No More Learning

This is what makes Baur's Church History, and especially its first volume, a classic for all time. It may perhaps be of some in terest to those who do not read German, and have not direct access to this work, if I here give a short sketch of Baur's account of primitive Christianity, thus carrying on the above (p. 263 sqq. ) outline of Wellhausen's history of Israel, which will assist in the formation of an approximately true idea of the results of modern criticism in respect to Biblical and early ecclesiastical history.
Baur begins with the preparation for Christianity in the Gentile and Jewish world. This includes, besides the political universalism of the Roman Empire, the Graeco-Roman philosophy ; the Socratic and Platonic idealism and the Stoic and Epicuraean search for the summum bonum contain the closest parallels to the religious questions of Christianity, and in the later eclecticism of a Cicero and Seneca we have the outlines of a natural theology, which was subsequently further developed on Christian soil. We may therefore say that in Christianity the various movements of the time con verge towards the same goal, and find in it their ultimate idea and most complete expression. Simultaneously,
form, new ideas were borrowed from the Greeks, and in particular the Old Testament conception of God was lifted out of the narrow sphere of the Jewish theocracy. Even the dread of contact with the world and the religious self- contemplation of the Essenes was one of the points of spiritual affinity between Judaism and Christianity. Thus the whole previous history of mankind was a preparation for Christianity ; it contained nothing which had not already in some form or other been recognised as a result of rational thought, or as a want of the human heart, or as a demand of the ethical consciousness. In order to ascertain the original character of Christianity, Baur starts from the Sermon
tianity
? Judaism had assumed in Alexandrine Hellenism a more subtle and
spiritual
? ? ? Ch. III. ] ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND HISTORY OF DOGMA. 289
on the Mount, Matthew v. In the Beatitudes we get a glance into the centre of the principle of thought and feeling of which it was the product, viz. " an infinitely sublime religious consciousness, which, though pervaded by the deepest feeling of the pressure of the finite and all the contradictions of the present, rises far above everything finite and limited. It is the pure feeling of the need of salvation, still undeveloped but containing within it the antithesis of sin and grace, and as such necessarily involving the reality of salvation. " The
emphasis laid by Jesus on the heart and character, as that
in which alone man's absolute moral worth consists, is an
essentially new step, a departure in principle from Mosaism,
and is the fundamental principle of Christianity. And just as
the idea of righteousness is deepened into a perfect surrender of man's own will to God's, so the Old Testament idea of
? the theocracy is so much spiritualised that everything relating to man's connexion with the kingdom of God is made
dependent solely upon ethical conditions. " Christianity, thus viewed, is in its most essential and primitive elements a
purely ethical religion, and its highest and peculiar excellence is its wholly ethical character as rooted in the ethical con sciousness of mankind. " But this spiritual substance of Christianity took concrete form in the Messianic idea, and by its aid entered on its historical development, the conscious ness of Jesus widening to universality by means of the national consciousness. By the name " Son of man " Jesus
expressed his truly universal Messianic vocation ; in Peter's confession this became an acknowledged fact for himself and for his disciples ; in Jerusalem he put the nation to the test, whether they adhered to their traditional, material and par- ticularist Messianic belief, or would recognise a Messiah such as he was and had shown himself by his whole life and work. The answer could only be the one of which he had long himself been assured. But his apparent overthrow was really the most decisive victory and entrance upon life. His death
was the complete rupture between him and Judaism. What the Resurrection really was lies outside the province of his torical inquiry, which has only to maintain that in the belief
of the disciples the resurrection of Jesus was the most certain
and incontrovertible of facts. So far as history is concerned,
the necessary pre-supposition for everything that follows is not so much the fact of the resurrection of Jesus itself as
G. T. U
? ? ? BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Bk. IIS.
