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,
Indeed, in not a few places he is even guilty of an absolute meanness
without any deeper meaning or religious significance.
Indeed, in not a few places he is even guilty of an absolute meanness
without any deeper meaning or religious significance.
Pleiderer - Development of Theology in Germany since Kant
Similar difficulties arise from the application of the idea of the Absolute to the Christian idea of God.
It 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 personal, self-conscious, and self- determining spirit. Nevertheless, impossible for our thought to show how personality can be consistent with ab soluteness. Personality arrived at via eminentice, absolute ness via ncgationis but these two methods yield no coherent
'
? 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.
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? 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. 201
clom --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
? ? ? ? 202 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 God and man is described in ecclesiastical
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
tradition by metaphysical
? life in harmony with God gradually overcoming the power ot sin. Reconciliation thus appears as the consequence ot salvation. But the Christian faith is not content with this. That the founder of the society is its pattern has not been
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
historically
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 believer's 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 as the society of those confessing the Christian faith, organised external forms, and the religious and teleological idea of the communion of saints, which an object of faith. The identi fication of the former with the latter the fundamental error of Roman Catholicism. The Church can never be called a
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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 therefore, not an empirical but a religious conception. The peculiar blessing possessed by the members of the kingdom sonship to God, attained by justification and regeneration the personal certainty of this brings with participation the kingdom of God, but membership the
Church not identical with membership in the kingdom of God. In actual history, the kingdom of God appears in the advancing moral organisation of the whole 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 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 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
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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
? 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.
theological
? ? ? ? 1
? ? ? ? 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
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? ? ? 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 \6yiu 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
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
John
? ? ? ? Ch. 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 Peter but what was the advantage of knowing that these works do not come from the authors whose names they traditionally bear, 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, -- 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
scientific commentator to get rid of this false appearance
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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 we 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,
Indeed, in not a few places he is even guilty of an absolute meanness
without any deeper meaning or religious significance.
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 countenanced even by orthodox theologians in many instances, and accepted, at any rate partially, by Schleiermacher too in
kernel, was
? ? ? Ch. I. ] NEW TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND EXEGESIS. 213
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
? V
? ? ? 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
? 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
John.
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 that great personality, especially 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 recently estab lished community, revering its founder with all the more
tus).
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 com munity of orientals, chiefly unlearned people, who therefore could not appropriate and express those ideas the abstract conceptual forms of the understanding, but only as symbols and stories in the concrete fashion of the imagination. When all this 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
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before the mind the whole mass of new ideas, started by Jesus, and of old ones, applied to him, cast 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, which the first Christian community, composed chiefly of Jewish converts, lived and breathed. Jesus, as the greatest prophet, must have gathered up and surpassed his life and deeds everything that the ancient prophets had done and experienced he, as the restorer of the Hebrew religion, could not be 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. 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 made possible by oral tradition being the medium of communication. "
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 due to the inexorable logic with which the critic worked out his task 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, which
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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. " 1
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 which is finally given in the following speculative form :-- "When mankind is once sufficiently developed to have as its
1 Schwarz, Zur Gesch. d. ncucstcn T/icoL, p. 97, sq.
? ? ? ? Ch. I. ] NEW TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND EXEGESIS. 2 1 7
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
? ? ? ? ;
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 in metaphysical categories of doubtful value for
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
? instead of the facts of the devout heart and moral will, 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.
knowledge,
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 quite lost sight of in Strauss's allegorising, since there no sort of inner connec tion between the philosophical ideas which he looked for the essence of the belief in Christ and the person of Jesus himself. However, Strauss, after the critical disintegration of the legends of miracles, had given us 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
? ? if
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in
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in
it,
? Ch. 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 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 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 Xeander's Lcben Jesu (1837), Ullmann's Historisch oder mythisch and Weisse's Die evangelise he Geschichte, kritisch und philosophise bearbeitct (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, 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 the same way as mineral waters have them. In the cases of raising the dead there always (even John xi. ) the possibility of only an apparent death. The miraculous star of the Magi 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
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I
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:
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? 220 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
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
torical and the mythical. Ullmann
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. 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
the Church had been created by the power of the person ality of Jesus, might still, in return, have transformed and
adorned the idea of Christ by the aid of its mythical
tions and hopes. Nevertheless, in his book, published shortly afterwards, Vergdngliches und Bleibcndes. Zwei friedliche Bldtter (1838-39), Strauss allowed the justice of Ullmann's objection so far as to admit that man's religious life related to the rest of his life as the centre of a circle to its circumference, and that religion Christ was supreme, and was so far above other founders of religions as to be un surpassable for all time. For 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 altogether above the plane of history. But assuming that this position of Strauss was in itself a tenable one, its weakness lay his method of proving this grandeur of Christ for 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 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 as an his
torical authority. This produced wavering uncertainty in the third edition of his Leben Jesu, unpleasing contrast to the unflinching logic and clearness of the earlier editions, while the possibility of thus creating favourable impression upon the theological public was lessened by the not unfounded
concep
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? 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.
