criticism of the Pauline Epistles, of
which only those to the Galatians, Corinthians, and Romans,
are accepted as genuine. The third part gives an account
of the Pauline theology from the point of view that it repre-
sents Christianity as the absolute spiritual religion in opposi-
tion to Heathenism and Judaism. There is no doubt much
in these two latter parts, as in the former one, capable of
being disputed and needing amendment, but the great merit
of the book remains, of having clearly set forth with an
emphasis, never approached before, the epoch-making im-
portance of the Apostle Paul in the history of Christianity,
the originality of his conception of Christianity, and the
magnitude .of the struggle by which he carried out his ideas
in spite of the Jewish prejudices of the primitive Church.
Equally important, for a right understanding of primitive
Christianity, with Baur's work on Paul was further his Criticism
of John's Gospel, first given as an essay (1844), which he
afterwards incorporated in his book on Die kanonischen Evan-
gelien (1847), as its first and most important part. He does
not start in the customary way with the question as to the
author, which only concludes the investigation. The question
he starts with is, on the contrary, that of the idea and purpose
guiding the author in his peculiar presentation of the gospel
history. Baur finds this in the idea of the Logos presented
in the prologue ; since the Logos, as the divine principle of
light and life, appears bodily in the phenomenal world in the
person of Jesus, and enters into conflict with the darkness of
the world, the whole history of Jesus turns on the development
and solution of this antithesis of metaphysical and ethical
1 This view of the Acts of the Apostles was further developed and put into
a more extreme form by Zeller. It regards the Acts as an " offer of peace "
made by a Paulinist to the Judaisers with a view to the union of the two
parties: but it cannot be maintained: for (i) the supposed extremity of
Paulinism in presence of an all-powerful Jewish Christianity is unhistorical ;
(2) the Acts, on the contrary, exhibits a Gentile Christianity energetically
asserting itself against Judaism ; (3) the inexact account of Paulinism given
in this book cannot be the result of intentional misrepresentation, since it
was not peculiar to the author but common to Gentile Christians of the
second century ; (4) finally, the theory altogether overlooks the real and
undoubted object of the writer, viz. to defend Christianity in view of the
Roman power as a religion not violating the laws of the State, and with a
claim to the same toleration as Judaism.
230' BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Bk. III.
principles, light and darkness, truth and falsehood, belief
and disbelief, children of God and children of the devil,
life and death. Thus John's Gospel contains a Christian
gnosis akin to though not identical with the heretical gnosis,
clothed in the form of an historical account of the life of
Jesus. That such an account, completely dominated by ideal
motives of a doctrinal nature, does not possess historical
truth, and cannot and does not really lay claim to it, is self-
evident, and is then further proved by Baur by a critical
comparison of the Johannine and synoptic Gospels, the
superior historical probability being always found on the
side of the latter. In particular it is shown, in opposition to
the attempts to divide the Gospel, that precisely the Johannine
speeches serve the dogmatic purpose of the author and stand
in the closest connection with the narratives, and in general
that the whole Gospel shows a systematic unity of composition
which excludes all possibility of distinguishing between genuine
and not genuine or better, between historical and purely ficti-
tious elements. At last the question as to the author of the
Gospel is investigated and his identity with the Apostle dis-
proved, partly by the unhistorical character of so many of the
narratives, in which the Gospel is inferior even to the writings
of Mark and Luke, who were not eye-witnesses, and in par-
ticular by the ignorance shown of places and conditions in
Palestine (e.g., i. 28 ; v. 2 ; ix. 7 ; xi. 51 ; xviii. 13); partly
by the attitude of the author to the question of the Passover,
which is the exact opposite of the view which the Church in
Asia Minor claimed to derive from the Apostle John ; partly
also by the contrast between the entire dogmatic character
of the Gospel and that of the Apocalypse, which exhibits, in
accordance with Galatians ii., the Apostle John as still quite
enthralled in Jewish Christian conceptions, which the author
of the gospel has left far behind. But if it be asked how it
was possible for a non-apostolic gospel to be regarded by the
Church as a work of the apostle, Baur finds the explanation
in the peculiar spirit and character of the Gospel. By its
spiritual nature, that pneumatic character attributed to it
even by the ancients, it exercised a peculiar charm on men's
minds; and since, in virtue of its later origin, it represented a
more developed form of Christian consciousness and life, it
offered all the more points of contact with the time of its
origination and diffusion. It contains references to all the
Ch. I.] NEW TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND EXEGESIS. 231
conflicts of the time, and yet nowhere bears the definite mark
of a temporal or local opposition. The most important of
these elements of its time are the Gnosis, the doctrine of the
Logos, Montanism, and the question of the Passover. To
all these movements and questions of the age the Gospel stands
in a special relation ; we cannot say that they presuppose the
Gospel, and yet neither is it conditioned by them ; it comes
into contact with them, and yet remains in this respect free
and independent. It is the peculiar characteristic of this
Gospel to be connected with all shapes of the consciousness
of the age, and yet only in so far as at the same time to main-
tain an independent attitude towards all, harmonising the
antitheses into a higher unity."
While particular points in Baur's argument may be im-
pugned, his view of the Fourth Gospel has as a whole not been
refuted by later researches, but always confirmed anew. And
when we consider how this very Gospel had previously stoutly
withstood all criticism, and how difficult this non liquet had
made a scientific investigation of the gospels, and so of the
origin of Christianity generally, we must admit that Baur's
discovery deserves to be called the beginning of a new era
and a fundamental achievement for all future investigation of
primitive Christianity. The same cannot be said of his
criticism of the three synoptic Gospels. However natural it
was for him to think that he ought to apply to the other
gospels the key which had proved so useful in the case of
John's Gospel, viz. the discovery of a dogmatic purpose, it
was this very fact that prevented him from seeing their
literary relation to each other. Only thus can we explain
Baur's resting content with Griesbach's altogether mistaken
hypothesis that Mark's Gospel consists of extracts from
Matthew and Luke, when Wilke and Weisse had already
clearly and irrefragably proved the priority of Mark as the
source of both the others. It is the common fate of scientific
discoverers to be led into fresh extremes and errors by the
exaggerated application of their newly found principles. Baur
did not escape this fatality ; that his keen critical eye failed
him in the case of the Gospels of Mark and Matthew and of
the Apocalypse is only to be explained by the apparent agree-
ment in these cases of the traditional view with his theory,
derived from Paulus, of the perpetuation of the opposition be
tween the Judaic and Pauline parties in the post- Pauline age
232 BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Bk. III.
A more exact appreciation and a less prejudiced critical analysis
of these three books might have led to a limitation of the
scope of this theory. Baur's further labours in the history of
the Church and of dogma will be described in a later chapter.
Baur was as great a teacher as he was an author. He pro-
secuted scientific research as a sacred service in the temple of
truth ; he combined the lofty comprehensive glance of genius
with the laborious industry and careful accuracy of the scholar,
and imparted the truth he discovered with the straightforward
openness of a conscience freed from selfishness and party
spirit ; he thus exerted an influence over intelligent and re-
ceptive young men of the depth and intensity of which the
present generation can form no idea. No wonder that Baur
from the first decade of his academical activity continued to
gather round him a band of disciples who followed intelli-
gently in the footsteps of their master, and soon became his
co-workers by their independent prosecution of his researches.
The first of these was Strauss, who had shot ahead of his
teacher by his Leben Jesu, considered above, and who had
supplied if not the impulse yet the proximate occasion of the
epoch-making critical investigation of the Gospels. He was
followed by Eduard Zeller, Albert Schwegler, Karl Planck,
Karl Kostlin, and others. The common organ of this
" Tubingen School " was the Theologische Jahrbiicher, edited
by Zeller, still of special interest as the monument of one of
the most active and fruitful periods of modern theology. A
glance at the essays and studies therein collected suffices to
show how entirely Baur's disciples and friends were free from
the slavish dependence, narrow-mindedness, and dull uni-
formity which are wont to form the unpleasing clarker side
of " schools." Essentially agreed in their critical method,
Baur's disciples differed from the first not a little in their
critical results.
ZELLER, in his critical essays on the Acts of the Apostles,
which first appeared in the Theologiscke Jahrbucher, and were
afterwards collected in a volume, made some valuable con-
tributions to the exegetical interpretation and historical criticism
of the Acts ; even those who, like myself, 1 hold that he carried
out Baur's theory of an intended reconciliation of Paulinism
and Jewish Christianity in a one-sided and much exaggerated
1 Comp. ante, p. 229 note.
Ch. I.] NEW TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND EXEGESIS. 233
manner, to the neglect of other essential points, will not deny
to Zeller's book the merit of having by its incisive criticism
brought out the problem of early Christian history into the
full light of day, and of having thus contributed to its solution,
even though this does not accord with his own.
Even more than of Zeller's Apostelgeschichte, we must say
of A. SCHWEGLER'S book, Das nachapostolische Zeitalter in
den Hauptpunkten seiner Entwickelung (2 vols., 1846), that, in
spite of all the ingenuity often shown in the just appreciation
of details, it must be regarded as on the whole a failure.
Baur's view of the original opposition and gradual reconcilia-
fkm of the primitive Christian parties is here exaggerated
into a caricature. Christianity before Paul, Schwegler con-
sidered to have had no lofty ideas at all, but to have been a nar-
row, rigidly ascetic and legal form of Judaism, closely related
to Essenism, which, as " Ebionitism," maintained the upper
hand even against Paul's universalistic teaching, so that the
principles of the latter could scarcely anywhere prevail ; until
the age of Irenaeus ecclesiastical Christianity remained more
or less an Ebionitic Jewish Christianity, which by degrees de-
veloped into Catholicism. This point of view guides Schwegler
in his estimate of the whole of early Christian literature ;
everything in it really, or presumedly, un- Pauline is at once
taken as a proof of the Jewish Christian character of the book
in question ; the possibility is never considered of the existence
of Gentile Christians with un-Pauline and even anti-Pauline
views, not from Judaising tendencies, but because they found
much in Paul's theology which was unsuited to the compre-
hension and needs of the Gentile Christian Churches. It
seems as if Schwegler, hypnotised as it were with the one idea
of early Christian " Ebionitism," was completely blind to all
the varied thoughts and interests which moved that age and
also influenced the life and belief of the Christian Churches.
The dangerous tendency, to be seen, it must be confessed, in
Baur, of insisting too exclusively on a new point of view as
the only true one, was carried in Schwegler to the most
extreme lengths.
It is, however, of importance to note that a protest was
immediately raised against this one-sidedness from within
the Tubingen School itself. Planck and Kostlin, in several
excellent essays, still worth reading, in the Theologische Jahr-
bucher (1847 and 1850) endeavoured to correct Schwegler's
234 BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Bk. III.
theory. Its principal error, PLANCK holds to be, that it made
Paul the real author of the new principle, and therefore the
founder of Christianity, leaving unexplained how he was
enabled to arrive at this new knowledge and to connect it
with the person of Jesus. We must rather start from the
position that the new principle was actually conceived, if not
fully developed, by Jesus, being contained in his idea of the
true righteousness as perfect self-renunciation and the surrender
of the human will to the divine will, thus combining the
perfect fulfilment of the law with its translation into the spirit,
and the cancelling of its purely external character. Paulinism
therefore only developed into full consciousness the principle
implicitly contained in primitive Christianity. The true right-
eousness of self-surrender to God, which Jesus spontaneously
exemplified and so experienced as an immediate fact of his
own consciousness, became in Paul the quickening " grace,"
or power of the " Holy Spirit," coming to us from without,
from Christ. In this appears the difference between the
dependent and the creative mind, between the systematising
theologian and the original religious genius. Since the older
apostles did not, like Paul, prosecute dogmatic reflections, they
failed indeed to see so clearly the difference between the new
Christian principle and Judaism, but they still possessed this
principle in the form, directly derived from Jesus, of deepened
righteousness and practical piety. This Christianity, Judaic
only in form, was not opposed in principle to Paul's anti-
Judaic Christianity ; and hence a reconciliation of the two was
possible, without external concessions, by means of an inward
approximation of each to the other. It should be mentioned
that Planck held with Schwegler, that the development was
wholly on the Jewish Christian side, while Paulinism stood apart
as a stimulating principle but one incapable of growth.
KOSTLIN likewise censures Schwegler for not distinguishing
between the later extreme Ebionitism and the original apos-
tolic Jewish Christianity. The latter was from the first, in
point of fact, though without being clearly aware of it, in
advance of Judaism, and was then stimulated by Paul to a
development in two directions ; on the one hand, it advanced
to ecclesiastical unity, and, on the other, retrograded to here-
tical Ebionitism. To Kostlin also belongs in particular the
credit of first seeing that Paulinism and Gentile Christianity
must not be forthwith identified. The failure of the Pauline
Ch. I.] NEW TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND EXEGESIS. 235
doctrines of righteousness by faith and of the annulling of the
law to find permanent acceptance, is to be explained not, as
Schwegler thought, by the preponderance of Jewish Chris-
tianity, but by the fact that the Gentile Christians themselves
were without the speculative conditions and practical needs
necessary for the comprehension and adoption of these doc-
trines. They did not need, like Paul, the disciple of the
Pharisees, deliverance from the law, but the discipline of
the law ; the law did not seem to them, as it did to Paul, a
negative stage of development of transitory validity, but the
permanent standard of a pure and thoroughly ethical life for
the community. The natural desire to form fixed Christian
morals was what made the acceptance of Paul's doctrines of
the law and of justification a practical impossibility to the
Gentile Christian Churches, even if they had been understood.
Even Paul had recognised this desire of his Churches so far
as to speak of a " law of the Spirit," according to which
Christians ought to live. Nevertheless his teaching lacked
the legal precision desiderated by the Church ; it was too
ideal to be directly made use of by it. The need was felt of
supplementing this ideal Paulinism on trie side of the actual
morality of works, and this found expression in the combina-
tion of Peter with Paul, or in the appeal against the one-sided
party watchwords of the heretics to the authority of all the
apostles i.e. of Christ himself.
The lines of Planck and Kostlin were further pursued by
ALBRECHT RITSCHL, until from being an adherent he became
an opponent of the Tubingen school. In the first edition of
his book, Die Entstehung der altkatholischen Kirche ( 1 850), his
disagreement with the theories of Baur and Schwegler was
only partial, but in the second edition (1857) he declared his
total antagonism to their fundamental principles. Like Planck
and Kostlin, Ritschl holds that in the person of Jesus and the
belief of the first apostles we have the common neutral start-
ing-point of the various later parties. The attitude of Jesus
towards the law, he maintains, was an essentially independent
one superiority to the externality of the ceremonial law in
the ethical principle of love to God and man, while observing
a conservative attitude in outward religious life. Accordingly
Ritschl considers that the first apostles no longer regarded
the law as religiously binding, but only continued its ob-
servance as a national custom, a view for which he appeals
236 BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Bk. III.
to the Epistles of Feter and James, the genuineness of which
he ventures to maintain against the doubts of criticism.
Though we must admit this to be too great a concession to
conservative apologetics, we recognise a valuable advance on
the older Tubingen theologians in Ritschl's tracing the de-
velopment of Catholic Christianity, not like them from Jewish,
but from Gentile Christianity, which he distinguishes from
Paulinism. He rightly points out that Paulinism had a
neutral basis in common with Jewish Christianity in the
doctrines of God, angels and demons, the present and future
world, Christ's second coming, the resurrection and judgment ;
to which we must add that the specifically Pauline doctrines
of reconciliation and justification have their roots in Jewish
(Pharisaic) theology. The earlier Tubingen theologians were
distinctly in the wrong in almost completely overlooking Paul's
Jewish side in exclusive attention to his anti- Jewish tendencies,
and thereupon explaining every departure from his teaching by
a reference to Judaistic motives, while, reversely, it must be
explained for the most part from the anti- Judaistic habit of
thought of the Gentile Christians. Ritschl is right in main-
taining that " Catholic Christianity is a distinct stage of re-
ligious thought within the sphere of Gentile Christianity ; it
is independent of the conditions of Jewish Christian life, and
opposed to the fundamental principle of Jewish Christianity ;
it does not, however, depend merely upon the authority of
Paul, but rests both upon the Old Testament and the sayings
of Christ, and also upon the authority of all the apostles,
represented by Peter and Paul." But when Ritschl goes on
to explain the conversion of Paul's teaching into the Catholic
Christianity of the early Church by the failure of the latter to
understand the Old Testament, and condemns it as a " de-
generation," the objection presents itself that Paul's doctrine
of justification is not found in the Old Testament, which, as
the Epistle of James shows, offers rather the means of its
refutation than of its proof. Ritschl was unacquainted with
the sources of the Pauline theology, and hence cannot satis-
factorily explain its post-apostolic development. A second
serious defect is his total neglect of the other chief factor in the
evolution of the theology of the Church, and even of that of the
New Testament viz. Hellenism. This explains his strange
inability to deal with such an important phenomenon of early
Christianity as the Gospel of John, and his omission of all
Ch. I.] NEW TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND EXEGESIS. 237
reference to it in his book, with the exception of a brief
and meaningless note. Beyond question this gospel can be
explained neither by means of Jewish Christianity nor of
Paulinism, least of all by a superficial Gentile " degeneration"
of the latter, since it is purely a product of Christian Hellen-
ism. The very existence of this single book (irrespective of
others, e.g. the Epistle to the Hebrews) is a proof that no
history of early Christianity can be regarded as complete
which does not take account of the important factor of
Hellenism, which Ritschl, in a much more striking degree even
than the other Tubingen critics, has failed to do.
With Ritschl are connected several other opponents of the
Tubingen school, of whom we may here mention the more
important: MEYER (Commentar ziim neuen Testament], BLEEK
{Einleitung in das N. Test, and Commentar zu den synop-
tischen Evangelien], LECHLER (das apostolische und nachaposto-
liscke Zeitalter mit Riicksickt auf Unterschied und Einheit in
Lehre und Leben, 2nd ed., 1857), WEISS (der petrinische
Lehrbegriff ; der johanneische Lehrbegriff ; Biblische Theolo-
gie des Neuen Testaments ; Einleitung in das Neue Testa-
ment], REUSS (die Geschichte der heiligen Schriften Neuen
Testaments, and Histoire de la Thdologie chretienne au siecle
apostolique], EWALD (Geschichte Israels, vols. v. and vi. ;
Geschichte Chris tus, and Gesch. des apostol. Zeitalter s], HASE
(die Tiibinger Schule. Ein Sendschreiben an Dr. Baur). It
would lead us far beyond our limits to give the views of all
these theologians in detail, and we shall therefore be content
to mention summarily their objections to the Tubingen theory.
They first dispute the sharp antithesis affirmed by this theory
between Paul and the original apostles. A certain difference
in tendency is indeed admitted ; but this is not such that the
two parties were mutually exclusive, but rather such that they
supplemented each other. "We find variety coupled with
agreement, and unity with difference, between Paul and the
earlier apostles ; we recognise the one spirit in the many
gifts " (Lec/iler). The Judaistic antagonists against whom
Paul had to contend were an extreme party with which the
apostles themselves must not be identified. Further, the
view is controverted that the struggle and the attempts at
mediation and reconciliation were continued until the middle
of the second century ; on the contrary, it is contended that
the destruction of Jerusalem severed the bond which had
238 BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Bk. III.
hitherto connected the converted Jews with their nation and
its worship. With this ceased also the influence of Judaistic
agitation upon the Gentile Christian Churches ; and hence-
forth, in place of the Pauline- Judaistic controversies, we have
the new struggle with the heathen political power and heathen
heresy (Gnosticism), to which the Johannine Apocalypse
already bears witness. Further, an attack is made on Baur's
method of tracing in the New Testament writings products
of a definite party movement, and of determining their place
in the history of primitive Christianity by means of their
supposed dogmatic or ecclesiastical " Tendenz" These ob-
jections are generally urged, moreover (irrespective of just
objections to exaggerations on the part of the Tubingen
School), from an apologetic desire to save the traditional
authorship of the Biblical writings, the most serious critical
arguments being too little regarded. The Epistles of James
and i Peter are asserted to be not only genuine, but pre-
Pauline, and (by Ritschl and Weiss) to be nowise connected
with Paul. Of the deutero- Pauline Epistles, all even those
to the Ephesians, Timothy, and Titus, regarded as spurious
even by Credner and De Wette are reclaimed as Pauline.
Special ardour is shown in the contention for the genuineness
of John's Gospel ; the dilemma, admitted by Llicke, that
either the Apocalypse or the Gospel, but not both, is genuine,
is given up, and the development of the author of the Apoca-
lypse into the evangelist is considered probable. But the more
hotly the contention raged at first around this question, the
greater is the significance of the fact that the former champions
of the genuineness of John's Gospel could not altogether resist
the adverse arguments, but were compelled to make greater
or less concessions to criticism. Hase, Weizsacker, and
Reuss have recently attributed the Gospel not to the apostle
himself, but to one of his disciples ; and even Weiss limits
the historical value of the speeches to a minimum of reminis-
cences, which have become confused in the mind of the author
with his own reflections, and thereby transformed. With re-
gard to other books also e.g. the Pastoral Epistles or the
Acts we have to note concessions made by the above-named
theologians to Tubingen criticism, so that a gradual agree-
ment as to the main questions need not be regarded as im-
possible. It is a specially happy omen that, in the province
of exegesis, a uniform method of philological objectivity and
Ch. I.] NEW TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND EXEGESIS. 239
exactness has been more and more developed on all hands ;
the services of Meyer and Weiss to exegesis are everywhere
acknowledged. A tribute should also be paid to Weiss's
Bib Use he Theologie des Neuen Testaments, as a work of
pre-eminent scientific soundness, containing copious matter
arranged with exemplary clearness, and surpassing all others
in practical utility as a textbook for students.
The Tubingen school was not behindhand in replying to
these numerous and serious attacks. Besides Baur and Zeller,
HILGENFELD, in numerous books and essays (in the Zeitschrift
fiir wis sense haft Lie ke Tkeologie), distinguished himself as the
ready champion of the right of scientific criticism. Fond of
emphasising his independence of Baur, he still, in all impor-
tant points, followed in the footsteps of the master ; his
method, which he is wont to contrast as Liter arkritik with
Baur's Tendenzkritik, is nevertheless essentially the same as
Baur's. In his view of the fourth Gospel, Hilgenfeld goes
even further than Baur, making it altogether dependent upon
Gnosticism. In the Synoptic question he leaves Baur's view
essentially unchanged, only placing Mark between Matthew
and Luke. He modifies somewhat the criticism of Paul's
epistles, restoring Philippians and i Thessalonians to Paul.
VOLKMAR differs decidedly from the other Tubingen critics
only on the question of the Synoptists ; he follows Wilke and
Weisse in regarding Mark as the earliest Gospel, which was
followed by Luke immediately, and only subsequently by
Matthew, the last being dependent upon both the others, and
a gospel harmony from the point of view of the Catholic
Church, with its reconciliation of differences. This un-
doubtedly correct view Volkmar has exaggerated, after the
fashion of Bruno Bauer, by making Mark the author of a
"didactic epic," intended to illustrate the Pauline gospel.
Though this seemed to do away with all historical foundations,
Volkmar, in his Religion Jesu, and still more in his Jesus
Nazarenus und die erste christliche Zeit (1882), tries to
separate and establish a kernel of historical facts as the basis
of the gospels. In his interpretation of the Apocalypse, he
follows Tubingen principles, and refers the Apocalyptic
imagery in the boldest manner to the party struggles of
primitive Christianity. The book is now somewhat out of
date, since Volter has shown that the Apocalypse is composed
of elements belonging to different authors and times, and
240 BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Bk. III.
Vischer has made a Jewish basis with Christian revisions very
probable. With Hilgenfeld and Volkmar, we must mention
HOLSTEN as a strict adherent of Baur in his line of criticism. In
his commentary on Galatians, and in several works on Paul,
he has discussed the Apostle's peculiar teaching with great
acumen, though often with too great subtlety and exaggerated
dialectic ; his long-promised review of the entire Pauline theo-
logy has not yet appeared. The question of the Synop-
tists has also latterly engaged Holsten's attention ; he tries
very hard, but with doubtful success, to defend Hilgenfeld's
view (Matthew-Mark-Luke). On this question, HOLTZMANN
is the exponent of the view now most generally accepted. In
his book on die synoptischen Evangelien, he maintains the
priority of Mark ; our Matthew he derives from Mark and
Matthew's original " collection of sayings " (the \6yia of
Papias), and finally Luke from our Matthew and Mark.
Besides numerous essays, Holtzmann has furnished valuable
contributions to New Testament exegesis and criticism in his
works on the Epistles to the Colossians and Ephesians and
the Pastoral Epistles ; and his Einleitung in das Neue Testa-
ment gives an excellent summary of the present position of
all the questions concerned. Whilst most critics were thus
working at questions of detail, HAUSRATH was led by his
natural love of artistic form, and his position as ecclesiastical
historian, to combine details into a vivid account of the time
as a whole. In particular his neutestamentliche Zeitgeschichte
has the merit of showing the place of the development of
primitive Christianity in the history of the world, and of
describing the connexion, too much neglected, between
the evolution of the Christian Church and the condition
of the Grseco- Roman world. As this work is further
distinguished by a beauty of style rare in German theolo-
gians, it has attracted attention even among the laity, and
contributed much to the diffusion of the results of modern
research.
At the commencement of the sixth decade of the century,
after Baur's death, the labours of Bible critics were so much
confined to literary questions of detail that these purely learned
controversies seemed to have put an end to the interest in the
great fundamental questions. This interest was, however,
revived in the same field in which a generation before the
whole movement had originated. The appearance in quick
Ch. I.] NEW TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND EXEGESIS. 241
succession of the works of RENAN l and STRAUSS on the life
of Jesus, which were followed by several other books on the
same subject, brought this question afresh to the front. The
difference between Strauss's new book, Leben Jesu fur das
deutsche Volk (1864), and his earlier one, was that he intended
it, not for theologians only, but for the nation at large, es-
pecially for the educated men of Germany. Accordingly,
it is thrown into a different form ; in the place of learned
discussions of details we have a summary of the results of
criticism with regard to the gospel history, popular in the best
sense of the word. In this new work Strauss seeks to obviate
the objections often brought against his earlier work, that it
gave a critique of the gospel history without a critique of the
authorities, and led merely to the negative result of the
unhistorical character of what was previously regarded as
historical, not to the ascertainment of a positive historical
kernel. He now prefixes a tolerably thorough criticism of
the authorities, though adhering too strictly to Baur's views
on all questions, even with regard to Matthew and Mark,
1 Renan's Vie de Jesus (1863) belongs, neither in its origin nor in its effects,
to the history of German theology, but its international importance demands
the following remarks. It is evident that a book which in a short time
attained a world-wide celebrity must have had some special excellence. Not
to do injustice to it, we must be careful not to judge it by a wrong standard.
Such would be, in this instance, the standard of strictly scientific historical
inquiry. If Renan's object had been to ascertain the actual ultimate founda-
tion of the gospel narratives, he would, of course, have had to begin with a
careful investigation of the sources their composition, date, trustworthiness,
and mutual relations, which would doubtless have led him to conclusions in
particular with regard to the Fourth Gospel which would have made it impos-
sible for him to make use of the contents of this Gospel unconditionally, and
to co-ordinate it with the others. I doubt not that Renan's subtle historical
insight would have enabled him without difficulty to arrive, by means of this
criticism of the authorities, a calm comparison of the texts, and a careful
weighing of the various probabilities, at a collection of data giving the most
probable view we can form on these matters. A book cf this kind would
have possessed greater value as an historical treatise, but would have lacked
all the merits and charm which make Renan's Vie de Jesus so unusually
attractive. These merits are, in a word, not scientific, but poetical. With a
faculty of poetical imagination, which paints characters, states of mind and
feeling, and scenery with equal vividness, Renan has composed from the
gospel stories a religious epic, which brings forth the Saviour from the unap-
proachable darkness of dogma into the midst of the life of his people, first as
the idyllic national leader, then as the contending and erring hero, always
aiming at the highest, but doomed to tragic failure from the resistance offered
by the reality to his ideal. Even those who may disapprove of such a
G. T. R
242 BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Rk. III.
without doing justice to the grounds of the opposite views.
Strauss, as he himself remarks in the preface, is not interested
in these questions. "What we really want to know is whether
the gospel history is true as a whole and in its details or not,
and such preliminary questions can only excite general interest
in proportion as they are connected with this fundamental
problem. In this respect the criticism of the Gospels has
undeniably in the last twenty years somewhat run to seed.
New hypotheses, particularly with regard to the first three
Gospels, their sources, aims, composition, and mutual relations,
crop up in such numbers, and are both maintained and at-
tacked with as much zeal as if these were the only questions,
while the resulting controversy is of such proportions that we
have almost to despair of ever settling the principal question,
if its solution has to wait for the conclusion of this contro-
versy." We must indeed, Strauss says, have made up our
minds as to the Fourth Gospel before we can enter into the
discussion of these matters ; but the mutual relation of the
Synoptic Gospels is not of the same importance. Moreover,
poetical treatment of a subject sacred to Christendom, must admit that it has
brought the human figure of Jesus nearer to countless men who had long lost
all appreciative feeling and care for the Christ of dogma, and has made him
the object of their sympathetic appreciation and reverent admiration. And
if offence was given by Kenan's bringing out shadows and weaknesses in his
picture of Jesus, we might in general, without wishing at all to defend him in
detail, reply by way of excuse, that shadows in a bright picture might appear
expedient to make the human figure more life-like and his story more dramatic.
Finally, it must be said for this religious epic, as for other historical romances,
that, without teaching us history in detail, it enables us to realise an historical
event or period as a whole by means of the poet's comprehensive and divin-
ing intuition better than the scanty accounts of the strict historian can ever
do. The further volumes of Renan's great work on the genesis of Chris-
tianity, the scientific value of which cannot be denied, still leave something
to be desired as regards critical rigour in the investigation and use of authori-
ties. But this defect is counterbalanced by the merits of vivid description of
the local and social environment of events and fine delineation of character.
Renan always places before his readers real human beings of flesh and blood,
with noble and base passions and motives, not mere ideal pictures upon a
golden background. Of special interest is his description of the Apostle
Paul. But he has too little sympathy with this Apostle of faith to be alto-
gether just to him ; he places him with Luther, as one of the historical men
of power, but fails in the case of both men to appreciate the depth of their
religious feeling and far-seeing speculation. The theological side of religion
is indeed always neglected by Renan, while he has a true eye for its practical
social side. He thus serves to supplement the German historians.
Ch. I.] NEW TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND EXEGESIS. 243
without deciding all those endless critical questions, we can
at least arrive at the negative result, that in the person and
work of Jesus there is nothing supernatural, nothing that need
oppress mankind with the leaden weight of an infallible
authority demanding blind belief. " And this negative result
is for our purpose, which is not solely historical, but looks
rather towards the future than the past, an important, if not
the most important, point." Of the positive correlative to this
negative result we can say nothing for certain ; but a summing
up of what in the present position of research must be con-
sidered probable is both permissible and desirable. " All
those engaged in these researches are thus reminded of the
real point at issue, and such reminding, such recall from the
circumference to the centre, has always been profitable to
science." It is in fact by such a balancing of the accounts that
Strauss now, as in his former works, gave a useful impulse to
the advance of science. The first of the two books into which
this Life is divided gives the outline of the historical life of
Jesus. This account has been called dry and meagre, and
indeed is so in comparison with Kenan's richly coloured
poetry ; but who can blame the historian, if his authorities are
of such a nature that, on a critical examination, they fail to
furnish him with sufficient material ? Besides, it must be
admitted that on the main questions as to the religious and
Messianic consciousness of Jesus, and his relation to the Law,
Strauss carefully weighs the various indications, and with
subtle insight determines the most probable account. Like
Schleiermacher and Renan, Strauss assumes that the religious
consciousness of Jesus was the source of his consciousness of
himself as the Messiah ; but he expressly declines to accept
the idea (with Renan) that in the latter Jesus made use of
"accommodation" or "played a part"; since in the case
of a personality of such immeasurable historical influence
every inch must have been conviction ; this conviction was
the more natural in the case of Jesus, as the Messianic expec-
tation had a religious and ethical as well as a political side,
and the former side would appear to him of prime importance
in proportion as the latter had always hitherto proved itself
disastrous. The fundamental characteristic of the piety of
Jesus, Strauss holds to be his transference of the indiscrimi-
nate kindness towards good and evil alike, which was the
fundamental principle of his own nature, to God as the deter-
244 BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Bk. III.
mining principle of his nature also. " By fully developing in
himself this glad spirit, which was at one with God and
embraced all men as brothers, Jesus had realised the pro-
phetic ideal of a new covenant, with the law* written in the
heart; he had, to use Schiller's language, "Die Gottheit in
seinen Willen aufgenommen" identified his will with God's,
and hence for him God, in Schiller's words, * had descended
from the throne of the universe, the abyss had been filled up,
and the terror had fled,' in him man had passed from slavery
to freedom. This gladness and integrity ( Ungebrochene), this
action from the delight and joy of a beautiful soul, we may
call the Hellenic element in Jesus. But the fact that this
impulse of his heart, and, in harmony therewith, his conception
of God, were purely spiritual and ethical this attainment,
which the Greek could only attain to by philosophy, was in
his case the dowry granted to him by his education according
to the Mosaic law, and his instruction in the writings of the
prophets." Jesus had not, like Paul, to pass through an
agitating conflict and conversion, but was from the first a beau-
tiful nature, his development went on in general uniformly, if
not without great effort yet without violent crises ; " this is the
only living sense of the dogma of the sinlessness of Jesus, of
which, in its rigid ecclesiastical form, as a purely negative idea,
we can make absolutely nothing." After the first book has
given a description of the conjectural historical kernel of the
history of Jesus, the second book treats of his mythical history,
which had formed the sole subject of the earlier work. But
while it had there been treated analytically, it is here treated
genetically. It is assumed as the result of the former work
that the supernatural element in the gospel narratives is
mythical ; but the question now arises as to how we are to
conceive the origin and development of this mythical history.
As the first effect of the life and character of Jesus, we find
the belief of his disciples in his resurrection ; and thus we find
their ideas of him transplanted into a temperature in which a
luxuriant growth of unhistorical seedlings was bound to spring
up, each more miraculous than the other. The inspired Son
of David comes to be the Son of God without human father ;
the Son of God grows into the incarnate creative Word ;
the humane, thaumaturgic physician becomes the resuscitator
from the dead, the absolute lord of nature and its laws ;
the wise popular teacher, the prophet reading the hearts
Ch. I.] NEW TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND EXEGESIS. 245
of men, becomes omniscient, God's alter ego, his life on
earth an episode in his eternal existence with God. This
process, by which the various strata in the development
of the conceptions of Christ were formed one after the
other, as the expression of the Christian feeling prevalent
in a given circle at a given time, is worked out in the
second book. It thus both supplements and confirms the
results of the previous work. For "if any one denies the
historical validity of a story universally believed, we have a
right to demand from him not only the grounds of his opinion,
but also an explanation of the process by which the unhistori-
cal narrative has come into existence." This explanation is
here given with such thoroughness and perspicuity that the
scientific value of the new work, in spite of its popular form,
is decidedly superior to that of the earlier one. The fact that
it, nevertheless, did not produce anything like the same sensa-
tion only proves that in the intervening generation the world
had become accustomed to receive the results of scientific re-
search even in religious matters much more calmly than had
previously been the case.
The two works of Renan and Strauss were followed by a
vast stream of literature on the life of Jesus, which, however,
grew shallower as it increased in breadth. Most of the works
of this class produced in the last twenty years have paid less
and less serious attention to both literary and material criti-
cism, and have almost retrograded to the position of pre-critical
apologies and harmonies. Inasmuch as this branch of theology
has thus completed its revolution, theologians ought without
doubt to deduce the conclusion that a scientifically certain life
of Jesus is impossible with the existing authorities. However
painful it may be thus to resign ourselves, this might still be
attended by the advantage of leading theology away from
devotion to small details and the attempt to trace the steps of
Jesus in Galilee and Judea, and to combine the mosaic of
evangelical tradition, now in one way, now in another, to the
study once more of history on a large scale, which would look
for the sources of Christianity in the life of expiring antiquity
as a whole, and see in the triumphant progress of Christ's
spirit through the earth the proof of his divine mission, proof
drawn from the wide history of the world, and independent
of the ever problematical results of the detailed investiga-
tion of his earthly life. From the mass of this literature
246 BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Rk. III.
I will call attention to three works as the most important,
Schenkel's Charakterbild Jesu, Keim's Geschickte Jesu von
Nazara, and Weizsacker's Evangelise he Untersuchungen.
SCHENKEL'S Charakterbild Jesu, which appeared almost
simultaneously with Strauss's " Life of Jesus for the German
People," provoked an outburst of opposition among German
theologians, the reason of which it is hard to discover in the
book assailed. This is so far from having an irreligious
tendency, or being a frivolous treatment of sacred history,
that on the contrary it is full of a passionate enthusiasm for
the character of Jesus, such as satisfies the demands of the
heart much more than those of strict scientific research. In
its estimate of the value of the sources, Schenkel's book, it is
true, excels all other works here mentioned ; the priority of
Mark is maintained with great decision, and all connection of
the Fourth Gospel with the Apostle John, who did not live in
Ephesus, denied with equal emphasis (so at least in the 4th
ed., 1873). But in his use of the authorities, the author is far
from deducing the necessary consequences from this correct
conclusion. Instead of attending to the peculiarities of each
Gospel, and seeing in them the influence of a later time and
development of doctrine, all the Gospels are really used as if
of equal value, and from their narratives and speeches (even
the Johannine), by means of artificial harmonising and arbitrary
interpretation, a life of Christ is constructed, which, with all its
ideality, produces rather the impression of a modern reformer
and champion of liberty and truth than of the real historical
founder of the Church. Even those who are far from over-
estimating the historical value of Kenan's life of Jesus, can
scarcely avoid ranking it higher than Schenkel's representa-
tion of Jesus. Compare, for instance, Renan's keen insight
into the social side of the work of Jesus with Schenkel's
recasting of all the language of the passages of the Gospels in
question, to bring them into conformity with modern ethics.
Or let us hear Schenkel's description of the significance of the
death of Jesus. "In order to kill the bondage to the letter
of religion, Jesus, the inspired representative of the spirit of
religion, had to die. The sanguinary law condemning free-
dom of belief was sentenced by his death ; by his sacrificial
blood he bought freedom of belief and through it liberation
from the bondage of the letter and of sin. Thus his death
became a victory of freedom and love, and thereby the source
Ch. I.] NEW TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND EXEGESIS. 247
of a new religion, which overcame evil in the inmost core of
personality, a ransom for the captives in Israel and the
heathen world." Schenkel did not consider that " personal
freedom .of faith and of conscience" are ideals of very recent
growth, which cannot without a serious anachronism be
carried back to the rise of Christianity, and actually made the
pivot of the whole work of Jesus. Indeed, Schenkel's own
character was of such vigorous and yet one-sided subjec-
tivity that he altogether lacked the impartiality of objective
historical insight.
THEODOR KEIM became known about the year 1860 by his
lectures on the human development and historical rank of
Jesus (in the 2nd edition, together published under the title
Der geschichtliche Christiis, 1865) as an able writer on the life
of Jesus, distinguished alike by his insight and religious feel-
ing. When his extensive work Geschichte Jesii von Nazara
(3 vols., 18671872) appeared, it was recognised even by
antagonists as of first-rate scientific importance. In it there is
collected and skilfully digested such a mass of learned mate-
rial, that this alone suffices to render it a lasting storehouse of
information for all students of the subject. The investigation
of the authorities, too, is more thorough than in similar works
(with the possible exception of Weizsacker's). And yet it is
here that the great error of the book lies. The discussion of
the Fourth Gospel is indeed excellent, and Keim is as decided
as Strauss with regard to its unhistorical character. But on the
question of the Synoptists Keim has not got beyond the view
of Griesbach and Baur, that Matthew is the original Gospel,
and Mark a compilation from it and Luke. His advocacy of
this totally erroneous view is feeble ; the evident signs of the
derivative character of Matthew are overlooked or attributed
to later revision ; his account of Mark is full of the strongest
prejudices. This erroneous estimate of the authorities places
the whole work from the beginning upon a false and unstable
basis, the effects of which naturally disturb all that follows.
The strangest thing is that Keim himself, in the course of his
history, often deserts his critical canon and finds himself
obliged to give Mark or Luke the preference over Matthew.
To this uncertainty as to the relation of the Gospels to each
other must be added Keim's failure sufficiently to appreciate
the influence of apostolic and post-apostolic teaching on the
gospel accounts, as well as of the personal influence of the
248 BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Bk. III.
writers themselves. When we further consider that Keim
regards the Easter stories in the Gospels as historical accounts
of actual Christophanies, and thus at the close of his book
quits strictly historical ground altogether, we shall be justified
in saying that his work, in spite of its great learning, fails
to satisfy the rigorous demands of critical historical inquiry.
Keim's style, too, lacks, according to my taste, the simplicity
and sobriety appropriate to historical investigations. It is
quite true that the lofty subject of this history demands a
corresponding dignity of tone and language. But this does
not cancel the difference between an historical inquiry and a
sermon. When the emotional style of the pulpit is employed,
as it is by Keim, in historical narrative, it is almost inevitable
that emotion should substitute its language for that of the sober
understanding, and the weight of high-sounding phrases take
the place of material facts and arguments. Keim in this
respect closely resembles Ewald.
Of all the writers on the life of Jesus, CARL WEIZSACKER has
most carefully discussed the question of the authorities ; this
forms the first half of his book, Untersuchungen iiber die
evangelise he Geschichte, ihre Quellen imd den Gang ihrer
Entwickelung (1864). He comes to the conclusion that the
three Synoptic gospels are based upon a common original,
the synoptische Grundschrift, most closely followed by our
Gospel of Mark, and that the speeches contained in the two
other Gospels, and not in Mark, are derived from a second
source, the " collection of sayings," incorporated in different
ways by Matthew and Luke with the Grundschrift, Matthew
giving the purer form of it. The Fourth Gospel he holds
has a two-fold aspect, it has an ideal and also an historical
side ; it is not indeed composed of different elements capable
of being externally distinguished, but its two-fold character
pervades the whole work, which is on the one hand based
upon great theological ideas, and on the other guided by quite
definite historical motives. For the latter Weizsacker appeals
in particular to the small incidental remarks, such as definite
notes of time or place, which in his opinion bear traces of
personal recollection. Such traces he thinks he finds even in
the Johannine speeches, his strongest argument, besides the
hostility to the Jews, being the circumstance that the evan-
gelist does not introduce his personal doctrinal view into the
speeches of Jesus (an opinion which necessitates a very forced
Ch. I.] NEW TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND EXEGESIS. 249
interpretation of many unambiguous utterances in the speeches
of the Johannine Christ). Weizsacker' s explanation of this
two-fold character of the Gospel is that it was founded upon
personal recollections and communications of the aged
Apostle John, and composed by one of his disciples towards
the close of the first century. This intermediate position on
the Johannine question, which Weizsacker shares with Renan,
Hase, and many more, is after all a great concession to
Tubingen criticism ; but it is allowable to ask whether this
position is tenable, and not a halting-place merely on the
retreat which must end in the complete surrender of all
apostolic connexion with the Fourth Gospel. I hold Keim's
view is the more correct one, and that these scholars have
been influenced to some extent, if not by ordinary apolo-
getical motives, yet by their dogmatic predilection for an ideal
of Christ, which may be gathered from the Fourth Gospel,
though only by a free interpretation of the speeches, and with
which moderns have a good deal of emotional sympathy.