29O
the belief in it ; but no psychological analysis can penetrate the inward spiritual process by which this belief was gene rated in the mind of the disciples. In their view the return of Jesus at the end of the world was so closely connected with his departure, that by this expectation the old Messianic hopes might easily be renewed and strengthened in them, whereby the difference between the disciples and the other Jews would sink into insignificance. What was it that raised the belief in the risen Jesus to a new principle of universal importance? It was, Baur answers, the work of the Apostle
Paul, prepared for by the Hellenist Stephen. His conversion,
even though we cannot get to the bottom of it by any psy
chological analysis, may be conceived as brought about by the help of the great impression made on him by the death of Jesus, which from the very fact of its contradicting all Jewish national assumptions, necessarily gained in Paul's view an importance extending far beyond Jewish particularism, so that he first fully grasped the universalism of Christianity. The two points of view which had been united in the person of Jesus -- the universal or ethical and the national Jewish or Messianic, --were respectively divided amongst his disciples, the elder apostles, generally laying emphasis on the national
character of Jesus, while Paul gave energetic expression to his ethical universality. He did not indeed appeal to the details of the life or teaching of Jesus, since the whole of Christianity was for his mind concentrated in the person of Jesus and the great facts of his death and resurrection. After
Paul had for a considerable time been working among the
pursue its own independent course separate from the other. How deep the disunion really was, in spite of the brotherly shake of the hand, was soon seen at Antioch, in the personal
quarrel between Paul and Peter, which left a lasting impres
sion on both sides. In none of Paul's epistles have we the
slightest sign of the two apostles having afterwards been in any way reconciled ; the Acts passes over the scene in Antioch in such deliberate silence that we can plainly enough infer how little the recollection of it accorded with the concili atory Tendenz of the writer ; and in the pseudo-Clementine Homilies (of the latter half of the second cen^--*? \ we can
? mixed Churches in Syria, he and the
including the Apostles, became involved in a dispute, which ended with the resolution that each of the two parties should
Jewish
Christians,
? ? ? Ch. III. ] ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND HISTORY OF DOGMA. 29 I
see that even then the Jewish Christians could not forgive Paul his harsh words about their chief apostle. Soon after we meet with the systematic opposition of the Jewish Chris
tians to the Apostle Paul in Galatia, where they wished to convert the Pauline Church to Jewish legalism ; and then in Corinth, where they tried to destroy Paul's authority by aU the resources of intrigue and under the pretext of the authority of the original apostles. And even in Rome, Baur holds, Paul had to contend with Jewish Christians ; in order to defend his mission to the Gentiles against their prejudices he wrote his Epistle to the Romans, the last, in Baur's view, which we have of his. During the Apostle's last stay in Jerusalem also, the Jewish Christians took part in the tumult which led to his imprisonment, and thus proved the implaca bility of their hatred of the Apostle of the Gentiles, whom they regarded as an apostate from the Law of their fathers. by which they continued to feel themselves bound. --The reconciliation, so far as possible, of these two parties, hitherto sharply opposed to each other, by the adjustment of their differences and the softening of their antagonism, was, accord ing to Baur, the chief object aimed at in the sub-apostolic age; the whole literature of this period appears from this point of view as a series of monuments of this opposition, and its gradual reduction by the advances of both sides. Of the Gos pels, Luke is the purest and most important record of Paulin- ism, while Matthew represents Jewish Christianity. The latter found its strongest anti-Pauline expression in the Apocalypse, which Baur regarded as a work of the Apostle John, and interpreted thoughout from the point of view of the primitive Christian party struggle ; so that even in the censure of the Balaamites and Nicolaitans (i. e. libertine
Gnostics), he only saw an attack on Paul. As further chief witnesses for the continued power and even supremacy of Jewish Christianity, Baur appeals to Hegesippus and the
pseudo-Clementine writings, from the middle of the second
? but he is too hasty when he makes use of the " Tendenzroman " of the latter as a sign of the Judaistic ten dencies of the Church at that time. But in spite of this bitter enmity to Paul, he holds that Jewish Christianity had
an infinite capacity for development, and was so prudent in everywhere meeting the needs of the Church by the sacrifice of its former legalism, that it came to exercise an influence on
century,
? ? ? 292 BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Bk. III.