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 personal, self-conscious, and self- determining spirit. Nevertheless, impossible for our thought to show how personality can be consistent with ab soluteness. Personality arrived at via eminentice, absolute ness via ncgationis but these two methods yield no coherent
'
? 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.
? ? I'
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is, it is
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it is
;
? 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. 201
clom --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
? ? ? ? 202 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 God and man is described in ecclesiastical
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
tradition by metaphysical
? life in harmony with God gradually overcoming the power ot sin. Reconciliation thus appears as the consequence ot salvation. But the Christian faith is not content with this. That the founder of the society is its pattern has not been
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
historically
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 believer's 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 as the society of those confessing the Christian faith, organised external forms, and the religious and teleological idea of the communion of saints, which an object of faith. The identi fication of the former with the latter the fundamental error of Roman Catholicism. The Church can never be called a
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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 therefore, not an empirical but a religious conception. The peculiar blessing possessed by the members of the kingdom sonship to God, attained by justification and regeneration the personal certainty of this brings with participation the kingdom of God, but membership the
Church not identical with membership in the kingdom of God. In actual history, the kingdom of God appears in the advancing moral organisation of the whole 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 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 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
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;
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? Ch. IV. ] ECLECTIC MEDIATING THEOLOGIANS. 205
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
? 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.
theological
? ? ? ? 1
? ? ? ? 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
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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 \6yiu 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
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
John
? ? ? ? Ch. 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 Peter but what was the advantage of knowing that these works do not come from the authors whose names they traditionally bear, 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, -- 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
scientific commentator to get rid of this false appearance
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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 we 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,
Indeed, in not a few places he is even guilty of an absolute meanness
without any deeper meaning or religious significance.
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 countenanced even by orthodox theologians in many instances, and accepted, at any rate partially, by Schleiermacher too in
kernel, was
? ? ? Ch. I. ] NEW TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND EXEGESIS. 213
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
? V
? ? ? 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
? 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
John.
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 that great personality, especially 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 recently estab lished community, revering its founder with all the more
tus).
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 com munity of orientals, chiefly unlearned people, who therefore could not appropriate and express those ideas the abstract conceptual forms of the understanding, but only as symbols and stories in the concrete fashion of the imagination. When all this 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
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before the mind the whole mass of new ideas, started by Jesus, and of old ones, applied to him, cast 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, which the first Christian community, composed chiefly of Jewish converts, lived and breathed. Jesus, as the greatest prophet, must have gathered up and surpassed his life and deeds everything that the ancient prophets had done and experienced he, as the restorer of the Hebrew religion, could not be 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. 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 made possible by oral tradition being the medium of communication. "
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 due to the inexorable logic with which the critic worked out his task 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, which
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? 2l5 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. " 1
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 which is finally given in the following speculative form :-- "When mankind is once sufficiently developed to have as its
1 Schwarz, Zur Gesch. d. ncucstcn T/icoL, p. 97, sq.
? ? ? ? Ch. I. ] NEW TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND EXEGESIS. 2 1 7
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
? ? ? ? ;
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 in metaphysical categories of doubtful value for
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
? instead of the facts of the devout heart and moral will, 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.
knowledge,
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 quite lost sight of in Strauss's allegorising, since there no sort of inner connec tion between the philosophical ideas which he looked for the essence of the belief in Christ and the person of Jesus himself. However, Strauss, after the critical disintegration of the legends of miracles, had given us 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
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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 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 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 Xeander's Lcben Jesu (1837), Ullmann's Historisch oder mythisch and Weisse's Die evangelise he Geschichte, kritisch und philosophise bearbeitct (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, 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 the same way as mineral waters have them. In the cases of raising the dead there always (even John xi. ) the possibility of only an apparent death. The miraculous star of the Magi 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
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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
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
torical and the mythical. Ullmann
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. 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
the Church had been created by the power of the person ality of Jesus, might still, in return, have transformed and
adorned the idea of Christ by the aid of its mythical
tions and hopes. Nevertheless, in his book, published shortly afterwards, Vergdngliches und Bleibcndes. Zwei friedliche Bldtter (1838-39), Strauss allowed the justice of Ullmann's objection so far as to admit that man's religious life related to the rest of his life as the centre of a circle to its circumference, and that religion Christ was supreme, and was so far above other founders of religions as to be un surpassable for all time. For 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 altogether above the plane of history. But assuming that this position of Strauss was in itself a tenable one, its weakness lay his method of proving this grandeur of Christ for 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 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 as an his
torical authority. This produced wavering uncertainty in the third edition of his Leben Jesu, unpleasing contrast to the unflinching logic and clearness of the earlier editions, while the possibility of thus creating favourable impression upon the theological public was lessened by the not unfounded
concep
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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.