A valuable continuation of his book on the Gospels has
lately been given by Weizsacker in his work, Das apostolische
Zeitalter der christ lichen Kirche (1886)." He first describes
the formation of the primitive community by the appearances
of Christ (which, like all critical theologians, he conceives as
subjective experiences, or visions, of the Apostles), and its
original condition before the activity of Paul, who forms the
subject of the remainder of the first half of the book. Paul's
conversion is first related and explained by its psychological
conditions ; then his first missionary journey, the form of his
doctrine and theology are described ; this is followed by the
detailed consideration of the relations of the Apostle of the
Gentiles to the Churches in Jerusalem and Antioch, and a
comparison of the accounts of Galatians ii. and Acts xv. And it
is most noteworthy that in all the chief questions here involved,
in particular in his unfavourable view of the historical charac-
ter of the Acts, Weizsacker is in surprising agreement with
the theory of Baur. Subsequently the Apostle Paul's mis-
sionary journeys, and the condition of the Churches founded
by him, are described, under the guidance of the genuine
Epistles, in a very thorough and instructive manner. A
second part describes the further development of affairs from
Paul's imprisonment down to the end of the first or begin-
ning of the second century : (i) in Jerusalem, with an account
250 BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Bk III.
of the Epistle of James and the origin of the Synoptic
Gospels ; (2) in Rome, with the discussion of the Epistles to
the Romans and Philippians, the legend of Peter, and the
Epistles of Clement and the Hebrews ; (3) in Ephesus, with
the consideration of the Johannine literature and the Epistles
to the Ephesians and Colossians. The two questions as to
the presence of Peter in Rome and John in Ephesus are both
answered by Weizsacker, like Renan, in the affirmative, the
first with more assurance than the second ; the chief evidence
in the latter case being the Apocalypse, which he holds to
have been composed not by the Apostle John himself, but by
one of his disciples, who appealed to his authority. Weiz-
sacker' s analysis of the Apocalypse is subtle and ingenious,
but not sufficiently thorough ; it is superseded by the
researches of Volter and Vischer, who have shown the
probability of a plurality of authors and a Jewish work as
the basis of the Apocalypse. The final portion of the book
treats of the Church of the first century, its assemblies and
worship, its constitution and its life. The historian's skill is
everywhere shown in discovering the most important and
characteristic facts, and in producing, from minute and
apparently unimportant indications, by skilful grouping and
ingenious inferences, a vivid picture of the earliest state of
the Christian Church and its natural evolution from small
beginnings. Much is, of course, only conjecture of which the
truth may be disputed ; but even when it fails to produce
complete conviction, Weizsacker' s account is so clearly con-
ceived, and the reasons for it so carefully given, that it is
in the highest degree attractive and suggestive. Since Baur's
Christenthum der drei ersten Jahrhunderte, nothing has
appeared on the earliest times of the Christian Church
superior to the "Apostolic Age" by Weizsacker, the worthy
occupant of Baur's chair.
In conclusion, I may here refer to my own book, Das
Urchristenthum, seine Schriften und Lehren, in geschicht-
lichem Zusammenhang beschrieben (1887). It is based on the
Hibbert Lectures, delivered in England in 1885, on "The
Influence of the Apostle Paul on the Development of Christi-
anity," and forms an extension and continuation of my earlier
work on Paulinismus (1873). In it I have tried to show
that the development of primitive Christianity into the
Catholic Church must not be conceived as a continued
Ch. I.] NEW TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND EXEGESIS. 251
struggle and gradual reconciliation between Paulinism and Jew-
ish Christianity, as Baur had thought ; nor (with Ritschl) as
a falling away from the apostolical religion and a degeneration
of Paulinism ; but as the natural evolution of the Christian
Hellenism introduced by Paul, which soon cast off the
Pharisaic elements in Paul's doctrines, and developed, on
the one hand, in a speculative direction, into the Johannine
theology of Asia Minor ; on the other, in a practical direc-
tion, into the Church life of Rome (Epistle of James). But
notwithstanding my difference from Baur, both in my general
view and in my estimate of individual books (especially the
Apocalypse, the Gospels of Matthew and Mark, the Acts and
others), I shall never forget how much I, with all our genera-
tion, owe to the epoch-making achievements of the great
Tubingen Master.
CHAPTER II.
OLD TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND EXEGESIS.
IN the same year with Strauss's Life of Jesus, which intro-
duced the new era of New Testament research, appeared
VATKE'S book, Die Religion des Alien Testaments nach den
kanonischen Biichern entwickelt, which contained the be-
ginning of a not less important revolution in the views held
regarding the Old Testament. The book met with a strange
fate. The able and original theories it contained were re-
ceived with such universal disapprobation that it was scarcely
considered worth while even to consider them with any
thoroughness ; for a generation they remained practically
unnoticed, and it was only between 1865 and 1870 that the
same critical views were again advanced in a different form,
and evoked ever growing interest. To Vatke's book itself
its unfortunate history was partly due. As a disciple of Hegel,
Vatke had a keen eye for the laws of the mental development
and religious consciousness of nations ; approaching Old
Testament research with his insight thus quickened by phi-
losophy, he saw the impossibility of resting content with the
traditional or even with the semi-critical views of the history of
the religion of the Old Testament then in vogue. But this
very philosophical training, which was Vatke's strength, con-
stituted the weakness of his book in the eyes of the public.
After the then prevailing fashion of his school, Vatke had
prefaced his historical inquiry by philosophical prolegomena,
enunciating in the most abstract form propositions concerning
the idea and phenomenon of religion, which could only be
understood by those initiated into the mysteries of Hegelian
terminology ; and even in the course of his history he em-
ployed this terminology much too freely. No wonder that
this unfortunate form of the book had on many the deterrent
effect described by Reuss 1 in his own case. "On the ap-
1 Gesch. der h. Schriften Allen Testaments. Preface, p. ix.
25 *
Ch. II.] OLD TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND EXEGESIS. 253
pearance of the book, the table of contents, with its Hegelian
formulae, of itself terrified me to such an extent that I re-
mained at the time unacquainted with it. A speculative
treatment of history I trust no further than I can see. Since
then indeed I have seen that theory and formula in this book
were really only an addition which might be dispensed with,
and that my inquiries might have been materially assisted if
I had not let myself be deterred by them." Since it is one
of the pleasantest duties of the historian to place misjudged
merit in its proper light, I will here give a short account
of Vatke's little known book, not of its philosophical super-
fluities, but of its valuable, historical, and critical essence.
Vatke starts from the indisputable fact that the sources for
the earlier history of the Old Testament religion are derived
from later legends, and are therefore incomplete and un-
certain. Accordingly he not only passes over the whole
history of the patriarchs as prehistoric legend, as others had
done before him, but he also subjects the traditional account
of Moses to a more searching criticism than any one had pre-
viously ventured to do. He finds that the notion of Moses
having given the people its civil law and a pure belief in
God is irreconcilable with later history. For he holds it to
be impossible that a whole nation should suddenly sink from
a high stage of religious development to a lower one, as is
asserted to have been so often the case in the times of the
judges and kings ; and equally impossible for an individual
to rise all at once from a lower to a higher stage, and raise a
whole nation with him with the same rapidity. We must not
separate individuals from the general life around them, and
must therefore often supply connecting links omitted in the
legend, or reduce our conception of the individuals in question
to the standard of their age. " This is particularly the case
with Moses, since on the assumption of the truth even of only
the greater part of this tradition as to his work, both his own
person and the whole course of Hebrew history become
inexplicable ; he would have come when the time was not
fulfilled, and would thus be far more miraculous than Christ
himself. The profound idea of the New Testament, that the
law was introduced between the promises and their fulfil-
ment, may after aH be justified, since the Pentateuch in its
completed form is in truth later than the promises of most
of the prophets." From indications in later history, and
254 BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Bk. III.
from isolated statements of the prophets (Amos v. 25 sg.}<
Vatke infers that the Hebrews in the time of Moses shared
the universal worship of the stars. With regard to the work
of Moses, a critical examination of the tradition, in conjunction
with the condition of the country under the judges, makes it
certain in the first place that Moses did not found a state,
since the main condition of this was wanting, viz. the estab-
lishment of a legislative and executive authority, which did
not exist in Israel- until the times of the kings. With the
conception of actual sovereignty the Mosaic state lacked also
all higher unity and all that belongs to the sphere of public
justice. The legislation of the Pentateuch did not found a
political constitution, and was not intended to do so ; its
object was the partial development of certain relations of the
community, and it must therefore have originated within a
state already constituted, and may be compared to canon law.
With regard to the sacrificial and sacerdotal ordinances of
the Pentateuch, the history of the times of the judges and
earlier kings proves that the simple patriarchal method of
worship was then in force, a plurality of sacred places, the
priesthood not confined to a single tribe, the forms of worship
still very simple. Only in the later kingdom of Judah did the
system of the Pentateuch become possible ; it was then by
degrees actually realised, and became the fixed ritual after
the Babylonian exile. Composite ceremonies, such as those
of the " Mosaic " ritual, are in general only comprehensible
as the products of a lengthy development, and become, in
their stereotyped permanence, the dead shells of a previous
or a parallel spiritual growth ; the rigid mechanism of form
is never the original and direct product. That the laws con-
cerning ritual in the Pentateuch are not derived from Moses,
and do not belong to the early pre-prophetic period at all,
is confirmed by the protests of the prophets against the
ceremonial worship, which they regard as not a revelation
from God,- but an invention of godless and deceitful men ;
which would have been quite impossible if the Pentateuch
had existed. But if Moses was thus neither a political nor
ecclesiastical legislator, nor a sage speculating on the nature
of God, he was still a true prophet, who came forward in
consequence of direct inspiration as an ambassador from God,
and hallowed the judicial and moral life of the nation by
bringing it into relation with the divine will ; he concluded
Ch. II.] OLD TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND EXEGESIS. 255
a " covenant " between the people and Jehovah, and thus
maintained the dependence of the historical and natural ex-
istence of the nation upon the sphere of justice and morality ;
this indicates that he beheld in Jehovah a holy power, and that
he deduced the other attributes of the divine nature from this
central idea. We must not however attribute to Moses all
the consequences involved in this principle ; for like the con-
ception of the ideal unity of God, the attributes of his nature
were realised in their fulness only in the course of time. The
divine holiness was regarded partly as an exclusive principle
on the side of natural existence and the service of nature,
partly as the standard of a legal and moral life ; in order
therefore to separate the elements of the sensible and the
higher order of things, and to arouse the moral sentiment
from the dream of nature-life, this Power had to appear to
men as severity, as a consuming fire and a jealous power ; its
instruments had to be full of a like holy zeal, while the abstract
nature of their message only increased the necessity for stern-
ness. For the question at issue was still the recognition of the
Lord, of a holy Will, of law and morality in general ; the first
abstract stages of a great process of purification were still
being passed through, which afterwards the earlier prophets,
especially Elijah, similarly fought their way through. The
principle of mercy and grace could scarcely be represented
even in an infinitesimal degree in such a development.
Although Moses received the idea of the holy national God,
whose will was to guide the whole political and moral life of
his people as an original intuition, i.e. as a revelation, we
still must not disconnect his appearance and work from its
historical conditions. For since natural religion produces
some legal and moral institutions, we must not draw a hard
and fast line between the two forms of religion ; it only
needed a distinguished personality, in whom were focussed
the various rays of a better spirit, to find and announce the
solution of the problem of the national mind, and thus give
its development a new direction. But although part of the
nation sided with the prophet of the higher spirit and carried
on his work, still he was far from being able to lift the whole
people up to his higher point of view. The mass of the
nation still clung to the old Semitic worship of nature. Later
tradition was therefore wrong in representing the people
under and after Moses as repeatedly sinking to a lower stage
256 BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Bk. III.
from a higher one already attained ; on the contrary, the
development was a gradual one in an upward direction amid
a constant struggle between the two parties. " Hence the
later religion of the Hebrew nation had the Sabaic religion
of nature, and particularly the worship of Saturn, as its
empirical starting-point, and the revelation of the divine
ideality and holiness as its higher principle."
This description of its Mosaic beginnings gives the key to
Vatke's whole view of the history of the Hebrew religion.
This view, as may be seen, is the outcome of an acute com-
parative examination of the traditions, and of general ideas
on the philosophy of history. The latter indeed will not be
a recommendation in the eyes of the public of to-day ; but
to me this appears an instructive example of the intuition of
a philosophically trained mind showing empirical research
the road to its most fruitful discoveries.
A curious contrast to Vatke's book is presented by EWALD'S
great work on the History of Israel (ist ed. 1843-52, 3 vols. ;
3rd ed. 1864-68, 7 vols.). In the former the decisive points
are noted with the penetrative glance of genius, and the out-
lines of an actual historical development are brought clearly
before us, with the omission of unimportant particulars ; while
in the latter the reader's mind is confused amid an endless mass
of details which prevent his ever arriving at a distinct idea of
the history as a whole. His criticism of authorities exhibits
Ewald's critical sagacity in its strength and weakness keen-
sighted in little things, shortsighted in great. Ewald distin-
guishes as the main sources of the Pentateuch, the Book of
Covenants, the Book of Origins, three Prophetical Narrators,
and lastly the Deuteronomist. But though he has much to
say about the character of these sources and the determin-
ation of their date, he pays no attention to those serious
objections which Vatke had already urged against the early
pre-prophetic origin of the ritualistic and priestly legislation of
Leviticus and Numbers ; Ewald does not attribute this legis-
lation to Moses himself, but he has no difficulty whatever in
dating it (as the Book of Origins) from the time of Solomon.
Ewald, moreover, has scarcely the faintest idea of the
development of the religious consciousness, of which Vatke
with so much insight gives a probably true description. He
considers the revelation of the purely spiritual God, in whom
love is superior to punitive justice, had been so completely
Ch. II.] OLD TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND EXEGESIS. 257
given in Moses, that we can understand neither how such a
phenomenon was possible at the time, nor what fresh and
higher truth the subsequent prophetical, or even Christian,
revelation could add. This is connected with one of Ewald's
characteristic peculiarities. He lacked the primary qualifica-
tion of an historian, the ability to sink his own personality
and mode of thought and identify himself with other and alien
modes of thought and feeling. When any historical figure
impresses him (and all impress him which tradition in any
respect represents as heroes), he is immediately carried away
by his feelings, and ascribes to his heroes, forgetting the re-
quirements of sober criticism, all the noble moral thoughts
and feelings which he, the historian, entertains at the mo-
ment. We might call his history a didactic romance. His
method of treating the Hebrew legends of miracles is more
suitable to the edifying romance than to an historical inquiry.
He does not actually believe the miracles, but does not openly
deny them and explain the origin of the legends ; he mani-
pulates the individual traits of these Biblical narratives in so
artificial a manner, and casts over the whole such a cloud of
edifying phrases, that each reader may make what he likes out
of them, one a real miracle, another a natural and insignificant
event, a third a moral allegory. But this was just what the
public wanted in the middle of the century ; the bright light
of Tubingen criticism had given pain to weak eyes only just
waking from the dreams of centuries ; so it was comforting
to have the Biblical history of the Old and New Testaments
interpreted by so great a scholar and set in a dim, soft twilight,
such as could not hurt the weakest eyes, while at the same
time it flattered the cultivated mind with a considerable
degree of Aufkldrung. Thus this excellent philologian, but
bad historian and worse theologian, was able to retard by his
authority the healthy advance of Biblical criticism for a whole
generation. The light of the two stars, Hengstenberg and
Ewald, quite eclipsed that of Vatke ; but at last Vatke' s bril
liant theory has been brought to the front by the labours of
more recent inquirers, and made the centre of the Old Testa-
ment researches of the present day. Not for men only, but
also for books, die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht /
During the decades of Ewald's supremacy, when Vatke
appeared to be forgotten, Reuss in his lecture room at Strass-
burg had given his auditors an account of the Old Testament
G.T. s
258 BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Bk. III.
literature and religion different from the prevalent one and
very similar to that of Vatke. Two of his hearers, while the
master himself cautiously deferred the publication of his views,
made the theory, by their independent researches, the subject
of a controversy which since then has never ceased. H. GRAF,
in his book, Die gesc hie Jit lie hen Biicher des A. Testaments
(1866), by an investigation of the history of the Israelite
ritual, as given in the more ancient sources (not in Chronicles,
which is much later and is coloured by a marked Tendenz],
arrived at the result that the priestly legislation in the middle
books of the Pentateuch was later than Deuteronomy, and only
after the Babylonian exile incorporated as a great interpola-
tion with the earlier work of the Deuteronomist. He still, how-
ever, kept to the then usual view, that the Elohistic narratives,
in spite of their close connection with the priestly legislation,
were part of the " Grundschrift" and regarded them ac-
cordingly as the oldest part of the Pentateuch. He had thus
divided this Grundschrift into two parts, which, although
perfectly similar in language and thought, were supposed
to differ in date by more than 500 years, the one being the
oldest and the other the most recent portion of the whole
Pentateuch. It was of course not a difficult task for criticism
to prove the impossibility of such an hypothesis. But while
the representatives of the older point of view believed them-
selves to have thus refuted the whole theory, and to have
vindicated the antiquity of the whole Grundschrift, including
the priestly code, keener critics considered Graf's error to
consist in want of thoroughness in working out his own
theory, and not extending it also to the narrative portions
of the Grundschrift. Graf himself recognised this error, and
in an essay published shortly before his death on "die soge-
nannte Grundschrift des Pentateuchs" drew the necessary in-
ferences. Still, in spite of the great impression produced by
his arguments, German theologians continued to reject the
" Grafsche Hypothese" through inability to get rid of the
prejudice, supported by the authority of Ewald, that his
theory was contradicted by the ascertained history of the
literature of the Old Testament. In these circumstances it was
again a former pupil and later colleague of Reuss, Professor
KAYSER, of Strassburg, who by his book, Das vorexilische
Buch der Urgesc hie hte Israels und seine Erweiterungen(\^^],
gave the death blow to this prejudice by proving, by an in-
Ch. II.] OLD TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND EXEGESIS. 259-
vestigation of the literary interdependence of the books, that
the Jahvistic book of history, with its naive epic style, is the
oldest, that then follows the Deuteronomist, and that lastly
the Elohistic legislation was added, with its appropriate
framework of narrative ; the order of sequence inferred from
the history of the ritual being thus confirmed by the literary
evidence. Two years after Kayser's book, appeared WELL-
HAUSEN'S essays on the composition of the Hexateuch (Joshua
being taken with the Pentateuch), and then his Geschichte
Israels (1878), in which the arguments for the new hypothe-
sis, derived from the parallel development of law, ritual, and
literature, were exhibited with such cogency that the impres-
sion produced on German theologians (especially of the
younger generation) was almost irresistible ; thenceforward
" Graf's hypothesis," the resuscitation of the long-ignored
theory of Vatke, was universally regarded as a question de-
serving most serious consideration, and by many as an ascer-
tained fact. It was a special merit in Wellhausen's book to
have excited interest in these questions outside the narrow
circle of specialists by its skilful handling^of the materials and
its almost perfect combination of wide historical considerations
with the careful investigation of details, and to have thus re-
moved Old Testament criticism from the rank of a subordinate
question to the centre of theological discussion. Personally
I welcomed this book of Wellhausen's more than almost any
other, for the pressing problem of the history of the religion of
the Old Testament appeared to me to have been at last solved
in a manner consonant with the principle of human evolution,
which I am compelled to apply to the history of all religion. It
is true, I was better prepared than the majority of German
theologians to appreciate Wellhausen's book by my acquaint-
ance with Kuerpen's work,. Godsdienst van Israel.
The Dutch scholar ABRAHAM KUENEN had even before
Graf come to doubt the early date of the priestly Grundschrift,
from observing that the impossibilities which Colenso had
proved in his criticism off Old Testament history occurred
with the greatest frequency in it. When Graf's book ap-
peared, Kuenen saw at once that its separation: of) the Grund-
schrift into law and history was untenable ; but in consider-
ing the further question 1 , whether the historical portions should
follow after the laws, or vice versa, he decided unhesitatingly
for the former alternative, perceiving that Graf's arguments
26O BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Bk. III.
for the post-deuteronomic origin of the priestly laws were
valid, while his supposition of the early date of the correspond-
ing historical narrative was neither proved nor to be proved.
Hence he arrived at the conviction that " not only is the
priestly legislation chronologically later than the preaching of
the prophets, but the priestly historiography is later than the
prophetic (Jahvistic)." From this point of view he composed
his great work, masterly alike in form and matter, Godsdienst
van Israel (1869-70), which in Holland met with deserved
appreciation, but in Germany, on account of its foreign lan-
guage, was less known beyond the narrowest circle of special-
ists than it deserved ; it is all the more a matter for congratu-
lation that an English translation has facilitated its circulation
beyond the narrow limits of the Dutch tongue. The ability
and originality of this history strike one at the outset. It
had always hitherto been supposed that the history of a na-
tion or a religion must follow the chronological sequence of
events, and therefore begin with the earliest time ; it was not
remembered that the earliest history, since there exist no
contemporary authorities for it, is the most uncertain and
least adapted to form the secure starting-point of historical
inquiry, constituting as it does at first only an obscure prob-
lem, the solution of which, so far as any solution is possible,
can only be approached from other ascertained facts. If our
conception of the earliest times is to be more than an arbi-
trary hypothesis, if it is to produce the impression of a well-
considered conviction, we must first lay its grounds before
the reader ; but since from the nature of the case these can
only consist of inferences from later well-attested facts, we
must begin with an account of the latter. Hence it follows
that the proper method is to start from some period that is
historically clearly known (with the 8th century in Hebrew
history, the time of the first prophets that left written records).
The prophetic authorities for the history of this period directly
supply only the conception of Israel's prehistoric life which
was entertained in prophetic circles, they contain the national
heroic legends as interpreted by the prophetic consciousness
of the 8th century. Only by taking account of the alter-
ations in the form of the legend made by this later time, either
by addition or subtraction, can the historical kernel be ap-
proximately extracted from the legendary husk, its probability
being greater in proportion to the extent to which it serves
Ch. II.] OLD TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND EXEGESIS. 26l
to explain the later development. This method combines
the most careful analysis and criticism of the sources with a
secure synthesis of the results, thus analytically obtained, in the
positive construction of the historical process of evolution.
This splendid method of historical research was, so far as I
am aware, first applied to the religion of Israel by Kuenen ;
it is, however, exactly parallel to Baur's method of investigat-
ing the history of primitive Christianity. Baur started with the
Apostle Paul, and used the indications as, to the conditions of
the apostolic age, as supplied by Paul, to explain the historical
books produced in those conditions, and then only argued back
to the state of Christianity before Paul ; and in exactly the same
way Kuenen starts with the first literary prophets, seeks from
the conditions of their time to explain and estimate the his-
torical books belonging to it, and thence draws inferences with
regard to the previous period, which must be conceived in
such a way as to account for the state of things in the pro-
phetic age as the natural development from it. This exact
similarity of method in different departments is the more
interesting, as there is no doubt that Kuenen was uninflu-
enced by Baur's precedent, but worked out his method quite
independently, led by his own sound historical instinct. Of
the rareness of this fine historical instinct, and of the difficulty
most people find in even following an inquiry into intricate
questions in this way, we have evidence every day ; I have
myself been censured on all hands for beginning my account
of Primitive Christianity with Paul and not with Jesus, who,
everybody knows, preceded him ! But Abraham and Moses
preceded Amos and Isaiah, and yet Kuenen had good reason
to begin with the latter instead of the former. Real historical
insight seems as rare as philosophical, and perhaps they are
one and the same an eye for the reality behind phenomena.
It was not until after Kuenen and Wellhausen that the
early teacher of Biblical criticism and originator of this new
movement, EDUARD REUSS, gave publicity to the results of
half a century's labours in two extensive works, the one in
French (being the third part of his great undertaking, La
Bible], L histoire sainte et la loi, and the other in German,
his Geschichte der heiligen Schriften Alien Testaments (1881).
In the preface to the latter he states that the idea and plan of
the work were determined on at the time of his first course
of lectures on the subject in 1834, but only in the shape of an
262 BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Bk. III.
intuition, for which he could not at the time produce sufficient
arguments. " Those who remember the literature of that
period, mot the conservative merely, but particularly the criti-
cal, will -be able to understand my unwillingness at once to
challenge the learned world to look upon the Prophets as
older than the Law, and the Psalms as later than both. For
these propositions, which were the main pillars of my concep-
tion of Hebrew history, were as yet rather a distant vision
than a solid fabric." He tells us he hit upon this idea in his
study >ef the legislation of Israel in hope of finding the thread
of Ariadne, which might guide him out of the labyrinth of
the current hypotheses into the daylight of a psychologically
possible .process of development of the people of Israel.
While in his youth much effort was wasted in explaining
miracles as natural occurrences, the most unnatural miracles
were left unexplained, viz. the commencement of Israel's reli-
gious education with the developed Levitical ritual ; the
unacquaintance with it displayed by the greatest prophets,
such as Samuel and Elijah ; the censure pronounced by the
Books of Kings on what those prophets approved by their
example, and so on. Such difficulties as these, felt by Reuss
when quite a young man, but which were overlooked by
others, or explained away, led him to the bold solution which
overthrew the whole mass of current hypotheses, and opened
fresh channels for Old Testament criticism. On the other
hand, he himself confesses that he was at first guilty of the
same want of thoroughness as Graf (see above, p. 258), and
that it was the works of others, especially of Kayser and
Kuenen, which helped him logically to work out his present
theory. The grounds of this theory are most fully given in
the introduction to his book, L histoire sainte et la loi (1879).
He shows first negatively, by a thorough literary and historical
examination, the impossibility of regarding the Mosaic tradi-
tions as historical truth ; he then tries to find a secure
starting-point for positive criticism, and discovers it in Deuter-
onomy. This book, discovered under Josiah, and no doubt
composed not long before, is unacquainted with the most
important regulations of the priestly (Sinaitic) legislation, and
must therefore be earlier in date ; on the other hand, it shows
an acquaintance with the Decalogue and the Book of Cove-
nants (Exod. xx.-xxiii.), as well as with the Jahvistic historical
narrative. This ''national epic of Israel" is therefore the
Ch. II.] OLD TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND EXEGESIS. 263
earliest portion of the Pentateuch, dating from the ninth cen-
tury B.C. With this was united, shortly before the Exile, the
only book of laws then in existence, the so-called Deuter-
onomy, by the insertion of the introductory and closing chap-
ters. It was not till after the Exile that the priestly legislation
was produced, by following out the indications given by
Ezekiel ; it was codified by Ezra in Palestine, and at first
promulgated as an independent book of laws. Finally, in
Ezra's school, it was incorporated in the pre-exilic Jahvistic-
Deuteronomic work, and now forms the larger portion of the
middle books of the Pentateuch. On the basis of this criti-
cism of the literature, Reuss has, in his Geschichte des Alien
Testaments, described the evolution of the religious and
political life of the people of Israel, from its historical com-
mencement to the destruction of Jerusalem, in four sections,
viz. the ages of the Heroes, the Prophets, the Priests, and
the Scribes.
In order to give the reader a general idea of the history of
Israel as it takes shape under these critical principles, it seems
most suitable to take as my basis Wellhausen's short sketch,
first contributed to the Encyclopedia Britannica, and then
published by him in a somewhat enlarged German edition
(1884) in the first number of his Skizzen und Vorarbeiten.
It seems to me to contain a good summary of the conclusions
as to which critics of the school of Reuss and Graf are agreed,
and which may now perhaps be regarded as the certain result
of the most recent critical labours ; this of course does not
exclude uncertainty on many questions of detail, and difference
of opinion among critics even of this same school. This,
however, rather affects unimportant questions, the solution
of which may be interesting to specialists, but does not deeply
concern the history of theology.
Long before the Hebrew tribes were united into one politi-
cal community, Wellhausen tells us, they had a certain internal
unity, going back to the time of Moses, and apparently due
to Moses himself. The basis on which Israel's sense of
national unity at all times rested was the belief that Jahve was
the God of Israel, and Israel the people of Jahve. Moses did
not invent this belief, but he succeeded in making it the foun-
dation of the nation and its history. Necessity compelled a
number of related families to quit their ordinary mode of life,
and this gave him his opportunity. He undertook to lead
264 BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Bk. III.
them ; he had faith in the result, and the result justified him.
But the success of the undertaking, of which he was the
moving spirit, was no merit of his. A tremendous occurrence,
independent of him, and not even capable of being foreseen
in the darkness of the future, concurred in a startling manner
with his purpose; One whom wind and sea obey placed His
power at his command. Behind him there stood a higher
Power, whose spirit worked in him, and whose arm acted for
him not for his own good, but for that of the people. It
was Jahve. Jahve was the moving, provident force in the
history which the elements of the nation, collected by neces-
sity, passed through together, and in which they gained the
beginning of a real national consciousness. Moses was instru-
mental in producing this consciousness ; he also succeeded
further in keeping it alive and developing it. The extra-
ordinary circumstances which had given the first impulse to
the formation of the new nation still continued, and under
their pressure the creation of Israel went on. The authority
Moses had gained by his deeds naturally gave him the posi-
tion of the judge of the people. By giving his judicial sentences
in the name of Jahve, and connecting this function with his
sanctuary, he established a fixed centre for traditions of justice,
and began a thora in Israel, which imparted to the sense of
nationality and to the idea of God a positive ideal content.
Jahve was now not simply the God of Israel, but as such also
the God of law and righteousness, the basis, motive, and
unexpressed content of the national conscience. From that
time forth Jahve continued to raise up men who were moved
by the spirit to place themselves at the people's head ; in
them his own leadership took bodily shape. He marched
among the warriors of the levy, and their enthusiasm marked
his presence. Finally Jahve decided from heaven the strug-
gle carried on on earth. He was always on the side of Israel ;
his interest was limited to Israel, although his power being
God extended far beyond its borders. Thus Jahve was in
truth a living God, but the tokens of his activity in the great
crises of the history were separated by long pauses. His
mode of working bore some resemblance to thunder ; it was
more suitable for extraordinary occasions than for daily
domestic use. Still even in the intervals of quiet it did not
altogether cease. As human leaders do not altogether lose
in peace the influence gained in war, so was it with Jahve.
Ch. II.] OLD TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND EXEGESIS. 265
The ark of the covenant, an idol intended primarily for the
life of soldiers in camps and on marches, continued also in
peace, as the sign of Jahve's presence, to be the centre of his
worship. And with the ritual was closely connected, both in
the time of Moses and later, the sacred administration of
justice, the thora. In all difficult cases inquiry was made of
the mouth of Jahve, counsel being sought of the priests, who
gave sentence in the name of Jahve, either according to their
own knowledge of his will, or according to a decision of the
lot, and possessed simply moral authority. The priestly
thora was an institution wholly unconnected with and prior to
political arrangements ; it existed before the State, and con-
stituted one of its invisible fundamental pillars. War and law
were religion before they were changed into compulsion and
civil order; this is the real meaning of the so-called theocracy.
A regular state, with specific sanctity, was by no means built
up by Moses on the principle, ''Jahve the God of Israel;"
and after him the old patriarchal constitution of- families and
clans, the elders of which were leaders in war and judges in
peace, continued to exist. Only when the whole nation had
some great special work to perform was an appeal made to
Jahve as the last and extraordinary resource. The theocracy
may be said to have arisen to supply the defects of anarchy.
Out of the religious consciousness of nationality grew the
State, the sanctity of which depended precisely on the fact
that it arose as an ideal of religion, to be realized in conflict
with indolence and selfishness. "Jahve the God of Israel"
accordingly meant that national duties, both internal and
external, were conceived as sacred. It did not mean at all
that the almighty Creator of heaven and earth had first made
a covenant only with this single people, that they might know
and worship him. Jahve was not at first the God of the
whole world, who then became the God of Israel ; but he was
originally simply the God of Israel, and then became much
later the God of the world. In an enlightened idea of God,
Moses would have given the Israelites a stone instead of bread ;
most probably he left them to think as their fathers had
thought about the nature of Jahve in itself, irrespective of his
relation to men. With speculative truths, for which there
was then no demand whatever, he did not concern himself,
but only with practical questions, definitely and necessarily
brought before him by the time. The religious starting-point
266 BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Bk. III.
of the history of Israel is distinguished, not by its marked
novelty, but by its normal character. In all ancient nations
we find the gods brought into relation with national officers,
and religion used as a motive power of law and custom ; but
in none with such purity and force as in the case of the
Israelites. Whatever Jahve's real nature may have been
the God of thunder, or whatever he was, it retreated more
and more into the background as something secret and tran-
scendent, and no questions were asked concerning it. The
whole emphasis was laid on his action in the world of men,
whose aims he made his own. Religion did not call men to
participate in the life of God, but, on the contrary, God in the
life of men ; but in this it did not really fetter but free human
life. The so-called particularism of the idea of God, the
limitation of Jahve's interest to the affairs of Israel, was the
real strength of this religion ; it liberated it from the fruitless
play of mythology, and facilitated its application to moral
duties, which are always first presented and fulfilled only in
definite circles. As the God of the nation, Jahve became the
God of law and righteousness, and as such grew to be the
highest, and finally the sole power in heaven and earth. After
the settlement of the Hebrews in Canaan, the higher civiliza-
tion of settled life was accompanied by a gradual weakening
of their national and religious consciousness. In proportion
as Israel coalesced with the conquered country, the gods of
the two nations coalesced also, and then arose a syncretism of
Jahve with Baal, which lasted on into the time of the prophet
Hosea. But the course of national history fanned the smoul-
dering coals into a blaze. The Philistines aroused Israel and
Jahve from their slumber. In the struggle against them was
founded Saul's kingdom ; and his more fortunate successor,
David, became the founder of the united Israelite kingdom,
whose military power remained always the proudest memory
of the nation. Later Jewish tradition, however, was wrong
in making him a Levitical saint and pious psalmist. Under
Solomon the floodgates were opened to Oriental culture in
the wider and higher sense ; closer intercourse with foreign
lands widened the people's intellectual horizon, and at the
same time deepened the sense of its peculiarity. His intro-
duction of Phoenician and Egyptian institutions into the
worship of Jahve might offend the true old Israelites of his
time, but his temple became afterwards of great importance
Ch. II.] OLD TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND EXEGESIS. 267
to the religion. The division of the kingdom under Reho-
boam was caused both by the discontent at the innovations
and strict discipline of Solomon's government, and also by
the jealousy of the tribe of Joseph, which had always been
the natural rival of the tribe of Judah favoured by David.
Religion was at that time no obstacle to the separation, as the
temple services in Jerusalem had not yet become exclusive,
the worship instituted by Jeroboam at Bethel and Dan
being equally legitimate ; there were images in both places,
and indeed wherever there was a sanctuary. There was in
general no difference in the religious and spiritual life of the
two kingdoms, save that religious movements generally first
originated in Israel. A new stage in the history of religion
began with the appearance of the prophet Elijah, the most
striking heroic figure in the Bible, towering solitary above his
time, and whose memory was preserved by legend and not
by history. When Jahve had thus founded the nation and
kingdom, primarily by its struggle with external foes, he
commenced an attack, within the nation and in the spiritual
sphere, upon the foreign elements which had been hitherto
admitted without much opposition. Ahab's erection of a
temple for the Tyrian Baal in Samaria was the occasion of
Elijah's contention against the Baal cultus generally, and
against the syncretism between Baal and Jahve, from which
very few in Israel had kept free. For Elijah there were not
several Powers with equal claims and equally worthy of
worship, but everywhere only one holy and mighty Being,
revealed, not like Baal in the life of nature, but like Jahve in
the ethical demands of the spirit ; the idea of God began in
individual men to rise above national limitation. In the flour-
ishing period of the Northern kingdom, under Jeroboam II.,
Hebrew literature began. The religious lyrics, telling of the
mighty deeds of God through and for Israel, which were
originally handed down by word of mouth, were now com-
mitted to writing and collected ; thus arose the " Book of the
Wars of Jahve" and the " Book of the Upright," the oldest
Hebrew histories. The next step was to write history in
prose, making use of documents or family recollections. The
books of Judges, Samuel, and Kings contain a considerable
part of these ancient historical writings. At the same time
certain collections of judicial maxims and decisions of the
priests were written down, of which we have an example in
268 BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Bk. III.
the so-called " Book of the Covenants" (Exod. xxi., xxii.). A
little later, perhaps, were recorded the legends of the Patriarchs
and of the earliest times, which cannot have had a very early
origin. When in this way a literary age had arisen, the pro-
phets also began to write down their speeches. With the
growth of civilization and national prosperity, worship also
became more stately than in the simple times of antiquity.
This was also the channel by which heathenism could, and did
again and again, make its way into the worship of Jahve ;
especially was this the case with the private sanctuaries, so
that kings and prophets emphatically insisted on the publicity
of worship, which provided a corrective for the worst excesses.
The priests, moreover, did not merely offer sacrifices, but were
also the advisers and instructors of the people, although these
more important duties were neglected in comparison with the
more lucrative ones connected with the sacrifices. The belief
of the nation was the simplest possible : Jahve is the God of
Israel, Israel's helper in need, the judge to secure him justice
against his enemies. But Jahve's work was seen, not in the
fate of individuals, but in that of clans and nations. Rarely
has history so powerfully touched the chords of a nation's
heart ; rarely has it been to this extent regarded as the effect
of the divine action, to which human action can only inquir-
ingly adapt itself, or prayerfully submit. Events were mira-
cles and signs, chance the pointing finger of a higher hand.
This way of looking at history was preserved from triviality
because the history of a people, not of individuals, was the
object of attention. The faith of men thus gained an
emotional vividness, the conception of God a magnificent
reality. Seers and prophets saw by second sight what Jahve
did, but there was no theology which coolly speculated about
him. Men did not seek to know his principles of action, but
his immediate intention, in order to act accordingly. The
living proof of actual experience was compatible with great
freedom of expression ; the reality of experience did not fear
even contradictions. Jahve had incalculable moods ; he
caused his face to shine, and he was wroth, it was not known
why ; he created good and evil, punished sin and tempted to
sin. Satan had not then robbed him of some of his attributes.
In spite of all this, Israel did not doubt him. On the whole,
times had hitherto been prosperous ; the disharmony between
external experience and faith had not become so painful as to
Ch. II.] OLD TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND EXEGESIS. 269
demand a reconciliation. The case was different when the
great Assyrian power began to stretch out its arms towards
Israel. In anticipation of the coming troubles, the prophet
Amos made his appearance, the first and purest representative
of a new phase of prophecy. While all the minor nations
trembled before the approach of the eastern conqueror, the
Israelite prophets alone were neither surprised nor dismayed,
but in advance solved the terrible problem history presented.
They enlarged religion so as to embrace the conception of the
world, which had proved fatal to other religions, before it had
really become part of the profane consciousness of the people.
Where others saw the ruin of what was most holy, they saw
the triumph of Jahve over appearances and vain beliefs.
Whatever might fall, what was valuable remained firm. The
very time they lived in became for them the unfolding story
of a divine drama, the course of which they watched with
prophetic foresight and intelligence. Everywhere the same
laws, everywhere the same goal of development. The nations
are the actors, Israel the hero, and Jahve the poet of the
tragedy. The prophets, of the line of whom Amos was the
first, did not proclaim a new God, but" they preached that
the God of Israel was primarily and above all the God of
righteousness, and Israel's God only in so far as Israel
satisfied his righteous demands. They therefore reversed
the traditional order of the two fundamental articles of faith.
This delivered Jahve from the danger of coming into collision
with the world, and suffering shipwreck ; the sovereignty of
right extended further than the might of the Assyrians.
Thus an historical contingency enabled moral convictions to
break through the limitations of the narrow faith in which
they had grown to maturity, and so to bring about an
advance in the knowledge of God. This is the so-called
ethical monotheism of the prophets ; they believed in the
moral order of the world, in the unfailing validity of righteous-
ness as the supreme law for the whole world. From this
point of view Israel's prerogative seems to be annulled, and
Amos, who states the new doctrine with the greatest abrupt-
ness and regardlessness of consequences, sometimes verges
upon the denial of it ; he calls Jahve the God of hosts, i.e. of
the world, but not the God of Israel. Still, the special relation
of Jahve to Israel was not doubted by the prophets; they only
made its condition a moral instead of a physical one. They
27O BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Bk. III.
emphasised the idea not as yet the name of the Covenant
and the corresponding idea of the Law, and made these the
basis of religion. Nevertheless, their attention was directed,
not as yet to the righteousness of the individual and the heart,
but to national uprightness and social action. The negative
result of their ethical monotheism was their attack on ritual,
so far as it was regarded as a means of purchasing the favour
of God without moral worth. Above all, the prophets at-
tacked the sensuous rites connected with worship as a
heathenish service of Baal. The prophets were taught by-
history to know the awful severity of the righteousness of
Jahve ; they are the founders of the religion of the Law.
This is what constitutes their importance, not their being the
forerunners of the gospel. Least of all are they the latter on
account of their Messianic prophecies. In them they really
fall back upon the patriotic but illusive hopes of the common
people, and the " false prophets," whom they on other grounds
assail. This was the proof of the insufficiency of their princi-
ple. In view of the facts and necessities of history, the posi-
tion of the prophets inevitably led them to transcend the limits
of their nation and the world. It was due to the prophets
that the fall of Samaria did not injure but strengthened the
religion of Jahve ; they saved the faith by destroying the
illusion ; they also immortalised Israel by not involving Jahve
in the ruin of the nation. After the fall of Samaria, the king-
dom of Judah, which had hitherto politically and religiously
followed in the wake of the northern kingdom, succeeded to
its position. The prophet Isaiah was the means of saving
it from immediately sharing the fate of the northern kingdom,
by being involved in the foreign politics of the time, and of
securing for it a century of quiet and prosperous development.
He despised politics, and yet understood them better than the
short-sighted, practical politicians of his day ; he took in at a
glance the confusion of the time, for he stood outside and
above it. A magnificent faith in the victorious, universal
sovereignty of Jahve gave him courage and discretion amid
the storms of the time. While the great military powers of
the world threatened to stamp out Jerusalem, he beheld in
spirit the time when the great nations should come to pay
homage in the city of Jahve, and truth go forth from Zion.
Truth never expressed its confidence in itself with greater
assurance of victory. But this joyful confidence was mingled
Ch. II.] OLD TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND EXEGESIS. 271
with tragic resignation. Isaiah recognised the inevitableness
of heavy judgments, to which the greater part of the nation
would succumb, and only a small remnant be spared as a
sacred seed for the future. And to prepare this remnant to
realise the ideal of a people of God, first on a small scale, he
considered to be the most pressing duty of the age. The
prophets thus entered on the path of practical reform, begin-
ning with the purification of worship. Isaiah energetically
resumed the attack on the worship of images, which Hosea
had previously derided, and obtained its actual abolition under
King Hezekiah. But the popular religion offered so stout a
resistance to this reform that Hezekiah's son Manasseh had to
comply with it in the restitution of ritualistic superstitions, and
even permit its increase by the adoption of all kinds of heathen
rites and forms. The counter-reformation aped in bloody
fanaticism the sacred zeal of the prophets, children were sacri-
ficed in honour of J ah ve- Moloch in the valley of Gehenna.