the formation of the Christian Church which cannot be exaggerated, as is specially proved by the development of the hierarchy, altogether an outcome of Jewish Christianity. At the head of the canonical writings, which were at once the expression and the agents of this process of conciliation, he places the Epistle to the Hebrews, which by the emphasis it lays on the priesthood is shown to be a product of Jewish Christianity, although of a higher and more spiritual form of
already influenced by Paulinism. (This opinion receives a remarkable correction in a note which describes the charac teristics of the Epistle to the Hebrews as " Alexandrinism," which neither Judaism nor Paulinism, but intermediate between them, and by its limitation of them superior to both --an excellent remark, which only needs to be consistently worked out to lead to a different conception of the develop ment of post-Pauline Christianity. ) The same effort at recon ciliation, represented in the Epistle to the Hebrews on the Jewish Christian side, represented on the Pauline side by the Epistles to the Ephesians and Colossians they em phatically insist on the unity of the Church, as the essential result of Christ's death as healing all division, and of Christ's central all-inclusive position the universe. In the Pastoral Epistles, and in those of the pseudo- Ignatius, the Pauline party displays an eirenical readiness, for the sake of an effec tive opposition to the heretics, to meet the efforts of the
? Christians in the direction of a hierarchical organisa tion of the Church. In return, the Jewish Christians, in the
fication, still speaks of a " law of liberty " and " royal law of love," and by its practical morals makes a contribution to the formation of Catholic Christianity. In particular the First Epistle of Peter proves that the Jewish Christians were even able to accommodate themselves to the dogmatic ideas of Paulinism by direct quotation of Pauline Epistles and the Second Epistle of Peter even gives " brother Paul " a certifi cate of orthodoxy, and only laments that some things in his epistles are hard to be understood, and had been misinter preted. Finally, in order to remove all disturbing recollection of the Apostolic struggles out of the way of the union of
parties desired by both sides, the Acts of the Apostles gave an ideal picture of the Apostolic age, in which the two party
Jewish
Epistle of James, so far made concession to the followers of Paul that spite of its rejection of Paul's doctrine of justi
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? Ch. Ill] ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND HISTORY OF DOGMA. 293
leaders, Paul and Peter, were designedly made so much alike that they really seem to have changed places. Since this deviation from history must be intentional, the Acts must be regarded as " an effort at conciliation and a proposal of terms of peace on the part of a Paulinist, who wished to pro cure the recognition by the Jewish Christians of Gentile Christianity, by concessions from his own party to Judaism, and sought to influence both parties in this manner (on this view, compare the remarks above, p. 229). A similar position is taken by Baur with regard to the writings of the Apostolic Fathers and of Justin Martyr, and he explains the legend of the death of both Paul and Peter in Rome as the expression of the finally consummated reconciliation of the primitive Christian parties. The same process of development, of which this was the practical side in the Roman Church, is seen on its ideal side in the Gospel of John ; while in the former case the object was the realisation of the idea of the Church, it was here the evolution of an ideal theology. As there Peter and Paul were fraternally united as patrons of
the Roman Church, so here in this Johannine theology faith
and works disappear in love as their higher unity. The
opposition through which Paulinism had been compelled to fight its way, is in John removed into the far distance. The particularism of Judaism, with all the contradictions it in cluded, is lost in the general contradiction of the two prin ciples of light and darkness, which forms the background of John's theology and also dominates the sphere of ethics. This is a point of affinity between the Johannine Gospel and Gnosticism, that great movement of the second century, which both directly and indirectly greatly contributed to the forma tion of catholic and ecclesiastical Christianity. Here fresh questions present themselves, the horizon is widened, but new dangers threaten. God and world, spirit and matter, origin,
development, and consummation of the world, are the concep tions here involved, and in their development the antitheses of the religions take a share. The questions of salvation and of the ethico-religious consciousness are generalised into questions of metaphysical speculation. But the Catholic Church, everywhere careful to preserve the proper mean, had to avoid this extreme equally with that of Jewish particularism. For it was here threatened by an equally serious peril from ideas by which the Christian consciousness would altogether
? ? ? ? 294
BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Bk. III.