This period, in which the antithesis between ritualistic bigotry
and pure morality reached its acutest form, witnessed the
origin of the powerful warnings of the prophet Micah, and
perhaps also the commands of the Decalogue, which con-
cerned ritual only negatively by the command to abstain from
idols, and constituted moral goodness the sole content of the
divine Will, quite on the lines of Micah vi. 6-8. A short
but very fruitful triumph was obtained by the prophetic efforts
at reform under King Josiah. One of their results was the
Book of Deuteronomy, supplementing the Decalogue by an
actual national code of laws, based chiefly on a modification
of ancient legal maxims. It was the first book of Law and
Covenant, the comprehensive programme of a reorganisa-
tion of the theocracy according to the ideals of the prophets.
Here is shown more plainly than anywhere else that Prophets
and Law are not opposed to each other, but are identical and
related as cause and effect. Nowhere is the fundamental
thought of the prophets expressed more clearly than in
Deuteronomy, that Jahve demands nothing for himself, but
regards and demands justice between man and man as the
true religion, and that his Will is not hidden high above us or
far off from us, but is to be found in the sphere of moral con-
duct known and understood by all. The most important
regulation regarding ritual in this code was the centralisation
of the worship of Jahve in Jerusalem, and the abolition of all
272 BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Bk. III.
other sanctuaries. The motive of this radical innovation was
the consistent carrying out of the pure monotheistic religion,
and opposition to the heathenish naturalism, which had taken
such firm root in the idolatry of the high-places that it could
only be exterminated by the abolition of the latter. The
limitation of the worship of Jahve to Jerusalem was the popu-
lar and practical form of the prophetic monotheism ; but the
subsidiary consequence of this measure, and one not intended
by the legislator, was to strengthen the hierarchy at Jeru-
salem. Thus the first practical consequence of the prophetic
efforts at reform contained the germ of the subsequent de-
generation of their work. The theocratic zeal aroused in the
people for Law and temple appeared to all to be a pledge of
lasting prosperity. Only one man was not deceived by the
external appearance, the prophet Jeremiah. In warning
words he pointed those who thought themselves secure to the
fate of Shiloh and the Ephraimites ; he was rewarded with
scorn and persecution. The patriotic fanaticism, which would
not learn either from Jeremiah or the course of history itself,
led to the destruction of Jerusalem, and the carrying away of
the people into the Babylonian captivity. Jeremiah, who had
foreseen this, did not despair, but turned his eyes towards a
better future for religion and his people. In his hopeless
struggle with popular infatuation and obstinacy he had come
to see that the real want was a new heart, which could be
created by no teaching and no form of worship, but could
only be given by God to individual men. The endeavour to
make religion individual and inward was the new tendency
which sprang out of the decline of the nation, and was pre-
figured in the individualistic piety of the last and greatest of
the prophets, Jeremiah. In place of the nation he was him-
self the subject of religion ; he only, not Israel, had fellowship
with Jahve. He knew that the future and eternity depended
upon him, for the nation was not eternal, but the truth which
the nation despised, and of which he was certain. The small
Jewish colony that returned from the exile was no longer a
State, but only a religious community. The means for its
organisation could only be supplied by the temple service and
the priesthood of Jerusalem. The hierocracy, for which even
at the beginning of the Exile Ezekiel had begun to prepare,
was now inevitably realised. The high-priest, with the
nobility of the priests, beside whom the common Levites sank
Ch. II.] OLD TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND EXEGESIS. 273
to mere temple servants, became the centre and rulers of
the community.- But in the confusion of the next decades the
religious spirit threatened to die out, and the Jewish colony to
perish by its mixture with the semi-heathenism of the inhabi-
tants of the country. Then came, under Ezra, a new rein-
forcement of Jews from Babylon, who aroused afresh in the
colony in Palestine the spirit of strict loyalty and the exclusive-
ness of the Jewish nature towards everything not Jewish,
which had been more fully developed in a foreign land. The
introduction of Ezra's priestly code laid the foundation of the
Judaism of later times. This post-Deuteronomic legislation
deals, not with a nation, but with a community, and regulates
chiefly the worship. Political matters are left out, as they
concern the foreign government. The constitution of the
community is assumed to be the hierocracy. The head of
the worship is the head of the whole community ; the high-
priest takes the place also of the king. The other priests are
officially his subordinates, as the bishops are subordinate to
the pope. They are distinguished from the Levites, the
lowest rank of the clergy, not only by their office, but also by
their noble birth. In this clerical organisation the govern-
ment of holiness is outwardly realised. Inwardly the ideal of
holiness governs life by a net of ceremonies and observances
which separate the Jew from the man. The renovated ritual
of the Temple, augmented by fresh sacrificial rites, had essen-
tially the same object ; it provided a fixed and united centre
for the new theocracy, and formed a protecting shell around
the faith and customs of the Fathers for the preservation of
ethical monotheism until it could become the common pro-
perty of the world. Underneath this husk of ceremonial
precepts the kernel of prophetic religion did not altogether
die. On the contrary, the individualisation of piety made
further progress. Men began to reflect upon religion. The
so-called " Wisdom" was evolved, of which we have literary
remains in the Book of Job, in the Proverbs of Solomon and
of the son of Sirach, and in Ecclesiastes. And that reflec-
tion was not injurious to depth of feeling, but that, on the
contrary, individualism tended to make religion a matter of
the heart, is shown by the Psalms, which all belong to this
period. It was an immense advance that the devout Hebrew
became assured of his communion with God, as he does in
many Psalms, by inward experience, and thus dared to trust
G.T. T
274 BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Bk. III.
to himself in his religious relations. This was a subsidiary
product of prophetism, but of equal importance with its chief
product, the Law ; it was the universalisation of the personal
experience which the prophets, while outwardly unsuccessful,
had had in themselves of the inward saving power of truth.
While Judaism in the following centuries was petrified under
the influence of the externality of ceremonial law, the germ of
a nobler future lived on in the depths of inward feeling such
as occasionally finds its expression in the " Wisdom " books
and the Psalms. The gospel developed these hidden im-
pulses of the Old Testament, while it protested against the
dominant tendency of Judaism. And the religious individual-
ism of the gospel remains the salt of the earth.
I hope I have not wearied the reader with this excerpt from
Wellhausen's sketch of the history of Israel. Its insertion
was necessary, inasmuch as it is possible to properly esti-
mate the great importance of the Old Testament criticism
of to-day only by a comparison of this new conception of
Israelite history with the earlier traditional one. There we
had from beginning to end a series of riddles, of psychological
and historical puzzles ; here everything is comprehensible, we
have a clear development, analogous to the rest of history, the
external history of the nation and the internal history of its
religious consciousness in constant accord and fruitful inter-
action ; and though not an unbroken advance in a straight
line of the whole people, still a laborious struggle of the repre-
sentatives of the higher truth with the stolid masses, a
struggle in which success and defeat succeed each other in
dramatic alternation, and even failure only serves to aid the
evolution of the idea itself in ever greater purity from its
original integuments. This is human history, full of marvels
and of Divine revelation, but nowhere interrupted by miracle
or by sudden, unaccountable transitions.
So bold an innovation necessarily provoked considerable
opposition. This was often expressly, and perhaps still
oftener silently, directed against what seems to us precisely
the advantage of this new theory, viz. the substitution of a
humanly comprehensible development for mysterious miracles
and revelations. Since this opposition rests on dogmatic
assumptions lying outside history, it cannot determine the
course of the historian. Serious consideration, on the other
hand, is due to such objections as have been raised by learned,
Ch. II.] OLD TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND EXEGESIS. 275
dogmatically unbiassed, Old Testament scholars, and are based
on scientific research. Specially important, in this connec-
tion, are Ewald's eminent scholars : Dillmann, Schrader, and
Noldeke ; further, Riehm, Delitzsch, Strack, Bredenkamp,
Ryssel, Curtiss, Finsler, Konig, Kittel, and others, I cannot
here enter on the various, often conflicting, views of these
scholars as to the composition of the Pentateuch. Their
chief objections to the theory of Reuss and Graf may be sum-
marised as follows : From the fact that in a given historical
period we find no traces of the observance of a law, we cannot
forthwith infer the non-existence of the law at that time, since
it is possible for laws to be in existence long before they come
to be observed in practice. Further, the difference between
the prophets and Deuteronomy on the one hand, and the
priestly code on the other, is exaggerated by the critics ; some
variations may be explained by the difference in the points of
view and objects aimed at. The view that the prophets and
the Deuteronomist had no acquaintance with the priestly
code must be qualified, for both the prophets and Deuter-
onomy presuppose the existence of a thora relating to the
ritual. 1 The distinction between priests and Levites was not
first introduced by Ezekiel, but was presupposed by him as
already long in existence. Finally, the chief objection is, that
the priestly code itself contains several directions which cannot
be explained from the time of Ezra, but point to a very early,
certainly pre-Deuteronomic date. Also the linguistic peculiari-
ties of the priestly code present indications of an early period,
not that after the exile, and in part even point to the earliest
period of Hebrew literature..
The advocates of! the Reuss-Graf theory have not been
slow to answer these objections* Kayser, in his essays on
the present position of the question of the Pentateuch, 2 has
subjected them to an examination, the conclusion of which is
that the three lines of attack made by Old Testament scholars
on Graf's theory have been repelled. " The theory has
maintained all its positions without giving way an inch. When
the history of ritual has shown that the laws of the Elohistic
book were first promulgated in the time of Ezra ; when the
history of literature makes it plain that the book was unknown
1 This is also maintained by Vatke in his posthumous Introduction to the
Old Testament (1887), though without renouncing the main principle of his
early book The Prophets before 1he Law.
* Jahrb.fiir prot. TheoL, vii. 2-4 Heft.
276 BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Bk. III.
to all previous writers, and can only be properly understood
by a reference to Ezekiel's mode of thought ; when, finally, the
history of language is compelled against its will to show that
,the book bears all the characteristics of this time, then what
further proof can we possibly expect of its really belonging to
it ? Until further evidence is forthcoming, we shall be justi-
fied in regarding Grafs theory as the best substantiated and
alone satisfactory explanation of the Pentateuch." Still even
the adherents of this theory admit that various questions of
detail have still to be answered. It is acknowledged that the
pre-Deuteronomic historical book, even after the removal of
the priestly code, is derived from two sources, a Jahvistic
and an Elohistic one ; as to the mutual relation of which
opinions are still quite divided. In Deuteronomy it is doubt-
ful whether the introductory and concluding chapters come
from the author of the book himself, or whether they were
added by a later hand, for the purpose of connecting it with
the earlier historical work. Of still greater importance is the
question whether the law promulgated by Ezra was the whole
of the Pentateuch, or only the main contents of the priestly
code, which was afterwards incorporated by the disciples
of Ezra in the earlier work, perhaps enlarged by the legal
additions and historical narratives.
The most recent thorough investigation of all these ques-
tions, including a consideration of antagonistic views, is given
by Kuenen in his Historisch-kritische Einleitung in die
Bucker des alien Testaments hinsichtlich ihrer Entstehung und
Sammlung (1885, German trans, by Weber, 1887; English
by Wicksteed, 1887). He comes to the conclusion that in
the year of the reforms of Ezra and Nehemiah (444 B.C.), the
Deuteronomic-prophetic sacred history and the priestly legis-
lative historical book were still separate, and that the two
were first combined to form the Hexateuch in the course of
the fifth century by the Sopherim of the school of Ezra ; that
the text of the Hexateuch even then underwent numerous
revisions during a considerable period, of which traces remain
in the discrepancies between the three recensions (textus re-
ceptus, Samaritan Pentateuch and the Alexandrine translation).
Of further advocates of this theory, we may here mention
Stade (Geschichte Israels, incomplete), Budde (Die biblische
Urgeschichte, 1883), Smend (Commentar zu Ezechiel], Duhm
(Theologie der Propheten, 1875), Schultz (A It testament lie he
Theologie, 2nd ed, 1878).
CHAPTER III.
ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND THE HISTORY OF DOGMA.
THE way in which ecclesiastical history is written is always
largely determined by dogmatic or philosophical theology.
The extent and character of his own comprehension of Christi-
anity guides the ecclesiastical historian in his view of the
Church's past and in his judgment of the action of the his-
torical personages and the growth of the institutions, customs,
and doctrines of the Church. Again, on the other hand, a
comprehension of the history of the Church is a factor in the
formation of a dogmatical view of the nature of Christianity,
and of the significance of its traditions in the doctrine and
customs of the Church. Hence an account of the develop-
ment of theology in our century is bound to include works on
ecclesiastical history, so far at least as the most important of
them are typical of a definite tendency or stage of theological
knowledge.
During the flourishing period of Rationalistic theology, at
the end of the last and beginning of this century, church
history was written on the pragmatic method, of which the
best known exponents were SPITTLER and PLANCK, both
Swabians by birth, and invited from Tubingen to Gottingen,
where they entered on long and successful careers both as
teachers and authors. Spittler's Grundriss der Geschichte
der christl. Kirche (1782), is written from the point of view
of the Aufklarung, in order to show how the human mind
had risen through the revolutions of eighteen centuries to
its present freedom in religious matters. The book is mainly
descriptive of the secular-political side of the Church ; its
religious and theological side being cast into the background.
Like Gottfried Arnold, Spittler sympathised with the heretics
in their opposition to the orthodox Church ; but this sympathy
was not due in Spittler, as in Arnold, to religious mysticism,
but to the dogmatic indifferentism of the Aufklarung, to which
the nature of Christianity as religion had become problem-
277
278 BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Bk. III.
atic and incomprehensible. Since Christian history is thus
from the beginning deprived of any guiding principle, it is
impossible to discover any theological coherence in it, and it
comes to be " one long lamentation over the weakness and
corruption of the human mind," which, however, is still gradu-
ally improved by the happy dispensations of Providence,
which from time to time, by the sending of wise men, brings
about a change for the better. The persons and phenomena
of history are not explained and judged according to the
principles arid motives of their own time, but all alike are
estimated by the standard of the modes of thought of the
Aufklarung, and anything not agreeing with it is forthwith
condemned as stupidity, phantasy, and error.
More moderate in tone, but written essentially on the same
pragmatic method, are Planck's works, Geschichte der Entstel-
lung, der Verdnderungen und der Bildung unseres protestant-
ise hen Lehrbegriffs von Anfang der Reformation bis zur
Einfukrung der Concordienformel (6 vols., 1781-1800), and
Geschichte der christlich-kinchlichen Gesellschaftsverfassung
(5 vols. 1803-1809). The excellence of these works consists
in the exactness of the examination of authorities, the careful
regard of the various concurring circumstances, external rela-
tions, and inward inclinations conditioning actions, and the
sagacity in the discovery and combination of motives, thus
producing a lifelike and vivid picture of historical events.
But the weak side of this " psychological pragmatism " is also
specially evident in Planck : he tries to explain everything
that happens by the accidental subjective motives of individual
persons, and fails to understand the deeper causes lying in the
general ideas and prevailing tendencies of an age. The sub-
jectivism of the Aufklarung, which isolates and lays stress on
the individual, with his peculiar nature and arbitrary will, is
reflected in this treatment of history, which substitutes for the
great objective forces of human society the trivial play of
accident and the caprice of individuals. And since the psy-
chological motives of men, especially of those living in the
past, can never be known with certainty, but at most only
conjectured, this pragmatism, which aims at explaining all
events by men's subjective motives, leads unavoidably to the
ascription of motives really quite foreign to the actors. We
often get the impression that the astute aims and plans
described by the historian are rather an invention of his own
Ch. III.] ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND HISTORY OP DOGMA. 279
than a part of the history itself. With this principle of the
Aufklarung is further connected the incapacity to enter, impar-
tially and sympathetically, into the modes of thought and the
religious interests and wants of the past. Such phenomena
as the papacy, scholasticism, and mysticism, find as little
favour in the eyes of Planck as of Spittler. That these things
were in their time the necessary and therefore legitimate ex-
pressions of the spirit of religious society, is a fact the subjec-
tive understanding of the Aufklarung cannot comprehend, but
it regards them categorically as lamentable errors, fanaticisms,
or even frauds. From this point of view the historian fails to
perceive the objective rationality of history, the development
of mind through various stages, and the functions of indi-
viduals foreign to himself, in whom the common spirit of their
time found a peculiar and forcible expression.
Among Planck's auditors from 1 808-10 was AUGUST
NEANDER, who had shortly before given up Judaism for Chris-
tianity, and under the influence of Schleiermacher's Reden
had resolved to study theology, in order, as he confessed to a
friend, to " make war for ever on the common understanding,
which gets further and further away from the eternal centre
of all being, the Divine." This confession sufficiently shows
how different was the spirit of the scholar from that of his
master ; nevertheless Neander was first led by Planck to study
the sources of ecclesiastical history, though with very different
results in his case. When, in 1813, Neander was called to a
chair in the newly founded University of Berlin, he became,
after Schleiermacher, the most important representative of
the new theology, which by its profounder appreciation of the
religious life gave him new insight into early Church history.
In quick succession he published a series of monographs, on
Julian and his Age, on St. Bernhard, Chrysostom, Tertullian,
the Gnostic Systems, and Memorials from the history of
Christianity, and the Christian life ; then his Allgemeine Ge-
schichte der chr is t lie hen Religion u. Kirche (10 vols., 1826-45).
During its publication appeared, as an independent supple-
ment, Die Geschichte der Pflanzung und Leitung der christ-
lichen Kirche durch die Apostel (2 vols., 1832), and Das Leben
fesu (1837). His departure from the earlier method of writ-
ing Church history was described by Neander himself in the
preface to the 2nd ed. of his St. Bernard as follows : " A new
life of faith had arisen, which began to revivify theological
280 BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Bk. III.
science also. This gave us the impulse to trace the stream of
Christian life in former centuries, and lovingly to include every-
thing Christian. A shallow Auf klarung, without mind or heart,
had, in its conceit and boastful poverty, taught us to despise
what was greatest and noblest in former centuries ; but now
this had been condemned alike by life and science. An
unhistorical age had given way to new insight into history
and to a new desire sympathetically to understand it, and
thoroughly comprehend the characteristic individuality of
historical phenomena." Neander's chief aim was everywhere
to understand what was individual in history. In the princi-
pal figures of ecclesiastical history he tried to depict the repre-
sentative tendencies of each age, and also the types of the
essential tendencies of human nature generally. His guiding
principle in treating both of the history and of the present con-
dition of the Church was that Christianity has room for the
various tendencies of human nature, and aims at permeating
and glorifying them all ; that according to the divine plan these
various tendencies are to occur successively and simultaneously
and to counterbalance each other, so that the freedom and
variety of the development of the spiritual life ought not to
be forced into a single dogmatic form. This was the source
of his sympathetic appreciation of the most different historical
characters, of gnostics and mystics, of saints and heretics,
not even excepting the apostate Julian, in whom he admired
the pathos of phantastic religious enthusiasm even in its hea-
then garb. Hence also his generous tolerance of tendencies
in his own time with which he could not sympathise (e.g. that
of his teacher Planck), his championship of the freedom of
scientific teaching, even on behalf of Rationalistic opponents,
such as the Halle professors, Gesenius and Wegscheider,
when denounced to the government by Hengstenberg. In
one direction only Neander failed to exercise his usual toler-
ance, viz. towards the Hegelian school and the Tubingen
criticism. This was so distasteful to him that in his judgment
of it he became unjust and bitter a sign of the consciousness
of having before him a scientific movement, not only opposed,
but superior to his own. Doubtless that too was incomplete,
and needed to be supplemented by Neander ; but it is equally
certain that it was strong just where Neander was weak.
Neander divided history into a series of separate pictures,
drawn with the loving hand of a master as edifying and instruc-
Ch. III.] ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND HISTORY OF DOGMA. 28 I
tive examples ; but he failed to grasp the connection between
phenomena, or- the general ideas which dominate each age and
give to it its special character, or the regularity of the general
development of the religious spirit in the Church. His was
too much an emotional nature, and his theology was too much
governed by the subjective point of view of Romanticism for
him to be able to do justice to the importance of ideas in
religion and to the mental conflict in the different movements of
thought in the Church. The great dramatic forces of history
were hidden from him by the lyrical emotions of single indi-
viduals. The same preponderance of emotion in his nature
prevented him from fully appreciating historic characters of
marked individuality. His own generous heart enabled him
indeed sympathetically to study the character of historical per-
sons, but he always saw in them mainly those features which
were in accordance with his own feelings ; the corners and
angularities, in which the peculiarities of character find their
most significant expression, he smoothed down, and idealised
his heroes into copies, more or less, of his own individuality.
This was the opposite error to that of the Rationalistic method ;
in the latter a want of sympathetic appreciation had led to the
misrepresentation and caricature of the figures of history, but
in Neander these figures become dim ideal forms, like stars
hard to distinguish in the surrounding mist. Finally, Nean-
der' s pectoral theology involved a serious lack of historical
criticism. This failing was indeed shared by almost all
Romanticists ; as they had grown tired of the sole sovereignty
of the understanding, the understanding was henceforth to
have no authority at all, and clear rational investigation be
doomed to silence, even in its proper province historical cri-
ticism. Too much influenced by the modern historical spirit
consistently to exclude criticism on principle, and yet too much
of an emotional theologian to make thorough-going use of it
where it assailed treasured and beautiful traditions, Neander
never freed himself from that hesitation and want of thorough-
ness which strikes us so painfully in his Life of Jesus. 1
Neander, moreover, regarded miracles, in the proper sense,
as possible, not only in Biblical times, but down to the third
century. If so late, why should they not be accepted much
later, or throughout all history ? Because on that supposition
1 Comp. ante^ p. 219.
282 BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Bk. III.
the scientific weakness of a supernaturalistic treatment of
history of such a kind would be much more strange and in-
tolerable than it actually is in Neander.
Closely allied to Neander, but of a more independent and
versatile mind, is the ecclesiastical historian, CARL HASE.
His strength likewise lies mainly in the loving study and deli-
cate, subtle Description of individual phenomena in history.
His pictures of mediaeval saints {Franz von Assisi, Katerina
von Siena), and of neue Propheten {Die Jungfrau von Orleans,
Savonarola, Thomas Miimer) are both in form and matter
model monographs, and evince a power of sympathetically
entering into peculiar phases of religious life such as was
possessed in an equal degree only by Neander. But Hase's
attitude towards the figures of history is more independent
than Neander' s ; he does not emphasise merely those sides of a
character which appeal to himself, but contrives, in a few brief,
pregnant lines, to sketch a clear and complete objective
picture of it. He does not, like Neander, seek for what is
edifying in the religious life of men and nations, but for what
is characteristic ; so that some details may be far from edifying,
for the simple reason that the actors in history are men, and
often caricature what is sublime. In his Lehrbuch der Kirch-
engeschichte (i ed., 1834, now nth ed.), Hase has succeeded
in compressing an unusually large amount of material into the
smallest possible space without anywhere creating the impres-
sion of a dry skeleton, but he makes " the wealth of life meet-
ing us in the original monuments of each age reveal itself even
in the most compressed outline." This was possible only to
an historian who combined a mastery of style, formed on classic
models, such as is possessed by few scholars, with a happy
instinct in separating the essential from the unessential. " Only
what has at some time truly lived and thereby become im-
mortal, by representing a ray of the Christian spirit, forms
part of history, which is a history of the living and not of the
dead." This excellent principle, enunciated in his preface, is
adhered to by Hase throughout his work. By throwing over-
board much of the worthless cargo usually carried by the
pedantry of scholars, he found room, in the small compass of
a single volume, for matter hitherto omitted or insufficiently
treated in Church histories, such as the religions of the hea-
then nations with which Christianity came into contact, or the
history of ecclesiastical art. Although the strongest point of
Ch. III.] ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND HISTORY OF DOGMA. 283
Hase's Church History is its artistic presentation of a wealth
of material, he 'gives us also from the stores of his wide histori-
cal knowledge, general reflections, birds-eye views, and main
points of observation, as well as his personal verdicts on men
and things. With the kindly tolerance which can be just to
other points of view, he combines a courageous honesty which
shows the dark as well as the bright side of his own Church,
and even of the period of the Reformation, which to other Pro-
testant historians is generally too sacred to be freely criticised.
This incorruptible impartiality in judgment is a merit of
Hase's history all the more valuable from its rareness among
our theologians. In the year 1885, the aged historian pub-
lished the first volume of a Church History, to be completed
in three volumes, in which the brief outlines and indications
of his text-book are further expanded for educated readers
generally. A glance at this volume shows how thoroughly
Hase, usually regarded rather as the historian of the middle
ages and recent times, is acquainted also with ecclesiastical
antiquity. He has, he himself acknowledges, learnt much
from Tubingen criticism ; his refusal to follow it in every
thing, we can only regard with approval. For my own
part, at all events, I have, in following my own line of study,
become more and more convinced of the truth of the verdict
pronounced by Hase (p. 175): "The Tubingen school has
perceived a part of the truth, the profound division in the
Apostolic Church (formerly lightly passed over), two forms
taken by primitive Christianity. But, as often happens, the
discoverer of a new truth overrates its importance. A definite
Jewish Christianity existed towards the close of the cen-
tury in Palestine only, although there may have been a few
individual Churches in Syria also. On the other hand, Paul's
victory must not be understood to mean that the converted
Gentiles at once grasped his profound ideas in opposition to
the necessity of the law ; they in their strict consistency are
not for the popular mind ; the Churches composed of Gentiles
would be likely to feel themselves morally strengthened and
quickened religiously by the spirit proceeding from Christ,
without troubling themselves about the Jewish law." If it is
granted to the venerable author to complete this admirable
work, it will remain a lasting and valuable monument of the
life-work of a German theologian and scholar. 1
1 Since the text was written the venerable historian has died.
284 BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Bk. III.
GIESELER'S Church History (3 vols., down to the Peace of
Westphalia, published by himself, 1824-1853, the subsequent
vols., 4-6, edited by Redepenning from his remains), is an
excellent aid to the study of ecclesiastical history, giving as it
does more fully than any other handbook the original authori-
ties for the views taken. Gieseler wished that each age should
speak for itself, since only by this means can the peculiarity of
its ideas be fully appreciated. The authors own account is so
completely subordinated to his quotations that the meagre text
is often little more than a heading to the notes. We get little
more than the bare materials of the history ; what he is to
think of them, is left by the learned historian to the reader him-
self. This objectivity is related to that of a Hase or a Baur
as a skilfully arranged photograph to the picture of an artist.
NIEDNER'S Ecclesiastical History is praised for its indepen-
dence and individuality of thought, but is also censured for its
heaviness and obscurity. At any rate its success has not
been great. HAGENBACH'S work is distinguished by the quali-
ties of an agreeable and edifying narrative, and is popular in
lay circles. The Ecclesiastical History of KURTZ, written
from the point of view of the Lutheran orthodoxy, has ap-
peared in two or three editions of varying length ; it contains
a collection of materials conveniently arranged for the purposes
of students.
The most important work of this century on Church History
is that of C. F. BAUR, his last great work, and the ripest fruit
of his far-reaching scientific researches, of which the works
on New Testament criticism above discussed l are only a frag-
ment, although the most important one. In order to review
his achievements in this department, we must first go back
to his earlier works on the history of religion and dogmas,
which preceded his epoch-making critical labours. The first
of these, Symbolik ^lnd Mythologie oder die N aturreligion des
Alterthums (1824), is written from the position of Schleier-
macher's theology, and also shows the influence of Schelling
and Creuzer. Religion is traced back to the spiritual nature
of man, and its realisation discovered in the history of religion
at large, which as a divine education of the human race is a
continual revelation of God ; mythology is also to be regarded
as a portion of this revelation, and hence the antithesis of
1 p. 227, sqq.
Ch. III.] ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND HISTORY OF DOGMA. 285
supernatural and natural revelation is reducible to a mere
difference in the degree of truth contained in each particular
religion. Even in this, Baur's earliest work, is noticeable his
effort to discover the rational content of the creations of the
religious imagination (Vorstellung), combined with the dispo-
sition to thrust into myths philosophical ideas foreign to them,
and to overlook their natural psychological sources. The first
literary fruits of his theological professorship in Tubingen
were the works lying on the borderland between mythology
and the history of dogma, Das manic hdisc he Religions system
(1831), Apollonius von Tyana (1832), Die christliche Gnosis
(1835), and Ueber das Christliche im Platonismus oder Sc-
krates itnd Christus (1837). The choice not less than the
treatment of these subjects is indicative of the large breadth of
view and the insight of the historian into the comparative his-
tory of religions ; he seeks for the points where Christianity
came into contact now as a friend, then as a foe with other
religions, and in conflict with them proved itself the higher,
the "absolute religion." His investigation of Gnosticism has
admittedly thrown light upon this obscure subject, though we
must likewise acknowledge that he interpreted and idealised
this mixture of Oriental mythology and Greek philosophy too
much from the point of view of modern philosophy.
Baur first entered on theology in the stricter sense by his
book, Gegensatz des Katholicismus imd Protestantismus nach
den Prinzipien imd Hanptdogmen der beiden Lehrbegriffe
(1834, and 2nd ed. enlarged, 1836). This is a defence of Pro-
testantism, evoked by Mohler's Symbolik, not indeed of the
empirical Protestantism expounded in the confessions of the
Churches, but of an ideal Protestantism on the lines of Schleier-
macher's Glaubenslehre and Hegel's Philosophy of Religion,
with the speculative doctrines of which the dogmas of the Pro-
testant communions are identified with a certain naive ingenu-
ousness. This disregard of the profound difference between his
own views and those of the Churches is characteristic of Baur ;
it is partly the result of his conscientious conviction that he
was faithful to the Protestant principle and its normal doctrinal
development ; partly also of his tendency to convert dogmatic
conceptions ( Vorstellnngen] too directly into philosophical
ideas, overlooking their actual origin in the religious spirit.
This defect is most apparent in the larger histories of dogma
published next, Die christliche Lehre von der Versb'hming in
286 BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Bk. III.
ihrer geschicktlichen Entwicklung bis auf die neueste Zeit
(1838), and Die christliche Lehre von der Dreieinigkeit ^lnd
Menschwerdung Gottes in ihrer geschichtlichen Entwicklung
(3 vols. 1841-43), followed by the Lehrbuch der christlichen
Dogmengeschichte (1847), which contains a concise survey of
the whole history of dogma. His method of treating these
subjects is characterised by Baur himself in his prefaces as
follows : The object of history is to give an account of the
nature of mind itself, its inner movement and development,
its consciousness of itself, advancing from point to point.
This can only be done by a speculative treatment of the
materials. For whenever there is inner connection there is
reason, and whatever is by means of reason must also be for
reason, for the contemplation of mind. Without speculation
historical research fails to get below the surface and outside
of the matter, and in proportion as the subject is comprehen-
sive and important, and belongs directly to the sphere of
thought, it is necessary not merely to reproduce in oneself
what individuals have thought and done, but also to follow in
thought the thoughts of the eternal Mind of which history is
the work. This is indeed a magnificent conception of the
historian's task, to trace the divine thoughts in history and
comprehend the ideal or teleological necessity in the develop-
ment of mind. But when Baur thought with Hegel that the
development of the living religious spirit was identical with
the dialectical development of logical categories, and that the
rise and growth of dogmas in the Christian Church can be
adequately rendered in the formulae of Hegelian terminology,
this was a decided error by which the value of his learned
works was sensibly diminished. We are not told exactly
what the real meaning of the Fathers was for their opinions
are always translated into the language of Hegel ; nor do we
get a clear account of the various factors, religious and secu-
lar, individual and social, universal and temporal, contributing
to the formation of dogma for instead of all these real fac-
tors appears always the imaginary cause in the "self-move-
ment of the idea." We may in fact affirm that Baur's slavery
to the formulae of the Hegelian philosophy was a weak point
in his treatment of the history of dogma, which only served
to obscure the truth and profundity of his conception of his-
tory as a true development of the human mind, and to give
the opponents of his principles many apparent advantages.
Ch. III.] ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND HISTORY OF DOGMA. 287
It is all the more important to notice that Baur in his later
years freed himself to an observable degree from this defect,
(which is specially characteristic of the monographs written
when in middle life on the history of dogma), and advanced
to a more independent conception of religious and historical
life ; of religious life, by subsequently more definitely distin-
guishing between religion and philosophy, and making the
former primarily ethical instead of intellectual ; and of histori-
cal life, by recognising the importance of the personalities,
before almost concealed under the generality of the idea, as
representatives of the idea, and as the concrete motive-forces
of history. This advance is seen in his last work, his Kirchen-
geschichte, which is therefore the maturest and most substan-
tial fruit of his labours, while its superiority to all his former
writings in point of clearness and ease of language is no doubt
connected with this improvement in matter. Baur had
thoroughly prepared himself for this work, in which he in-
tended to exhibit in connection the results of the labours of
his life, by a critical account of the Epochen der kirchlichen
Geschichtsschreibung (1852), in which he showed the deficien-
cies of previous methods, and demanded that ecclesiastical
history, like the secular history of our time (above all that of
Ranke), should abandon its trivial discussion of proximate and
accidental causes, and rather describe the great connexion
and general causes of the phenomena in the ruling ideas of
each age. This essay was followed by Das Christenthum
iind die christliche Kirche der drei ersten Jahrhunderte
(1853); next came, in Baur's lifetime, Die christliche Kirche
von Anfang des vierten bis zum Ende des seeks ten Jahrhun-
derts (1859). The three subsequent volumes, containing the
history of the mediaeval age, of the modern age, and of the
nineteenth century, were published from his remains in the
years immediately following his death (1860). In the preface
to the first volume, Baur announces his intention of giving a
more connected account of the early history of Christianity
than had previously been done ; in particular the basis pro-
vided in history itself for Christianity in the form of a Church
must be more accurately and thoroughly investigated, the
connexion and unity of the whole must be made plain, the
differences and mutual relations of the various co-operating
forces and principles explained ; in short, as harmonious a
picture as possible formed of all the individual traits which
288 BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Bk. III.
distinguish this rich period. This conception of the object
and method of Church history will remain a model for all time.
In the execution, advancing knowledge will, of course, discover
and correct errors in detail, but taken as a whole, it is the first
thorough and satisfactory attempt to explain the rise of Chris-
tianity and the Church on strictly historical lines, i.e. as a
natural development of the religious spirit of our race under
the combined operation of various human causes. This is
what makes Baur's Church History, and especially its first
volume, a classic for all time. It may perhaps be of some in-
terest to those who do not read German, and have not direct
access to this work, if I here give a short sketch of Baur's
account of primitive Christianity, thus carrying on the above
(p. 263 sqq.) outline of Wellhausen's history of Israel, which
will assist in the formation of an approximately true idea of
the results of modern criticism in respect to Biblical and early
ecclesiastical history.
Baur begins with the preparation for Christianity in the
Gentile and Jewish world. This includes, besides the political
universalism of the Roman Empire, the Graeco- Roman
philosophy ; the Socratic and Platonic idealism and the Stoic
and Epicuraean search for the summum bonum contain the
closest parallels to the religious questions of Christianity,
and in the later eclecticism of a Cicero and Seneca we have
the outlines of a natural theology, which was subsequently
further developed on Christian soil. We may therefore say
that in Christianity the various movements of the time con-
verge towards the same goal, and find in it their ultimate idea
and most complete expression. Simultaneously, Judaism
had assumed in Alexandrine Hellenism a more subtle and
spiritual form, new ideas were borrowed from the Greeks,
and in particular the Old Testament conception of God was
lifted out of the narrow sphere of the Jewish theocracy. Even
the dread of contact with the world and the religious self-
contemplation of the Essenes was one of the points of
spiritual affinity between Judaism and Christianity. Thus
the whole previous history of mankind was a preparation for
Christianity ; it contained nothing which had not already in
some form or other been recognised as a result of rational
thought, or as a want of the human heart, or as a demand
of the ethical consciousness. In order to ascertain the
original character of Christianity, Baur starts from the Sermon
Ch. III.] ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND HISTORY OF DOGMA. 289
on the Mount, Matthew v. In the Beatitudes we get a glance
into the centre of the principle of thought and feeling of
which it was the product, viz. "an infinitely sublime religious
consciousness, which, though pervaded by the deepest feeling
of the pressure of the finite and all the contradictions of the
present, rises far above everything finite and limited. It is
the pure feeling of the need of salvation, still undeveloped
but containing within it the antithesis of sin and grace, and
as such necessarily involving the reality of salvation." The
emphasis laid by Jesus on the heart and character, as that
in which alone man's absolute moral worth consists, is an
essentially new step, a departure in principle from Mosaism,
and is the fundamental principle of Christianity. And just as
the idea of righteousness is deepened into a perfect surrender
of man's own will to God's, so the Old Testament idea of
the theocracy is so much spiritualised that everything relating
to man's connexion with the kingdom of God is made
dependent solely upon ethical conditions. " Christianity, thus
viewed, is in its most essential and primitive elements a
purely ethical religion, and its highest and peculiar excellence
is its wholly ethical character as rooted m the ethical con-
sciousness of mankind." But this spiritual substance of
Christianity took concrete form in the Messianic idea, and by
its aid entered on its historical development, the conscious-
ness of Jesus widening to universality by means of the
national consciousness. By the name " Son of man " Jesus
expressed his truly universal Messianic vocation ; in Peter's
confession this became an acknowledged fact for himself and
for his disciples ; in Jerusalem he put the nation to the test,
whether they adhered to their traditional, material and par-
ticularist Messianic belief, or would recognise a Messiah such
as he was and had shown himself by his whole life and work.
The answer could only be the one of which he had long
himself been assured. But his apparent overthrow was really
the most decisive victory and entrance upon life. His death
was the complete rupture between him and Judaism. What
the Resurrection really was lies outside the province of his-
torical inquiry, which has only to maintain that in the belief
of the disciples the resurrection of Jesus was the most certain
and incontrovertible of facts. So far as history is concerned,
the necessary pre-supposition for everything that follows is
not so much the fact of the resurrection of Jesus itself as
G.T. u
290 BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Bk. III.
the belief in it ; but no psychological analysis can penetrate
the inward spiritual process by which this belief was gene-
rated in the mind of the disciples. In their view the return
of Jesus at the end of the world was so closely connected
with his departure, that by this expectation the old Messianic
hopes might easily be renewed and strengthened in them,
whereby the difference between the disciples and the other
Jews would sink into insignificance. What was it that raised
the belief in the risen Jesus to a new principle of universal
importance? It was, Baur answers, the work of the Apostle
Paul, prepared for by the Hellenist Stephen. His conversion,
even though we cannot get to the bottom of it by any psy-
chological analysis, may be conceived as brought about by
the help of the great impression made on him by the death
of Jesus, which from the very fact of its contradicting all
Jewish national assumptions, necessarily gained in Paul's view
an importance extending far beyond Jewish particularism, so
that he first fully grasped the universalism of Christianity.
The two points of view which had been united in the person
of Jesus the universal or ethical and the national Jewish or
Messianic, were respectively divided amongst his disciples,
the elder apostles, generally laying emphasis on the national
character of Jesus, while Paul gave energetic expression to
his ethical universality. He did not indeed appeal to the
details of the life or teaching of Jesus, since the whole of
Christianity was for his mind concentrated in the person of
Jesus and the great facts of his death and resurrection. After
Paul had for a considerable time been working among the
mixed Churches in Syria, he and the Jewish Christians,
including the Apostles, became involved in a dispute, which
ended with the resolution that each of the two parties should
pursue its own independent course separate from the other.
How deep the disunion really was, in spite of the brotherly
shake of the hand, was soon seen at Antioch, in the personal
quarrel between Paul and Peter, which left a lasting impres-
sion on both sides. In none of Paul's epistles have we the
slightest sign of the two apostles having afterwards been in
any way reconciled ; the Acts passes over the scene in
Antioch in such deliberate silence that we can plainly enough
infer how little the recollection of it accorded with the concili-
atory Tendenz of the writer ; and in the pseudo-Clementine
Homilies (of the latter half of the second century) we can still
Ch. III.] ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND HISTORY OF DOGMA. 2QI
see that even then the Jewish Christians could not forgive
Paul his harsh words about their chief apostle. Soon after
we meet with the systematic opposition of the Jewish Chris-
tians to the Apostle Paul in Galatia, where they wished to
convert the Pauline Church to Jewish legalism ; and then in
Corinth, where they tried to destroy Paul's authority by all
the resources of intrigue and under the pretext of the
authority of the original apostles. And even in Rome, Baur
holds, Paul had to contend with Jewish Christians ; in order
to defend his mission to the Gentiles against their prejudices
he wrote his Epistle to the Romans, the last, in Baur's view,
which we have of his. During the Apostle's last stay in
Jerusalem also, the Jewish Christians took part in the tumult
which led to his imprisonment, and thus proved the implaca-
bility of their hatred of the Apostle of the Gentiles, whom
they regarded as an apostate from the Law of their fathers,
by which they continued to feel themselves bound. The
reconciliation, so far as possible, of these two parties, hitherto
sharply opposed to each other, by the adjustment of their
differences and the softening of their antagonism, was, accord-
ing to Baur, the chief object aimed at in the sub-apostolic age ;
the whole literature of this period appears from this point
of view as a series of monuments of this opposition, and its
gradual reduction by the advances of both sides. Of the Gos-
pels, Luke is the purest and most important record of Paulin-
ism, while Matthew represents Jewish Christianity. The
latter found its strongest anti- Pauline expression in the
Apocalypse, which Baur regarded as a work of the Apostle
John, and interpreted thoughout from the point of view of
the primitive Christian party struggle ; so that even in the
censure of the Balaamites and Nicolaitans (i.e. libertine
Gnostics), he only saw an attack on Paul. As further chief
witnesses for the continued power and even supremacy of
Jewish Christianity, Baur appeals to Hegesippus and the
pseudo-Clementine writings, from the middle of the second
century, but he is too hasty when he makes use of the
" Tendenzroman " of the latter as a sign of the Judaistic ten-
dencies of the Church at that time. But in spite of this
bitter enmity to Paul, he holds that Jewish Christianity had
an infinite capacity for development, and was so prudent in
everywhere meeting the needs of the Church by the sacrifice
of its former legalism, that it came to exercise an influence on
BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Bk. III.
the formation of the Christian Church which cannot be
exaggerated, as is specially proved by the development of
the hierarchy, altogether an outcome of Jewish Christianity.
At the head of the canonical writings, which were at once the
expression and the agents of this process of conciliation, he
places the Epistle to the Hebrews, which by the emphasis
it lays on the priesthood is shown to be a product of Jewish
Christianity, although of a higher and more spiritual form of
it, already influenced by Paulinism. (This opinion receives
a remarkable correction in a note which describes the charac-
teristics of the Epistle to the Hebrews as " Alexandrinism,"
which is neither Judaism nor Paulinism, but intermediate
between them, and by its limitation of them superior to both
an excellent remark, which only needs to be consistently
worked out to lead to a different conception of the develop-
ment of post- Pauline Christianity.) The same effort at recon-
ciliation, represented in the Epistle to the Hebrews on the
Jewish Christian -side, is represented on the Pauline side by
the Epistles to the Ephesians and Colossians ; they em-
phatically insist on the unity of the Church, as the essential
result of Christ's death as healing all division, and of Christ's
central all-inclusive position in the universe. In the Pastoral
Epistles, and in those of the pseudo- Ignatius, the Pauline
party displays an eirenical readiness, for the sake of an effec-
tive opposition to the heretics, to meet the efforts of the
Jewish Christians in the direction of a hierarchical organisa-
tion of the Church. In return, the Jewish Christians, in the
Epistle of James, so far made concession to the followers of
Paul that in spite of its rejection of Paul's doctrine of justi-
fication, it still speaks of a "law of liberty" and a "royal
law of love," and by its practical morals makes a contribution
to the formation of Catholic Christianity. In particular the
First Epistle of Peter proves that the Jewish Christians were
even able to accommodate themselves to the dogmatic ideas
of Paulinism by direct quotation of Pauline Epistles ; and the
Second Epistle of Peter even gives " brother Paul " a certifi-
cate of orthodoxy, and only laments that some things in his
epistles are hard to be understood, and had been misinter-
preted. Finally, in order to remove all disturbing recollection
of the Apostolic struggles out of the way of the union of
parties desired by both sides, the Acts of the Apostles gave
an ideal picture of the Apostolic age, in which the two party
Ch. III.] ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND HISTORY OF DOGMA. 293
leaders, Paul and Peter, were designedly made so much alike
that they really seem to have changed places. Since this
deviation from history must be intentional, the Acts must be
regarded as " an effort at conciliation and a proposal of terms
of peace on the part of a Paulinist, who wished to pro-
cure the recognition by the Jewish Christians of Gentile
Christianity, by concessions from his own party to Judaism,
and sought to influence both parties in this manner (on this
view, compare the remarks above, p. 229). A similar position
is taken by Baur with regard to the writings of the Apostolic
Fathers and of Justin Martyr, and he explains the legend of
the death of both Paul and Peter in Rome as the expression
of the finally consummated reconciliation of the primitive
Christian parties. The same process of development, of
which this was the practical side in the Roman Church, is
seen on its ideal side in the Gospel of John ; while in the
former case the object was the realisation of the idea of the
Church, it was here the evolution of an ideal theology. As
there Peter and Paul were fraternally united as patrons of
the Roman Church, so here in this Johannine theology faith
and works disappear in love as their higher unity. The
opposition through which Paulinism had been compelled to
fight its way, is in John removed into the far distance. The
particularism of Judaism, with all the contradictions it in-
cluded, is lost in the general contradiction of the two prin-
ciples of light and darkness, which forms the background of
John's theology and also dominates the sphere of ethics. This
is a point of affinity between the Johannine Gospel and
Gnosticism, that great movement of the second century, which
both directly and indirectly greatly contributed to the forma-
tion of catholic and ecclesiastical Christianity. Here fresh
questions present themselves, the horizon is widened, but new
dangers threaten. God and world, spirit and matter, origin,
development, and consummation of the world, are the concep-
tions here involved, and in their development the antitheses
of the religions take a share. The questions of salvation
and of the ethico-religious consciousness are generalised into
questions of metaphysical speculation. But the Catholic
Church, everywhere careful to preserve the proper mean, had
to avoid this extreme equally with that of Jewish particularism.
For it was here threatened by an equally serious peril from
ideas by which the Christian consciousness would altogether
294 BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Bk. III.
lose its historical character. The tendency of Gnosticism
is to regard Christianity not primarily as the principle of
salvation but as the principle of the development of the world
generally ; it does not rest so much on a religious as on a
philosophical basis, and conducts again to philosophy as the
highest product of the heathen world ; it is the extension and
development of the Alexandrine religious philosophy which
had sprung from the philosophy of Greece. But in so far
as it clothes philosophical ideas less in the form of abstract
conceptions than of myths and allegories, it is in this respect
more akin to religion than to philosophy ; it is therefore
neither pure philosophy nor pure religion, but both together,
a combination of the two elements which Baur (perhaps not
very happily) calls " Religionspkilosophie" He further dis-
tinguishes three main forms of Gnosis, in one of which
Christianity is mixed with heathenism, in another with Juda-
ism, and in the third is opposed to both. With Gnosticism
Baur contrasts Montanism as the opposite heresy. While in
the former the idea supplants the historical reality, the latter
is a reaction of the realism of the Jewish Christian hope of
the future against its idealistic evaporation and ecclesiastical
secularisation. In an age in which the belief in the nearness
of the parousia failed, prophetic ecstasy grew rare or ceased,
and when, with this enthusiasm of the early Churches, their
ascetic zeal and love of holiness grew faint, there sprang up
in the Montanists a new form of ecstatic prophecy, a burning
chiliastic belief and a rigorous penitential zeal. These move-
ments of the second century, so different in character, and
crossing each other in all directions, all led to the develop-
ment and consolidation of the Church's doctrine and constitu-
tion as the indispensable breakwater against the billows of the
time. Not only had the practical religious side of Christian-
ity to be maintained against the transcendental speculations
of the Gnostics, but also the very ground to be conquered
against the chiliastic fanaticism of the Montanists, which cut
off all possibility of the historical development and progress of
Christianity in the world. It was therefore by means of its
antagonism to the Gnostics and Montanists that the definite
consciousness and growing solidity of the Catholic Church
were developed out of the reconciliation of Jewish and Gentile
Christians. In the struggle with the Gnostics was evolved
the principle of ecclesiastical tradition as the final court of
Ch. III.] ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND HISTORY OF DOGMA. 295
appeal in all disputes, the appeal to the Apostolic writings
having proved insufficient, owing to the possibility of various
and especially allegorical interpretations. That only on which
the Apostolic Churches agree can be received as true, for that
must have been taught by the Apostles ; what is inconsistent
with it is heresy, i.e. an arbitrary and new individual opinion.
But who was to decide what was Apostolical tradition and
the common faith of the Church ? The bishops alone could
do this, it being assumed that they were appointed by the
Apostles as their successors. It is true this assumption did
not correspond to the fact, since all indications go to prove
that the Churches were originally autonomous and chose their
own presidents, who were bishops and presbyters in one,
while the function of teaching was not confined to this office.
It was not until the struggle with the heretics showed the
need of a stricter centralisation of the Churches, that there
was instituted, at first in the individual Churches, the
monarchical episcopate superior to the presbyters. This epis-
copate provided a fixed rallying point against the separatist
tendencies of the heretics, and applied the Christian conception
of a supernatural world to the practical ifeeds of the present,
thus initiating the further historical development of Christianity
on the basis of a universal Church. But the same effort at unity
which had first raised the bishop of the individual Church
above the presbyters, went on to elevate the Bishop of Rome
above the others who were originally his equals. That
the Roman bishop was Peter's successor in Rome, is an his-
torical fiction, Peter never having been in Rome. The
unhistorical legend about Peter took its rise at first merely
in Rome's political importance, and since the papacy itself
depends on this legend, we must seek for the origin of the
papacy in the simple fact that the importance enjoyed by
Rome, as the capital of the world, was transferred to the
bishop of the Roman Church. The most striking feature of
the hierarchical system thus established is the simplicity of
the forms on which it depends. The fundamental form is
the relation of the bishop to the Church of which he is the
head. This form continues unchanged, however much the
system may be developed, enlarged, or modified. The bishop
of the smallest Church is essentially the same as the pope at
the summit of the papacy. At all stages of this hierarchical
system the same fundamental form repeats itself, its greatest
2Q5 BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Bk. III.
peculiarity being its capacity of indefinite extension. And this
hierarchical system is at the same time essentially theocratic ;
everything rests on divine authority ; the relation of the bishop
to his community is a repetition of the relation of Christ to
the Church. " The whole system is conditioned by a stage
of religious development in which men require to see a
visible representation of the relation in which Christ as the
Lord of the Church stands to it." The form assumed by the
Church in its episcopal constitution demanded also a corre-
sponding fixed and systematic expression in dogma. The
close connexion between the evolution of the constitutional
form and of dogma as its expression, is made very manifest
at the close of the first period of ecclesiastical development :
the oecumenical synod at Nicsea saw the completest repre-
sentation of the episcopate and also the enunciation of the
highest content of the Christian consciousness in the dogma
of the Homoousia. In this period the whole development of
dogma is concentrated in the doctrine of Christ's person.
This is the reflection and concrete expression of the current
view of Christian salvation as a whole. The Christ of the
Synoptists was still a human Messiah, miraculously born, it
is true, and anointed with the Spirit, and raised by his resur-
rection and ascension to divine honours, but still essentially
man. In Paul's view also Christ is man, not, however, an
earthly and phenomenal man, but a heavenly and spiritual
one, the eternal type of the spiritual sons of God, appearing
in time in the flesh, the second Adam. This higher phase
of Christology in Paul was connected with his higher view of
Christianity as the universal revelation of salvation for all
the world. The Christ of the Apocalypse also has divine
attributes predicated of him which seem to leave no essential
difference between him and God, but they are only externally
connected with the person of the Messiah, who is essentially
the instrument for the execution of the divine judgment.
The Christology of the Epistle to the Hebrews and the
smaller Pauline Epistles, on the other hand, rises to a higher
stage of development, and marks the transition to the Johan-
nine Christology, in which the idea of the Logos, borrowed
from the Alexandrine religious philosophy, and widely current
in the philosophy of the time, is transferred to Christ, the
doctrine of the Church corresponding to the Gnostic doctrine
of the aeons. As in philosophy, the Logos in the Fourth
Ch. III.] ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND HISTORY OF DOGMA. 2Q7
Gospel is the intermediate being connecting the transcendental
God with the world. This being becomes by the incarnation
the person of Jesus, who is accordingly regarded by the
Fourth Gospel as the self-revelation of a divine principle, the
historical view of the Synoptists being thus left far behind. In
the latter half of the second century the Johannine concep-
tion of the Logos came to be the dominant one, superseding
the earlier less definite ideas. This imposed on the theo-
logical thought of the Church the duty to define the relation
of this divine Logos or Son to God the Father. This was
first done in the sense form of a gradual emanation, corre-
sponding to the materialistic realism of Tertullian's con-
ception of God ; while in the abstract, transcendental idea
of God of the Alexandrians (Clement), almost all personal dis-
tinction vanishes between the Father and the Son. This view
lived on in the " Monarchians " of the third century, of whom
Sabellius particularly is ably interpreted by Baur. In the
Christology of Origen the two views, hitherto running parallel,
the one emphasising the distinction between God and the
Son, and the other their unity, balance each other in such a
way that his Christology became the turning point in the
history of the dogma, and the point of separation of the two
views, which were henceforward opposed to each other as
Arianism and Athanasianism. At Nicaea, with the victory
of the Athanasian formula of Christ's equality with God
(komoousia), the hierarchical aristocracy of the episcopate also
triumphed over the democratic presbyters. When Christian-
ity had, under Constantine, overcome the Roman world, its
consciousness of being the sole true and valid, or the " abso-
lute," religion found expression in the dogmatic enunciation
of the orthodox doctrine of the absolute equality of its founder
with God. Thus the inner history of the consciousness
of the Church, simultaneously with the external history of
the relation of the Church to the world and State, came
under Constantine to a climax which marked the close of
an era.
Here I must end this extract from Baur's Christianity in
tlie First Three Centtiries, space forbidding me to give more.
But I hope that enough has been given to show the mag-
nificently historical spirit of this work, and to prove that the
traditional accusations of an " a priori construction of history,"
''twisting of facts," etc., are baseless conventional fables, by
'298 BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY, [Bk. III.
which smaller men try to protect themselves in view of the
superiority of Baur.
Since Baur's, no important work has appeared embracing
the whole of Church history (of Hase's unfinished work we
have spoken above, p. 283). Much labour has, however, been
devoted to the more accurate investigation of particular
questions, both of the ancient Church, and especially of the
period of the Reformation, and valuable material for the
illumination of the past has been accumulated in monographs
and biographies. An enumeration of these works does not,
however, fall within the scope of this book. We can here
mention only the most recent work on the history of dogma,
.as it represents, with pre-eminent ability as well as partiality,
a new school of historical theology ; it is ADOLF HARNACK'S
Lekrbuch der Dogmengeschichte, vol. i., die Entstehung des
kirchlichen Dogmas ( 1 886), and vol. ii.,part i., die Entwickelung
des kirchl. Dogmas (1887). On the publication of the first
volume, the work at once attracted general attention, and
gained for its author the well-deserved reputation of an eminent
historian. It is based on a thorough independent investigation
of the authorities, and the vast mass of material is arranged
with rare skill and clearness ; the writer's style is lucid and
vigorous, and he is always pleasing and suggestive, even
when not convincing. But the book owes its special im-
portance to its fundamental view of the history of dogma, by
which it gives typical expression to a prevalent mode of
thought and feeling of our time. Perhaps we can most
simply describe its character by saying that to Baur's opti-
mistic evolutionary theory of history it opposes a pessimistic
view of Church history, which makes this history to consist,
not in a progressive teleological and rational development
and ever richer unfolding of the Christian spirit, but in a
progressive obscuration of the truth, in the progress of
disease in the Church, produced by the sudden irruption of
Hellenic philosophy and other secularising influences. We
can understand that such a view is acceptable to a realistic
and practical age which has long lost all touch with the
ancient dogmas; we cannot deny that it contains relative
truth, and might, in fact, serve as a salutary complement
to Baur's optimism ; but is it adapted to form the supreme
guiding principle of ecclesiastical history, or can it justly
claim to be the only scientific view, or the right to condemn
Ch. III.] ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND HISTORY OF DOGMA. 299
as unscientific scholasticism the teleological theory of evo-
lution, which, in the manifold play of individual causes,
recognises the governance of a higher Reason ? These are
questions to be seriously asked. Moreover, this pessimistic
verdict on Church history is by no means a new one ; it is
found, in a certain sense, in the Magdeburg Centuriators, in
a different form in the mystic Gottfried Arnold, and in yet
another in the Rationalists. All these historians, however,
in their condemnation of the development of the Church had
a definite standard in what they assumed to be the original
truth of Biblical Christianity. But if we ask wherein, ac-
cording to Harnack, uncorrupted Christianity consists, we
nowhere get a clear answer. He cannot regard it as con-
sisting in the whole teaching of the New Testament, or he
would not with such surprising indifference hurry over the
Pauline and Johannine theology. Are we therefore to go
back to Jesus ? But Harnack leaves us in complete un-
certainty whether we are to take as the genuine, permanent
constituents of Christianity all that is reported in the Gospels
as the preaching of Jesus, including the declarations regarding
the permanent validity of the Jewish law, the limitation of
the preaching of the gospel to Israel, Christ's visible return
to establish an earthly kingdom, and similar matters. But
where a definite conception, based on history, of the nature
of Christianity is so wholly wanting, the question as to
whether individual phenomena are truly Christian or a de-
generation, corruption, and secularisation of true Christianity,
can only be answered according to personal taste. In so far
this method of writing Church history is at least as subjective
as the Rationalistic method of the last century. Harnack's
keen-sighted realism is undoubtedly of great value, but it
needs to be combined with the profound idealism of a Baur
to form the true combination which can yield a completely
satisfactory treatment of Church history.
BOOK IV.
THE PROGRESS OF THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN
SINCE 1825.
CHAPTER I.
THE SCHOOLS OF PHILOSOPHY IN THEIR RELATION TO
THEOLOGY.
AT the opening of the present century the state of religious
life in England was substantially the same as in Germany.
On the one hand, a rational supernaturalism prevailed, which
sought to combine faith in revealed religion with the empirical
philosophy of Locke. This was attempted by showing the
possibility on rational grounds of revelation, and by basing
the fact of revelation on the external evidence supplied in the
miracles and prophecies of the Bible. At the same time it
conceived the God of revelation under Deistical forms, and
repudiated all vivid religious feeling as mystical ''enthusiasm."
Utilitarian considerations, which formed the practical side of
the empirical philosophy of the period, also played a pro-
minent part in orthodox belief; either on the ground of the
tangible use of the doctrines of the Church in promoting
social order, or with a view to the transcendental benefits
implied in the divine reward of virtue. In contrast with this
unemotional and rational faith of the upper classes, satis-
faction for the religious needs of the lower classes was sought
for in a quickening of the consciousness of sin and grace after
the manner of Methodism. But in this " Evangelical party "
quickened religious feeling and zealous philanthropic effort
were so much cut off from any living relation to the thought
of the age and to theological inquiry, that any influence from
this quarter upon the theology of the Church was not more,
in fact still less, possible than was the case with the older
German Pietism. To bring new life and movement into
theology, a complete revolution in the minds of men was
needed. This followed in England from causes similar to
those which had produced a like result in Germany ; and in
part the revolution was due to the direct influence of idealism
as it had sprung from German Romanticism.
303
304 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV.
The ultimate and profoundest source of this mental revolu-
tion, which, at the beginning of the century, spread through
all cultured nations, must be sought in the nature of man.
After the cold understanding had in the eighteenth century
exercised despotic sway, starving the emotions and fettering
the phantasy, these wronged sides of our nature once more
claimed their rights, and rebelled against the despotism of
the understanding with an imperious violence which was as
tyrannical and exclusive as that of the understanding had
been. " A return to nature and natural emotions," was
now everywhere the watchword, and Rousseau became the
prophet of the new age. The cry found its echo in the
" storm and stress" spirits of belles lettres: Herder and Goethe
were its heralds in Germany, Wordsworth and Shelley in
English poetry. Emotion, entering into loving sympathy
with Nature, could no longer behold in her the dead mechan-
ism to which sensualistic philosophy had degraded her ; the
machine, which had been robbed of its divinity, was once
again transformed into the living garment of God. But
Nature owed her reanimation to the soul of man, which had
taken possession of her. It was therefore impossible that
men should go no further than external Nature : they turned
their gaze upon their own nature, and sought in the depths
of the feeling heart, in its unconscious surmisings and un-
utterable sighs, the presence of a divine spirit, the witness of
our kinship to God. Thus from the Gospel of Nature of
Rousseau sprang the philosophical idealism of Kant and of
Fichte, and the religious pantheism of Herder and Novalis.
In like manner, in the case of Wordsworth, the poetic love of
Nature became a devoted self-surrender to the God whose
rule we recognise within not less than around us. If the
standpoint which was thus reached was still only the sub-
jectivism of the eighteenth century, the events of history ^N^^,
at the same time, bringing about an important advance.
Rousseau's Gospel of Nature had been marked by an
anti-social and anti-historical tendency ; its aim had been the
emancipation of the self-sufficient individual from the limita-
tions of an outlived order of society. At first it was every-
where taken up in this sense. In Germany the " schone
Seelen " greeted with enthusiasm the French Revolution,
and in his Robbers, Schiller depicted the Titanic endeavour
of the individual, in the fresh consciousness of its strength,
Ch. I.] PHILOSOPHY IN RELATION TO THEOLOGY. 305
to break up the old order of the world and to construct a
new one to its- own mind. In the same spirit the youthful
Coleridge wrote poems breathing sympathy with revolutionary
democracy, and, with Southey, planned a " grand scheme
of Pantisocracy," a Utopian commonwealth of liberty and
equality, to be established in America. Out of this intoxica-
tion of individualism the idealists of Europe were rudely
awakened by the thunder of the cannon of Bonaparte. As
the social system of Europe collapsed like a house of cards
under the hand of the new Caesar, it was made clear whither
the principle of selfish individualism, which breaks up society
into helpless atoms, inevitably conducts. When it appeared
that the separate nations were to be broken up and converted
into the one empire of the Caesar, the national spirit every-
where rose up against the foreign tyranny, patriotic feeling,
which distinguishes in such a marked manner the nineteenth
from the eighteenth century, was aroused from its slumbers.
And as the nations became conscious of their own peculiar
characteristics and rights, they once more called to remem-
brance their own past history. With admiring love they
recurred to the period of their youth and early manhood,
and discovered, precisely in those epochs which Rationalism
in its ingratitude and want of insight had despised, stores of
national strength, virtue, and honour, forming a humiliating
contrast to the weakness and disgrace of their own time.
Thus the enthusiasts of individual freedom were transformed
into the patriotic champions of national liberty in the anti-
Napoleonic wars, and out of poetic Romanticism sprang the
Tugendbvnd of young Germany, based upon an earnest sense
of duty and patriotic devotion. The Kantian imperative of the
subjective reason was enlarged and deepened, in the philosophy
of Hegel, into the consciousness of the dependence of the
individual on the rationality of history as realised in the
State. The true freedom, which is alone worthy of man, was
now seen to consist, not in opposition to the commonwealth,
but .in unselfish devotion to it ; not in defiance of the State,
but in subordination to it as loyal citizens, and in securing
individual, by labouring for universal ends. Precisely the
same transformation was effected in England. Whilst young
men hailed enthusiastically the French Revolution, when it
seemed that ''temple and tower were to fall to the ground"
before its trumpet-blast of " natural rights," Burke raised his
G.T. x
306 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV.
voice, as " one crying in the wilderness/' against the delusion
of the individualistic idea of freedom, and pointed out the
unreasonableness of the endeavour to separate the individual
from the nation, to which he owes his existence, or from society
and its historical arrangements, to which really all human
culture is due. What Burke's eloquence failed to effect, the
course of history brought about. Under the pressure of a
" Continental System " and the wars of Napoleon, English
national feeling was aroused, the poets of Nature and Free-
dom became the heralds of patriotic love, of an admiring piety
towards the history of the past, which Sir Walter Scott's
genius restored to new life in the hearts of his contemporaries
by poetic idealisation.
But in the history of Christian nations, the Church, with
her institutions, customs, and doctrines, plays such an
essential part, that their inner and outer life could not be at
all understood without the consideration of this factor. It
was natural, therefore, that the newly awakened interest in
the history of the past generally should quicken also the
appreciation of the history of the Church, and therewith of
the positive and traditional elements in the faith and customs
of the nations. In those things which had been an offence
to the critical understanding of the eighteenth century, there
was now discovered, by the new historical sense, suggestive
symbolism, fine human feeling, natural poetry, and prophetic
truth ; in short, so much nourishment for the famishing soul
and the thirsty fancy, that the sons began to revere deeply
what the fathers had thrown aside as worthless superstition.
Thus, from the same Romanticism which had begun with
Rousseau's Gospel of Nature, sprang at last the revival or
religious and ecclesiastical taste and feeling. Rousseau was
followed by Chateaubriand and the Italian Manzoni ; by
Schleiermacher and Neander, and the Catholic convert
Schlegel, in Germany ; and by Coleridge, and John Henry
Newman and Pusey, in England.
In order to last, and to influence the life of a nation from
various sides, a new mode of feeling always requires a new
mode of thought as its accompaniment, with new ideas and
associations of ideas as its vehicle and support, In Germany
this want was met in the idealistic philosophy founded by
Kant, which in all its various developments had this in
common, that it connected man with the higher world of
Ch. I.] PHILOSOPHY IN RELATION TO THEOLOGY. 3O/
spirit, and set before him conscious devotion to it as the
object of his own perfection. In England, however, no such
philosophy as this existed. For the philosophy of Locke
was, in reality, in its popular form, the formal expression of
that barren view of things which binds man to the world of
the senses as the sole reality, makes the individual complete
in himself, and prescribes as his highest end the pursuit of his
own advantage ; which was therefore precisely that view of
things which the new and more profound poetry and religious
and historical Romanticism indignantly repudiated. Under
these circumstances it was very natural that the originators
of this new mode of feeling in England should seek their
weapons of defence and attack in German philosophy. We
shall see as we proceed in what various ways this philosophy
affected the most thoughtful minds in England. Yet it re-
mained, after all, but a foreign growth on English soil. So
true is it that a philosophy is able to exercise a determining
influence upon the ecclesiastical and theological thought of
a nation only when it has penetrated it so profoundly as to
determine the popular philosophy of the educated classes
concerned. As regards the idealistic philosophy of Germany,
no such reception of it was possible in England. On the
other hand, the English philosophy of the past could no longer
satisfy the requirements of the new poetic and religious
feeling. The revived religious consciousness accordingly
failed to find the indispensable intellectual basis and regulative
principles, without which it could not develop into definite
theological teaching, or guide the development of the mind
of the Churches in harmony with the general thought of the
nation and the age. It seems to me that we have here the
explanation of the remarkable fact that the Church life of
England, until within the last decade, has remained almost
completely untouched by the vast progress of the scientific
thought of the educated classes, and that wherever the two
come into contact, such a violent collision is the consequence
that popular feeling is shocked, and not a few despair of the
possibility of any mutual understanding. It is true that
latterly this tension has been somewhat relaxed, and just now
signs are not wanting of the rise of a new philosophical view
of the world suited to the British genius, under the auspices
of which a reconciliation of the Church and the world, of
theology and science, may be hoped for.
308 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV.
I propose, in the first instance, to offer a review of the
various philosophical schools in their relation to religion and
theology. This review must commence with the idealism of
Coleridge and Carlyle, which was so greatly influenced by
German philosophy. This idealism is met by the reaction of
the empirical philosophy of Mill and the critical philosophy
of Hamilton, connected with which is an agnosticism in vari-
ous forms. There follows then an evolutionary philosophy,
with more of systematic completeness, and in two forms : first,
realistic, with an agnostic basis, represented by Herbert
Spencer; second, idealistic, represented by the Neo- Hege-
lians, Caird and Green, with whom are connected, finally, the
living representatives of speculative theism.
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE was a true representative of
Romanticism with all its bright and dark sides. He was a
man of wide culture, of fine sensibility, of vivid imagination, of
ready intellect ; but as a thinker his efforts were spasmodic
and fragmentary, lacking steadiness, consistency, and thorough-
ness ; and he displayed a surprising want of moral strength.
As a young man he was an enthusiastic worshipper of Nature
and Freedom ; afterwards, when sobered down under the in-
fluence of personal and historical experiences, he sought in
German philosophy consolation for the shipwreck of the ideals
of his youth. He studied Lessing and Kant, Jacobi and
Schelling ; and by the aid of philosophical idealism he recon-
ciled himself to the faith of the Church, from which he had
been totally estranged. Yet the reconciliation was in such a
form that he no longer based his faith upon supernatural au-
thority, but upon the ideal constitution of the human mind
itself, regarding Christianity as the perfection of human rea-
son. With Herder and Schleiermacher, Coleridge maintained
that Christianity is not a theory or speculation, but a life and a
living process, that the proof of it therefore must consist in the
inner personal experience of that life. While he thus related
himself to the supernaturalism of the orthodox party of that
time by going over to the side of the Evangelicals (the Pietists
of England), on the other hand he departed from the latter
in that he regarded Christianity not as something absolutely
supernatural in antithesis to the human, as the germs of it
lie in the nature of man himself and are brought to their
perfection by Christianity ; for which reason the truth of Chris-
Ch. I.] PHILOSOPHY IN RELATION TO THEOLOGY. 309
tianity can never contradict reason when properly understood.
Coleridge expounded these views in his Aids to Reflection
(1825), not, it is true, in a systematic form, but in suggestive
aphorisms and explanatory examples, which should serve to
arouse independent reflection in the direction indicated.
Coleridge attached the greatest importance to the distinc-
tion, taken from Kant's Critique, between the "understand-
ing," as " the faculty judging according to sense," and the
" reason," as the faculty of " universal and necessary truths."
He further distinguishes the speculative from the practical
reason, the former as applied to formal or abstract truth, the
latter as applied to actual or moral truth, as the fountain of
ideas and the light of the conscience. While he is thus far
apparently quite in agreement with Kant, Coleridge ascribes
nevertheless to the practical reason a meaning which passes
beyond the moral sphere : like Jacob! he describes it as the
feeling or instinct of supersensible truths, or, with Schelling,
as an intellectual intuition of spiritual objects. Whilst the
understanding is confined to the world of the senses, and can
accordingly pronounce only conditional judgments, the reason
is the source of unconditional and necessary judgments, the
intelligible spiritual nature of man, which is one with the
Divine Spirit. From overlooking this distinction and from
the illegitimate application of the understanding to supersen-
sible objects, arises "unbelief or misbelief." "Wherever the
forms of reasoning appropriate only to the natural world are
applied to spiritual realities, the more strictly logical the
reasoning is in all its parts, the more irrational it is as a
whole." Propositions such as these, to which the parallels
may be found here and there in German Romanticism and
speculative philosophy, have a certain meaning as a protest
against a shallow and negative Rationalism, but they betray
none the less a questionable inclination to suppress intelligent
criticism in religious questions. Nor did Coleridge altogether
escape this danger, although he had the good sense to acknow-
ledge the logical understanding as a negative canon in re-
ligious questions, since absolutely inconceivable propositions
cannot be true. It is only the positive proof of the truths of
religious faith which must not be derived from theoretical
argumentation, but from the moral and spiritual nature of man.
It is, as Coleridge well observes, the peculiarity of Chris-
tianity that, unlike philosophy, it does not seek by workings
310 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV.
upon the intellect to elevate the character, but its first step is to
cleanse the heart and afterwards to restore the intellect like-
wise to its natural clearness. If the effects were not propor-
tionate to the Divine wisdom of the method, it was because
<k the doctors of the Church forgot that the heart, the moral na-
ture, was the beginning and the end." " This was the true and
first apostasy, when in council and synod the Divine Humani-
ties of the Gospel gave way to speculative systems, and religion
became a science of shadows under the name of theology, or
at best a bare skeleton of truth, without life or interest, alike
inaccessible and unintelligible to the majority of Christians."
Coleridge illustrated his view of Christianity in its applica-
tion to selected doctrines original sin, redemption, baptism,
inspiration. In doing this he everywhere seeks so far to
rationalise the dogma as to surrender its scholastic husk while
preserving its religious and moral kernel. The affinity of his
theology with Schleiermacher s, especially as represented by
the conservative wing of Schleiermacher s school, strikes the
student at once. The dogma of " original sin" is made to
mean that sin as spiritual evil is a condition of the will, which
is the ground and cause of all sins, that it was not inherited
from without, but is the act of the will itself, and so " self-
originated." This is certainly much more a Kantian than
Biblical or ecclesiastical doctrine. In complete agreement with
Kant, Coleridge says " that in respect of original sin, every
man is the adequate representative of all men," and that the
first man in time, the Adam of Genesis, is only the type of
the race. Hence all statements as to the perfection of man
in Paradise must be cast aside as phantastic and valueless.-
With regard to the doctrine of redemption, according to
Coleridge, the cause of redemption is not so much the death
of Christ as the incarnation of the Creative Word in the per-
son of Christ. This manifestation of the Divine in the human
life, labours, and death of the Saviour produces, as its effect,
our transformation from fleshly to spiritual men, and, as further
consequences, our progressive sanctification by the Word and
the Spirit. But the various forms of expression which are
used by the apostles to set forth the actual consequences of
the act of redemption show by their diversity that they ought
to be taken as metaphors only, borrowed in part from Jewish
theology and in part from the opinions prevalent amongst
the readers and opponents of the apostles.
Ch. I.] PHILOSOPHY IN RELATION TO THEOLOGY. 3 I I
Specially interesting and instructive is Coleridge's essay,
entitled, Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit, published after
his death (1840), in which he assails the dogmatic theory of
the inspiration of the Scriptures with very rational arguments,
while adhering tenaciously to his conviction of their incom-
parable religious and moral value. He shows admirably that
the Biblical writers themselves lay no claim to the verbal in-
spiration of their writings, and that this doctrine, really bor-
rowed from the Jewish Rabbis, must therefore be regarded
as an unscriptural superstition. He goes further, and asks,
" How can infallible truth be infallibly conveyed in defective
and fallible expressions," such as all human words and sen-
tences must be ? Moreover, we should gain nothing by such
an unnatural supposition, but on the contrary be simply losers.
For if all the heart-awakening utterances of human hearts,
such as we find in the Bible, were nothing more than " a
Divina Commedia of a superhuman ventriloquist " ; if the
sweet Psalmist of Israel were himself as mere an instrument
of the inspiring Spirit as his harp, an automaton poet, all sym-
pathy and all example would be gone, and we could listen to
his words only in fear and perplexity. The Bible is undeni-
ably " the appointed conservatory, an indispensable criterion,
and a continual source and support of true belief; but we
must not confound this with the statements that the Bible is
the sole source, and that it not only contains but constitutes
the Christian religion, that it is in short a creed consisting
wholly of articles of faith ; and that consequently we need no
rule, help, or guide, spiritual or historical, to teach us what
parts are and what are not articles of faith." As the Church
herself has admitted it as a canon that each part of Scrip-
ture must be interpreted by the spirit of the whole, it has
thereby practically granted "that it is the spirit of the Bible,
and not the detached words and sentences, that is infallible
and absolute." We see that it is the view of the Bible at
once free and reverent of Lessing, Herder, and Schleier-
macher, which Coleridge commends to his countrymen. We
shall find in the next chapter, in the case of the representa-
tives of the Broad Church party, that though this view has met
with opposition in the English Church, it has gradually made
its way there to a considerable extent.
THOMAS CARLYLE spent his early youth in the midst of the
simplest conditions of country life, as the eldest son of a
312 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV.
Scotch mason, in a family in which a plain and serious Puri-
tanical piety held sway. These impressions of his childhood
engraved themselves so deeply on his heart that they con-
tinued powerfully to influence him after he had given up the
dogmas of the Church. From the bright inquisitive intellect
of the youth, who sought for truth at any price, the defects of
the traditional arguments in support of orthodox dogmas
could not long remain concealed, and an eager study of the
works of Gibbon and Hume, to which he devoted himself
during his university course in Edinburgh, added all that was
needed to make him a decided sceptic. But he could not
rest satisfied in mere negation. He was profoundly unhappy
when, under the influence of Hume's philosophy, the God of
the orthodox faith could no longer be believed in, or had be-
come the unconcerned absentee spectator of a mechanically
rotating universe, and when the idea of duty had also seemed to
change from a Divine messenger and guide to a false earthly
phantasm, made up of desire and fear. But his profound love
of truth and sense of duty formed the rock on which the
waves of doubt broke. Whilst his intellect, beclouded with
sceptical and pessimistic horrors, pictured to him the world as
the sport of chance and the work of the devil, his moral con-
sciousness attained to the certainty of the indestructible
freedom of the soul as the lord of the world. With this the
44 Everlasting Yea" obtained the conquest over the ''Ever-
lasting No." It was the repetition in an individual of the
same process as had been passed through in German philo-
sophy a generation earlier ; when the world of orthodox be-
lief, destroyed by the criticism of the understanding, was
reconstructed from the subjective resources of man as a moral
and rational being; when the moral self-consciousness ex-
panded into the ideal world of the great German thinkers and
poets.
And it was not in Carlyle's case merely a similar process
of development, but it took place in direct dependence on
German thought. In the critical period of his life he occu-
pied himself closely with the writings of Goethe and Schiller,
Jean Paul and Novalis ; translations from their works were
his earliest literary efforts. To Goethe especially he felt
himself under great obligations. From the many fine things
which he has written upon Goethe, the following passage, as
especially characteristic of Carlyle himself, may be quoted
Ch. I.] PHILOSOPHY IN RELATION TO THEOLOGY. 313
here : " He who would learn to reconcile reverence with
clearness ; to deny and defy what is false, yet believe and
worship what is true ; amid raging factions, bent on what is
either altogether empty or has substance in it only for a day,
which stormfully convulse and tear hither and thither a dis-
tracted expiring system of society, to adjust himself aright ;
and working for the world and in the world, keep himself
unspotted from the world let him look here. This man
(Goethe), we may say, became morally great, by being in his
own age, what in some other ages many might have been, a
genuine man." 1
' To reconcile reverence with clearness, to deny and defy
what is false, and yet to believe and worship what is true "
this is in fact an admirable summary of Carlyle's own
character and labours. A believer, in the sense of orthodox
theology, he never became, but always expressed most un-
reservedly his poor opinion of it,, at times indeed with a vehe-
mence which might surprise one in the case of an historian
who showed on other occasions such loving sympathy with
antiquity, did we not remember that the orthodox system
does not yet belong to ancient history, but is still a power in
the world, often making itself felt as a retarding fetter to minds
that are striving after truth and clearness for themselves and
others. It is not any want of religion, not frivolous scepti-
cism, but rather a good piece of old Scotch Puritanism,
combined with modern ethical idealism, which makes him
ruthlessly indignant at every form of religious cant, at all
ecclesiasticism that has become external form and convention.
Yet what is almost more repulsive and hateful to him than
the latter are the empty and windy negations of frivolous
scepticism, atheism, and materialism. In one of his masterly
characterisations of the present age 2 (to be compared with
Fichte's discourses on the Grundzttge des gegenwartigen Zeit-
alters] he says : " The fever of scepticism must needs burn
itself out, and burn out thereby the impurities that caused it ;
then again will there be clearness, health. The principle of
life which now struggles painfully in the outer, thin and barren
domain of the Conscious or Mechanical, may then withdraw
into its inner sanctuaries, its abysses of mystery and miracle ;
1 Miscellanies, vol. iv. p. 49 (Popular Edition, 1872).
2 Ibid., vol. iv. p. 35.
3F4 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV.
withdraw deeper than ever into that domain of the Uncon-
scious, by nature infinite and inexhaustible ; and creatively
work there. From that mystic region, and from that alone,
all wonders, all poesies, and religions and social systems have
proceeded ; the like wonders, and greater and higher, lie
slumbering there ; and, brooded on by the spirit of the waters,
will evolve themselves, and rise like exhalations from the
deep."
In his essay on Diderot, 1 Carlyle shows that his mechanical
materialism was the natural outcome of his barren logical in-
tellect, but that two consequences of some value have followed
from it : First, that all speculations of the sort we call Natural
Theology are unproductive, since of final causes nothing
can be proved, they being known only by the higher light of
intuition ; secondly, that the hypothesis of the universe being
a machine, and of " an Architect who constructed it, sitting as
it were apart, and guiding it, and seeing it go, may turn out
an inanity and nonentity"; that "that 'faint possible Theism,'
which now forms our common English creed," which seeks a
God here and there, and not there where alone He is to be
found inwardly, in our own soul, that this Theism cannot
be too soon swept out of the world. To the individual who
with hysterical violence theoretically asserts a God who is a
mere distant simulacrum, Carlyle exclaims, " Fool ! God is not
only there, but here, or nowhere, in that life-breath of thine,
in that act and thought of thine, and thou wert wise to look
to it."' " Whosoever, in one way or another, recognises not
that ' Divine Idea of the World, which lies at the bottom of
appearances,' can rightly interpret no appearance ; and what-
soever spiritual thing he does, must do it partially, do it
falsely." 3 With the theoretical perversities of the mere logical
understanding, which makes of the universe a dead mechanism,
go hand in hand the moral and spiritual perversities of selfish
utilitarianism. This blind pursuit of pleasure, which will have
God's infinite Universe altogether to itself, and therefore
necessarily remains for ever deceived and dissatisfied, is the
root of all evil. For this reason sorrow is so good and needful
to man, that it teaches him that happiness is not his highest
end and good, but rather, as Goethe maintains, life really be-
gins with self-renunciation. " Love not pleasure, but love God!
1 Miscellanies, vol. v. p. 49 sq. 2 Ibid., p. 51. 8 Ibid., p. 52.
Ch. I.] PHILOSOPHY IN RELATION TO THEOLOGY. 3 I 5
This is the ' Everlasting Yea/ wherein all contradiction is
solved : wherein whoso walks and works, it is well with him."
This is in brief the Weltanschauung of Carlyle, an ethical
idealism after the manner of Fichte, Herder, and Goethe. It
is undoubtedly not " Theism " as commonly understood, but
it is as little an abstract and systematic " Pantheism." Carlyle
hated all such formulae, and the endless controversies about
them. With him the essential thing was to feel God in
one's own soul as a living reality, to behold reverently his
rule in the world of nature and history, and from this feeling
and vision to labour for the good and true in unselfish devo-
tion. For himself he did not require a more definite formu-
lation of his philosophic view of things, and declined it as an
impediment. But he was too good an historian not to know
that the clothing of tangible symbols is necessary to make
ideal truth the faith of an historical community. The forms of
ecclesiastical creeds and life are, like institutions of the State,
the ''clothes" of the idea ; without such clothes and historical
vestures, Carlyle expressly maintains, society has never existed,
and never can exist. 2 But, he forcibly remarks, that it is with
these spiritual as with our bodily clothes w always need them,
but cannot always have the same. Time, which adds much
to the sacredness of symbols, at length desecrates them again.
Symbols also wax old, as everything in the world has its rise,
its culmination, and its decline. As in the past new prophets
have always arisen at the right moment, who as God-inspired
poets created new symbols, so will it be in the future also.
" Meanwhile, we account him Legislator and wise who can
so much as tell when a symbol has grown old, and gently
remove it." 3
Carlyle has nowhere expounded connectedly his view of the
nature and development of religion (and we must remember
that he was really not a philosopher, but an historian), but his
ideas thereon may be gathered from various passages of his
writings, forming an inwardly connected whole. Religion
we may thus summarise his opinion is to be found in every
man as part of his spiritual constitution, as a God-given faculty,
enabling him to apprehend intuitively the Divine in the world
and in human life, and to worship it in reverent obedience.
But the constitutional endowment becomes an actual living
1 Sartor Resartus, p. 133. 2 Ibid., p. 149. 8 Ibid., p. 155.
3l6 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV.
power in historical society only ; and there only by the instru-
mentality of those leading minds which as seers and prophets
apprehend in clear thought, and reveal in intelligible speech
what slumbers unconsciously in the souls of all. Their word
brings to consciousness the truth which was previously unper-
ceived, although longed for and dimly surmised, which lay in
the depths of the soul, and which is then incorporated in the
symbols of religious societies. These symbols are the indis-
pensable means of presenting to men's minds in an intelligible
and realisable form the Divine and Eternal, which is itself a
nameless and unutterable mystery. For this reason they are
the sacred bond binding souls together, tokens, signs, stand-
ards, and garments of the Eternal and Divine, acknowledged
by multitudes .in common. Yet they are not themselves the
Eternal and Divine, and, as having arisen in time, they have
only limited duration. Waxing old with the progress of time,
they lose the intelligible meaning which they had at the begin-
ning, and then become empty masks, delusive simulacra, and
hindrances of the truth and religion. It is then time to re-
move them cautiously, and to supply their place with new
symbols from the perennial source of truth the depths of the
unconscious, intuitive spirit. But the time of transition, when
the old is no more understood and received, and the new has
not yet been generally recognised and acknowledged, is a
time of difficulty and trouble. Doubt and denial then prevail ;
the cold understanding thrusts its barren logic into the place
of creative genius ; science, history, the universe are made
mechanical ; and only a few profounder minds perceive be-
neath the surface of chaos the signs of a new world of order,
in which reverence shall be combined with clearness. Such
a prophet of a nobler future Carlyle saw in Goethe, in the
midst of this desert age of the barren understanding. And
we may add that Carlyle was himself such a seer, who beheld
prophetically, in the light of eternal ideas, not the past only,
but also the future courses and destinations of human history,
and illuminated them with his inspiration.