lose its historical character. The tendency of Gnosticism is to regard Christianity not primarily as the principle of
salvation but as the principle of the development of the world
generally ; it does not rest so much on a religious as on a
philosophical basis, and conducts again to philosophy as the highest product of the heathen world ; it is the extension and
development of the Alexandrine religious philosophy which had sprung from the philosophy of Greece. But in so far as it clothes philosophical ideas less in the form of abstract conceptions than of myths and allegories, it is in this respect more akin to religion than to philosophy ; it is therefore neither pure philosophy nor pure religion, but both together, a combination of the two elements which Baur (perhaps not very happily) calls " Religionsphilosophie. " He further dis
three main forms of Gnosis, in one of which Christianity is mixed with heathenism, in another with Juda ism, and in the third is opposed to both. With Gnosticism Baur contrasts Montanism as the opposite heresy. While in the former the idea supplants the historical reality, the latter is a reaction of the realism of the Jewish Christian hope of the future against its idealistic evaporation and ecclesiastical secularisation. In an age in which the belief in the nearness of the parousia failed, prophetic ecstasy grew rare or ceased, and when, with this enthusiasm of the early Churches, their ascetic zeal and love of holiness grew faint, there sprang up
in the Montanists a new form of ecstatic prophecy, a burning chiliastic belief and a rigorous penitential zeal. These move ments of the second century, so different in character, and crossing each other in all directions, all led to the develop ment and consolidation of the Church's doctrine and constitu tion as the indispensable breakwater against the billows of the time. Not only had the practical religious side of Christian
ity to be maintained against the transcendental speculations of the Gnostics, but also the very ground to be conquered against the chiliastic fanaticism of the Montanists, which cut off all possibility of the historical development and progress of Christianity in the world. It was therefore by means of its antagonism to the Gnostics and Montanists that the definite consciousness and growing solidity of the Catholic Church were developed out of the reconciliation of Jewish and Gentile Christians. In the struggle with the Gnostics was evolved the principle of ecclesiastical tradition as the f>-- 4
? tinguishes
? ? ? Ch. III. ] ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND HISTORY OF DOGMA. 295
appeal in all disputes, the appeal to the Apostolic writings having proved insufficient, owing to the possibility of various and especially allegorical interpretations. That only on which the Apostolic Churches agree can be received as true, for that must have been taught by the Apostles ; what is inconsistent with it is heresy, i. e. an arbitrary and new individual opinion.
But who was to decide what was Apostolical tradition and the common faith of the Church ? The bishops alone could do this, it being assumed that they were appointed by the Apostles as their successors. It is true this assumption did not correspond to the fact, since all indications go to prove that the Churches were originally autonomous and chose their own presidents, who were bishops and presbyters in one, while the function of teaching was not confined to this office.
It was not until the struggle with the heretics showed the need of a stricter centralisation of the Churches, that there was instituted, at first in the individual Churches, the monarchical episcopate superior to the presbyters. This epis copate provided a fixed rallying point against the separatist tendencies of the heretics, and applied the Christian conception of a supernatural world to the practical needs of the present, thus initiating the further historical development of Christianity on the basis of a universal Church. But the same effort at unity which had first raised the bishop of the individual Church above the presbyters, went on to elevate the Bishop of Rome above the others who were originally his equals. That the Roman bishop was Peter's successor in Rome, is an his torical fiction, Peter never having been in Rome. The unhistorical legend about Peter took its rise at first merely
in Rome's political importance, and since the papacy itself depends on this legend, we must seek for the origin of the
in the simple fact that the importance enjoyed by Rome, as the capital of the world, was transferred to the bishop of the Roman Church. The most striking feature of the hierarchical system thus established is the simplicity of the forms on which it depends. The fundamental form is the relation of the bishop to the Church of which he is the head. This form continues unchanged, however much the system may be developed, enlarged, or modified. The bishop of the smallest Church is essentially the same as the pope at
the summit of the papacy. At all stages of this hierarchical system the same fundamental form repeats itself, its greatest
? papacy
r~
? ? ? 295 BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Bk. III.
peculiarity being its capacity of indefinite extension. And this hierarchical system is at the same time essentially theocratic ; everything rests on divine authority ; the relation of the bishop to his community is a repetition of the relation of Christ to the Church. " The whole system is conditioned by a stage of religious development in which men require to see a visible representation of the relation in which Christ as the Lord of the Church stands to it. " The form assumed by the Church in its episcopal constitution demanded also a corre sponding fixed and systematic expression in dogma. The close connexion between the evolution of the constitutional form and of dogma as its expression, is made very manifest at the close of the first period of ecclesiastical development : the oecumenical synod at Nica:a saw the completest repre sentation of the episcopate and also the enunciation of the highest content of the Christian consciousness in the dogma of the Homoousia. In this period the whole development of dogma is concentrated in the doctrine of Christ's person. This is the reflection and concrete expression of the current view of Christian salvation as a whole. The Christ of the Synoptists was still a human Messiah, miraculously born, it is true, and anointed with the Spirit, and raised by his resur rection and ascension to divine honours, but still essentially man. In Paul's view also Christ is man, not, however, an earthly and phenomenal man, but a heavenly and spiritual one, the eternal type of the spiritual sons of God, appearing in time in the flesh, the second Adam. This higher phase of Christology in Paul was connected with his higher view of
? as the universal revelation of salvation for all the world. The Christ of the Apocalypse also has divine attributes predicated of him which seem to leave no essential difference between him and God, but they are only externally connected with the person of the Messiah, who is essentially the instrument for the execution of the divine
The Christology of the Epistle to the Hebrews and the smaller Pauline Epistles, on the other hand, rises to a higher stage of development, and marks the transition to the Johan- nine Christology, in which the idea of the Logos, borrowed
from the Alexandrine religious philosophy, and widely current in the philosophy of the time, is transferred to Christ, the doctrine of the Church corresponding to the Gnostic doctrine of the a^ons. As in philosophy, the Logos in the Fourth
Christianity
judgment.
? ? ? Ch. III. ] ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND HISTORY OF DOGMA. 297
Gospel is the intermediate being connecting the transcendental
God with the world. This being becomes by the incarnation
the person of Jesus, who is accordingly regarded by the Fourth Gospel as the self-revelation of a divine principle, the historical view of the Synoptists being thus left far behind. In
the latter half of the second century the Johannine concep tion of the Logos came to be the dominant one, superseding the earlier less definite ideas. This imposed on the theo logical thought of the Church the duty to define the relation of this divine Logos or Son to God the Father. This was first done in the sense form of a gradual emanation, corre sponding to the materialistic realism of Tertullian's con
of God ; while in the abstract, transcendental idea of God of the Alexandrians (Clement), almost all personal dis tinction vanishes between the Father and the Son. This view lived on in the " Monarchians " of the third century, of whom
Sabellius particularly is ably interpreted by Baur. In the Christology of Origen the two views, hitherto running parallel, the one emphasising the distinction between God and the Son, and the other their unity, balance each other in such a way that his Christology became the turning point in the history of the dogma, and the point of separation of the two views, which were henceforward opposed to each other as Arianism and Athanasianism. At Nicaea, with the victory of the Athanasian formula of Christ's equality with God
(homoousia), the hierarchical aristocracy of the episcopate also triumphed over the democratic presbyters. When Christian ity had, under Constantine, overcome the Roman world, its consciousness of being the sole true and valid, or the " abso lute," religion found expression in the dogmatic enunciation
of the orthodox doctrine of the absolute equality of its founder with God. Thus the inner history of the consciousness of the Church, simultaneously with the external history of the relation of the Church to the world and State, came under Constantine to a climax which marked the close of
an era.
Here I must end this extract from Baur's Christianity in
the First Three Centuries, space forbidding me to give more. But I hope that enough has been given to show the mag nificently historical spirit of this work, and to prove that the traditional accusations of an " a priori construction of history," " twisting of facts," etc. , are baseless conventional fables, by
ception
? ? ? ? 298 BIBLICAL AND HISTORICAL THEOLOGY. [Bk. III.
which smaller men try to protect themselves in view of the superiority of Baur.
Since Baur's, no important work has appeared embracing the whole of Church history (of Hase's unfinished work we have spoken above, p. 283). Much labour has, however, been devoted to the more accurate investigation of particular questions, both of the ancient Church, and especially of the period of the Reformation, and valuable material for the illumination of the past has been accumulated in monographs and biographies. An enumeration of these works does not, however, fall within the scope of this book. We can here mention only the most recent work on the history of dogma, as it represents, with pre-eminent ability as well as^partiality, a new school of historical theology ; it is Adolf HarnaCk's Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte, vol. die Entstehung des
? kirchlichen Dogmas (1886), and vol. ii. ,part die Entwickelung des kirchl. Dogmas (1887). On the publication of the first volume, the work at once attracted general attention, and gained for its author the well-deserved reputation of an eminent historian. based on a thorough independent investigation of the authorities, and the vast mass of material
arranged with rare skill and clearness the writer's style lucid and
vigorous, and he always pleasing and suggestive, even when not convincing. But the book owes its special im portance to its fundamental view of the history of dogma, by which gives typical expression to a prevalent mode of thought and feeling of our time. Perhaps we can most simply describe its character by saying that to Baur's opti mistic evolutionary theory of history opposes a pessimistic view of Church history, which makes this history to consist, not a progressive teleological and rational development and ever richer unfolding of the Christian spirit, but in a progressive obscuration of the truth, in the progress of disease in the Church, produced by the sudden irruption of
Hellenic philosophy and other secularising influences.