It is well known and intelligible enough that Carlyle stood
very much alone with such views amongst his fellow-country-
men, the Conservatives regarding him as a dangerous Radical,
and the Liberals as a reactionary. It is, therefore, the more
noteworthy that in the middle of the century a few more men
are found, who, like Carlyle, and to some extent influenced
Ch. I.] PHILOSOPHY IN RELATION TO THEOLOGY. 317
by him, sought to combine the severest criticism of the tradi-
tional belief of the Churches with genuine and profound piety
and moral earnestness. 1 Chief amongst these was FRANCIS
WILLIAM NEWMAN, younger brother of John Henry Newman,
who will come under our notice in the next chapter, to whom
he was in no degree inferior in point of delicacy and religious
feeling, and far superior in depth and clearness of thought
and in moral courage, although English society has per-
sistently placed the daring heretic, whose free thought was
inconvenient, below the socially distinguished and dignified
ecclesiastic with his polished style. In the book, Phases of
Faith (1850), Francis Newman, following his own religious
development, really a typical case for our age, describes
the process by which a truth-loving mind is compelled by the
logic of facts to resign one position after another in the
authoritative creeds. It is not a priori presuppositions, not
considerations of the undevout understanding, not speculative
theories, that shake the foundations of his inherited belief; it
is simply the application of the intellect to the examination of
the received authorities, resulting in the conviction of their
insufficiency, and human and historical conditionality, and
accordingly of their want of divine authority, and of their
unfitness to serve as the firm ultimate bases of belief. Thus, in
the first instance, the orthodox creed is examined by the test
to which it itself appeals the Scriptures, and is found not to
accord with them, and to be therefore unsatisfactory. The
examination is then carried further ; the Bible itself is sub-
mitted to it ; the parallel narratives are compared (e.g. in the
Gospels and the historical books of the Old Testament),
and are found not to agree ; then one doctrine is compared
with another (e.g., predestination and eternal torments with
the goodness and mercy of God), and here, again, irreconcil-
able contradictions are presented ; finally, notions of the Bible
are compared with undoubted facts of science (e.g. of astro-
nomy, geology, human history), and once again the fallibility
of Scripture has to be acknowledged. If, with the Unitarians
of that generation, the attempt was made to fall back from the
teaching of the Bible as a whole upon the teaching of Jesus,
as the final and sure authority, it could not be made out his-
1 One of these was William Rathbone Greg, the author of The Creed of
Christendom^ 1851.
1 8 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV.
torically, from the traditions, what the teaching of Jesus cer-
tainly was ; all such attempts show ever afresh that it is a
self-destructive contradiction to seek to base an authoritative
system upon free critical inquiry. When the great primary
questions of religion are proposed, there are only two solutions
possible : either we follow the inward law of the reason and
conscience and disregard the external law of authority, or vice
versa. The middle course of orthodox Protestantism, which
requires on the one hand the submission of the proud reason
to the infallible authority of the " Word of God," and on the
other hand appeals from the authority of the Church to the
right of the individual " conscience" (which must mean the
reason), is illogical and contradictory ; and the sense of this
sends many to Rome.
This position of Newman's is undoubtedly logically impreg-
nable, but in his statement of it he has overlooked an essential
point. The education of reason and conscience, by which the
individual is fitted to form true judgments, is the result of
the historical development of humanity, and cannot therefore
be separated therefrom, but must always seek from thence
instruction and guidance. From this point of view the anti-
thesis of inward and outward authority becomes less absolute
than Newman makes it, being the constant interaction of his-
torical universality and individual spontaneity. The closing
remarks of Newman's are excellent : Religion was created by
the inward instinct of the soul, its longing for the sympathy
of God with it and for fellowship with him. But it had after-
wards to be purified and chastened by the sceptical under-
standing ; the co-operation of these two powers is essential for
its perfection. While religious persons dread critical and
searching thought, and critics despise instinctive religion, each
side of man remains imperfect and curtailed. Surely the age is
ripe for a religion which shall combine the tenderness, humility,
and disinterestedness that are the glory of the purest Chris-
tianity, with that activity of intellect, untiring pursuit of truth,
and strict adherence to impartial principle which the schools
of modern science embody.
Newman has sketched an ideal picture of a Christianity thus
chastened and combined with the knowledge of the present
day, in the two short but valuable essays, The Soul, its Sorrows
and its Aspirations : an Essay towards the Natural History of
the Soid as the true Basis of Theology (1849, 3rd ed., 1852),
Ch. I.] PHILOSOPHY IN RELATION TO THEOLOGY. 319
and Theism, Doctrinal and Practical (1858). A profound and
genuine piety breathes through both of these books, combined
with clear and sound thought, which places in a bright light
the fundamental religious problems, and seeks their solution
in the depths of personal consciousness, and also in the wider
region of the consciousness of humanity as reflected in history.
As confessions of a devout thinker (akin to St. Augustine's
Confessions), they form a true book of devotion for thoughtful
religious readers. The comparison with Schleiermacher's
Reden is also obvious; but it cannot be denied that Newman's
idea of the nature of religion has this superiority over that of
the Reden, that it is based upon a truer psychology, and the
mysticism involved in it is less aesthetical than ethical, and
consequently the conception of God in Newman's essays is
more Christian than Spinozistic.
The empirical philosophy of the i8th century was handed
on and attained to new significance in the two Mills, father
and son. Following Hume and Hartley, JAMES MILL, in his
Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind(\^2<^), had
traced all our intellectual and moral judgments to the associa-
tion of ideas, which in consequence of frequent occurrence
together become constantly connected. This doctrine of the
association of ideas forms also the basis of the philosophy of
JOHN STUART MILL, though it does not there retain the logical
thoroughness which it has in the father's system. In re-edit-
ing his father's book, the son added notes in explanation and
correction which amount to an abandonment of the funda
mental principle of this philosophy. But as he sought
nevertheless tenaciously to cling to it, remarkable inconsis-
tencies and uncertainties found their way into his doctrine,
both on its theoretical and its practical side.
According to J. S. Mill we have knowledge of our sensa-
tions and ideas only, but neither of an object external to us
nor of a subject as the basis of those feelings. Things are
only the permanent possibilities of sensation, and mind is only
a series of feelings with a background of the possibility ot
feeling. Having had his attention called by Hamilton to the
fact that an association of rdeas is possible only by a comparison
of similar sensations, that comparison involves remembrance,
and remembrance is possible only by virtue of the identity ot
the ego as existing throughout the series of different feeling?.
Mill extended his definition of mind by the addition, that \\
32O THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV.
is " a series of feelings which is aware of itself as past and
future." That this is a paradox, an inexplicable puzzle, he
himself admitted, without on that account, however, amending
the erroneous idea of the mind with which he had set out, and
to which alone the puzzle is to be ascribed. He likewise
admitted that the phenomenon of memory is a puzzle which his
psychology is unable to solve, as no explanation of it can be
assigned which does not involve belief in the identity of the
ego, which is the thing to be accounted for. Under the pres-
sure of this difficulty he wavers between such indefinite
descriptions as an inexplicable "link of sensations" or "thread of
consciousness " and the supposition of a real permanent element
which is different from everything else, and can only be spoken
of as the ego. But he is far from making any actual use of
this as an original active principle. Nor do our sensations
reveal any more the reality of external objects than of the ego.
Things, bodies, are simply groups of sensations, which arise
according to the law of causality, which, however, is the law
of subjective association. The theory gives no explanation of
the source whence these groups come, or of how they can
affect each other, of how it comes about that we associate with
the perception of certain moving bodies the idea of persons
external to ourselves. Cause is the name simply of the regu-
lar recurring connexion in experience of certain sensations ;
when we speak of the " law of causality," we mean only the
uniformity, observed in experience, of a series of occurrences
an abstraction which, according to Mill himself, is not
reached until an advanced stage of observation has been
attained, whilst really thought is subject to the category of
causality from the beginning. Of course, with this explana-
tion of causality from the association of ideas, the element of
necessity is put out of court, and Mill accordingly regards it as
by no means inconceivable, that in other worlds than this the
connexion between cause and effect may not exist. Mathema-
tical truths, in like manner, possess nothing beyond the prob-
ability of inferences from uniform experience, and by no means
unconditional certainty. The contrary opinion would lead to
the metaphysics of innate principles, with which the doors
would be opened to the unscientific method of intuition and all
kinds of mysticism. In order, therefore, to protect science, em-
piricism is carried through to its extreme sceptical consequences
by which the ground is cut from under the feet of all science !
Ch. I.] PHILOSOPHY IN RELATION TO THEOLOGY. 32!
The final outcome of the philosophy of Mill is no better
on its ethical side. From the school of his father and of
Bentham, he adopts the principle that happiness is the one
desirable object, though it is not merely one's own happiness,
but that also of others, yet the latter only for the sake of the
former. No other reason can be assigned why the general
happiness is desirable, except that each person desires his
own happiness. In his autobiography, 1 Mill speaks, how-
ever, of an important crisis in his life, when he learnt that
" the end of happiness was only to be attained by not making
it the direct end. Those only are happy (I thought) who
have their minds fixed on some object other than their own
happiness ; on the happiness of others, on the improvement
of mankind, even on some art or pursuit, followed not as a
means, but as itself an ideal end. Aiming thus at something
else, they find happiness by the way. Once make the
enjoyments of life a principal object, and they are immedi-
ately felt to be insufficient." Beyond doubt, noble utterances,
to which an almost verbal parallel is to be found in the
idealist Carlyle 2 ; but Mill has not shown how we are to
harmonise with them the fundamental principle of his ethical
philosophy, according to which the idea of happiness, and in
the last instance one's own happiness, is the highest motive
of action. Here also, as in the theoretical section of his
philosophy, he has failed to carry through his psychological
analysis to the final decisive point ; he has not made it clear
to himself that the question why we feel ourselves under
moral obligation at all, is quite distinct from the question
as to the content, the what, of right moral conduct. It is
undoubtedly true that in relation to the latter question the con-
sequences of an action to society and to the individual must
be taken into consideration as an essential criterion. But if
this criterion of the specific action is confounded with the
motive of the moral will, if the desire for happiness is made
the chief motive, and put in the place of the sense of duty,
the actual facts of the true moral consciousness are rendered
as inexplicable as theoretical knowledge is when the associa-
tion of ideas, which is only a means of logical thought, is put
in its place. The utilitarian principle of the empirical philo-
sophy has its proper place as an heuristic principle in
1 Page 142. 8 See ante, p. 314.
G. T. Y
322 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV.
practical sociology, when the existence of the sense of duty
is assumed as a matter of course ; but when it claims to be
an explanation of the moral consciousness generally, and
when the sense of duty is accordingly derived from calcula-
tions of utility, the true science of ethics is not served, but
rendered impossible. 1
It is intelligible that with such premises the religious views of
Mill could not rise far above sceptical negations. His father,
who had lost all belief in a good God in consequence of his
education in the creed of Scotch Presbyterianism and of his
reflections on the evils of the world, brought up his son
without any religious belief. As compared with the purely
negative position of his early days, it marks, therefore, a
certain advance when, in his essay on The Utility of Religion
(written between 1850 and 1858), he allows that in early
times religious belief in the Divine sanctions of moral laws
was an excellent means of introducing and establishing them,
and that even now religion, like poetry, answers to a craving
in men for higher and nobler ideas than actual life supplies.
But it is doubtful whether "the idealism of our earthly life,
the cultivation of a high conception of what it may be made,
is not capable of supplying a poetry, and, in the best sense
of the word, a religion, equally fitted to exalt the feelings and
still better calculated to ennoble the conduct, than any belief
respecting the unseen powers." " The essence of religion is
the strong and earnest direction of the emotions and desires
towards an ideal object, recognised as of the highest excel-
lence, and as rightfully paramount over all selfish objects of
desire. This condition- is fulfilled by the Religion of Human-
ity in as eminent a degree, and in as high a sense, as by the
supernatural religions even in their best manifestations, and
far more so than in any of the others," which, by their
threats and promises, strengthen the selfish element of our
nature instead of weakening it. Besides, these religions
suffer under so many contradictions and irrationalities that the
simple and innocent faith which their acceptance involves can
co-exist only with a torpid and inactive state of the speculative
faculties, whilst persons of exercised intellect are able to
1 The folly of such a mode of procedure in ethical science, Carlyle has
admirably satirised by setting the problem, " Given a world of knaves, to
produce an honesty from their united action ? " (Misc., iv. p. 36.)
Ch. I.] PHILOSOPHY IN RELATION TO THEOLOGY. 323
believe only by the sophistication and perversion either of the
understanding or of the conscience. Finally, the Religion of
Humanity leaves open an ample domain in the region of the
imagination, which may be planted with possibilities and
hypotheses, of which neither the falsehood nor the truth can
be ascertained.
In the later essay on Theism, written between 1868 and
1870 (which had not received the final revisions which it was
his habit to make), likewise published after the author's
death, Mill appears to have advanced beyond this purely
critical standpoint. The inquiry is not now merely with
regard to the utility of religion, but as to the truth of religious
ideas, and the result of it leads to the acceptance of the pre-
ponderating probability of certain suppositions, although un-
doubtedly they are still far enough removed from orthodox
belief. From the adaptations in nature, Mill now considers,
there is evidence which points, not to the creation of the
universe, but of the present order of it by an Intelligent
Mind ; though the imperfections in nature necessitate the sup-
position that its Author has but limited power over it ; and that
he has some regard to the happiness of his creatures prob-
ably, though we are not justified in supposing this is his sole
or chief motive of action. It is also possible that a Being
thus limited in power may interfere occasionally in the im-
perfect machinery of the universe, though in none of the
cases in which such interposition is believed to have occurred
is the evidence such as could possibly prove it. In the same
way the possibility of life after death must be admitted,
though it cannot be converted into a certainty. " To me it
seems that human life, small and confined as it is, and as,
considered merely in the present, it is likely to remain, even
when the progress of material and moral improvement may
have freed it from the greater part of its present calamities,
stands greatly in need of any wider range and greater height
of aspiration, for itself and its destination, which the exercise
of imagination can yield to it without running counter to the
evidence of fact." . . . " The indulgence of hope with
regard to the government of the universe, and the destiny of
man after death, is legitimate, and philosophically defensible.
The beneficial effect of such hope is far from trifling. It
makes life and human nature a far greater thing to the feel-
ings, and gives greater strength as well as solemnity to all
324 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV.
the sentiments which are awakened in us by our fellow-
creatures and mankind at large." Religious belief in the
reality of the divine ideal, notwithstanding all the perver-
sions and corruptions of it, has proved its force through past
ages, a force beyond what a merely ideal conception could
exert. And this belief can only increase in value when the
critical thinker resigns the idea of an omnipotent ruler of the
world, as then the evils of the world no longer cast a shadow
upon his moral perfection. The Divine ideal is still more
valuable as it is to be beheld incorporated in the human
personality of Jesus. However much of the accretions of
legend and speculation may be taken away from us by rational
criticism, Christ will remain a unique figure ; on his words and
deeds " there is a stamp of personal originality, combined
with profundity and insight, which must place the Prophet
of Nazareth in the very first rank of the men of sublime
genius of whom our species can boast. A better translation
of the rule of virtue from the abstract into the concrete cannot
be found, than to endeavour so to live that Christ would
approve our life." In the continual battle between the
powers of good and of evil, it is to the good man an eleva-
ting feeling to know that he is helping God by a co-operation
of which God, not being omnipotent, really stands in need,
and by which a somewhat nearer approach may be made to
the fulfilment of his purposes.
The religious idealism which speaks through these words
of Mill's is the more gratifying that it could not be looked
for from the principles of his philosophy. After individual
happiness had been made in morals the main principle, it
is surprising to find unselfish devotion to the requirements of
goodness or the purposes of God constituted the ideal in
religion. These are, surely, two standpoints far removed
from each other, the reconciliation of which Mill has not
supplied. And after he had in logic referred causality to
the association of subjective ideas, and the objectivity of
knowledge had been denied, we are taken by surprise when
finally an intelligent Designer and Ruler of the world is
inferred by means of the law of causation. Evidently Mill's
personal feeling and thinking were better than his philosophical
prejudices strictly allowed.
The principal representative of the intuitive philosophy,
which, Mill supposed, was inclined to consider cherished
Ch. I.] PHILOSOPHY IN RELATION TO THEOLOGY. 325
dogmas as intuitive truths, and intuition as the voice of
God and Nature, having a higher authority than the voice of
reason, was the Scotch philosopher, Sir WILLIAM HAMILTON.
Against his system Mill wrote his book, Examination of Sir
William Hamilton s Philosophy, which he subjected to a
searching criticism from his own empirical standpoint. But
he seems to have ignored the fact that the " intuitive," or
critico-speculative philosophy has other and more important
representatives than Hamilton ; and his knowledge of the
history of philosophy, particularly of German philosophy, was
defective. 1
Hamilton was indebted to both Reid and Kant : he endea-
voured to combine the realism of the former with the sub-
jective criticism of the latter, but without any great success.
He himself published an edition of the works of Reid with
notes, and after his death his pupils, Mansel and Veitch,
edited his Lectures on Logic and Metaphysics (1860, 4 vols.).
But he had previously plainly indicated his philosophical
position in his Review of the Philosophy of Cousin, which
appeared first in the Edinburgh Review (1829), and finally
in the volume of Discussions on Philosophy and Literature,
in 1852. There are, he considers, four views with regard to
the Unconditioned : according to Cousin it is cognisable and
conceivable by means of reflection ; according to Schelling,
though it is not comprehensible by reflection, it is knowable
by intellectual intuition ; according to Kant, though not
theoretically knowable, it is knowable as a regulative prin-
ciple, and its notion is more than a mere negation of the
Conditioned ; finally, according to Hamilton himself, it is
neither conceivable nor in any way knowable, because
it is simply the negation of the Conditioned, which alone
can be positively conceived. With regard to Kant,
Hamilton admits that to him belongs the merit of having
first examined the extent of our knowledge, and of having
limited it to the conditional phenomena of our consciousness,
but maintains that Kant's deduction of the categories and
ideas was the result of great but perverse ingenuity, and
his distinction between the understanding and the reason
o
surreptitious. As Kant admits that the " ideas" involve
1 As critics of Mill, may be mentioned, McCosh, Green, Bradley (Prin-
ciples of Logic}, Martineau.
326 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV.
self-contradiction, and yet makes them legitimate products of
intelligence, the speculative reason becomes in his system an
organ of simple delusion, and this must lead to absolute
scepticism. For if our intellectual nature be perfidious in
one revelation, it must be regarded as misleading in all.
When the falseness of the speculative reason has been once
proved, it is impossible to establish the existence of God,
Freedom, and Immortality on the ground of the supposed
veracity of the practical reason. Because Kant did not
completely exorcise the spectre of the Absolute, it has ever
since continued to haunt the German school of philosophy.
Though Schelling perceived the impossibility of getting a
philosophy of the Unconditioned by means of conceptual
reflection, his " intellectual intuition " of the Absolute was the
product of arbitrary abstraction and a self-delusive imagina-
tion ; for when the antithesis of subject and object, which
constitute consciousness, has been annihilated, all that remains
is nothing, which is baptized with the name of " Absolute."
According to Hamilton, the Infinite and Absolute is simply
an abstraction of the conditions under which thought is
possible, and accordingly a negation of the conceivable. For
to think is to condition, and conditioned limitation is the
fundamental law of thought. Thought cannot get beyond con-
sciousness, and consciousness is possible only under the anti-
thesis of subject and object, which are conceivable only in
correlation and mutual limitation. Whence it follows that a
philosophy which claims to be more than a knowledge of the
conditional is impossible. Our knowledge of mind and matter
cannot be more than a knowledge of the relative manifestation
of an existence, the essence per se of which the highest
wisdom must acknowledge as unknowable, as Augustine had
confessed, ignorando cognosci. But as the power of our thought
cannot be made the measure of existence, so neither may we
limit the horizon of our faith to the realm of our knowledge.
By miraculous revelation we have received our faith in the
existence of something unconditioned beyond the sphere of all
conceivable reality. The saying of Jacobi is therefore true :
an understood God would be no God at all, and to imagine
that God is what we think would be blasphemy. The
ultimate and highest consecration of all true religion must
be an altar to the unknown and unknowable God. In this
Nature and Revelation, Heathenism and Christianity agree.
Ch. I.] PHILOSOPHY IN RELATION TO THEOLOGY. 327
These ideas of Sir W. Hamilton's were further expanded
and made the basis of a system of dogmatic supernaturalism by
his disciple MANSEL, in his Bampton Lectures, The Limits of
Religious Thought (1852, 5th ed. 1870). The position taken
is, that if philosophy undertakes to subject the contents of
revealed religion to criticism, it must first show its right to
attempt this by the proof of its power to conceive the nature
of God. But this proof has hitherto never been forthcoming,
and from the very nature of the mind can never be given.
For the " Absolute," the "Infinite," the " First Cause" of
philosophy involve irreconcilable contradictions. The Abso-
lute is one and simple ; how then can we distinguish in it a
plurality of attributes ? The Infinite is that which is free
from all possible limitation ; how then can it co-exist with its
contradictory the Finite ? And how can the Infinite be at
the same time the First Cause, since there is involved in the
very idea of cause the antithesis of effect, and accordingly
limitation ? From the nature of human consciousness, too,
the proof is given that these ideas involve hopeless contra-
diction. Consciousness is the relation of an object to a
subject and to other objects, but the idea of the Absolute
precludes all such relation. Further, our consciousness is
subject to the laws of space and time, and cannot therefore
think the thought of a Being not likewise subject to them.
But, Mansel holds, we must not thence infer that the Infinite
cannot exist, but only that what the Infinite is and his rela-
tion to the Finite is for us incognisable. From this our duty
is plain to accept without addition or subtraction whatever
revelation, that is, the Bible, teaches as to God, on its autho-
rity. This will be the more easy when we remember that
the greatest difficulties of belief have their parallels in philo-
sophy ; for instance, the doctrine of the Trinity, in the relation
of one Absolute to a plurality of attributes ; the Divine sonship
of Christ, in the relation of the eternal cause to effects in time ;
the two natures in Christ, in the relation between the Infinite
and the Finite ; miracles, in the conception of government by
law at all, and in the relation of the law of causality to freedom
generally. If the reason is incapable of solving these philo-
sophical problems, it is not justified in rejecting the doctrines
of revelation because they are also, but not more, inconceivable.
As little may the reason on moral grounds criticise revelation.
For neither are moral principles by any means the eternal truth
328 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV.
of reason, but are laws which God has revealed with reference
to our human nature, without being himself bound by them.
When therefore the inspired word of God records commands
of God which seem to involve apparent immorality, we may not
argue therefrom that God cannot have revealed such com-
mands, but only that God's nature is not less incomprehensible
to our moral than to our speculative reason. Such instances
must be treated as " moral miracles," which prove that God
has the right to occasionally suspend the moral laws not less
than natural laws, without cancelling their validity in ordinary
practical life.
To the obvious question, how with such incapacity of reason
we can be in a position to recognise a Divine revelation as
such, and to distinguish the revelation of the Bible as the
only true one from the alleged revelations of other religions,
Mansel replies at the end of his book only, and there but
briefly. He warns us not to lay the main stress of the proof
on the internal evidence, which would involve an appeal to
the incompetent reason. " The crying evil of the present
day in religious controversy is the neglect or contempt of the
external evidences of Christianity ; the first step towards the
establishment of a sound religious philosophy must consist in
the restoration of those evidences to their true place in the
theological system." Though unconditional certainty does
not belong to any one of them taken singly, in conjunction
they constitute a sure foundation of faith in the revelation of
the Bible, and the revelation thus established must be accepted
from beginning to end, without criticism on the part of the in-
competent reason. If the teaching of Christ is in any one thing
not the teaching of God, it is in all things the teaching of
man, and Christ was an impostor or an enthusiast ; but if Christ
is in truth the Incarnate Son of God, every attempt to improve
his teaching is more impious than to reject it altogether, for
this is to acknowledge a doctrine as the revelation of God,
and at the same time to proclaim it inferior to the wisdom of
man.
It is significant as to the condition of theology in England
at that time, that this unqualified dogmatism of Hansel's
should have met with a large amount of approbation, and that
the author was considered a true Defensor Fidei. It is all the
more to the honour of F. D. MAURICE that he at once discerned
not merely the irrationality of Hansel's theory, but also the
Ch. I.] PHILOSOPHY IN RELATION TO THEOLOGY. 329
danger to which it laid open Christian faith, and that he
boldly and energetically opposed it. He very properly con-
siders that the fundamental mistake of Mansel is, that he
starts from ideas which he has himself set up, and then argues
from the contradictions, which he has himself put into them,
that the ideas themselves involve contradictions. He falls at
once upon the question of the Infinite, and overwhelms his
readers with a discussion of metaphysical problems, without
so much as touching the fundamental problem of conscious-
ness, without having asked, " How does our consciousness get
at reality at all?" Mansel holds the question as to the nature
of reality, of personality, as insoluble, because we cannot know
anything beyond the phenomena of our own consciousness,
but does not consider that while phenomena constitute the
immediate content of our consciousness, it is the very function
of philosophical science to deal not with them, but with what
is, das Ding-an-sich. It is precisely this to distinguish
what is from what merely appears to be, which is the province
of reason, without which man would sink to the level of the
animal. The same distinction which is necessary in daily life,
must also be applied in the highest relatfons of knowledge.
When Mansel denies this, he casts aside the Bible as well
as reason. If he pronounces Kant's Practical Reason, with its
faculty of ideas, as merely a faculty of lies, then conscience and
the faith of the simple Christian are faculties of lies without
any support in reality. In order to deliver English theology
from the influence of German philosophy, Mansel falls back
upon the scepticism of Hume, with whom he shares also the
indifference of Positivism, which in the absence of personal
conviction advocates the re-assurement of men's minds by
means of the established religion of the State. Mansel's
endeavour to base faith upon sceptical agnosticism can only
serve to strengthen thoughtless indifference and traditional-
ism, which is the greatest danger for England.
What a dangerous two-edged sword this agnosticism of the
apologists is was very soon made evident. In the course of
the next decade, upon this agnosticism Matthew Arnold based
his ethical idealism, Seeley his aesthetical idealism, and Herbert
Spencer his evolutionism, three theories which, with all their
dissimilarities, have this in common, that they all regard the
impossibility of a Divine revelation and revealed religion to
be the necessary consequence of the incognisability of God.
330 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV.
In his works, Literature and Dogma (1873), and God and
the Bible (1875), MATTHEW ARNOLD has advocated, as a sub-
stitute for supernatural religion, an ethical idealism very much
of the same nature as that of Fichte. He had convinced
himself that in an age like this, which will take nothing for
granted, but must verify everything, Christianity in the old
form of authoritative belief in supernatural beings and mira-
culous deeds, is no longer tenable, and that the only method
of defending the Faith which has any promise of success, is
that which confines itself to such ethical truths of Christianity
as can be verified by experience, and rejects everything
beyond them, or admits it only as their merely poetic garb.
According to Matthew Arnold, religion has no more to do
with supernatural dogma than with metaphysical philosophy :
it is ethical, it has to do with " conduct," but as distinguished
from ethics, it is " ethics heightened, enkindled, lit up by
feeling," in a word it " is morality toiiched by emotion." The
mistaken notion that religion is something more than and
different from this, and in some way supernatural, arose from
a misunderstanding of the poetic and rhetorical form of speak-
ing natural to it ; what was meant as a poetic and imaginative
representation of ethical experience and emotion, was taken
for strictly scientific truth. This .holds very specially of belief
in God. It would be folly to make religion depend on the
conviction of the existence of "the moral and intelligent
Governor of the universe " of theology, a belief which cannot
possibly be verified by experience. The God of religion is
a poetical personification of that which alone constitutes the
object of religious faith in its moral sense. For this object
Arnold has coined the phrase, " the Eternal, not ourselves,
which makes for righteousness." All that we can say of
this power, on the evidence of experience, is that it is not
ourselves, but is ever revealing itself in the universe as the
Power making everywhere and always for righteousness, in
consequence of which also all things have and tend to fulfil
the law of their being. That this Power should be converted
by the religious imagination into a personal God, who thinks
and loves and rules the world, does no harm so long as we
treat the personification simply as representing in a poetic
form the unknowable Not-ourselves, of which we can become
aware only as working for the production of righteousness.
But as soon as ever we try to treat the personal God of
Ch. I.] PHILOSOPHY IN RELATION TO THEOLOGY. 33 I
religion as a really existing being and object of scientific
thought, we enter the region of fanciful anthropomorphism or
abstract metaphysics, where the possibility of verification by
experience, and therefore of sure conviction, ceases. The tra-
ditional philosophical arguments for the existence of an intelli-
gent First Cause are equally baseless with the popular proofs
from miracles, and have, indeed, less value, as the latter
belong to a great and splendid whole a beautiful and power-
ful fairy tale, while the former are only the hollow talk of
philosophical sophism. Of a personal Governor of the world
we can form no clear conception, and can have no certain con-
viction based upon experience, but we can form an idea and
have experiential certainty of a Power making for righteous-
ness. That idea of a personal God had its origin in meta-
physics, and must be banished, with metaphysics, from religion,
that in the future religion may occupy the only solid ground
supplied by the moral experience of mankind.
It need create no surprise that this theory met with a
considerable amount of favour in England, for it falls in
with the agnostic tendencies of our age, and at the same time
endeavours to be just to the moral consciousness, and to
retain reverence for the Bible. In Holland, too, it is known
and extensively held under the name of " ethical idealism."
To us Germans it presents little that is new, but is simply
another form of the sittliche Weltordnung, which Fichte at
the end of the last century pronounced the essence of the idea
of God. Arnold also shares Fichte's moral earnestness, and his
enjoyment of an onslaught on other opinions, without always
observing due moderation in his attack. And as regards the
tenability of the theory, the development of Fichte's philosophy
seems to offer an instructive anticipation. It is at all events
certain that the idea of an " Eternal Power not ourselves,
which makes for righteousness," is far from being a clear idea
derived from experience, as Matthew Arnold maintains ; but
is, on the contrary, an abstract philosophical conception,
behind the vagueness of which the possibility of very
various interpretations is hidden. At one time this " Not-
ourselves " is described as a real, efficient power, to which we
feel we are subject, and for which we feel reverence. In that
case, the inference can scarcely be withheld, that the effects
which we experience presuppose an active, effective, and
therefore actual subject, who intends to produce these effects,
332 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV.
and who must accordingly be conceived as a being capable
of having spiritual, moral purposes, which would bring us to
a position very much like theism. On the other hand, other
passages point to an entirely different interpretation. The
" Not-ourselves " is also spoken of as a law of nature after the
manner of the law of gravitation, or the law of spiritual
beauty ; as the latter was personified by the Greeks in Apollo,
so the law of moral conduct was personified by the Hebrews
in Jehovah, which is not at all inconsistent with the sup-
position that they might have reached the law by the Dar-
winian method of adaptation and heredity. Now, since a
" law " is not itself an operative, effective force, but only the
manner of the operation of actual beings, the interpretation
of Arnold's theory just given conducts necessarily to the
Positivist view, according to which the divine consists simply
in the morally good feelings and actions of man himself, not
in any power outside and above man. But, in that case,
where is the Not- ourselves upon which Arnold lays so much
stress ? To a more thoroughly logical agnostic will it not
seem to be a remnant of mystical speculation, which is not
verifiable by experience, but must be got rid of, and the
Positivist idea of humanity put in its place ? But then we
get the atheistic religion of humanity of Feuerbach and
Comte. To bring that, however, into harmony with Biblical
theism 'would be more than Arnold could accomplish, even
with his very bold and free exegesis.
It must be doubted whether Arnold's idea of a " Power
not ourselves, which makes for righteousness/' which admits
of such various and in fact contradictory interpretations, is
superior in point of clearness and credibility to the conception
of God which has hitherto been generally held. Arnold
would not have deceived himself so far as he did on this head
if he had tried more seriously to think out his ideas. But he
often declares, with characteristic mocking irony, that for
philosophical thinking he has no faculty. In this he was
undoubtedly perfectly right. For a fuller discussion of
Arnold's position, I refer the reader to Martineau's essay on
Ideal Substitutes for God (3rd ed., 1881), to his work, A
Stiidy of Religion, its Sources and Contents (1888) ; further, to
Tulloch's essay on The Modern Religion of Experience.
Tulloch remarks that Arnold's " Power not ourselves, which
makes for righteousness," can as little be verified by expe-
Ch. I.] PHILOSOPHY IN RELATION TO THEOLOGY. -333
rience in the sense of natural science as any ancient dogma.
All that can be proved by the method of this science is the
recurrence of certain external conditions, to which Arnold
gives the name of " righteousness/' and behind which he
supposes a Power causing them. But this is beyond question
as much his belief as the creed of any one else is his. The
idea of righteousness is as certainly a product of the con-
science, or of what Arnold calls metaphysics, as the idea of
personality ; both arise from within, and are not brought from
without. In fact, the two are twin ideas, inseparably con-
nected in the Hebrew and the universal conscience a law of
conduct and a lawgiver, or personal authority, from whom it
issues. This is undoubtedly the voice of experience, though
not in Arnold's, but in a higher and truer sense of the word.
Accordingly, Arnold's notion of dogma as an excrescence or
a disease of religion is superficial. Of course religion and
dogma are not identical. But the latter is the product of
religious thought, or of the thought of the Church upon the
facts of religious experience. The creeds of the Church are
the fruit of the best possible efforts of theological thinkers
of every age, accordingly living expressions of the Christian
consciousness, deserving as such more respect than they
meet with from the representatives of the modern spirit.
So far the judgment of Tulloch. His remarks in the same
essay on the personal and literary characteristics of Matthew
Arnold I will not repeat here, incontrovertible as they appear
to me to be.
The author of the anonymous book, Natural Religion
(1882), who is, we are told, Professor SEELEY, of Cambridge,
is Arnold's equal in the lucidity and beauty of his style, and
superior to him in breadth of view and acuteness of thought.
He also proceeds from the conviction that the supernatural
elements of traditional religion are rapidly losing their hold
upon the mind of the men of this age, while religion itself is
to-day as needful and indispensable as ever it was. He, too,
seeks to ascertain how much of traditional religion will be
left when the supernatural has been abandoned. But the
answer returned by Arnold, that the essential element of
religion is morality, does not satisfy Seeley, inasmuch as re-
ligion makes itself felt in other and equally important depart-
ments of man's " Higher Life." It is not so much a manner
of acting as of feeling, namely, the habitual feeling of admira-
334 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV.
tion and reverence, combined with love and devotion. It is
not merely the God of wonders who can be the object of such
a religious worship, but whatever is beautiful, good, and true
in nature and man. Seeley accordingly distinguishes three
kinds of religion, each of which has its own peculiar value,
and can be harmoniously combined with the others. First,
the religion of the beautiful in nature, the aesthetic religion
of the Greeks ; second, the worship of the morally good
in man, the religion of ideal humanity, the very essence
of Christianity, which though propagated at first under
the supernatural form of the Christology of the Church,
has since the middle of the last century, freed from that
husk, developed into the religion of Humanity. Third,
to these must be added now the worship of the Unity
and Eternity of the universe, which, under the name of
" God," is conceived as the Supreme Power, comprehending
nature and man ; a religion which will remain though all
belief in the supernatural is abandoned. Reverence for the
supreme unity and the law of all being is so natural to men,
that it will continue to be felt, however they conceive the
relation of the One to the various elements of the universe,
or of God to the world. We do not find the difference of
theories as to man and the relation of his physical and mental
powers to one another hinders the practical reverence we feel
for human nature ; and as little is our practical worship of
the Unity and Regularity of the universe affected by the
theological question as to the relation of the one Principle to
the multiplicity of phenomena. The name " Nature" does not
adequately represent this Unity, inasmuch as often in the
usage of scientific men it leaves out of view the moral and
human side of the universe, which is to us the more
important side. But the word " God " combines the great-
ness and glory of nature with " whatever more awful forces
stir within the human heart, whatever binds men in families
and orders them in states." God " is the Inspirer of kings,
the Revealer of laws, the Reconciler of nations, the Re-
deemer of labour, the Queller of tyrants, the Reformer of
Churches, the Guide of the human race toward an unknown
goal." The worship of this God, who reveals himself in
Nature and in History, is not merely possible in an antisuper-
naturalistic age of art and science, but it is very necessary.
For nothing else than the worship of the Divine and Eternal
Ch. I.] PHILOSOPHY IN RELATION TO THPXJLOGY. 335
in phenomena is able to confer upon art and science the virtue
of ideality, and to raise them above commonplace and
triviality. The State and Society rest, too, upon the basis of
religion, reverence for the eternal laws of human life, free
from all the supernatural wrappings of the past, which
render religion stationary and cut it off from the living
stream of modern life. Natural religion, on the other hand,
occupies a place in the centre of the movements of the
present and is the uniting and elevating force of all mani-
festations of human life. It is the attainment of the ideal
which the Reformation proposed, which was, in fact, the
ideal of the Hebrew prophets, for their religion was social,
political, historical, and supernaturalism was not its main-
spring. But Seeley does not wish to exclude everything
supernatural from religion : he desires that faith may hold
that a higher world than that known to us exists, only this
transcendental world must not be made the chief thing.
Interesting as this aesthetic agnosticism beyond doubt is as
a transitional phase in an age of scepticism, it is not possible
to entirely withhold assent to the criticisms of those who
maintain that thus to widen religion till it becomes simply the
admiration of everything beautiful and great in Nature and
history, is to water it down and empty it of significance, till
the wants of the devout soul are not met. Religion, as
Tulloch urges, undoubtedly does not ignore Nature, but dis-
covers therein the rule of God ; but the distinctive mark of
religion is an ideal transcending both Nature and man. The
Holy One of the Prophets and the Heavenly Father of Christ
are not merely higher conceptions, but also truer ones, than
any ideas of Nature of previous religions. The real problem
is, Is there a spirit above nature and Man, a universal Con-
sciousness, with which our higher life can have communion ?
To make religion the admiration of the laws of Nature and
the ideals of art and science, is to introduce confusion into
language, and to throw back moral ideas, which Christianity
had grafted upon our thought, to the outlived stage of
heathen thinkers. Perhaps we may add that thought itself is
unable to rest finally in such a vague, problematic relation of
the world to the one principle as Seeley expounds ; and this
must be felt the more in proportion as the effort is made to
comprehend the totality of the universe in the unity of thought,
which is the tendency of evolutionism in its various forms.
THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV.
HERBERT SPENCER is regarded as at present the chief
representative of agnosticism. But the agnosticism which
Spencer adopted from Hamilton and Mansel forms but the
one aspect of his philosophy, to a certain extent the con-
venient background into which all metaphysical problems
can be relegated, so as to construct with fewer hindrances
a system of natural evolution from the results of modern
science. The significance of his philosophy lies in the bold-
ness with which it makes the idea of evolution, which has
controlled natural science since Darwin, the dominant point
of view in the formation of a connected and systematic theory
of the world. In order to save his doctrine of natural de-
velopment from collision with the presuppositions of existing
belief, he has placed the doctrine of the incognisability of the
Absolute as a wall of separation between philosophy and
religion, that an eternal peace may be concluded between
them ; but, in reality, with the result that he has deprived
religion of its contents and his philosophical system of its
prime principles. But, as in Spencer's system the idea of a
harmonious and orderly world, or of a systematic unity among
phenomena is so prominent, and this idea requires, or pre-
supposes necessarily, a connecting principle, or a basis of
unity, he has not been able to consistently carry out his
agnostic theory, but has surreptitiously converted the bare
negative, which Hamilton's Absolute amounted to, into a
reality, which bears the relation of a positive cause to
phenomena, only that nothing definite can be known as to
its nature and its further relation to phenomena.
In his First Principles (1862), the ultimate principles of his
philosophy, Spencer starts from the position, that as religion
has always been of great importance in the history of mankind,
and has been able to hold its ground in defiance of the attacks
of science, it must contain an element of truth. But as there
are various religions which claim to be true, and as science
also can make the same claim, while yet truth is but one, the
latter, Spencer holds, must be looked for in what the various
religions have in common with each other and with science.
This common element cannot be a definite conception of the
Absolute or the First Cause of the world, for it is precisely on
this point that opinions diverge, and in every one of the three
main theories Atheism, Pantheism, and Theism is shown
the impossibility of a satisfactory solution that is not self-
Ch. I.] PHILOSOPHY IN RELATION TO THEOLOGY. 337
contradictory. It follows that God, the Absolute, the Uncon-
ditioned, is not for us cognisable, but a great mystery, as all
religions to some extent acknowledge, and the higher their
rank, so much the more fully, only that the philosopher
regards this mystery as not merely relative, as the religions
regard it, but as absolute. Science and religion agree in this,
for science knows nothing about the most universal ideas
force and matter, space and time ; it can know things only by
comparing them with others that resemble them, and on that
very account is unable to know the Absolute, which cannot
be compared with anything.
But although it is involved in the very nature of our con-
sciousness that it can know only what is finite and limited,
Spencer declines to go with Hamilton in maintaining that the
Absolute is a purely negative concept. On the contrary,
he holds that the reality of the Absolute is the necessary
correlative of the Relative. This is both a necessity of
thought and of the analysis of things. For if every de-
finite state of consciousness has a limited content, the latter
presupposes an unlimited and general content as the raw
material of limiting thought. Our self- consciousness, as it is
the consciousness of the conditioned ego and non-ego, pre-
supposes an Unconditioned which is neither the ego nor
the non-ego : this is the Absolute, which is accordingly the
necessary correlative of our self-consciousness. And this a
priori proof from consciousness is confirmed by an a posteriori
proof from the analysis of external things. The results of
modern physics and chemistry reveal as the constant element
in all phenomena Force, which manifests itself in various
forms that change places with each other, while amid all their
changes it remains unaltered. If, accordingly, every specific
force is only a relative changeable phenomenal form of one
universal unchangeable force, this must be regarded as the
absolute reality which must necessarily be presupposed as
the background and basis of all that is relative and pheno-
menal. The entire universe is to be explained from the
movement of this absolute Force, which takes place rhyth-
mically as attraction and repulsion, integration and disinte-
gration, evolution and dissolution ; the phenomena of nature
and of mental life come under the same general laws of
matter, motion, and force, which are however only symbols of
the absolute Reality or Force which is in itself unknowable.
G. T. z
33$ THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV.
It is .obvious that Spencer has thus very seriously modified
the doctrine of Hamilton and Mansel as to the incognisability
of the Absolute. The Absolute of Spencer, of which substan-
tiality, causality, eternity and immutability are predicated,
is no longer the simple Unknown, which would be beyond all
our conceptions. The only question which arises is whether
Spencer's doctrine of the Absolute is adequate to account for
the world of mental life, and whether it is adapted to serve
as the basis of the reconciliation of science and religion. An
affirmative answer can hardly be given to this question. For
there is surely much force in the contention of Spencer's
opponents, that his agnostic evolutionism is really only a
disguised materialistic (hylozoistic) Pantheism ; for if the
supreme principle is nothing but force manifesting itself in
various motions, it does not land us beyond materialism. On
the other hand, it must be allowed that Spencer's real
intention is directed to something higher, the attainment of
which has been frustrated by his entanglement in the principle
of empiricism and the psychology of association, though in
many of his statements he approaches very nearly a higher
position. If the Absolute must be conceived as the neces-
sary correlative of our self-consciousness, can it be conceived
simply as physical force, and not rather as universal self-
consciousness, as a spiritual self? And if we get the idea of
force from the experience of our own power of volition, its
action and its resistance, is it not natural to think of mind-
force as prior to physical, and accordingly of the absolute
Force at the basis of all specific forces as Mind ? The
doctrine of evolution would harmonise perfectly well with
these inferences, only it would have to become idealistic
instead of materialistic, and only after this transformation had
been made would a practicable basis be supplied for the
reconciliation of religion and science which Spencer has done
well to attempt.