We can understand that such a view acceptable to realistic and practical age which has long lost all touch with the ancient dogmas we cannot deny that contains relative truth, and might, in fact, serve as a salutary complement to Baur's optimism but adapted to form the supreme guiding principle of ecclesiastical history, or can justly claim to be the only scientific view, or the right to condemn
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? Ch. III. ] ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY AND HISTORY OF DOGMA. 299
as unscientific scholasticism the teleological theory of evo lution, which, in the manifold play of individual causes, recognises the governance of a higher Reason ? These are questions to be seriously asked. Moreover, this pessimistic verdict on Church history is by no means a new one ; it is found, in a certain sense, in the Magdeburg Centuriators, in a different form in the mystic Gottfried Arnold, and in yet another in the Rationalists. All these historians, however, in their condemnation of the development of the Church had a definite standard in what they assumed to be the original truth of Biblical Christianity. But if we ask wherein, ac
cording to Harnack, uncorrupted Christianity consists, we nowhere get a clear answer. He cannot regard it as con sisting in the whole teaching of the New Testament, or he would not with such surprising indifference hurry over the Pauline and Johannine theology. Are we therefore to go back to Jesus ? But Harnack leaves us in complete un certainty whether we are to take as the genuine, permanent constituents of Christianity all that is reported in the Gospels as the preaching of Jesus, including the declarations regarding the permanent validity of the Jewish law, the limitation of the preaching of the gospel to Israel, Christ's visible return to establish an earthly kingdom, and similar matters. But where a definite conception, based on history, of the nature of Christianity is so wholly wanting, the question as to whether individual phenomena are truly Christian or a de generation, corruption, and secularisation of true Christianity, can only be answered according to personal taste. In so far this method of writing Church history is at least as subjective as the Rationalistic method of the last century. Harnack's keen-sighted realism is undoubtedly of great value, but it needs to be combined with the profound idealism of a Baur to form the true combination which can yield a completely satisfactory treatment of Church history.
? ? ? ? ? BOOK IV.
THE PROGRESS OF THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825.
? ? ? CHAPTER I.
THE SCHOOLS OF PHILOSOPHY IN THEIR RELATION TO THEOLOGY.
At the opening of the present century the state of religious life in England was substantially the same as in Germany. On the one hand, a rational supernaturalism prevailed, which sought to combine faith in revealed religion with the empirical philosophy of Locke. This was attempted by showing the possibility on rational grounds of revelation, and by basing the fact of revelation on the external evidence supplied in the miracles and prophecies of the Bible. At the same time it conceived the God of revelation under Deistical forms, and repudiated all vivid religious feeling as mystical "enthusiasm. "
Utilitarian considerations, which formed the practical side of
the empirical philosophy of the period, also played a pro minent part in orthodox belief; either on the ground of the tangible use of the doctrines of the Church in promoting social order, or with a view to the transcendental benefits implied in the divine reward of virtue. In contrast with this unemotional and rational faith of the upper classes, satis faction for the religious needs of the lower classes was sought for in a quickening of the consciousness of sin and grace after the manner of Methodism. But in this " Evangelical party " quickened religious feeling and zealous philanthropic effort were so much cut off from any living relation to the thought of the age and to theological inquiry, that any influence from this quarter upon the theology of the Church was not more, in fact still less, possible than was the case with the older
German Pietism. To bring new life and movement into theology, a complete revolution in the minds of men was needed. This followed in England from causes similar to those which had produced a like result in Germany ; and in part the revolution was due to the direct influence of idealism as it had sprung from German Romanticism.