Spencer would probably himself have taken this further
step, if he had been able, on the decisive question as to the
fundamental act of knowledge, to set himself free from the
superficiality and confusions of the association-psychology.
This he has failed to do, and defines consciousness as a suc-
cession of sensations or changes, which implies a relation of
different states, and is brought about by different impressions
of force. The question here arises, as in Mill's system, Can
Ch. I.] PHILOSOPHY IN RELATION TO THEOLOGY. 339
a succession of feelings or changes be consciously felt without
a subject to recognise the change, without an active synthetic
principle to combine the changing states of feeling into the
unity of consciousness ? But Spencer has no place in his
system for such a subject, as he holds that the ego consists
simply of a " faint " and the object of a "vivid" series of
sensations. He acknowledges therefore really nothing more
than passive sensations, or impressions of force, and supposes
he can explain consciousness from their changes alone, while
undoubtedly it is wholly inexplicable without the active
synthesis of the ego. Spencer can have ignored this prime
factor only because, like all empiricists, he " confuses the
succession of feelings with cognition of succession, changes
of consciousness with consciousness of change." When he
speaks of change of states of consciousness as the result of
changing impressions of force, he seeks to find the origin of
consciousness in effects produced from without, which cannot,
however, surely, be perceived as in succession and changed
save by reference to previously existing consciousness ; he
really, therefore, presupposes consciousness as already in-
wardly present, while he seeks to explain it from external
action. In fact, we must concur in the searching- criticism of
Green, 1 that Spencer has not grasped the fundamental pro-
blem of the source and nature of knowledge, as. it was pro-
posed by Hume and solved by Kant in the synthetic function
of the ego. Spencer supposes that Kant has been refuted
by the new discovery of the doctrine of natural evolution,
namely, that the supposed a priori or innate ideas which are
considered to precede experience, are in reality only the result
of the experience of the race which the individual inherits. 2
But Spencer here fails to perceive the real nature of the pro-
blem, which is, How is experience in any form possible ? A
problem which remains unaltered whether the experience is
that of the individual or the race, and to the solution of
which no historical " psychogenesis " of nature can contribute
in the smallest degree. And while his evolutionary psycho-
logy contributes nothing whatever towards a solution of the
problem as to the nature of knowledge, Spencer really makes
1 Works of Thomas Hill Green, vol. i. pp. 383 sqq.
* See Martineau's critique of this doctrine, Types of Ethical Theory, vol. ii.
PP- 357 sqq.
34 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV.
a solution of it impossible by degrading the relation of sub-
ject and object, the ego and the non-ego, to a mere difference
of degree in the strength or vividness of a series of sensa-
tions. An error so fundamental at the crucial point can do
no other than produce a fatal effect upon the whole system
built upon it. If a man fails to perceive in himself the active
subject, the self-conscious mind, it cannot be expected of him
that he should find it in the Absolute.
With reference to the religious import of the Spencerian
doctrine of the Unknowable, the forcible criticisms of MAR-
TINEAU and J. CAIRD may here find a place. The former 1
says that " Spencer's testimony against the purely phenomenal
doctrineis of high vake " ; for " it betrays his appreciation
of that outlook beyond the region of phenomena for the con-
ditions of religion which cannot eventually be content to gaze
into an abyss without reply." But his position, that we can
know only that the absolute power is, but not what it is, is
untenable, because 'it is self-contradictory. We can know the
first fact by thought only, and " how can there be a thought
with nothing thinkable ? " " By calling this existence a
' Power,' Mr. Herbert Spencer surely removes it by one
mark from the unknown ; but, besides this, * we are obliged/
he says, ' to regard that Power as omniscient/ as eternal, as
one, as cause manifested in all phenomena ; a list of predi-
cates, scanty indeed when measured by the requisites ' of
religion, but too copious for the plea of Nescience." When
we distinguish this Absolute from all that is related to it,
we know it, for to distinguish is to know. " This negative
ontology -which identifies ' the supreme reality ' with total
vacuity, and makes the infinite in Being the zero in thought,
cannot permanently poise itself in its precarious position ; it
must either repent of its concessions to realism and lapse into
the scientific commonplace, ' all we know is phenomena ' ; or
else advance, with what caution and reserve it pleases, into
ulterior conceptions of the invisible cause, sufficient to soften
the total eclipse into the penumbra of a sacred mystery."
Martineau makes further the pertinent remark, that "it is
but natural that the pretensions of men to more knowledge
than they can substantiate should lead to this reaction into
1 A Study of Religion^ vol. i. pp. 131 sqq.
Ch. I.] PHILOSOPHY IN RELATION TO THEOLOGY. 341
imaginary ignorance." " The Gnosticism of theologians is
responsible for much of the Agnosticism of this century."
John Caird, in his Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion
(iSSo), 1 has given a searching criticism of Spencer's agnos-
ticism, the chief points of which are as follows. The two
propositions that our intelligence is confined to the finite and
relative, and that we have cognisance of an existence beyond
the finite, are contradictory and cancel each other. Whoever
maintains that human knowledge is limited shows thereby
that it is not limited merely by the relative, because in that
case it could have no knowledge of its own limits. The true
conclusion from the principles of Spencer's theory of know-
ledge is not the incognisability of the Absolute, but its non-
existence ; his " unknowable Absolute " is simply the negation
of thought ; and therewith of being, in every sense in which
we can use the expression. In reality, the assertion- of the
unknowableness of the Absolute is based upon an abstraction;
a fictitious logical entity is first created, and then conscious-
ness is charged with imbecility because of its inability to think
that fiction. Nothing can possess any reality for us save as.
it is capable of forming a part of our thought, or is in itself a
thinkable reality. All science proceeds on the tacit assump-
tion that nature and the world of man are intelligible, of the
presence of reason, thought in things, and of rational rela-
tions in the events of history. This general presupposition
cannot leave us when we rise beyond nature and humanity to
the ultimate basis of all. phenomena. If reason is irresistibly
impelled (even according to Spencer) to seek, above and
beyond the manifold and changeful phenomena, a permanent
unity, an infinite and absolute reality, it can at this stage, as
little as at any previous one, fall into the suicidal contradic-
tion of seeking by thought an object which has no relation to
thought, and of seeking the ultimate explanation of all rational
relations in the irrational. The presupposition and the final
goal of thought cannot be an Absolute which is simply the
negation of thought, but rather that which comprehends all
finite things and thoughts only because it is itself the Unity
of Thought and Being, and in which therefore our human
thought finds its fullest revelation. Lastly, Caird observes,
1 Pages 10-38.
342 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV.
that Spencer's demand of religious worship of the Unknow-
able is an impossible one for the human heart to meet. It is
true all religion contains an element of mystery, inasmuch as
finite intelligence cannot be the measure of the infinite ; but a
religion all mystery is an absurd and impossible notion, and
would be nothing else than the apotheosis of ignorance. The
homage which we render to the Being in whom are hid all
the treasures of wisdom and knowledge, all the inexhaustible
wealth of that boundless realm of truth in which thought finds
ever increasing stimulus to aspiration, to wonder and delight,
is totally different from the dumb wonder of ignorance or the
grovelling awe of the supernatural, as it is exhibited in the
fetish-worshipper, whose religion is the nearest approach to
the religion of the Unknowable. True religion is not the
blind fear of an unknown Being, but trust, sympathy, and
love toward the " God who is light, and in whom is no dark-
ness at all," and to know whom is eternal life for the human
spirit.
As is evident from this critique of Spencer's position, and
as he himself intimates in his " prefatory note," John Caird
takes essentially the -standpoint of Hegel's Philosophy of
Religion. He founds his proof of the existence of God on the
fundamental principle of Hegelian speculation, in which he
finds the essence of the oncological argument, namely, that
the correlation of thought and being in our consciousness
involves as its necessary presupposition the absolute unity of
both in the divine consciousness. After the example of
Hegel, he describes the forms of the religious consciousness
as the representative, figurative form of knowledge, as the
abstract, disintegrating logical understanding, and as synthe-
tic, reintegrating speculation, which discovers in the contradic-
tions, to the understanding insoluble, of finite and infinite,
freedom and necessity, etc., the inseparable moments or
members of a concrete unity. Caird's idea of religion is also
formed after Hegel's, though with a stronger accentuation of
the ethical side, and in that respect related to Fichte's ethical
mysticism. Religion is the realisation of the ideal, which
in morality is never more than approximately reached ; for
religion is the surrender of the finite to the infinite will, the
abnegation of all private individual volition, and complete
identification of the personal will with God's. Hence en-
trance upon the religious life is the termination of the struggle
Ch. I.] PHILOSOPHY IN RELATION TO THEOLOGY. 343
between " the false self and that higher self which is at once
mine and infinitely more than mine," the realisation of the
divine self in the human. The last chapter in the book,
which deals with the relation of the philosophy to the history
of religion, offers excellent observations on false and correct
applications of the idea of development to the history of
religion. This idea is according to Caird in no way incon-
sistent with the claim of Christianity to a divine origin, if the
latter is not understood in such a sense as to sever Chris-
tianity from human history, which it is not the interest of the
apologist to do. There is reason to resist the application
of the idea of evolution to Christianity in a sense which would
assert that there was nothing new and original in it, but
only a combination in new forms of pre-existing elements.
The connection of Christianity with the past must be conceived
as the transmuting of the past by a new creative spiritual
force. Thus, based upon Hegel, we have here an idealistic
form of evolutionism in opposition to that of Herbert Spencer.
The Scottish philosophers, Edward Caird and Hutchison
Stirling, and the Oxford Professor, Thomas Hill Green, have
successfully endeavoured to introduce their-countrymen to the
philosophy of Hegel ; the two former by excellent mono-
graphs on Kant and Hegel, in which, while differing on many
points, they concur in representing the Kantian philosophy
as the fundamental basis of the speculation which reaches its
climax in Hegel. This conception of the relation of the two
great German philosophers appears to prevail pretty generally
in England and Scotland, and it is without doubt much more
correct than the view which prevails in Germany, in conse-
quence of the interpretation of Kant brought into vogue by
the Neo-Kantians during the last decades. According to
this interpretation, in order to remove him as far as possible
from the tabooed Hegel, Kant is to be explained in the
sense of Hume and Locke, whereby the epoch-making
element of his philosophy is totally ignored. It is really a
remarkable phenomenon in national psychology, that in the
same years in which in Germany the younger generation dis-
covers the progress of philosophy in a backward movement
from Hegel to Kant, and from Kant to Hume and Locke, the
younger generation in Great Britain has gone in the exactly
opposite direction. In his elaborate Introductions to Hume's
works (1874), by which he first obtained a name as a philo-
344 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV.
sophical thinker, THOMAS HILL GREEN sought to show that
the English philosophy of the last hundred years has remained
stationary, because it has continued to build upon the founda-
tion of the empiricism of Locke, although Hume had shown
its untenability, and that therefore the first condition of an
advance is a serious reconsideration of the problem proposed
by Hume, a problem the solution of which Green considers
possible only in the direction of the speculative philosophy
begun by Kant and carried further by Hegel. He had given
expression to this conviction a few years earlier (1868), in the
suggestive essay on Popular Philosophy in its Relation to
Life, at the close of which he says : * " A peculiar charac-
teristic of our times is the scepticism of the best men. Art,
religion, and political life have outgrown the nominalistic
logic and the psychology of individual introspection ; yet the
only recognised formulae by which the speculative man can
account for them to himself, are derived from that logic and
psychology. Thus the more fully he has appropriated the
results of the spiritual activity of his time, the more he is
bafHed in his theory, and to him this means weakness, and
the misery of weakness. Meanwhile, pure motive and high
aspiration are going for nothing, or issuing only in those
wild and fruitless outbursts into action with which speculative
misery sometimes seeks to relieve itself. The prevalence of
such a state of mind might be expected at least to excite an
interest in a philosophy like that of Hegel, of which it was
the professed object to find formulae adequate to the action of
reason as exhibited in nature and human society, in art and
religion."
As a tutor in Oxford, Green exercised, by the force of his
strong and sterling personality, directed always, both specu-
latively and practically, to the highest ideals, a powerful
influence, which continues to work, upon the young minds
that gathered around him. His importance as a philosophical
thinker became known to wider circles only after his death
by his posthumous writings. For our purpose it is his Pro-
legomena to Ethics, and his theological essays and addresses
(in the third volume of his collected works), that are of
special importance. On these and the references of his
editor, in the memoir prefixed to the third volume of his
1 Works, vol. iii. p. 124.
Ch. I.] PHILOSOPHY IN RELATION TO THEOLOGY. 345
works, the following sketch of his religious philosophy is
based.
In a review of J. Caird's Introduction to the Philosophy of
Religion, Green complains that Caird does not "sit looser to
the dialectical method" of Hegel, and identifies thought and
reality without sufficient explanation ; that the vital truth which
Hegel had to teach must be presented in a form which will
be more acceptable to serious and scientific men generally.
Green thus summarises this " vital truth " of Hegelianism :
" that there is one spiritual self-conscious being, of which all
that is real is the activity or expression ; that we are related
to this spiritual being, not merely as parts of the world which
is its expression, but as partakers in some inchoate measure
of the self-consciousness through which it at once constitutes
and distinguishes itself from the world ; that this participation
is the source of morality and religion." The exposition of
these propositions constitutes the subject matter of Green's
philosophy of religion. He finds the foundation of faith in
God in the intellectual and moral nature of man. Our know-
ledge of the world, being the mind's active combination of
various appearances into the unity of consciousness, becomes
the ground of the knowledge of a self-conscious Mind in the
universe, which is the necessary condition of the existence of
a like activity in ourselves, and the source and bond of the
ever growing synthesis called knowledge. But as the source
of all knowledge God is not knowable by us in the same
sense as any other object, and can only be thought of under
metaphors and practically experienced as the power by which
our minds think and love. As our thought presupposes as
the ground of its possibility an eternal thinking Mind, so our
moral action presupposes an eternal Will employing man as
the instrument of the realisation of its ends. For all moral
action is self-realisation, the development of our true nature,
the endeavour to perfect our actual nature in the direction of
a highest ideal. This effort after self-improvement is the
practical proof of an absolute perfection. For the possibili-
ties of our nature which wait for realisation presuppose a
superhuman self from which, in which, and for which they are
actual ; there must be an eternal subject which is all that the
imperfect subject is destined to become by the unfolding of
its powers. It is in this sense that Green uses the somewhat
bold expression, " God is our possible or ideal self." But he
346 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [ Bk - IV -
does not mean by this that this self is an empty, merely
imaginary ideal ; on the contrary, it is the only realising
principle, or cause, of our personal self, which is never more
than a relative reality. As little may this be understood in
the sense of a pantheistic identification of God with man, be-
cause our imperfect, perpetually developing being distinguishes
us essentially from the eternally perfect being of God. But
what the expression does mean is that the human mind is in
principle one with the Divine, relatively participates in God,
is a reproduction of the Divine under the conditions of the
finite. According to Green, the inner essence of Christianity
lies in its sense of this fact, that God is not an alien, far-off
outward Power, but the Father, whose " word is nigh unto
us," of whom we may say that we are reason of his reason,
whose spirit lives in us, and for whom we live in living for
the brethren ; and thereby we live freely, because in obedi-
ence to a spirit which is our self; and in communion with
whom we have assurance of eternal life. A self which can
think and will eternal ideas, can seek to realise eternal ends,
is itself above time, shares in the nature of the eternal ; the
perfect development of its capacities cannot be its annihila-
tion, although we can form no conception of the positive state
of the realised ideal, because it lies beyond our experience.
The philosopher is accordingly conscious of being in essen-
tial accord with Christian faith when this is conceived in its
religious sense, that is, as a disposition of mind or character,
consisting in the consciousness of potential unity with God,
and issuing in the effort to realise this unity in life, in self-
denial, and in confiding love. This faith is independent of
historical proofs in every form, and carries the evidence of its
own certainty along with it. As a religious faith it cannot
come into conflict with knowledge, as both alike have their
source in reason or self-consciousness, which is itself again a
revelation of the Divine reason. But religious faith in its
empirical ecclesiastical form has another side, by which it
necessarily comes into conflict with knowledge. The one
spiritual truth is clothed in the forms of the imagination,
which can never adequately represent the idea. The pro-
gressive revelation of God in the spirit of man and in the
whole course of human history is narrowed to an event of the
past, occurring but once or occasionally, and of an exceptiona
and absolutely miraculous nature. Events of this kind are
Ch. I.] PHILOSOPHY IN RELATION TO THEOLOGY. 347
then made to constitute the immediate object of faith, and
this faith in miracle the indispensable condition of Christian
piety and morality. But in this view it is forgotten that as-
sent to historical traditions, be they well or ill attested, true
or untrue, can never be more than an act of the intellect,
which would make no difference to the moral value of a man,
to his religious and moral character. From this faith, still
required in the churches, in the miraculous as the specific
form of divine revelation, the moral feeling and the intellectual
culture of our day have revolted. For when once the idea of
" nature " is conceived as a continuous, uniform system of
laws, " a supernatural event " would be a breach of the con-
tinuity of the order of which it was supposed to be an ele-
ment, that is, it would contradict the conditions under which
alone a thing can be an event. "As long as the truth of
religion is supposed to depend on supernatural events, science
is right in pronouncing it a fiction and in identifying faith
with unreason." The business of apologetics can be no other
than to distinguish faith in its spiritual and religious essence
from the inadequate forms of the imagination, and to learn to
understand historically the rise and growth of the latter.
It was not within the scope of Green's vocation as a philo-
sopher to deal with the critical history of Christian faith, but
he everywhere shows a close acquaintance with the results of
recent historical criticism, as far as they could serve to confirm
his philosophical speculations. " The glory of Christianity,"
he says, 1 " is not that it excludes, but that it comprehends ;
not that it came of a sudden into the world, or that it is given
complete in a particular institution, or can be stated- complete
in a particular form of words ; but that it is the expression of
a common spirit which is gathering together all things in one.
We cannot say of it, Lo, here it is, or Lo, there ; it is now, but
was not then. We go backward, but we cannot reach its
source ; we look forward, but we cannot foresee its final
power. We do it wrong in making it depend on a past
event, and in identifying it with the creed of a certain age, or
with a visible society established at a particular time. What
we thus seem to gain in definiteness, we lose in permanence
of conviction ; for importunate inquiry will show us that the
event can only be approached through a series of fluctuating
1 The Witness of God, Works, iii. pp. 240 sqq.
34$ THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV.
interpretations of it, behind which its original nature cannot
be clearly ascertained ; that the ' visible Church ' of one age
is never essentially the same as that of the next ; that it is
only in word, or to the intellectually dead, that the creed of
the present is the same as the creed of the past." But if it
is doubtless true that the roots of the system of practical
ideas which we call Christianity are as old as mankind, the
ideas would never have been developed save through definite
historical events and personal influences, among which some
outweigh all others in importance. The Son of Man came,
who was conscious, in the meanness of human life and death,
of the communication of God to himself, and through him to
mankind. Then came Paul, who found his idea of the
" heavenly man," borrowed from the philosophy of his day,
realised in Jesus, and made the death and resurrection of
Jesus the symbol of the fundamental principle, that man
comes to his true self only by the passing out of his old nar-
row self into the true divine self. But while Paul had placed
this moral and spiritual element above the miraculous, sub-
sequently the relation was reversed : the miraculous over-
powered the moral and the spiritual. Yet two generations
after Paul followed the author of the Fourth Gospel, "who
gave that final spiritual interpretation to the person of Christ
which has for ever taken it out of the region of history and of
the doubts that surround all past events, to fix it in the puri-
fied conscience as the immanent God." By combining in faith
the spiritual with the moral, God with man, " this Gospel
has rilled the special function- of presenting the highest
thought about God in language of the imagination, and has
thus become the source of the highest religion." l But while
according to Paul and John Christ dwells and works as spirit
in believers, in the Church he has been step by step " ex-
ternalised and mystified." Thus arose dogma with its mys-
teries, from which knowledge and the purest moral culture
are estranged. But trustful, child-like love, set before us by
the Biblical presentation of Christ, and made an inward part
of our life and character, is sufficient to meet and overcome
all the blows of criticism and the problems as to historical
events. And if, as must be allowed, it is no longer possible
for the modern thinking Christian to retain the communion
1 Works, iii. p. 219.
Ch. I.] PHILOSOPHY IN RELATION TO THEOLOGY. 349
and fellowship of the confessions and creeds of the ancient
Church, he must, nevertheless, continue to feel bound to his
fellow- Christians by the ties of practical love. Green's own
life was an example of this, and he combined in an uncommon
degree practical social labours with philosophical pursuits.
There are not wanting various indications that, as in Ger-
many the original Hegelianism, so in England Neo-Hege-
lianism, is so far from being the final end of philosophy, that
even those thinkers who are intimately conversant with the
latter, and ungrudgingly acknowledge its noble and massive
idealism, have nevertheless not been able to convince them-
selves of the tenability of the system, and so find themselves
compelled to advance in the direction of speculative theism
(which also predominates in the post- Hegelian speculation of
Germany). We must mention, as written on these lines, the
able book of ANDREW SETH, Hegelianism and Personality
(1887), which appears to have been occasioned by the writ-
ings of Green ; for it begins with critical observations on the
crucial doctrine of Green's system, that a universal or divine
self is present in every individual as the efficient principle of
its theoretical and practical knowledge. In order to under-
stand and fairly judge this doctrine, Seth holds it is necessary
to go back to its genesis in the philosophy of Kant and his
successors, especially of Hegel. An acute analysis and cri-
tique of these systems leads to the result that the fundamental
error of Hegelianism and the allied English doctrine is the
identification of the human and the divine self-consciousness,
and that this identification depends throughout on the ten-
dency to take a mere form of consciousness, which is the
same in all individuals, and so universal, as a real being, to
hypostatise and call it the self common to God and men.
This is contrary, Seth maintains, to the characteristic nature
of the self, which, although in knowledge a principle of unity,
is in existence, or metaphysically, a principle of isolation (?).
For the most certain testimony of consciousness is, that I
have a centre of my own a will of my own. Nor does the
religious consciousness lend any countenance to the represen-
tation of the human soul as a mere mode or efflux of the
divine. On the contrary, religious self-surrender of the will
to the divine will presupposes the active self of the man.
What Hegel calls " spirit," " absolute spirit," is at bottom
350 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV.
nothing more than the abstract scheme of intelligence, which
Fichte constructs in his Wissenschaftslekre. But this ab-
stract form has neither reality nor real value. The attempt
of the Hegelian schools to unify the divine and the human
subject is ultimately destructive of both. We cannot rightly
conceive either the divine or the human self in this impossible
union ; nor is this wonderful, seeing they are merely two in-
separable aspects of our own conscious life isolated and hypo-
statised. If we are to ascribe real existence to God, Seth
declares with truth, there must be a divine centre of thought,
activity, and enjoyment, which can no more be lost in its
manifestations in the universe than human personality in its
life for others. The admission of a real self-consciousness in
God is, moreover, demanded by the fundamental principle of
the theory of knowledge interpretation by means of the
highest category within our reach : if the self-conscious life is"
the highest in us, we cannot deny it to God ; he may, indeed
must, be infinitely more than we know ourselves to be, but
he cannot be less. The Hegelian system, continues Seth, is as
ambiguous on the question of man's immortality as on that
of the personality of God, and for precisely the same reason
that the self of which assertions are made is not a real but a
logical self. The two positions are two complementary sides
of the same view of existence. If we can believe, with the
Hegelians of the Left, that there is no permanent Intelligence
and Will at the heart of things, then the self-conscious life is
degraded from its central position, and becomes merely an
accident in the universe ; but, on the other hand, to a philo-
sophy founded upon self-consciousness, and especially upon
the moral consciousness, it must seem incredible that the suc-
cessive generations should be used up and cast aside as if
character were not the only lasting product and the only valu-
able result of time. Seth summarises his critique of Hegel
and Neo-Hegelianism in the sentences, " Hegel is the pro-
tagonist of idealism, and champions the best interests of hu-
manity ; but in its execution the system breaks down, and
ultimately sacrifices these very interests to a logical abstrac-
tion styled the Idea, in which both God and man disappear."
The speculative theism towards which Seth seeks to bring
Hegelian speculation is represented also in the writings of
ROBERT FLINT, Professor of Divinity in the University of
Edinburgh, Antitheistic Theories (1877) and Theism (1876),
Ch. I.] PHILOSOPHY IN RELATION TO THEOLOGY. 351
and in his brief but very instructive article on Theism in the
ninth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. In the first-
named book Flint has passed under review the naturalistic,
positivist, pessimistic, and pantheistic theories, and shown
their untenability ; he does not in this work deal with agnosti-
cism, but has reserved it for a separate work, which has not
yet appeared. This will be looked for with the greater in-
terest, as the article on Theism in the Encyclopaedia offers
some excellent observations upon the agnostic position.
Flint maintains that agnosticism is so far from being the
necessary corollary of Kantian criticism, that, on the contrary,
it contradicts its true principles. For if it is the categories
which make experience possible, their validity cannot be re-
stricted to sense experience, but extends as truly to the realm
of moral and religious experience. And if the objective
validity of the categories, or the necessary forms of thought, is
generally called in question, it is not merely theology which
is thereby deprived of all foundation, but equally all other
sciences, which are then all resolved into castles in the air.
But against such scepticism human consciousness testifies, for
it cannot think the mere subjectivity of a true category. As
against Hamilton and Mansel, Flint observes that the idea of
the Absolute so far from being, as they alleged, an empty ne-
gation, abstraction, and fiction, because out of all relation to
the knowable, contains the foundation of all relations, the
basis not less of existence than of thought, and therefore
far from being unknowable, is the richest and highest idea,
to which all other knowledge conducts as its necessary com-
pletion. In it all the metaphysical categories are included,
for God is the absolute Being ; all the physical categories, for
he is absolute Force and Life ; all the mental categories, for
he is absolute Spirit ; all the moral categories, for he is the
absolutely Good. Thus the idea of God brings all ideas which
are the conditions of human reason and the basis of a know-
ledge of things into an organic system ; the whole truth of
the world, unfolded in the various sciences, as well as the
truth of the mind, is included in the idea of God. A philo-
sophy of the Absolute, such as Hegel's, may in its contro-
versy with Agnosticism fall into some extravagances of Gnos-
ticism ; but a theist may nevertheless sympathise with its
general aim and appropriate many of its results. Undoubt-
edly this philosophy needs correction, so far as it fails to do
352 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV.
justice to the personality and transcendence of the Divine.
And this error is due to its having obtained the idea of God
too exclusively by the method of formal logical thought, and
to its neglect of the other sides of the mind, the moral and
religious experience particularly. The idea of God cannot
be laid hold of solely by the scientific organising intellect,
but only by the combined theoretical and practical powers of
the mind. It is a truth ever more clearly perceived, that the
divine glory has its centre in moral perfection, in holy love.
On the other hand, the general movement of theism tends to
a mediation between the extremes of pantheism and deism,
to a harmonious combination of the personal self-equality
and the universal agency of God. Positive science has
powerfully co-operated with speculative philosophy in pro-
moting this movement. The modern scientific view of the
world has not as its result pantheism, but it gives sanction to
the relative claims of pantheism, and demands a theism which
acknowledges God's immanence in the world while holding
fast to his personality. The theory of evolution as applied
to nature and history does not lead to Agnosticism, but to a
more vivid knowledge of God, from whom and through whom
and to whom are all things, who is the eternal source of all
forces in nature, and also the power in history working for
truth and righteousness. These excellent views of Professor
Flint seem to me to contain, in fact, the quintessence of the
best thoughts of modern speculative philosophy and the pro-
gramme of its further development.
Lastly, as tending in a similar direction, must be mentioned
the works on the philosophy of religion of JAMES MARTINEAU,
the revered and venerable theologian who has spent his life
outside the Established Church as a preacher and theological
tutor amongst the Unitarians. By his Essays Philosophical
and Theological (2 vols., 1869), which appeared originally
chiefly in the National Review, and his college addresses, he
was known as one of the ablest antagonists of agnostic and
materialistic philosophy ; and his two larger works, Types
of Ethical Theory (2 vols., 1885), and A Study of Religion
(2 vols., 1888) have more than sustained his reputation. In
his " Introductory chapter on recent developments," prefixed
to the re-issue of the second edition of John James Tayler's
Retrospect of the Religious Life of England (1876), Martineau
could speak of the emendation of the idea of God which had
Ch. I.] PHILOSOPHY IN RELATION TO THEOLOGY. 353
been effected since the days of the older Natural Theology,
" an emendation which had taken place long ago among the
Unitarians," that "God is no longer conceived as the First
Cause prefixed to the scheme of things, but as the Indwelling
Cause pervading it : not excluded by Second Causes, but
coinciding with them while transcending them ; as the One
everliving Objective Agency, the modes of which must be
classified and interpreted by science in the outer field, by con-
science in the inner." And he considers that " this change
o
of conception is due to the lessened prominence of mechanical
ideas and the advance of physiology to a dominant position,
substituting the thought of life working from within for that
of transitive impulse starting from without." Modern science,
with its doctrine of evolution, leaves theism, he maintains,
undisturbed and unharmed, as no physical knowledge can
prevent it from conceiving the unity of the Causal Power,
which evolution presupposes, as mind, a thesis implied in the
very idea of causality. This thought Martineau has worked
out in his St^ldy of Religion. After a valuable introductory
book on the limits of human intelligence, from which we
quoted above, 1 the idea of causality is reduced to that of
operative power, and this again to that of voluntary activity ;
whence the conclusion is drawn, that all that takes place in
nature has one kind of cause, which we can only conceive as
a will analogous to our own ; that therefore the universe of
originated things is the product of a supreme Mind. To the
charge of anthropomorphism, Martineau replies, that what-
ever idea we form of the ultimate principle of the universe,
it must be taken from the analogies of human experience, and
the one thing that makes the difference is, whether it be drawn
from the lower or the higher aspects of our human nature.
The notion, too, that God as a designer must be separated
from the world and left outside of it, is unfounded, for " the-
ism is at liberty to regard all the cosmical forces as varieties
of method assumed by God's conscious causality, and the
whole of Nature as the evolution of his thought." Yet the
immanency of God must not be so conceived as to leave
no room for the personality of created minds, or to make the
actual cosmos the boundary of the possibilities of the divine
activity. To get the more definite contents of the idea of
1 Ante, p. 340.
G. T. A A
354 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV.
God, the inference from our own moral nature to God as the
perfect Ideal is made, since that Ideal cannot be merely sub-
jective fancy, but the objective authority, in whose legislation
our conscience finds its origin and its explanation. Martineau
had previously maintained in his essay on Ideal Substitutes
for God, in opposition to the ethical idealism without God, of
such writers as Matthew Arnold and F. A. Lange, that the
truth of our religious and moral consciousness stands or falls
with the reality of the divine ideal.
Martineau's Study of Religion is a most instructive and
suggestive work ; what it seems to lack is a closer analysis
of the psychological nature of religion, and particularly a
more thorough examination of the historical development of
the religious consciousness of mankind. But it is not only
this work, but the English philosophy of religion generally
which seems to me to require supplementing and developing
in this direction. It would thereby exert greater influence
upon the theology of the Church, which appears to have
remained hitherto too much out of touch with the progress
of philosophical thought. 1
1 During the translation of the manuscript of this book has appeared
Martineau's work, The Seat of Authority in Religion (London, 1890), which
supplements his Study of Religion in a desirable way. For it follows up
the philosophical examination of the ultimate ground of religious certainty,
and of the relation of the divine and the human factor in all revelation with
an historical analysis of the traditional authorities (the Church, the Bible),
and with a review of the historical process by which the religion of Jesus
was transformed into a religion about him, and the kernel of moral and
religious truth was covered by a husk of " Christian mythology." Even those
who may think Martineau's critique of the early Christian traditions here
and there too radical, must be compelled to admit that it is the result of a
thorough examination of the facts, and of a penetrating and discerning
judgment. And every unprejudiced reader can convince himself by a careful
study of the fine concluding chapter, that this bold critique is quite consistent
with a fervent reverence for the religious personality of Jesus, and accordingly
does not detract from the essence of Christian faith. The work with which
Dr. Martineau has crowned the labours of his long life will be a lasting
monument of a mind not less free than devout. May it find many grateful
readers at home and abroad ! O. P.
CHAPTER II.
PARTIES AND MOVEMENTS IN THE THEOLOGY OF GREAT
BRITAIN.
IT was remarked at the beginning of the previous chapter
that that general revolution of thought and feeling, commonly
known as " Romanticism," which took place at the com-
mencement of this century, produced good fruit in the revival
and reanimation of the religion of the Church. The first
and most influential representative of this new tendency in
England was Coleridge, in whose Aids to Reflection (1825),
German idealistic philosophy was transplanted to English
soil, and employed in the revivification of theological thought.
We have seen that in Coleridge, as in Schleiermacher, his
German predecessor, intellect and feeling, faith and know-
ledge, entered into such a close alliance with each other, that
he appeared on the one hand as the apologist of the faith of
the Church, in opposition to anti-religious rationalism ; and,
on the other, as at the same time the champion of a more
liberal view of traditional doctrines, in opposition to a literal
orthodoxy. These two aspects of Coleridge's thought, while
combined in his own person, separated into two distinct
parties or tendencies in the Church, their common origin, in
the set of feeling in Romanticism, betraying itself outwardly
in the fact that both parties proceeded from the same circle
of Oxford students, and were represented by men who were
personal friends in their university days, far as their courses
subsequently diverged. In this also we meet with a striking
similarity to the early days of modern German theology.
The relation of J. H. Newman, the originator and early
leader of the Anglo- Catholic movement, to his liberal teacher
and mentor, Whately, may be compared with Neander's
relation to his teacher Planck ; and the parallel between the
friendship of Thomas Arnold with Keble, the friend of
Hurrell Froude and Newman, and the friendship of the
youthful Schleiermacher with Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel,
355
356 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV.
is still more obvious. We must begin with the movement
of the High Church, or Tractarian, or Puseyite party, and
then take up that of the Broad Church, led by Thomas
Arnold and F. D. Maurice, which, from the first, existed by
the side of the Tractarian movement, but did not obtain
general influence until the latter had passed the zenith of its
power. This movement of the Broad Church party has been
more recently followed by a liberalism of a more decided
type, which has been represented during this generation in
the rise of Biblical criticism in Great Britain.
The Tractarian movement dates from the summer of 1833,
though its roots extend a few years further back. In the
year 1827 appeared Keble's Christian Year, a collection of
religious lyrics on the principal festivals of the ecclesiastical
year ; the poems clothe a tender and deep piety in the
symbolic garb suggested by the seasons of the natural and
Christian year, and are the production of a true poet. We
might call Keble the English Novalis, the poet of religious
idealism, to whose vision " two worlds " lie always open, the
visible being but a type of the invisible, which always lay
nearest his heart. Only Keble did not possess the philo-
sophical culture and learning of Novalis, and lacked con-
sequently his largeness of view : in Keble's mind, profound
personal piety was so exclusively associated with the forms
of Anglican doctrines and ceremonies, that he could not con-
ceive Christianity or religion at all, apart from the Anglican
system ; his religious intolerance went so far, that when the
Queen selected a Lutheran prince to be godfather to one of
her sons, he set on foot a protest against it from English
clergymen. The religious poems of the Christian Year
gave such perfect and admirable expression to a wide-spread
state of feeling amongst English people, that the little volume
found everywhere the warmest reception, and probably ob-
tained more friends than all the subsequent theological tracts
and learned books for the new movement in the Church. It
produced a still deeper effect on the convictions and the
subsequent life of John Henry Newman, who had hitherto
passed amongst Oxford ,men as a disciple of Whately's,
though as early as 1826 his mind began to take another
turn, chiefly through intercourse with his friend Hurrell
Froude. This young man seems .to have played a similar
part amongst the allies of English .Romanticism to that
Ch. II.] PARTIES AND MOVEMENTS IN THEOLOGY. 357
played by Friedrich Schlegel in the same movement in
Germany. From Fronde's Remains, which were published
(1836-9) after his death by Newman and Keble, one gets
the impression of a man not of great natural capacity, but
of loose and neglected mind, which was greatly lacking both
in moral strength and solid learning ; a man who loved to
indulge in paradoxes, which aimed at being clear and pro-
found, but were often meaningless, and who, from his limited
aristocratic Anglican standpoint, passed sentence upon every-
thing outside and beyond it with the greater arrogance in
proportion to his ignorance. He hated the Reformation and
the Reformers, especially " Luther, Melanchthon and Co.,"
because they denied the jus divinum of the Catholic Church,
preferred preaching to the sacraments, and put an end to
ecclesiastical discipline. He demanded the restoration of
monasticism, celibacy, fasting, ancient ritual and art, but
especially the emancipation of the Church from the supre-
macy of the State. The fanatical thoroughness with which
Froude advocated his views made a deep impression on
John Henry Newman, to whose nature submission to a
stronger personal authority was a necessity, and who was
just then passing through a mental crisis. When then at
length, soon after the appearance of the Christian Year, a
friendship between Keble and Newman was brought about
by Froude, the triumvirate was constituted, the object of
which was nothing less than a second Reformation, or
counter- Reformation, of the English Church.
The movement thus prepared for in this circle of Oxford
friends was brought to a head through the political and
ecclesiastico-political agitations at the beginning of the
thirties. In order to allay the agitation in Ireland, Sir
Robert Peel had carried his Bill for Catholic Emancipation, to
the great alarm of the Oxford orthodox party. The French
Revolution of July, 1830, and the accession of William IV.,
brought the Whigs into power, who, after a violent conflict
with the Tory lords and prelates of the Upper House,
passed in 1832 the Reform Bill, a measure which had been
long and loudly called for by the majority of the nation.
The next year followed a Bill to remedy abuses in the Irish
Church, by which the income of the Anglican Church in
Ireland was greatly reduced, and one-half of its (superfluous)
sees were abolished. The unyielding opposition on the part
358 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV.
of the nobility and clergy to all these absolutely necessary
reforms had so much excited liberal feeling amongst the
people generally, that the bishops were on several occasions
insulted and attacked ; and the premier, Lord Grey, ad-
vised the bishops "to set their house in order." In High
Church circles the feeling prevailed, that the very existence
of the Church was imperilled, and that what was required
was to create a powerful counter-movement to the liberal
tendencies of the day. The Assize Sermon of Keble's in
the University pulpit at Oxford, on the " National Apostasy,"
formed the signal for its friends ; and in July, 1833, at a
conference at Hadleigh, it was resolved to take immediate
action. Under the conviction that " living movements do
not come of committees," but depend on personal influence,
Newman placed himself at the head of this, and began in
1833 the issue of the Tracts for the Times, as their editor
and principal author ; this being the origin of the name
" Tractarian." In the space of eight years (1833-41), ninety
tracts were published, which are collected in six volumes.
Contemporaneously there appeared also, by various writers,
extracts from the Church Fathers, under the title of Records
of the Church. When in 1835, Pusey, Professor and Canon
of Christ Church, joined the movement, an English transla-
tion of the whole of the Fathers was projected, which began
to appear in 1838, under the title of A Library of the Fathers
of the Holy Catholic Ck?irck.
The design of this movement was certainly not purely
religious by any means, but ecclesiastico- political, not to say
political ; it was a general war against the Liberal tendencies
of the age, and in defence of custom and tradition in the
Church and society. As a means to this end, the revival
and confirmation of the doctrines and usages of the Anglican
Church was to be taken in hand. But while to all appearance
the object was only to restore historical Anglicanism in its
original purity, in reality the tendency to Catholicism was so
decided that Anglicanism was from the very first left a long
way behind, and the end of the movement, it could be fore-
seen, must be Romanism. This could be perceived in the
first declarations of the Tractarians, the principal of which
were the following: that salvation is based upon the objective
efficacy of the sacraments, which again depends on their ad-
ministration by apostolically appointed priests, that is, on the
Ch. II.] PARTIES AND MOVEMENTS IN THEOLOGY. 359
apostolic succession of the bishops, who, as successors of the
apostles, are the inheritors of the gifts of the Holy Ghost,
and are thereby the highest authority, in complete inde-
pendence of the State, in matters of life and doctrine. The
writings of the Tractarians were devoted to the exposition
and the dogmatico-historical (rather than the Biblical) proof
of these positions. A few special points may be here men-
tioned. A tract of Pusey's, which appeared in 1835, on
Baptism, attacked the evangelical doctrine of regeneration
through faith, and its separation of the baptism of the spirit
from the baptism of water ; Pusey taught that the real re-
generation is effected by the act of baptism, that the only
condition presupposed is that no bar be placed in the way by
unbelief; that since this cannot be the case with infants, the
baptized child is regenerated. The Catholic doctrine of opus
operatum is adopted as correct ; but as the grace of baptism
may be lost again, for sins committed after baptism satisfac-
tion must be made by earnest penance, which has to be shown
also in the old ecclesiastical form of ascetic observances.
Hence the necessity of Church discipline as a means of
grace. The mere preaching of the cross^of Christ can lead
to carnal security. It is not preaching, but ecclesiastical
discipline that forms moral character. In the sacrament of
the Lord's Supper, such is the doctrine, the body and blood
of Christ is present, without transubstantiation, in reality
in a mystical manner, and the sacrament is a sacrifice
(sacrificium, not merely sacramentum), that is, the mystical
application of the sacrifice of Christ on the cross, in which
Christ and the Church are together the subject and the
object of the sacrifice. R. J. Wilberforce connected this
theory with the doctrine of the Incarnation of Christ, holding
that the Incarnation is perpetuated in the consecration and
the sacrifice of the eucharist in a spiritual but real manner.
To confession also, sacramental significance is ascribed ; fre-
quent private confession, in accordance with prescribed rules,
is advocated. But as the sacraments owe all their saving
efficacy to their administration at the hands of the Church,
the whole stress falls ultimately, as in the Catholic doctrine,
upon the true doctrine of the Church. It is the actual visible
saving institution founded by Christ through the agency of the
apostles ; by the bishops, as the successors of the apostles,
the Holy Spirit descends through it, the means of grace are
360 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV.
efficaciously administered and the truth infallibly taught.
The invisible Church is composed solely of the living and
perfected members of the visible Church, so that to the latter
salvation is unconditionally confined. The g< notes "of the
true Church are apostolicity, catholicity, and autonomy. The
most important condition is the apostolical succession of
the bishops, which includes the other essential signs. The
most perfect Church is the Anglican. The other episcopal
Churches are branches of the one Catholic Church, but dis-
eased branches (especially the Romish Church), on account
of their errors ; on the other hand, all communities of Dis-
senters, as well as the Protestant Churches of the Continent
that have no bishops, are severed branches, sects, which do
not possess the means of salvation. For it is only through
the apostolic succession of the bishops that the gift of the
Holy Spirit, and therewith the saving efficacy of the sacra-
ments, has been preserved to the Church. As Christ is the
supreme Mediator, the bishop is his representative on earth,
the mediator between the Church and Christ, the highest
authority for the laity. The Scriptures cannot be taken as
the final and sufficient norma fidei on account of their
ambiguity ; they must be interpreted according to the rule
of tradition, especially of the earlier centuries. Thus we
have in the Nicene Creed the witness of the whole Church,
affirming that the doctrine of the Trinity is the teaching of
Scripture when properly understood. In the Preface to the
translation of the Fathers, it is maintained that the New
Testament is the source of doctrine, but that the Catholic
Fathers are the channels through which it comes down to us,
and that an earnest study of Catholic antiquity conducts those
who are tired of modern questionings into the haven of security.