? ? ? ? 304 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Hit. IV.
The ultimate and profoundest source of this mental revolu
tion, which, at the beginning of the century, spread through all cultured nations, must be sought in the nature of man.
After the cold understanding had in the eighteenth century exercised despotic sway, starving the emotions and fettering the phantasy, these wronged sides of our nature once more claimed their rights, and rebelled against the despotism of the understanding with an imperious violence which was as tyrannical and exclusive as that of the understanding had been. " A return to nature and natural emotions," was now everywhere the watchword, and Rousseau became the prophet of the new age. The cry found its echo in the " storm and stress" spirits of belles lettres: Herder and Goethe were its heralds in Germany, Wordsworth and Shelley in
English poetry. Emotion, entering into loving sympathy with Nature, could no longer behold in her the dead mechan ism to which sensualistic philosophy had degraded her ; the machine, which had been robbed of its divinity, was once again transformed into the living garment of God. But
Nature owed her reanimation to the soul of man, which had taken possession of her. It was therefore impossible that men should go no further than external Nature : they turned
their gaze upon their own nature, and sought in the depths of the feeling heart, in its unconscious surmisings and un utterable sighs, the presence of a divine spirit, the witness of our kinship to God. Thus from the Gospel of Nature of
Rousseau sprang the philosophical idealism of Kant and of Fichte, and the religious pantheism of Herder and Novalis. In like manner, in the case of Wordsworth, the poetic love of Nature became a devoted self-surrender to the God whose rule we recognise within not less than around us. If the standpoint which was thus reached was still only the sub
jectivism of the eighteenth century, the events of history were, at the same time, bringing about an important advance.
Rousseau's Gospel of Nature had been marked by an anti-social and anti-historical tendency ; its aim had been the emancipation of the self-sufficient individual from the limita tions of an outlived order of society. At first it was every where taken up in this sense. In Germany the " schone Seelen " greeted with enthusiasm the French Revolution, and in his Robbers, Schiller depicted the Titanic endeavour of the individual, in the fresh consciousness of its strength,
? ? ? ? Ch. PHILOSOPHY IN RELATION TO THEOLOGY.
305
to break up the old order of the world and to construct a new one to its own mind. In the same spirit the youthful Coleridge wrote poems breathing sympathy with revolutionary democracy, and, with Southey, planned a " grand scheme of Pantisocracy," a Utopian commonwealth of liberty and equality, to be established in America. Out of this intoxica tion of individualism the idealists of Europe were rudely awakened by the thunder of the cannon of Bonaparte. As the social system of Europe collapsed like a house of cards under the hand of the new Caesar, was made clear whither the principle of selfish individualism, which breaks up society into helpless atoms, inevitably conducts. When appeared that the separate nations were to be broken up and converted into the one empire of the Caesar, the national spirit every
where rose up against the foreign tyranny, patriotic feeling, which distinguishes in such a marked manner the nineteenth from the eighteenth century, was aroused from its slumbers. And as the nations became conscious of their own peculiar characteristics and rights, they once more called to remem brance their own past history. With admiring love they
? manhood, and discovered, precisely in those epochs which Rationalism
recurred to the period of their youth and early
in its ingratitude and want of insight had despised, stores of national strength, virtue, and honour, forming a humiliating contrast to the weakness and disgrace of their own time. Thus the enthusiasts of individual freedom were transformed into the patriotic champions of national liberty the anti- Napoleonic wars, and out of poetic Romanticism sprang the
Tiigendbund of young Germany, based upon an earnest sense of duty and patriotic devotion. The Kantian imperative of the subjective reason was enlarged and deepened, the philosophy of Hegel, into the consciousness of the dependence of the individual on the rationality of history as realised in the State. The true freedom, which alone worthy of man, was now seen to consist, not in opposition to the commonwealth, but in unselfish devotion to not in defiance of the State, but in subordination to as loyal citizens, and securing individual, by labouring for universal ends. Precisely the same transformation was effected in England. Whilst young men hailed enthusiastically the French Revolution, when seemed that "temple and tower were to fall to the ground"
before its trumpet-blast of " natural rights," Burke raised his g. t.