This love of ecclesiastical antiquity sprang out of the his-
torical impulse of Romanticism as much as Sir Walter Scott's
poetical revival of Scottish and English antiquity, or again,
the sympathetic learned study of German antiquity by the
brothers Grimm and the poet Uhland. But the mystical
realism of the above doctrine of the sacraments sprang like-
wise from the inclination of Romanticism towards a certain
Helldunkel, something neither light nor darkness, neither
sensible nor supersensible, a love of mysteries behind experi-
ence ; Novalis, for instance, liked to call himself a magischer
Idealist. So, again, the emphasis laid on the supernatural
Ch. II.] PARTIES AND MOVEMENTS IN THEOLOGY. 361
authority of the bishops by virtue of their supposed succession
from the apostles was equally acceptable to an age that had
grown tired of disputation ; and it was at the same time
adapted to confirm afresh the position of the bishops, which
had been shaken by political events. It is, therefore, not
surprising that Tractarian doctrines were received at first with
great favour in the English Church, especially amongst the
clergy. It is true that there was at the beginning no lack
of opposition, particularly on the part of the Evangelicals,
who at once perceived, and passed sentence on, the weak
place in the new movement its drift towards Rome. New-
man, indeed, endeavoured to defend his Anglo-Catholic posi-
tion as the true " Via Media" between Romanism and Protes-
tantism. This he did by undertaking to show the complete
agreement of the doctrines of the Church of England with
apostolic, that is, ancient patristic teaching, making use of a
very free and sometimes sophistic method of interpreting the
language of the Thirty-Nine Articles (in Tract 90). But it
was precisely this daring attempt to set aside the distinctive
points of the Anglican creed in relation to Roman doctrine by
the aid of forced and spurious interpretation, which brought
about the revulsion of public opinion. Tract 90 was censured
by the University (1841) and the Bishop of Oxford, and New-
man felt called upon to discontinue the series. Newman
resigned the leadership of the movement, which passed into
the hands of the more learned and cautious Pusey, who had
previously cast round it an academical nimbus, and at length
gave to it his name also. Many who had been so far its
friends now withdrew, or went over to the opposite party.
But this, again, produced the effect on the more faithful ones
of causing them to abandon all reserve in following out their
principles in their full consequences. In the course of his
studies in Church History, which he carried on in the retire-
ment of his country parish, Newman himself arrived at the
conviction by degrees that his Via Media was untenable :
more and more the catholicity of the Romish Church out-
weighed in his estimation the apostolicity of the Anglican ;
and the more he felt the defects of the latter, the dark spots
in the disk of the former tended to vanish. When at last the
Church of England committed what was in the eyes of him-
self and his friends the unpardonable crime of associating
itself with the Lutheran and Calvinistic sects of the Union-
362 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV.
Church of Prussia, with the view of founding a new bishopric
in Jerusalem, it appeared to Newman, as it had appeared still
earlier to some more zealous friends, that to continue in such
a Church was no longer possible. In October, 1845, he was
received into the communion of the Romish Church, and
in the course of a year he was followed by 1 50 clergymen and
laymen of position belonging to his party. The party itself
survived the heavy blow, but has subsequently shunned
cautiously the slippery region of dogmatics, and devoted itself
with the greater zeal to the elaboration of a ritual as nearly
like that of the Catholics as possible. This Ritualism, how-
ever, has very little in common with theology. 1
After his conversion Newman published several books,
which are of interest as giving an insight into his own reli-
gious character, and as throwing indirectly light upon the
movement of which he was the author and at first the chief
leader. This is especially the case with his Apologia pro Vita
Sua: being a History of his Religious Opinions (1865, ist ed.).
This autobiography owes its attractiveness, not only to the
universally acknowledged beauty of its style, but also to the
honest openness with which the author describes the various
phases of his religious opinions. A sincerely religious char-
acter is unveiled, as it struggles to reach the certainty of con-
viction with deepest earnestness ; and if the appearance of
ambiguity and want of sincerity sometimes arises, it is not
from the slightest wish to conceal anything from others from
external considerations, but because the writer is not clear in
his own mind, aad because he is trying to hold perforce what
is untenable and to conceal from himself consequences that
are inevitable. But honourable as such a character may be,
its weak side cannot be overlooked. The weakness consists
rather in a moral than an intellectual inability to distinguish
between religion and a particular form of its transmission in
doctrine and ritual ; 2 because the firm centre of religious and
1 In one of his letters to Emerson, Carlyle criticises this ritualistic Pusey-
ism in his somewhat pessimistic strain, as a symbol of the speedy dissolution
of the superannuated English Church. In Past and Present, and elsewhere in
his writings, he gives vent to similar vaticinations.
2 Comp. Apologia, p. 49. " From the age of fifteen, dogma has been the
fundamental principle of my religion : I know no other religion ; I cannot
enter into the idea of any other sort of religion ; religion as a mere sentiment,
is to me a dream and a mockery."
Ch. II.] PARTIES AND MOVEMENTS IN THEOLOGY. 363
moral certainty cannot be found in the man himself, he clings
to external authorities, maintains vehemently their inviolability,
and all the time is driven further and further by the inevitable
feeling of their insufficiency, until, weary of searching and
inquiring, the secure haven of Romish infallibility is at last
resorted to. What a different picture is presented in the
religious history of Francis Newman, the younger brother of
John Henry, as it is described in his Phases of Faith \ x In
both brothers we have the same deep religious nature and
the same restless desire for real conviction ; but in the case of
the younger brother there is also the moral courage to aban-
don traditional opinions about the truth and to search for the
truth itself, to let the outward props of authority fall one after
the other, to gain in the soul itself true certainty of the reve-
lation of God. John Henry Newman has also formulated a
theory of religious certainty, with a view to justifying his dog-
matism, and has expounded it in the two books, An Essay on
the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845), and An Essay
in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (1870). In the latter he
works out a principle which he had learnt from Keble, 2
namely, that religious conviction does not rest on intellectual
but emotional grounds, which cannot be theoretically proved,
probability being converted into certainty by a voluntary
assent and believing reception. Although this principle is not
wholly devoid of truth, there is reason to object to it, 3 that a
rule of certainty which is based neither on the reason nor on
proofs from fact, but on the simple power of the will to hold
something to be true, possesses no value, and may easily be-
come as fruitful a source of superstition as of faith. In fact,
the subjective character of this purely emotional certainty
is acknowledged by Newman himself in the very remarkable
words : " The argument from probability, in the matter of
religion, became an argument from personality, which, in fact,
is one form of the argument from authority." It will be diffi-
cult to avoid this conclusion, if it is once granted that religious
certainty rests merely upon emotional motives without rational
grounds ; in that case it is, of course, only a subjective cer-
1 See ante, p. 317.
2 Apologia, p. 19.
3 See Tulloch, in the Edinburgh Review, Oct., 1870, and his Movements of
Religious thought, p. 103.
364 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV.
tainty that cannot rest upon itself, but to render it secure
stands in need of the support of the greatest possible number
of other subjects, that is, of external authority.
Newman's work on the Development of Christian Doctrine
takes as its starting-point the incontestable principle, that
Christianity, like every historical institution, has passed
through a process of development, of growth, in doctrine and
custom, and was not given to the world at the beginning in a
perfect form. He offers a number of instances going to show
that orthodox Protestantism is under a delusion, when it sup-
poses that all its doctrines and practices are taught in Scrip-
ture and are prescribed therein, or are to be directly deduced
therefrom. It is impossible to remain in the mere letter of
Scripture, because the necessities of interpretation, for in-
stance, of such a phrase as "the Word became flesh," lead at
once to a series of further questions. Other questions, such
as the Canon of Scripture, its inspiration and authority, can-
not be answered from Scripture itself, because the Apostles
had not then given any decision on them. As within the
Biblical religion itself there is a development through the
Prophets to Jesus, so, again, in " the apostolic teaching no
historical point can be fixed at which the growth of doctrine
ceased, and the rule of faith was once for all settled." Finally,
in Scripture itself the necessity of such a progressive develop-
ment is distinctly indicated, for instance, in the parables of
the Leaven and the Mustard Seed. If in all this the author
displays undoubtedly a degree of sound historical sense, the
reader is immediately surprised by a very unhistorical and
genuinely dogmatic application of the true principle ! In
order to guide the process of the development of Christianity,
to distinguish correct developments from false, and to sanction
them, there is required an infallible authority outside the
development namely, the Church. If Christianity is, as a
whole, a revelation, the results of its development must share
the guarantee of its credentials. Revealed religion is distin-
guished from Natural by the very fact that it substitutes the
voice of a Law-giver an objective authority, Apostle, Pope,
or Church for the voice of conscience. In Protestantism
this authority is the Bible ; but as it can be proved that this
authority is insufficient, we must conclude that this required
living and present source of revelation can only be the infal-
lible arbiter of all true doctrines the Church. Nor is per-
Ch. II.] PARTIES AND MOVEMENTS IN THEOLOGY. 365
sonal judgment precluded by this infallible authority, but is
only limited to its proper range and preserved from error. We
must allow that this defence (following in the footsteps of the
German Catholic Theologian Mohler) of the principle of Catho-
lic tradition and authority is conducted very cleverly. It rests,
all the same, upon a great fallacy. The fact is overlooked
that the alleged infallible authority is itself a product of the
general development, and that it participates in its changes,
and is therefore subject, like every historical phenomenon, to
the law of relativity. Moreover, the false traditional idea of
development is throughout taken for granted namely, that
development consists solely in positive growth, in an extension
and more complete definition of older truth ; we hear nothing
of the great fact, that development has also a negative aspect,
that new truth does not come merely as an addition to the old,
but often abrogates the old, so that in reality there is accom-
plished in it the continuous criticism of mind in the process of
its development. We readily grant that this process does not
go on without obedience to an inner law of rationality ; but
precisely because reason is realised in the process of historic
development, it does not require a special" infallible institution
to guide it, which can only become an impediment to the
living spirit.
In the same year in which Newman set on foot the reac-
tionary High Church movement, THOMAS ARNOLD, the Head
Master at Rugby, published his pamphlet on The Principles
of Church Reform, which, though it provoked at first a storm
of indignation on all sides, presented in its fundamental
thoughts the ferment of a new progressive movement in the
English Church in the next decades. Arnold had, like New-
man, been a pupil of Whately's at Oxford, and a friend of
Keble's. But while in the case of Newman the influence of
the devout friend soon overcame the cool intellectual acute-
ness of the tutor, with Arnold it was the reverse. Through-
out his life Arnold continued to combine a profoundly earnest
piety with clearness of intellect, a manly love of truth, and a
restless desire for practical work ; indeed, it is not easy to say
which of these aspects of the noble man's character was most
marked. Arnold was at the beginning of the thirties not
less alarmed than Newman and his Oxford friends at the
political troubles and threatening tempest which appeared to
366 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV.
be gathering thick over the Church ; but while they sought
salvation by the abandonment of the Reformation in a reform
of dogma and the constitution and ritual of the Church, by
which its boundaries would be narrowed and more sharply
separated from the pulsating life of the nation, he demanded
a reform in the opposite direction. In order to preserve to
the nation the blessings of the State Church, he advocated
the opening of its doors to the Dissenters, and the widening
of its boundaries, so that all Englishmen who were, and wished
to be Christians, should find a place in it. As the condition of
membership, nothing more than an acceptance of the essential
doctrines of the Christian faith, common to all parties both
within and outside the Established Church, was to be required,
differences in doctrine, constitution, and ritual being considered
minor matters and permissible. The essential thing in Chris-
tianity is practical godliness, based on the revelation of God
in Scripture, and especially in the person of Jesus, and mani-
festing itself in the moral purification and sanctification of
personal and social life. It is the function of Church and
State equally, though from a different point of view, to be in-
struments and organs of this ideal. There may not, therefore,
be any separation between them, or jealousy and quarrel ; the
State needs for its moral ends the religion of the Gospel, as
the Church can exercise its educating influence over the nation
only within the constituted forms and regulations of the Chris-
tian State. These are the main principles of Arnold's pam-
phlet on Church Reform, principles which have as their basis,
not only an ideal view of the nature and ends of the State,
but also a broad view of the nature of Christianity ; a stand-
point exactly the same as that represented by Rothe in his
Anfdngc der Kirche and his Ethik^ But this combination
of Christian idealism and large-hearted humanity was then so
new in England, that Arnold's proposed reforms were obnoxi-
ous to all parties alike : to the High-churchmen they breathed
heresy and revolution, and the Liberals considered them too
conservative and narrow.
The storm of opposition from all sides did not shake
Arnold's conviction of the truth and wisdom of his ideas.
The force of his personal character ; the success of his work
1 Though Arnold differed from Rothe as to the source of the corruption of
the true idea of the Church. See Arnold's Letter to Bunsen, Jan. 27, 1838.
Ch. II.] PARTIES AND MOVEMENTS IN THEOLOGY. 367
in the school at Rugby, by which he initiated a reformation
in the entire system of public schools in England ; his power-
ful sermons, in which he proclaimed the eternal truths of the
Gospel with profound earnestness in simple undogmatic lan-
guage, and with constant reference to the various depart-
ments of moral life ; lastly, his work as a scholar in the field of
classical literature and Roman history all this combined in
compelling his opponents even to respect the assailed and
censured man, so that his sudden death (1842) was lamented
on all sides as a national calamity.
It is Thomas Arnold, if any one, who must be regarded
as the pioneer of free theology in England. It is true he
wrote no considerable theological work his vocation led
him into the field of scholarship and history : and his views
with regard to the interpretation of the Bible were neither
quite new, nor do they meet completely the present require-
ments of historical criticism. But Arnold was the first to
show to his countrymen the possibility and to make the
demand, that the Bible should be read with honest human
eyes without the spectacles of orthodox dogmatic presupposi-
tions, and that it can at the same time be revered with
Christian piety and made truly productive in moral life. He
was the first who dared to leave on one side the traditional
phraseology of the High-Churchmen and the Evangelicals,
and to look upon Christianity, not as a sacred treasure of the
Churches and sects, but as a Divine beneficent power for
every believer ; not as a dead heritage from the past, but as
a living spiritual power for the moral advancement of indi-
viduals and nations in the present. If the universality of his
interests and occupations was a hindrance to strictly scientific
theological inquiry, it was really very favourable to his true
mission : he showed how classical and general historical
studies may be pursued in the light of the moral ideas of
Christianity, and how, on the other hand, a free and clear
way of looking at things may be obtained by means of wide
historical knowledge, and then applied to the interpretation
of the Bible and the solution of current ecclesiastical ques-
tions. Thus he began to pull down the wall of separation
which had cut off the religious life of his fellow-countrymen,
with their sects and churches and rigid theological formulas
and usages, from the general life and pursuits of the nation.
It is also clear as day, that if longer life had been granted
368 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV.
to him, the result of the further prosecution of his historical
studies, which had been made, in his last year, part of his
vocation by his appointment to the chair of Modern History
at Oxford, would have been further insight and courage to
apply his historical and critical principles to the Bible. At all
events, his work was subsequently further prosecuted in this
direction by his friends and pupils.
Arnold was pre-eminently an independent character, both
in his scientific and his political principles. For this reason
he was prepared to learn from men of different schools.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge exercised great influence upon him,
and he confesses that he found in him what he had never
been able to find in any other English theologian : " His mind
is at once rich and vigorous, and comprehensive and critical ;
while the ?0o9 is so pure and so lively all the while." 1 From
Coleridge Arnold adopted the distinction between the
reason and the understanding, and the determination of the
relation of reason to faith as of two modes of perceiving
religious truth, which are not antagonistic but supplementary.
Of Coleridge's Letters on Inspiration? which he saw in
manuscript, he expressed the opinion, 3 that they were " well
fitted to break ground in the approaches to that momentous
question which involves in it so great a shock to existing
notions, ... but which will end, in spite of the fears and
clamours of the weak and bigoted, in the higher exalting
and more sure establishing of Christian truth." His friend-
ship with Bunsen, too, whose acquaintance he made in Rome
in 1827, had an important influence on Arnold's mind ; it was
through this scholar particularly that he kept himself in close
relations with German literature, though principally only with
its historical and Biblical exegetical works, but not with
German philosophy or systematic theology ; of Schleier-
macher he read only his critical essay on i Timothy, the
results of which appeared to him too bold.
The most direct and lasting influence on the mental
development of Arnold was that of WHATELY, who had been
in Oxford his tutor and adviser, and with whom, as Arch-
bishop of Dublin, he kept up a close friendship and constant
1 Letter No. 209, to Mr. Justice Coleridge, Sept. 25, 1839.
2 See ante, p. 311.
3 Letter No. 94, to Mr. Justice Coleridge, Jan. 24, 1835.
Ch. II.] PARTIES AND MOVEMENTS IN THEOLOGY. 369
intercourse. Whately was a man of clear intellect, happy
humour, and benevolent heart, but not a learned theologian.
His best known book is his Logic \ constructed upon Aris-
totelian principles, which was once largely used in English
colleges and universities. He carried his sound common
sense into theological questions also, and found that not a
few orthodox dogmas have no foundation in the Scriptures.
Thus the orthodox doctrine of election is not in harmony
with Paul's teaching, for in the latter what is dealt with is
not the unconditional predestination of individuals to salva-
tion or destruction, but only the appointment of the whole
Church to salvation in Christ, which is elected from the rest
of the Heathen, as previously the people of Israel had been
elected from the other nations. The final destiny of indi-
viduals depends solely on whether they personally do or do
not make use of the advantages offered to them, by partici-
pation in the revelation of the Church. The doctrine of
justification by faith, too, must not be understood of an
imputation of the merits of Christ, but of the forgiveness
of sins on the fulfilment of the moral conditions. The death
of Christ as a sacrifice must be received on the authority of
Scripture, but it cannot be shown to be necessary. It is the
same with the Deity of Christ : it must be believed on the
ground of Christ's own declarations in the Gospels, but
interpreted essentially in the sense of Christ being the
perfect moral example. The object of Christ's coming was
the foundation of the kingdom of God as a moral common-
wealth. The claim of an apostolical episcopal succession, with
power to impart the Holy Spirit, cannot be proved from
Scripture, and is wrecked on the historical improbability of a
chain of tradition being kept unbroken through eighteen cen-
turies; the true succession is holding fast to apostolic principles,
that is, the moral character of Christianity. This is violated
by the Tractarian doctrine of the sacraments, which substi-
tutes the opus operatum for the heart. The rigorous obser-
vance of the Sabbath, too, is not in harmony with the New
Testament, the law of the Sabbath having been abrogated
for Christians with the rest of the Mosaic legislation ;
Sunday is a voluntary institution of the Church for the good
of men. Generally, the Bible does not claim to be a law-
book for the regulation of faith and practice, but it contains a
system of practical truths, motives, and principles in a popular
G. T. B B
37O THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [ Bk - IV -
form. 1 The unwearied diligence with which Whately devoted
himself to his ecclesiastical duties, to promoting- the education
of the lower classes, and unostentatiously assisting the poor,
both Protestant and Catholic, of his diocese in Ireland, reflects
favourably on his practical and rational theology, which was
not either in philosophy or in history and criticism pro-
found. In the latter respect there is much affinity between
it and the Rationalistic (Kantian) supernaturalism, as it was
represented in Germany in the first decades of the century
by not a few theologians deserving of all respect.
As contemporaries and men of a kindred spirit with
Arnold and Whately, we may mention the Oxford theolo-
gians HAMPDEN and MILMAN, and the Cambridge theologians
THIRLWALL and JULIUS HARE. The name of Hampden is
associated with an episode of considerable moment in the
Tractarian movement. When he was nominated in 1836 to
the Regius Professorship of Divinity at Oxford, the dominant
party there, with Newman and Pusey at its head, got up a
protest against his appointment, and charged the learned
theologian with heresy on the ground of his Bampton Lec-
tures of the year 1832, on The Scholastic Philosophy in its
relation to Christian Theology, which had till then remained
unimpugned. In his lectures he had shown how orthodox
theology, as having risen in its Patristic and Scholastic form
under the influence of the philosophy in vogue at the time, is
not identical with the doctrine of the Scriptures, but is in
many respects an adulterated reflex of the simple Christian
belief. This indisputably correct account of the origin of
orthodox dogmas gave naturally great offence to High-
churchmen, whose fundamental principle was the identifica-
tion of Christianity with Scholastic theology. Pusey 2 main-
tained that this distinction between uncertain Scholastic doc-
trines and certain facts of Scripture was but the beginning
of scepticism and rationalism, as the example of Semler had
shown. The defence of Christianity then in vogue, which
threw the stress entirely upon the practical side of our
religion, he declared tended directly to unbelief, since every-
1 These are the leading principles of Whately's theological works, Essays
on the Difficulties in the Writings of St. Paul (1828), The Kingdom of Christ
(1841).
2 Hampdtris Past and Present Statements.
Ch. II.] PARTIES AND MOVEMENTS IN THEOLOGY. 3,7-11
thing that could not be brought under the rubric of practical
applicability, would be forgotten, and in the end denied.,
Hampden himself, in his inaugural lecture, professed his full
belief in all the doctrines of the orthodox faith in a way not
easy, it must be confessed, to reconcile with the expositions
of his Bampton Lectures. Consistency seems rather to have
been on the side of his assailants. But the manner of their
attack upon him, their denunciation of detached propositions
torn from their context, in order to convict him of heresy,
aroused the fierce indignation not only of Whately and
Arnold, but of wider circles, in which the reaction against
the principles of the Oxford party began from this time to
make itself felt. A pamphlet published at that time gives
the following not complimentary picture of higher education
at Oxford. In all higher branches of knowledge the aim is
to put down free opinions. The endeavour is to give a safe
direction to young minds, and to confine their movements
within the narrowest limits possible. No inquiry which
might possibly lead to other results than those of the estab-
lished formularies is permitted. It is not easy to form any
idea of the extent of moral terrorism with which this in-
tellectual tyranny is practised, with what jealousy the words,
behaviour, reading of those is watched, who are under the
suspicion of having diverged from the majority. This
system is commended in and outside of Oxford as a thoroughly
practical and wholesome method of training devoted servants
of the Church, who shall be free from all doubt. But the
evil fruits of it are a terrible distortion of sound intellect,
widespread ignorance and hypocrisy. The student who
comes at every step upon the warning, " Not too deep ! " is
discouraged and takes refuge in deliberate ignorance. He
persuades himself that knowledge at best is a dangerous
acquirement in his career. In the consciousness of his own
inability to defend rationally a position he has taken, he
regards all speculations that are foreign to his mode of
thought with vague fear. The consequence is that theology
is studied in Oxford to na purpose, however much is said
about it, because it is studied apart from the simple object
of discovering the truth, and merely with the object of finding
proofs in support of dogmas which dispense with all further
inquiry. Such was the view taken by an Englishman of
the Oxford of those years. The less reason we have to
372 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV.
doubt the truth of the picture, the more cheering is it to
observe how great progress has been made there in the
course of the last half century.
Even in those years bright exceptions were not wanting.
Milman was connected with Whately, Arnold, and Hampden,
belonging like them to the pre-Puseyite generation. His
History of Ike Jews, which appeared in 1829 (2nd ed. rewritten
1863), treated the narratives of the Old Testament in the
same way as the historical traditions of any other ancient
people, took up a critical attitude towards the chronological
data of the Bible, explained not a few narratives as oriental
poetry and allegory, and sought generally by its graphic
style, catching the national and antique character of early
Hebrew times, to deliver Biblical history from the bonds of
traditional sanctity, and bring it nearer to the mind and heart
of the present day. It is the same freer attitude towards the
Bible which is seen in Arnold's method of interpretation,
but Milman was as far as Arnold from holding the principles
of scientific criticism now followed by Wellhausen or Robertson
Smith. He was rather an imagipative narrator than an
acute investigator of history. Nevertheless, by his History
of the Jews, and his later History of Latin Christianity,
Milman contributed his share towards making in the bulwarks
of traditionalism breaches through which a freer spirit might
enter when the time arrived.
The same is true of the Cambridge theologians Thirlwall
and Julius Hare, who by their joint translation of Niebuhr's
History of Rome, and by theological works, did good service
in spreading the knowledge of German historical science
amongst their countrymen. Thirlwall published in 1825 a
translation of Schleiermacher's book on the Gospel of Luke,
with an introduction of some length, in which he accepted
and defended the principles of Schleiermacher's Biblical
criticism a bold thing to do in those days, when the strict
doctrine of Inspiration was still in full force, and German
theology was but little known in England, and on that very
account was the more summarily condemned as heretical !
Next to Coleridge, whose way of thinking on philosophy he
adopted, Julius Hare was above all his English contempor-
aries the student best acquainted with German theological
science. As a youth he had felt on the Wartburg the breath
of Luther's spirit, and subsequently wrote a thoroughly learned
Ch. II.] PARTIES AND MOVEMENTS IN THEOLOGY. 373
Vindication of the German Reformer, in reply to the charges
of the historian Hallam and the Scottish philosopher Sir
William Hamilton, and the Puseyites. Against the latter he
wrote the important polemical essay, The Contest with Rome,
1842, which had the greater influence as Hare's Christian
devotedness had been placed beyond doubt by his earnest
and thoughtful sermons. Speaking generally, it appears that
Hare made a deeper impression on his contemporaries by
his noble and amiable character than by his writings, which
were comparatively few, and of which the best known is his
volume of sermons, The Mission of the Comforter, dedicated
to the memory of Coleridge, .1846, in which he maintained
the principle of development of Christian doctrine. Amongst
his closest friends were Thomas Arnold and Frederick
Maurice. Maurice was Hare's pupil at Cambridge, and later
his brother-in-law, and to this intimate relation owed the
most powerful stimulus in his mental development.
FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE was one of the most impor-
tant English theologians of this century, with great individu-
ality of mind. To describe his mode of thought in theology
in a brief sketch, such as this necessarily is, is not easy, for
his theology is more complicated than that of any other theo-
logian, and is on many points extremely vague. In his
biography, published by his son in two large volumes, there
is presented the picture of a man of deep religious feeling and
of decided speculative and dialectical power, but at the same
time of a man who failed to reduce his convictions into a
consistent logical whole such as could fully satisfy himself, or
make a dominating and prevailing impression upon his con-
temporaries, because his own thought lacked clearness and
steadiness, and his knowledge concentration and thoroughness.
In reading his biography, the comparison of F. D. Maurice
with the German theologian Dorner has again and again
forced itself upon me. In both the same high moral and re-
ligious character compelling profound respect, the same mul-
tiformity of learned and moral interests, the same combination
of speculative theological thought with a vivid concern for
practical Church life, the same restless endeavour to mediate
both practically and theoretically between opposing parties and
modes of thought ; but in both also the same incapacity for
taking a clear and logically consistent position on questions of
principle, the same indefiniteness in dogmatic speculation, the
374 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV.
same dislike of rational historical criticism, the same shrinking
from the consequences of their own ideal principles, the same
hesitancy in estimating the real factors of life ; finally, as a
result of all this, the same fatality of giving offence on all sides
and the same waste of power on the endless frictions of the
actual world.
Maurice's father was a Unitarian minister, but his mother
and three sisters abandoned the faith of the father and joined
various other religious communions. This division in the
household made a profound impression upon the loving heart
and thoughtful mind of the boy, and early led him to the
conviction that every one's faith is true in what is positively
asserted by it, and untrue in what it denies, in its negations, in
charges against the opinions of others when they are not
sufficiently understood. But this charitable view of religious
differences did not prevent his own secession to the Estab-
lished Church, nor even his re-baptism, by which he accord-
ingly declared the Unitarian faith of his father un-Christian.
At Oxford he became acquainted with the leaders of the
Tractarian movement, which had just commenced ; and ap-
peared as a zealous convert in his pamphlet, Subscription no
Bondage, in which he sought to prove that subscription to the
Thirty- Nine Articles (though a few years previously he had
left Cambridge without taking his degree rather than sign
them) is no infringement of liberty, but rather a help in the
pursuit of the studies of a University. The Tractarians
believed that they had found in him a hopeful ally for their
cause, but they were soon disappointed, for he quickly turned
his back upon them on account of Dr. Pusey's tract on
Baptism, which he considered most dangerous, although, as
he thought, it contained a very important doctrine which was
denied by the Dissenters, and was adapted to unite all
Churches. Soon after this he published his first book, The
Kingdom of Christ (1838), in which he seeks to show that
the English Church is the true incorporation of the spiritual
universal fellowship of the kingdom of Christ, because it
alone teaches the full truth as to baptism, the eucharist,
apostolical succession, Scripture and tradition, and establish-
ment, whilst Quakers, Lutherans, Calvinists, Philosophers,
and Roman Catholics respectively hold but a part of it. But
the optimistic champion of Anglicanism was later on com-
pelled to find by bitter experience that it is for the dogmatist
Ch. II.] PARTIES AND MOVEMENTS IN THEOLOGY. 375
but a short step from the position of the defensor fidei to that
of the condemned heretic. When Maurice taught in his
Theological Essays (1853) that the Biblical phrases " eternal
life" and " eternal death" do not signify states of time of
indefinitely long duration in the future, but spiritual states of
communion and oneness with or separation from God, that
divine punishments are instruments of God's love employed
for our salvation, and that the Gospel of God's love for all
men, and not the fear of eternal torments in hell, constitutes
the object of faith, it was found that these doctrines are not
by any means in harmony with the Creeds of the Anglican
Church, and Maurice was removed from his theological pro-
fessorship at King's College, London. But though thus
deprived, he continued to assert his attachment to the Thirty-
Nine Articles, when properly understood, that is, according
to his interpretation of them. And when Bishop Colenso,
who had been on terms of intimate friendship with Maurice,
and had defended him at the time of his removal from
King's College, gave offence to the orthodox by his critic-
ism of the Pentateuch, our unaccountable theologian put
himself on the side of the same denunciators against whom
Colenso had been his advocate a few years before ; in fact,
he declared to his former friend that he expected from him
the resignation of his bishopric, to which he had no claim
as an unbeliever, receiving from Colenso the cutting reply
that there were many who were similarly of opinion, that the
author of the "Theological Essays" had no right to retain
his chaplaincy at Lincoln's Inn.
It is plain from all Maurice's letters to his friends and con-
nexions that through all these paradoxes he was absolutely
sincere and in earnest ; that the various changes through which
he passed were not owing to outward considerations ; that
his want of consistency was due to the indefiniteness of the
fundamental principles of his thinking, to the disharmony
existing between his heart and his intellect, between the
need he felt of adhering to an authoritative ecclesiastical
communion and his strong theological individualism. To his
father (Feb. 12, 1832) he explains his secession to Anglicanism
from the necessity of his heart to have God, the Invisible and
Unsearchable, revealed in a human form as a man such as
can be understood, "a man conversing with us, living amongst
us," who, in order thus completely to reveal God, cannot be
376 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV.
less than God. The greater simplicity of the Unitarian
faith he considers is of no value if it does not satisfy wants
which we feel, if it does not account for facts which we
know. As regards the Athanasian Creed, his explanation to
a friend of the supposed difficulties in the way of its accep-
tation is simply this : To know God is eternal life ; God is
perfect Love, the Father dwelling with the Son in one Spirit
is this perfect and eternal Love, which is the basis of all
things, whereupon we base our hopes for ourselves and the
world. (Certainly a very wide and free interpretation of this
Creed, an interpretation which may be made to include both
Arianism and Sabellianism as well as Athanasianism.) Par-
ticularly characteristic of Maurice's theological thought is a
letter to his mother (Dec. 9, 1833), in which he endeavours to
comfort her in her doubts as to the evidences of her being in
Christ. The truth is that every man is in Christ, created in
him, who is the Head of every man ; the difference between
the believer and the unbeliever is that the latter does not
perceive or acknowledge the truth, that except he were joined
to Christ he could not think, breathe, live a single hour. It
is the devil's lie to imagine that we are something apart from
Christ, and have a separate, independent existence. To
believe that we are in Christ does not require any special re-
ligious experience. We have the warrant for this faith in that
we cannot do one living act, or obey one of God's command-
ments, or pray, or hope, or love, without him ; and yet God
bids us do all these things. The state of independence, the
fleshly Adam state, is no state at all, it is a life of our own
vain imagination. The one thing therefore is to believe in
the Lord Jesus Christ as the Lord of our own spirit, that our
spirit belongs to him and not to the flesh, that Christ is in us,
and that we must let him do his will in us and through us.
This is a Christology which is a long way removed from ortho-
doxy, and is to a certain extent speculative and philosophical ;
very much like Dorner's. Christ is the ideal man, or the
Divine idea of Humanity, which is as a principle in the whole
race, but exists also, realiter, in one eternal Person, who by the
Incarnation became the historical Saviour Jesus. If humanity
is thus from the first essentially associated with Christ, a
saving revelation pervades human history from the beginning ;
there is no need for the reconciliation of a world alienated
from God, but the work of the historical Saviour can be no
Ch. II.] PARTIES AND MOVEMENTS IN THEOLOGY. 377
other than by his word and example to reveal and bring home
to the consciousness of men what had always been the fact
their being in the eternal Christ, and thereby in God. Con-
sequently Maurice reconstructed in this sense the orthodox
doctrine of the atonement. In his book, Tke Doctrine of
Sacrifice (1854), he teaches that Christ so far partook of sin as
to identify himself in sympathy with sinners. He did not
bear as a substitute the punishment of sin, but by his loving
participation in the miseries of sin he delivered men from
their sins, by teaching them to believe in the love of the
Father towards them, for with this faith in the loving God the
separation from God is ended, which constitutes the essence
of sin. It is a heathenish view of God to suppose that the
punishment of sin had to be removed by a sacrifice presented
to him. The Christian view is that God by the perfect self-
sacrifice of his Son, who was in his sympathy one with
sinners, made known his eternal love to the sinful world, and
that on that ground peace has been offered which men could
not of themselves have found. By this act of love on the
part of Christ the one possible method of peace and harmony
in the world generally is revealed. The principle of self-
sacrifice is revealed as the truth in which God displays his
inmost character and which all creatures must obey by appro-
priating the mind of the loving Christ. Thus Christ, the
eternal Head of mankind, becomes the Head of a new moral
world, in which no longer selfish discord reigns, but lasting
and self-sacrificing love.
These ideas tend obviously in the direction of that idealistic
philosophy of Christianity which is represented in the specu-
lative theology of Germany and in the writings of such men as
Caird and Green in Great Britain. But Maurice even more
than the kindred German theologian Dorner failed to work
o
them out consistently and thoroughly. The cardinal con-
tradiction of making the eternal idea of humanity at the same
time an historical individual of an absolutely supernatural nature
necessarily involved everywhere the diversion of all ideal
speculative effort of thought into traditional supernaturalism.
And in the case of Maurice this supernaturalism was the
more pronouncedly narrow, inasmuch as he found the spiritual
community of humanity, founded by the revelation of Christ,
embodied not in the universal kingdom of God, or the in-
visible community of the children of God, but in the Church
37$ THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV.
of England. 1 Accordingly, while he teaches on the one
hand that the entire human race is created and has its
essential nature in Christ as its ideal Head, he seems to
maintain on the other hand that it is only in the Church of
England that the Kingdom of Christ has attained actual
existence ! This is a contradiction that a German intellect
finds it hard to comprehend, or can only explain by supposing
that the strong national feeling of the Englishman had got
the better of the intellect of the theologian.
The sources of the characteristic points of Maurice's
teaching are to be found in the idealistic philosophy of
Coleridge (whose metaphysical ideas, however, acquire in
Maurice's system a Platonic modification), and in the doc-
trines of the Scottish theologians, THOMAS ERSKINE, of
Linlathen, and John McLeod Campbell, at whom we must
take a brief glance. The first of these men, an advocate by
profession, had, by his own independent study of the Bible,
arrived at the conviction that the orthodox representation of
the Gospel did not properly represent its real and scriptural
nature. 2 For the Gospel announces the forgiveness of sins not
as a reward of faith any more than as a reward of works, but
as the free unconditional gift of God, which was bestowed
on mankind once for all in their representative Head, Christ,
so that every man may appropriate it. Yet forgiveness is
not itself salvation, but only the means of it ; and salvation
itself is not a future good, but is spiritual fellowship with God
in the sanctification of the character by means of his holy love.
The very purpose for which God offers his free unmerited
love, as forgiving mercy to sinners, is that they may thereby
be encouraged and impelled to love him in return, and to
grow themselves into the image of his holy love. Glad
devotion to God, a loving dependence on the Creator, is the
perfect condition of the creature, in which all the faculties
1 This, the fundamental thought of his book, The Kingdom of Christ, is
stated in strong and emphatic language in a letter of July 12, 1834 (Life, i.
p. 1 66).
2 The most interesting of Erskine's writings, which has been followed in
the above account of his system, is The Unconditional Freeness of the Gospel
(1828); to it must be added The Brazen Serpent, or Life coming through
Death (1831); The Doctrine of Election, and its Connection with the General
Theory of Christianity (1837) ; his first work, Remarks on the Internal
Evidence for the Truth of Revealed Religion (1820), is of less importance.
Ch. II.] PARTIES AND MOVEMENTS IN THEOLOGY. 379
of the soul are kept in their proper order by that ruling
principle. The Fall of man consisted in the rise of the spirit
of independence, in that " each man became an independent
individual, loving and desiring and approving things accord-
ing as they affected himself, without regard to the will of
God or the sympathies of the universal family." And this
sin of man was also his misery, his hell. The punishment
of sin did not consist in external evils, which might be re-
moved by arbitrary acts, but it consisted in the very fact that
the man himself had revolted from saving fellowship with
God, and had exchanged the love of him for the love of
self and the world. " Restoration to a condition of salvation
cannot therefore be effected otherwise than by the restoration
of the love of God to its place as the paramount principle in
the heart, resulting in the due subordination of self and the
creature under it. Any remedy which falls below this re-
storation falls below man's need. No pardon which leaves
this undone is of any value to him. He needs no infliction
from without to make him miserable ; and it is not the re-
moval of any outward infliction that can give him happiness.
He must know that God is better than -happiness, and that
sin is worse than sorrow. The love of God, not the desire
of happiness, is the true keystone of the arch." The means
which God has provided for the attainment of this blessing
is the Gospel. It shows us, in the appearance of Christ,
the gracious character of God in relation to his rebellious
creatures, in order thereby to draw back our hearts to
him, which had been estranged through hatred, fear, or
indifference, and thus to restore love to God and to the whole
divine human family to its true place in the heart. It is
particularly the sufferings of Christ in which the holy love
of God has been revealed ; but not in the sense that God had
to be reconciled, that his love had to be purchased, by the
sacrifice of his Son ; on the contrary, his holy love itself
was the source of the mission and the self-sacrifice of Christ.
Christ, by his patient endurance of all the misery that had
sprung from the sin of the world, overcame sin itself by love
and glorified God by his obedience. His glorifying of the
Father, by obediently enduring suffering from love of his sinful
brethren, was both the expiation and the putting away of sin ;
and because it was the Head of mankind who accomplished
this as representing all men, the sin of the entire race is once
;80 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV.
for all forgiven in Christ ; the resurrection of Christ was the
seal of this forgiveness. The message of this forgiveness is
proclaimed to all the world as the free gift of God offered for
its acceptance, but only those who actually accept it are
really justified and made part of the Church of Christ. The
fear lest the Gospel of free, unconditional mercy should pro-
duce a false peace in a world dead in sins, and expose the
moral interests of Christianity to the dangers of antinomian-
ism, rests, as Erskine is continually reiterating, upon a mis-
conception. For the pardon, which is the free gift of God
in Christ, is of advantage to men only as they receive it, and
with it Christ himself, the revelation of the holy, loving
character of God, into their hearts ; and thereby the principle
of holy, self-sacrificing love is made the dominant power
and the root of personal holiness and salvation. Pardon is,
therefore, really received only when it evinces itself as the
effective means of sanctification and accordingly of salvation.
It is not itself salvation, for salvation cannot be given to men
gratuitously without conditions ; it consists in the fellowship
of the Holy Spirit ; heaven is holiness, and the forgiveness
of sins is a blessing only in so far as it produces holiness.
Holiness is the ultimate object God has in view with us, and
the Gospel message serves only as a means to this end.
These ideas of Erskine's were further worked out and
established by his friend, the theologian, J. McLEOD CAMP-
BELL, in his very suggestive book, The Nature of the Atone-
ment, and its Relation to Remission of Sins and Eternal Life
(1856, 5th ed., 1878). As a believing Biblical theologian,
Campbell does not deny that Christ presented an expiatory
sacrifice for us, but he maintains that when this sacrifice is
not interpreted in accordance with preconceived opinions,
but is looked at as it is, and as it is represented in the
Scriptures, it cannot be regarded as the suffering of the
punishment due to man's sin in his stead, but a moral and
spiritual meaning must be put upon it. Christ effected our
salvation by becoming the mediator between God and man,
and representing both God with man and man with God.
This twofold relation of the atonement is worked out with
reference to its retrospective and its prospective action. In
the first respect, Christ's work was to reveal the Father in
humanity and for humanity, to be the witness of God's holy
love, a love which hates sin and seeks to save the sinner by
Ch. II.] PARTIES AND MOVEMENTS IN THEOLOGY. 381
converting him. Christ felt the pain on account of sin that
filled the holy heart of God, and in a perfect, vicarious
contrition acknowledged the righteousness of the divine
condemnation of sin, as the representative of mankind before
God. When he identified himself with his brethren in the
flesh by his compassionate sympathy, he endured the deepest
pangs, such as only the Holy One could feel, on account of
the sins of men, both as guilt before God and as the source
of human misery. This pain on account of sin, and this
perfect repentance of it, offered to God in the name of man-
kind, constituted the true atonement for the sins of mankind,
a sacrifice well-pleasing to God, such as no execution of
punishment could have supplied. With this complete con-
demnation of the sinful past of mankind by its representative
Head, full satisfaction was offered to the holy will of God.
But this moral atonement of Christ had at the same time
prospective significance. It must be conceived as effecting
salvation, or eternal life, not merely as the indirect result of
Christ's work, but as inwardly connected with it, as, in fact,
already included in that work. This would not be the case
on the supposition of an imputation of vicarious punitive
suffering to sinners, which leaves their moral condition in
relation to God unchanged, and makes salvation only a future
state of happiness. The atonement must therefore be con-
ceived thus : Christ in his person represents humanity as
holy, well-pleasing to God, and animated solely by love to
Him, and by means of his identification with his brethren
Christ communicated his righteousness as a new life to them.
He thereby not only revealed the Divine Fatherhood to men,
but he also discovered the treasure of the Divine image in
man, which had until then been veiled under their sin. The
righteousness of Christ was the revelation of the latent
capacity in man for righteousness, which he possessed by
virtue of the indwelling Son of God. Christ must not be
conceived as so standing apart from humanity that his
righteousness could not avail for it otherwise than by im-
putation. He is, as the second Adam, the Head of humanity,
so truly one with it that his righteousness counts in the sight
of God as the righteousness of mankind generally, and that
it can pass from Christ to all men. Christ himself had in
his human consciousness the witness to the ability of man-
kind to be filled with the love of God. In his love to his
382 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV.
brethren lay the prophetic hope that they also would open
their hearts to the love of God, from which they had for a
time been estranged. Accordingly, the atoning work of
Christ did not consist in the deliverance of men from future
punishment and the obtaining of future happiness ; but in
communicating to them his knowledge and love of the
Father, and making them thereby children of God, in the
possession of eternal life and a righteousness well- pleasing
to God. Everything that the Son accomplished, and that
the Father accepted, had the prospective intention of being
reproduced in us ; both his pain on account of sin, and his
confiding and obedient love to the Father, were intended to
be appropriated by us. Nothing of a mere external nature
that God could do with us or could give to us, which is not
involved in the relation of our souls to God and in the re-
lation of our own hearts answering to his heart, can possibly
be our salvation.
This is manifestly the same reconstruction of the Christian
doctrine of salvation which was effected by Kant and Schleier-
macher in Germany, whereby it is converted from forensic
externality into ethical inwardness and a truth of direct
religious experience. Erskine and Campbell appear, however,
to have reached their convictions in entire independence of
German theology, by their own absorbing study of the Bible ;
and I regard their ideas as the best contribution to dogmatics
which British theology has produced in the present century.
That the Scottish Church rejected and thrust out from its
midst, in the person of Campbell, this line of theological
thought, was the heaviest blow that it could inflict upon itself;
thereby it arrested its healthy development for more than
half a century. For it is only just now that Scotch theo-
logians begin to start once more from Campbell, though, it
must be confessed, with great timidity, as may be seen from
the book of the Glasgow theologian, Alexander Bruce,
The Humiliation of Christ in its Physical, Ethical, and
Soteriological Aspects (1876). It is here taught (following
rather Hofmann, of Erlangen, than Campbell) that the Son
of God entered into the condition of humanity, as it lay under
the wrath of God, in such a way that he felt in himself the
effects of that wrath, though he was not himself in his per-
sonal relation to God the object of it. The value of the
sacrifice of Christ, Bruce holds, was equal to his Divine
Ch. II.] PARTIES AND MOVEMENTS IN THEOLOGY. 383
dignity multiplied by his perfect obedience, multiplied by his
boundless love, multiplied by his sufferings, which reached the
utmost limits of what a sinless body could endure. As God
took all this into account, and was thereby satisfied, we also
must take it all into consideration, in order to say " Amen " to
the Divine view of the sacrifice of Christ. This is an attempt
to mediate between the old and the new, which does not
approach in clearness of principle the thought of Erskine and
Campbell, although we must acknowledge that it is in the
same direction which they took.
Though condemned in the land of their birth, the ideas
of Erskine and Campbell were received in the soil of the
Liberal theology of England. The religious profundity of
the Scotchmen admirably supplemented the thought of the
Englishmen, which is characterised more by a practical
breadth than religious and speculative depth. It is to them
that Maurice's theology owes its best features. And from
Maurice again CHARLES KINGSLEY received the dominant
direction of his theology, which gave fitting expression to the
feelings of his heart in its warm sympathy for everything
truly human, and supplied the theoretical rallying-point for
his philanthropic aims. In the history of the Christian-
socialist movements of the century, the names of Maurice and
Kingsley occupy a foremost place. They showed by their
deeds what was the fundamental thought of their theology
that Christianity is the leaven which is destined to regenerate
and to hallow the life of human society. Side by side with
them stands the great preacher FREDERICK W. ROBERTSON,
whom death too soon removed, who was equal to them in
nobility of character and their superior in the wealth and
depth of his mind. The biography of this man, so admirably
executed by Stopford A. Brooke, reads like the life of a
saint, but of a Protestant and modern saint, who does not
escape out of the world, but, as a soldier of God, fights the
great fight with all ungodliness, with the sins of the upper
and the lower classes, with the unreality and falsehood of
even religious parties, who at the same time keeps his own
soul unspotted from the world, and who is compelled often
and deeply to drain the bitter cup of suffering, which no
soldier of God can escape in this world of wickedness and
folly. There is little in homiletical literature to compare
with the four series of Robertson's sermons, in respect
384 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV.
of wealth and depth of thought, strength of moral pathos,
warmth of religious emotion, clearness and vividness of style;
and elevation and beauty of language. As his biographer
says, Robertson " felt that Christianity was too much preached
as theology, too little as the religion of daily life ; too much
as a religion of feeling, too little as a religion of principles ;
too much as a religion only for individuals, too little as a
religion for nations and for the world. He determined to
make it bear upon the social state of all classes, upon the
questions which agitated society, upon the great movements
of the world." After painful inward conflicts, which arose
not merely out of theological difficulties, but from a percep-
tion of the falsehood and unrighteousness of the various
political and ecclesiastical parties, he found rest in the
Gospel of Christianity, the truths of which seemed to embrace
the truth of Conservatism and the progressive tendencies
of Liberalism, and to offer the solution of the questions of the
day, not by setting up laws or external limitations, but by the
spread of a spirit of love, of duty, and of mutual respect.
Those salutary truths he beheld embodied in Jesus, the per-
fect type of man as the child of God. He held that Christ
was humanity, and in Him alone is our humanity intelligible.
It is only in the feeling of fellowship and union with this life,
in the acknowledgment of like feelings and conflicts, in a
similar estimate of the world and its maxims, that our own
life becomes bearable and desirable. Judging humanity in
the light of this ideal, Robertson had, on the one hand, the
keenest eye for its sins and weaknesses in their endless forms
and disguises, and yet, on the other, he never lost sight of
the Divine heart and root of human nature. The greatest
truth which Christ revealed, as Robertson is always urging,
is that all men are as men children of God, and each other's
brothers ; they do not become children of God by baptism
or by faith and regeneration, but are already such by virtue
of the divine image in which they were created ; baptism is
the messenger to each one in particular, declaring that he is
a child of God de jure. But in order to be this de facto, it is
needful for him to receive this message in faith, and to
realise it in life, i.e. that he should be regenerated. Faith
does not create the fact of Divine sonship, but receives it
and converts it from an unconscious reality, which would avail
nothing, into a conscious and voluntary life after the likeness
Ch. II.] PARTIES AND MOVEMENTS IN THEOLOGY. 385
of Christ. Christ is our Saviour not by the vicarious suffer-
ing of the penalty due to our sins, but by being actually the
typical realisation of that which every man is potentially, as
a child of God, and ought to be actually. The death of
Christ was an atoning sacrifice, in so far as, having been
endured in sympathy with human misery, it established the
eternal principle, that salvation for man must always come
from the sacrifice of self in ministering and patient love, a
principle that is so universally asserted in nature and history
that it must be regarded as a law of the universe. Faith is
the life of Christ begun in us, which God counts as righteous-
ness, because, as the Divine life in the soul, it is the root and
spring of righteousness. As the inward principle of a morally
good will, it sets us free from external laws, which can only
incite to transgression or produce conventional legality. This
thought Robertson applied energetically in relation to the
Sabbath question ; he openly declared the legal observance
of the Sabbath a relapse from the spirit of the Gospel into
Judaism and Pharisaism. On account of this genuinely
Lutheran view of the question, he claims . almost more than
any other English theologian the synfpathy of Germans 1 ;
and not less on account of his views as to the authority of
Scripture and the dogmas of the Church. Deeply as
Robertson revered the Bible as the inexhaustible spring
of profoundest truth, he pronounced " bibliolatry " as super-
stitious, as false, and almost as dangerous as Romanism.
The Bible is inspired, he says, but not dictated ; it is the
word of God, but in the words of man ; as the former, per-
fect ; as the latter, imperfect. Indeed, the Divine wisdom is
shown in the fact, that it has given a spiritual revelation, that
is, a revelation concerning the truths of the soul and its
relation to God, in popular and incorrect language ; for how
otherwise could it have been understood by unscientific men
and ages ? The highest truths, he maintained, rest ulti-
mately, not upon the authority of the Bible, or of the Church,
but upon the witness of the Spirit of God in the human heart,
1 He claims this sympathy also for the reason that he did not share the
national prejudices of his countrymen, but, on the contrary, spoke with
fitting contempt of their contempt for everything German (see his remarks on
" German Neology," in his letter of 1849, Ltf e and Letters, p. 97 of People's
ed.). In this respect how far he stands above Maurice !
G. T. C C
386 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV.
a witness which is to be reached not by the cultivation of the
understanding, but by the loving obedience of the heart.
Accordingly, in interpreting the dogmas of the Church, he
never troubled himself about their intellectual husks, but only
about their kernel, the religious truths and moral principles
which are to be found under the various dogmatic opinions as
their real meaning. He was consequently, with all his strict-
ness in the condemnation of what is morally wrong, extremely
charitable and catholic in the views he took of dogmatic
differences of opinion. There was one principle which pro-
bably Maurice recognised in the dim distance, but which
in his case remained confused eclecticism, but Robertson's
deeper and clearer mind endeavoured to work out distinctly,
and applied with unerring tact in various regions of contro-
versy : it was the principle, that the one truth which under-
lies the various partial views of opposing parties, and by this
very partiality and onesidedness becomes falsehood, must be
brought out into clear light as the essential thing common to
both parties. An acute dialectical intellect and a rare power
of sympathy in entering into the thoughts and feelings of
others qualified him to perform, as few men could, the work
of a peacemaker amid contending religious parties. If a
longer life had been granted him (he died 1853, at the age
of thirty- seven), and if he had had leisure to write the
theological works which he had proposed to himself (that on
Inspiration, e.g.), what a beneficial influence he might have
exerted on the development of theological thought, both in
his own country and abroad! But as it is, his Sermons and
Letters are a rich source of truth and light, from which no
one can draw without feeling their purifying, strengthening,
and elevating power ; they are the monument of a genuine
religious genius, in whom for some time to come later
generations will reverently recognise a prophet of the higher
development of Christian thought and feeling.
We have still to take a glance at the course of Biblical
criticism in Great Britain, and the review may be the more
rapid as the labours in this department of theology practically
commenced but a generation ago, and have hitherto produced
little of independent value. The credit of having done the
work of pioneer in these studies in England must be accorded
to the learned classical scholar and theologian, JOWETT, who
Ch. II.] PARTIES AND MOVEMENTS IN THEOLOGY. 387
published in 1855 his exegetical work The Epistles of St. Paul
to the Thessalonians, Galatians, and Romans, with Critical
Notes and Dissertations (2 vols.), in which he introduced
to his countrymen the results of Baur's critical labours. His
own views hold a place midway between those of Baur and
the traditional ones as to the relation of Paul to the earlier
Apostles : there was not complete harmony, but neither was
there absolute antagonism ; the difference was not so much of
a dogmatic as of a practical nature, and on the part of the
Twelve was due more to want of consistency than to an-
tagonism of principles ; though in accord with Paul on funda-
mental principles, they were attracted to Jewish practices by
their national sympathies and habits. Some points of Pauline
theology are discussed in the appended Dissertations with
characteristic acumen and without dogmatic prejudice (e.g.
the doctrine of election). Of special value is the careful
criticism of the text, and the amended authorised English
version. The principles of interpretation which Jowett ap-
plied in his Epistles of Paul he has expounded in the ex-
tremely interesting essay, On the Interpretation of Scripture
(in the Essays and Reviews, 1860), in "which he demands,
quite in the spirit of Arnold, that the method of the classical
scholar shall be applied in Biblical exegesis, in short, that
" the Bible must be interpreted like any other book," and thus
the study of the Scriptures be raised to the rank of the most
valuable portion of the study of history and antiquity ; the
best book for the heart ought to be made the best for the in-
tellect, so that its moral judgment of history might seem to
complete and correct the aesthetic standard of the classics.
" Before we can make the Old and New Testaments a real
part of education, we must read them not by the help of
custom and tradition, in the spirit of apology or controversy,
but in accordance with the ordinary laws of human know-
ledge."
The year 1860, in which the Essays and Reviews appeared,
may be regarded as an epoch in the history of English
theology, corresponding to the year 1835 in the history of
German theology. The storm which this collection of theo-
logical essays by various authors called up in England had
great similarity with the commotion produced in Germany by
Strauss' s Leben Jesu. It is quite true that the causes of the
commotion in the two countries were by no means of equal
388 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV.
importance. For the Essays and Reviews contain nothing
that had not already been thought and said from the days of
Whately and Arnold by not a few writers belonging even to
the Anglican Church. The first essay, by Temple, Arnold's
successor at Rugby, deals with the gradual and progressive
education of the world, a thought which had from the time
of Lessing formed part of the ordinary consciousness of the
educated world, and which is to be found indicated in the
Church Fathers, and in fact in the New Testament. The
second essay, by Rowland Williams, gave an account, ex-
pressing substantial agreement, of Bunsen's Biblical Re-
searches. This was one of the essays which the opponents,
High-churchmen and Evangelicals combined, selected as the
basis of a prosecution for heresy. The charge was laid, that
the general scope, tendency, or design of the essay as a whole
was to disseminate unbelief in the Divine inspiration and
authority of Holy Scripture, to degrade it to the level of
mere human writings, to deny prophetic predictions and
miracles, or to interpret them in an unorthodox way, and to
explain away articles of the creeds. The trial, which took
place in the Court of Arches, before Dr. Lushington, and in
which Mr. James Stephen defended the accused essayists in
a masterly manner, ended in a complete triumph for Liberal
theology. Mr. Stephen remarked in the course of his defence
that a poor compliment would be paid to the English people
if they were deemed incompetent to bring into open discussion
the views of Baron Bunsen. The design of the accusation was
really nothing 'else than to put asunder reason and faith, which
God had joined together. But the questions which learning
and criticism had raised would have to be settled ; the de-
cisive question was whether the clergy should be allowed to
co-operate freely in the settlement. The authorities might
perhaps close the mouth of the clergyman, but not of the lay-
man, or of literature and history. Is it allowable to make a
compact between Christ and darkness ; reason and Satan ?
It is of greatest moment to Christianity itself that theo-
logians should be free to study the Bible. The decision of
the Court, which was in accordance with these principles,
sanctioned the rights of free theology in the English Church.
A leading representative of this new party, which may
be described as the left and progressive wing of the Broad
Church, was ARTHUR P. STANLEY, the pupil and biographer
Ch. II.] PARTIES AND MOVEMENTS IN THEOLOGY. 389
of Arnold. The fact that his high ecclesiastical position as
Dean of Westminster did not prevent his sustaining friendly
relations with Dissenters and heretics largely helped, no
doubt, to modify the dogmatic exclusiveness of the Estab-
lished Church. His theological writings were valuable con-
tributions in aid of a free and unfettered study of Biblical
and ecclesiastical history. Simultaneously with Jowett's com-
mentary on St. Paul, he published his kindred work, The
Epistles of St. Paul to the Corinthians, with Critical Notes
and Dissertations (1855), which had been preceded by his
Sermons and Essays on the Apostolic Age (1847), in which the
realistic historic method of Arnold was applied to the history
of the New Testament period in a way that departed far from
the lines of customary dogmatic exegesis. To the same
category belong his Lectures on the Jewish Church (1862), in
which the history of Israel is treated in a manner midway
between poetry and criticism, following very much the lines
of Ewald. In an essay on the Theology of the Nineteenth
Century, published in Eraser s Magazine, Feb., 1865, Stanley
characterised the method which he had followed. The theory
of development, he maintains, has taken the first place in every
field of religious and philosophical thought. It has had an
important effect on the proper understanding of the Bible
itself. The gradual growth, the imperfect forms, the varied
degrees of Revelation itself are now understood, and thus
the greatest difficulties in the way of understanding the Bible
are removed. We no longer expect to find in the Jews
of the Old Testament premature Christians, or premature
astronomers or geologists. Together with this historical
spirit, a characteristic of modern theology is the importance
it attaches to the moral and spiritual aspect of religion. The
value of internal evidence has now been recognised in theory
as well as in practice, in theology as well as in philosophy, and
its superiority to the proof from miracles. The spirit is placed
above the letter, and practice above dogma. The first and
clearest statement of this new principle is found in Arnold's
Essay on the Interpretation of Scripture, the man to whose
memory Stanley has dedicated such a noble monument in his
biography.
That the problems of Biblical criticism can no longer be
suppressed, that they are as it were in the air of our time, so
that theology could not escape them, even if it took the wings
39 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV.
of the morning and dwelt in the uttermost parts of the sea, was
strikingly shown at the beginning of the sixties by the re-
markable case of Bishop Colenso. He had gone as Bishop
to Natal with the orthodox belief in the inspiration of the
Bible, with the object of converting the Zulus, and returned
home as a critic to call in question the integrity and historical
character of the Books of Moses. In the course of his in-
struction of the heathen, their doubts led him to make a more
careful examination of the Biblical text, and in the process it
grew arithmetically certain to the keen and mathematical
intellect of the Bishop, that it was impossible to maintain the
correctness of the Mosaic records. The historical inquiries
thus started led him step by step to further results; he per-
ceived the composite character of the Pentateuch as consist-
ing of component parts of various ages and sources (the
Elohistic and Jahvistic sections), he perceived the gradual
growth of the Levitical Law, of which some portions origin-
ated before Deuteronomy, that is, before the time of Jere-
miah, other portions not until after Ezra, being inserted into
the earlier portions of the Pentateuch. In a word, Colenso
arrived, by his originally quite independent path of inquiry, at
results which are in substantial agreement with the views
of the Biblical science of our day. But the Bishops of the
Anglican Church, instead of calmly examining the honest
studies of their brother, felt called upon to break a lance for
Moses and the infallibility of the letter of the Bible, and
demanded the deprivation of the Bishop of Natal. Once
more the Secular Court, the Queen's Privy Council, was
wiser than the Churchmen, and pronounced the Bishop the
legitimate occupant of his see (1865).
Amongst the opponents of Colenso was to be found not
only Maurice, who had himself suffered as a persecuted
heretic, but even Matthew Arnold, who substitutes the moral
order of the world for the God of the Bible, and with this
object in view takes great liberties in the interpretation of the
Bible. In an essay in Macmillaris Magazine (Jan. and Feb.,
1 863), he demanded that the Biblical historian should show
great consideration for the edification of his readers. In order
not to do violence to their devout feelings, and not to endanger
the interest of the practical religious life, he ought, Arnold
thinks, to attenuate the difficulties which might be a stumbling-
block to faith in the Bible, to go out of the way of what is
Ch. II.] PARTIES AND MOVEMENTS IN THEOLOGY. 391
doubtful, such as the miraculous stories, by using nice gener-
alities, a method of which Stanley had given a perfect model
in his Jewish Church. Without doubt Matthew Arnold ex-
pressed the views of the great majority of Englishmen on
this matter, and perhaps the views of the men of his age. It
may also be granted that there are practical interests at the
bottom of such advice which have some justification. On the
other hand, it ought to be perceived, as Matthew Arnold
seems to have subsequently perceived, that the claims of the
purely scientific spirit to present the simple historical truth are
equally well founded, and that both those practical religious,
and these absolute scientific interests will be better promoted
by the separation of the two kinds of Biblical interpretation
the practical and the learned, than by a confused amalga-
mation of both. These hybrid forms, with their indefinite-
ness, half-truths and compromises, have little value in the pro-
motion of an exact knowledge of the historical facts ; the only
use they serve is to check, in a time of transition, such as
ours is, the too rapid advance of some and to prepare others
gradually to receive what is new ; in that way facilitating
and securing an orderly and steady development of general
opinion, and avoiding sudden leaps and catastrophes of a
dangerous kind. This is without doubt the duty which the
modified orthodoxy of the English Broad Church party has
to perform at present, and perhaps for some time to come.
The acknowledgment of the legitimacy of this purpose, and
respect for those men who endeavour to realise it, is quite
consistent with a decided assertion of the rights of strictly
scientific historical research in theology, uncontrolled by any
secondary considerations whatsoever. The representatives
of this purely scientific research are, however, so much in
the minority, not only in Great Britain, but everywhere, that
there is no reason to fear lest the development of the general
religious consciousness should go on at too rapid a rate.
Whilst the Colenso controversy was still engaging public
attention in England, R. W. MACKAY, (who had previously
by his Progress of the Intellect, as exemplified in the Religious
Development of the Greeks and the Romans (1850), a learned
work, but burdened with too great weight of material made
himself known as a free inquirer in the department of religion)
published the very instructive book, The Tubingen School
and its Antecedents (1863). An introductory review of the
39 2 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV.
relation of religion to theology, of the origin and development
of dogma, of the influence of modern philosophy on the
doctrine of the belief in miracles and inspiration, and of the
history of Biblical criticism from the Socinians to Strauss, is
followed by an excellent account of the critical labours of
F. C. Baur and his disciples, of their method and its new
results, the author professing himself an adherent of the school.
In an appendix polemical notes against the opponents of
the criticism of Baur, amongst others Ewald, Ritschl, and
Lechler, which show accurate knowledge, are added. To
this book the merit is to be ascribed of having promoted
an acquaintance with the stricter form of German criticism
in wider circles in England. Nor are there wanting signs of
o o o
the ferment produced by this criticism. Oxford itself could
not escape its influence, where T. H. Green introduced,
together with German speculative philosophy, the critical
results of the Tubingen school to his circle of friends.
A pendant to the various Lives of Jesus which appeared
on the Continent during the sixth decade originated in
Cambridge, Ecce Homo : A Survey of the Life and Work
of Jesus Christ (1866). This anonymous book (said to be
by Professor Seeley, the author of Natural Religion), pro-
duced a deep impression, and greatly promoted the cause of
more unfettered religious thought in Great Britain, although,
or perhaps because, it was not directly critical, but, upon the
basis of the narratives of the four Gospels, drew a picture of
the moral personality of Jesus with great delicacy of feeling
and a profound perception of his peculiar greatness and
originality. The nature of Christian morality, as distinguished
from Jewish and Heathen legality or philosophy, is derived
from the character of Jesus and the personal impression
he made upon his disciples. If, therefore, the personality
of Jesus as delineated by Seeley produces to some extent
rather the impression of an artificial composition than that
of real historical truth, this is the unavoidable consequence
of the author's neglect of any critical examination of the
sources ; the personal claims of Jesus in the Fourth Gospel,
and the Synoptics' discourses of the Messianic Judge being
ascribed to Jesus himself straightway. By this means the
portrait of the man, which is really the object aimed at, ac-
quires an unintelligible, problematic aspect. Still, Ecce Homo
takes a foremost place amongst the books of this class.
Ch. II.] PARTIES AND MOVEMENTS IN THEOLOGY. 393
At this point the learned work of the late Dr. EDERSHEIM,
The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah (2 vols., 1883), may
be mentioned. It is a harmonistic combination of the nar-
ratives of the Gospels, with a decided apologetic purpose,
and without any concession to the most important objections
of historical criticism. But the scientific value of the book
consists in its rich collection of materials as to the condition
of Jewish life and beliefs at the time of Jesus. It meets
thereby a real and urgent want of Biblical research in our
day. For it is very true, as the author observes in his
preface, that a light is cast by these contemporary circum-
stances and analogies upon many parts of the gospel history
itself, by which our knowledge of the origin of our religion
under the forms of Judaism, and yet in opposition to its spirit,
is essentially furthered. It is probable that strictly critical
research may make often another use than the author himself
would wish of the learned materials which his book supplies ;
where he finds confirmation of the historical character of a
narrative in the New Testament, or of a discourse in the
Fourth Gospel, others may discern rather the source of the
literary origin of the narrative or the discourse in question.
But in any case, the good service the author has rendered
should be thankfully acknowledged ; by laborious studies,
pursued through many years, in out-of-the-way Jewish lite-
rature, he has collected an extremely rich and useful mass of
materials bearing upon primitive Christian history.
SAMUEL DAVIDSON'S Introduction to the Study of the New
Testament (2 vols., 1868), presents noteworthy evidence of
the progress of historical criticism in England since the begin-
ning of the sixth decade. In the first edition (1848-51) the
author had maintained the genuineness of the whole of the
New Testament writings, not excepting even 2 Peter, against
all the objections of criticism. He then published an Intro-
duction to the Old Testament (1862-3), m which the stand-
point of the apologist was abandoned, and the intermediate
position of Ewald was taken (e.g. the Pentateuch not by
Moses, but not completed until the reign of Josiah, the Priestly
Legislation preceding the Prophets). Six years later, the
author having in the meantime resigned his position as
theological professor in the Lancashire Independent College,
and acquired full freedom to prosecute his critical studies,
appeared the second edition of his Introduction to the New
394 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV.
Testament, entirely rewritten, in which the standpoint of the
Tubingen school was taken with almost too little reservation.
The counterwork to it is the strictly apologetic Introduction
of Salmon, which appears to enjoy well-nigh the rank of an
authority in orthodox circles.
The latter is the case with the Introduction to the Study
of the Gospels, by WESTCOTT, now Bishop of Durham, the
English Tischendorf. This work, which appeared in six
editions between 1851 and 1881, belongs to that class of
apologies which, by their learning, an air of superiority
towards the main arguments of the critics, and occasional
minor concessions on secondary points, are accustomed to
make a great impression, and really perform the service above
referred to, of retarding the progressive theological spirit
of an age. The best part of the book is the introductory
chapters on the Jewish religion, and particularly the Messianic
faith of the century immediately preceding our era. But with
regard to the Gospels, the author holds that their contents
are in complete harmony, or that only unessential differences
in the form of narrative are to be met with. These are to be
explained by the varied individuality of the writers, in whom
the Divine image of the Saviour was reflected in diverse
but mutually complementary forms. For the Gospels are all
Divine in the highest sense, because they are in the highest
sense human. The spirit in the Evangelists searched into
the deep things of God, and led them to realise the mysteries
of the Faith, as finite ideas, and not in their infinite essence.
This is such language as we have long been accustomed to
hear from Neander ; instead of getting intelligible answers to
definite questions, we have to listen to the mystical phrases
of devotional literature, which appeal to the emotions and
presentiment (Ahnung), where, from the nature of the case,
the intellect alone is qualified to speak. Westcott's lectures,
entitled The Historic Faith (1882), have the same apologetic
purpose, being an historical and dogmatic exposition of the
Apostles' Creed.
But influential as these and similar apologetic works (they
are essentially so much alike that it does not seem necessary
to give a list of their titles) may be for the present moment,
they cannot arrest the stream of time. 1 This we may, finally,
1 The papers on the results of recent criticism of the Old Testament, read
Ch. II] PARTIES AND MOVEMENTS IN THEOLOGY. 395
assure ourselves of by a glance at three important works of
the last three lustra, with which our survey of English theo-
logy may conclude.
The anonymous work, Siipernatural Religion. An In-
quiry into the Reality of Divine Revelation (3 vols., 1874-
1879, in seven editions) seeks, with the aid of an acute and
scientifically trained intellect and extensive historical learning,
to overthrow the popular view of Christianity as a religion
transcending the human reason and based upon supernatural
institutions and miracles. With a view to this, the belief in
miracles is first examined in general, its untenability being
shown less from metaphysical than epistemological considera-
tions and analogies from experience, and the origin of the
belief is explained from psychological and temporal conditions.
When the proof from miracles has been thus in general de-
prived of its force, positively by the immutability of the order
of nature, and negatively by the unreliability of human obser-
vation and testimony, the Christian legend of miracles is next
submitted to trial by a detailed examination of the evidential
value of the Biblical documents the Gospels and the Acts.
From an examination of the testimony of the Fathers the
author finds that not one of the canonical Gospels is connected
by direct testimony with the men to whom they are tradition-
ally ascribed, and that the later, in itself valueless, tradition is
divided by a long interval of profound silence from the period
of its alleged authorship ; the canonical Gospels continue to
be anonymous documents until the end of the second century,
without evidential value with regard to the miracles which
they record. The internal evidence confirms this result of
the external ; to say nothing of minor discrepancies which
run through the first three Gospels, it is impossible to bring
the accounts of the Synoptists into harmony with the Fourth
Gospel ; they annul mutually the force of their testimony.
Like the Gospels, the Acts is a legendary composition of a
late date, and cannot be regarded as a sober historical narrative,
which renders the reality of the numerous miracles it reports
at the Church Congress, at Manchester, in 1888, by Dr. Perowne, the Dean
of Peterborough, Professor Cheyne, of Oxford, and Mr. J. M. Wilson, the
Head-master of Clifton College, supply one of many proofs of this. Mrs.
Ward, the author of Robert Elsmere, very justly regards the debate on these
papers as " The glorification of criticism." See her striking article on " The
New Reformation" in the Nineteenth Century for March, 1889.
THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV.
incredible. The testimony of the Apostle Paul as to the
resurrection of Christ remains then to be considered. A
close examination of his evidence shows that, so far as it con-
cerns the earlier events, it rests upon indefinite hearsay and
does not agree with the accounts of the Gospels, whilst the
Apostle's own experience, in view of his peculiar and highly
nervous temperament, must be looked upon as a subjective
vision, as are also most probably the appearances to the
excited disciples of Jesus. Accordingly the proof of the re-
surrection and ascension must be pronounced as absolutely
and hopelessly insufficient. The examination of the historical
sources has therefore confirmed the view of the improbability
of miracles formed upon general grounds.
So far the author of this interesting book stands upon firm
historical ground, and it will be difficult to upset his main
position. But when he proceeds to draw the inference that
the claim of Christianity to Divine revelation has no better
foundation than the like claim made by other religions, he
is advancing no longer an historical but a philosophical opinion,
which is not by any means the necessary consequence of his
critical results, but is based upon an inadequate estimate of
the distinctive properties of Christianity as an ethical religion,
and upon a superficial, external, dualistic idea of revelation.
The defect of the work Supernatural Religion, as of Strauss's
Leben Jesu, is that it employs destructive criticism ex-
clusively, and neglects to make clear, or even so much as to
indicate, what is the lasting moral and spiritual truth that lies
at the basis of the supernatural legends and dogmas. But
while this is beyond doubt a very serious defect, it is equally
certain, on the other hand, that the work of negative or
destructive criticism must everywhere be first done as the
conditio sine qua non of the positive or constructive task of a
better understanding of the historical religion. And as the
author himself describes his labours as but the negative pre-
paration for positive construction, 1 we are not justified in
judging them by any other standard ; and within the limits
which he proposed to himself, the value of his contribution to
the end in view cannot be called in question.
Naturally, a work of this kind attracted great attention
1 Preface, p. Ixxvii, " Under such circumstances, destructive must precede
constructive criticism."
Ch. II.] PARTIES AND MOVEMENTS IN THEOLOGY. 397
wherever the English language is spoken. Never before had
such a systematic attack, based upon solid learning, been
made in English upon the external evidences of the Christian
religion, which still continue to hold a foremost place, not
merely in the popular, but also in the theological apologetics of
England (Mansel, Newman, Mozley). It may, undoubtedly,
be taken as a sign of the times that this book, in the first year
of its publication, passed through six editions, and that the
periodical press of all parties gave long extracts from it, and
reviews of it, which were for the most part, as appears from
Lightfoot's complaint, of a favourable and even laudatory
nature. The answer which Lightfoot, the late Bishop of
Durham, offered in the name of orthodoxy in a series of
articles in the Contemporary Review, subsequently published
as a book, is extraordinarily weak. Instead of calmly sur-
rendering the outworks and establishing the claim of the
Christian religion to be a revelation (which was called in
question) by an appeal to its spiritual nature and its position
in the whole course of history, by which means the solely
negative standpoint of the author of Supernatural Religion
would have been successfully impugned, the short-sighted
scholar found nothing better to do than to submit the author's
examination of references in the Fathers to the Gospels to petty
criticism ; while, even if all the Bishop's deductions were
correct, the general result of the author's inquiries would not
be in any way altered. It is not surprising that in his reply
to Bishop Lightfoot, which has recently appeared, the author
not only adheres to his historical positions as not upset, but
that he also repeats his general conclusions in a form of more
pronounced antagonism. For his refutation, it needed really
other means than Bishop Lightfoot had at his command ; it
required a free, profound, and far-seeing philosophical and
historical defence of Christianity, as the growingly perfect
stage of the religious development of humanity.
And to such a defence the last decade has made in the
highest degree valuable contributions in the works of Robert-
son Smith and Edwin Hatch, which, though they belong to
very different departments, are closely allied by a common,
genuinely scientific method, an unprejudiced and acute criticism
of authorities, and a fine insight into the conditions and causes
of historical development. In 1881 and 1882 Robertson
Smith published two series of lectures, the one on The Old
THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV.
Testament in the Jewish Church, and the other on The Pro-
phets of Israel and their Place in History, which, together with
the author's articles in the ninth edition of the Encyclopedia
Britannica, hold a place amongst the best things that have
been written on the religion of the Old Testament. He
considers that the historical documents of our religion must
be treated according to the same principles as are applied
with such valuable results to the other sources of ancient
history. " The timidity which shrinks from this frankness,
lest the untrained student may make a wrong use of the
knowledge put into his hands," is, as Robertson Smith truly
remarks, " wholly out of place in Protestant Churches," which
ought to regard it as " a religious as well as an historical gain
to learn to read every part of the Bible in its original and
natural sense. Much unnecessary exacerbation of dogmatic
controversy would be avoided if theologians were always
alive to the fact that the supreme truths of religion were first
promulgated and first became a living power in forms that
are far simpler than the simplest system of modern dogma."
The revelation recorded in the Bible had a history which was
" subject to the laws of human nature, and limited by the
universal rule that every permanent spiritual and moral re-
lation must grow up by slow degrees and obey a principle of
internal development." This application of the idea of de-
velopment to the history of the religion of the Bible is so far
from detracting from its character as a revelation that, as
Robertson Smith admirably shows, the best way of proving
it is to show historically the unity and the consistent progress
through centuries of the development of the religion of the
Bible. " If the religion of Israel and Christ answers these
tests, the miraculous circumstances of its promulgation need
not be used as the first proof of its truth, but must rather be
regarded as the inseparable accompaniments of a revelation
which bears the historical stamp of reality." Without en-
dangering, therefore, religious faith in the truth of the religion
of the Bible, free discussion of the details of historical criticism
may be fearlessly conceded. Of this freedom, Robertson
Smith himself makes use without any reservation. He
confesses in the preface to his lectures on the Prophets his
adoption of the main positions of the newer school of criticism,
represented by Wellhausen, that the priestly legislation did
not precede but follow the prophets, that the latter were
Ch. II.] PARTIES AND MOVEMENTS IN THEOLOGY. 399
therefore not the interpreters of a religion which had been
previously fixed in the Law, but were the original representa-
tives of the ethical idea of God which was developed along
with and out of the national history of Israel. To show this
in detail, is the noble design of his excellent lectures on the
Prophets.
Simultaneously with Robertson Smith's lectures on the
history of the religion of the Old Testament appeared the
Bampton Lectures of the late Dr. Edwin Hatch, on The
Organisation of the Early Christian Churches (1881). In
the opening lecture the author gives a very instructive
account of the historical method which ought to be followed
in the inquiry before him. The first thing is, to test the docu-
ments as to their origin, their temporal and local surroundings,
and the value of what they say. When the facts have thus
been ascertained, the inquiry must proceed to the considera-
tion of the probable causes of the facts. Here careful
attention must be paid to the difficulty arising from the fact
that the same words do not always bear the same meaning,
but alter it with the development of the institution designated
(e.g. eTrtcrKOTros). The history of the past can never be pro-
perly understood when a series of historical facts is interpreted
by its modern form and meaning ; we have to begin at the
beginning, and trace the new elements step by step through
succeeding centuries. To understand this process of develop-
ment, it is needful also to consider the resemblances which
exist between Christian and non-Christian institutions, in
order that similar phenomena may be referred to the same
causes. Nor may the historian be deterred from such an
inference by the supposition of the supernatural character
of the Church. For the formation of the Church has been
effected by God according to the same laws by which the
life of human society generally is produced. The divinity
which clings to the Holy Catholic Church is the divinity of
order. " It is not outside the universe of Law, but within it.
It is Divine as the solar system is Divine, because both the one
and the other are expressions and results of those vast laws
of the Divine economy by which the physical and the moral
world alike move their movement and live their life." It is
then shown in detail how the Christian communities were
organised at first after the analogy of the Jewish synedrion
and the Gentile associations, borrowing from them both the
4OO THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV.
presbytery, or council of " old men," and the executive organs
of self-government the bishop and the deacons. The bishop,
at first only the president of the administrative body, gradually
became of greater importance, in proportion as the need of
an authoritative organ for preserving the unity of doctrine
and of discipline arose. But all the time the right to teach
and administer the sacraments still belonged to all members
of the Churches in common ; the right of the priority of the
clergy was as yet not exclusive. When the bishops laid
claim to the exclusive possession of this right, the claim was
energetically disputed by the Montanists, who maintained
the superiority of individual gifts of the Spirit to official rule.
Nor was ordination at first anything more than appointment
to an ecclesiastical office, of the same kind as any appointment
to a civil office, without implying the idea of the communica-
tion of exclusive spiritual powers. The clergy did not become
a separate class before the fourth century, and then partly in
consequence of the grant of special privileges from the State
to ecclesiastical dignitaries, partly also from the growth of
the influence of the analogy between the Christian and Mosaic
dispensations, whereby Christian ministers became priests.
The connexion between the individual Churches was also at
first loose and voluntary ; it was under the influence and after
the pattern of the State, again, that the organisation of the
confederation of the Churches was brought about.
Hatch then raises the question, whether the organisation,
thus effected, of the Christian communities into one general
Church can be justly identified with the ideal Church of the
New Testament, the "body of Christ." He denies this, and
establishes his position with great acuteness. The unity of the
Church, he shows, was in the earliest period only " a common
relation to a common ideal and a common hope." I n the second
period, the age of conflict with heretics, "the idea of definite
belief as a basis of union dominated over that of a holy life " ;
Christians were to be held together by their possession of the
only true tradition of Christian teaching. In the third period
was added insistence on Catholic order, without which dogma
seemed to have no guarantee of permanence. " It was held
not to be enough for a man to be living a good life, and to hold
the Catholic faith, and to belong to a Christian association ;
that association must be part of a larger confederation, and
the sumof such confederations constituted the Catholic Church."
Ch. II.] PARTIES AND MOVEMENTS IN THEOLOGY. 40 1
This is the permanent form of the idea of Catholic unity since
the fourth century. It is true, it was not universally accepted;
the Donatists were not to be convinced of the value of an
outward unity which lacked inward purity and sanctity. They
were put down with the aid of the State ; but the question
they raised was not thereby solved, but still retains its full
significance : the question whether external organisation
constitutes the Church ? And Hatch answers the question
in a truly Protestant spirit : " Subtler, deeper, diviner, than
anything of which external things can be either the symbol or
the bond is that inner reality or essence of union that inter-
penetrating community of thought and character which St.
Paul speaks of as the ' unity of the Spirit' !"
Hatch's book belongs, as is widely acknowledged, to the
best that have been written on the origins of our Church.
If he had been spared to write the history of Church doctrine,
after the same method as he has followed in his account of
the organisation of the Church, what an instructive work that
would have been ! The unexpected and sudden death of this
fine scholar must be regarded as a heavy loss not to Oxford
only, but to Protestant theology generally ; yet we may hope
that the seed sown by him will bear fruit far and wide. The
place where Green and Hatch laboured and cast the light of
philosophical and historical knowledge cannot fall back again
into the night of the Middle Ages. The days of a Newman
and a Pusey are for ever past for Oxford and for England.
G.T.
INDEX.
Ammon 89.
Arnold, M., 330 sq., 390.
Arnold, T., 365 sq.
Bauer, Bruno, 226.
Baur, F. C., 224 sq., 284 sq.
Biedermann 137 sq.
Bleek 237.
Bredenkamp 275.
Bretschneider 89.
Bruce, Alexander, 382.
Budde 276.
Caird, John, 340 sq.
Campbell 380 sq.
Carlyle 311 sq.
Colenso 390.
Coleridge 308 sq., 355.
Curtiss 275.
Daub 132.
Davidson, S., 393
Delitzsch 275.
De Wette 97 sq.,
Dillmann 275.
Dorner 156, 373.
Duhm 276.
227.
Edersheim, 393.
Eichhorn 209, 227.
Erskine (of Linlathen) 378 sq.
Ewald 237, 256.
Feuerbach 135.
Fichte, J. G., 57 sq.
Finsler 275.
Flint 350 sq.
Froude, Hurrell, 356.
Gieseler 209, 284,
Graf, H., 258.
Green, T. H., 344 sq.
Hagenbach 284.
Hamilton, Sir W., 325.
Hampden 370.
Hare, Julius, 370, 372.
Harnack 298.
Hase 205, 237, 282.
Hatch 399 sq.
Hausrath 240.
Hegel 68 sq.
Herder 21 sq., 210.
Hilgenfeld 239.
Hofmann, C. von, 173 sq
Holsten 240.
Holtzmann 240.
Hume 6 sq.
Jowett 386.
Kant 3 sq., 32 sq.
Kayser 258.
Keble 356.
Keim 247.
Kingsley, C., 383 sq.
Kittel 275.
Konig 275.
Kostlin 234.
Kuenen 259, 276.
Kurtz 284.
Lange, J. P., 170 sq.
Lechler 237.
Lightfoot (Bp.) 397.
Lipsius 195 sq.
Mackay 391.
Mansel 327.
Marheincke 131.
Martensen 164 sq.
Martineau 340, 352 sq.
Maurice, F. D., 328, 373 sq.
Meyer 237.
Mill, James, 319.
402
INDEX.
403
Mill, J. S., 319 sq.
Milman 370, 372.
Miiller, Julius, 124.
Neander 219, 279 sq.
Newman, F. W., 317 sq.
Newman, J. H., 358, 361 sq.
Niedner 284.
Nitzsch 123.
Noldeke 275.
Paulus 211.
Pfleiderer 250.
Planck 233, 277 sq.
Pusey 358.
Renan 241.
Reuss 237, 261.
Riehm 275.
Ritschl, Alb., 183 sq., 235.
Robertson, F. W., 383, sq.
Rohr 89.
Rothe 148 sq.
Ryssel 275.
Schelling 62 sq.
Schenkel 177 sq., 246.
Schleiermacher 44 sq., 103 sq., 209,
228.
Schrader 275.
Schultz 275.
Schwegler 233.
Schweizer 125 sq.
Seeley 333 sq., 392.
Seth 349.
Smend 276.
Smith, Robertson, 397.
Spencer, Herbert, 336 sq.
Spittler 277.
Stade 276.
Stanley, A. P., 389.
Stirner, Max, 136.
Storr 86.
Strack 275.
Strauss 132, 213 sq., 241 sq.
Supernatural Religion, 395 sq.
Temple 388.
Thirl wall 370, 372.
Tieftrunk 87.
Tulloch 332.
Twesten 124.
Ullmann 123, 220.
Vatke 252 sq.
Volkmar 239.
Wegscheider 89.
Weiss 237.
WeissepC. H., 145 sq., 222, 226.
Weizsacker, 238, 248 sq.
Wellhausen 259, 263 sq.
Westcott 394.
Whately 368 sq.
Wilberforce, R. J., 359.
Wilke 222, 226.
Williams, Rowland, 388.
Zeller, Ed., 229 n., 232.
mm