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? 306 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV.
voice, as " one crying in the wilderness," against the delusion of the individualistic idea of freedom, and pointed out the unreasonableness of the endeavour to separate the individual from the nation, to which he owes his existence, or from society and its historical arrangements, to which really all human culture is due. What Burke's eloquence failed to effect, the course of history brought about. Under the pressure of a " Continental System " and the wars of Napoleon, English national feeling was aroused, the poets of Nature and Free
dom became the heralds of patriotic love, of an admiring piety towards the history of the past, which Sir Walter Scott's genius restored to new life in the hearts of his contemporaries by poetic idealisation.
But in the history of Christian nations, the Church, with her institutions, customs, and doctrines, plays such an essential part, that their inner and outer life could not be at all understood without the consideration of this factor. It was natural, therefore, that the newly awakened interest in the history of the past generally should quicken also the appreciation of the history of the Church, and therewith of the positive and traditional elements in the faith and customs of the nations. In those things which had been an offence to the critical understanding of the eighteenth century, there was now discovered, by the new historical sense, suggestive symbolism, fine human feeling, natural poetry, and prophetic truth ; in short, so much nourishment for the famishing soul and the thirsty fancy, that the sons began to revere deeply what the fathers had thrown aside as worthless
Thus, from the same Romanticism which had begun with
Rousseau's Gospel of Nature, sprang at last the revival 01 religious and ecclesiastical taste and feeling. Rousseau was
by
Newman and Pusey, in England.
In order to last, and to influence the life of a nation from
various sides, a new mode of feeling always requires a new mode of thought as its accompaniment, with new ideas and associations of ideas as its vehicle and support, In Germany this want was met in the idealistic philosophy founded by Kant, which in all its various developments had this in common, that it connected man with the higher world of
? followed by Chateaubriand and the Italian Manzoni ; Schleiermacher and Neander, and the Catholic convert Schlegel, in Germany ; and by Coleridge, and John Henry
superstition.
? ? ? Ch. I. ] PHILOSOPHY IN RELATION TO THEOLOGY. 307
and set before him conscious devotion to it as the
spirit,
object of his own perfection. In England, however, no such philosophy as this existed. For the philosophy of Locke was, in reality, in its popular form, the formal expression of that barren view of things which binds man to the world of the senses as the sole reality, makes the individual complete in himself, and prescribes as his highest end the pursuit of his own advantage ; which was therefore precisely that view of things which the new and more profound poetry and religious and historical Romanticism indignantly repudiated. Under
these circumstances it was very natural that the originators of this new mode of feeling in England should seek their weapons of defence and attack in German philosophy. We shall see as we proceed in what various ways this philosophy affected the most thoughtful minds in England. Yet it re mained, after all, but a foreign growth on English soil. So true is it that a philosophy is able to exercise a determining influence upon the ecclesiastical and theological thought of a nation only when it has penetrated it so profoundly as to determine the popular philosophy of the educated classes concerned. As regards the idealistic philosophy of Germany, no such reception of it was possible in England. On the other hand, the English philosophy of the past could no longer satisfy the requirements of the new poetic and religious feeling. The revived religious consciousness accordingly failed to find the indispensable intellectual basis and regulative principles, without which it could not develop into definite theological teaching, or guide the development of the mind of the Churches in harmony with the general thought of the nation and the age. It seems to me that we have here the
of the remarkable fact that the Church life of England, until within the last decade, has remained almost completely untouched by the vast progress of the scientific thought of the educated classes, and that wherever the two come into contact, such a violent collision is the consequence that popular feeling is shocked, and not a few despair of the possibility of any mutual understanding. It is true that latterly this tension has been somewhat relaxed, and just now signs are not wanting of the rise of a new philosophical view
of the world suited to the British genius, under the auspices
of which a reconciliation of the Church and the world, of \ theology and science, may be hoped for.
? explanation
? ? ? 308 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1S25. [Bk. IV.
I propose, in the first instance, to offer a review of the various philosophical schools in their relation to religion and
This review must commence with the idealism of Coleridge and Carlyle, which was so greatly influenced by German philosophy. This idealism is met by the reaction of the empirical philosophy of Mill and the critical philosophy of Hamilton, connected with which is an agnosticism in vari ous forms. There follows then an evolutionary philosophy, with more of systematic completeness, and in two forms : first, realistic, with an agnostic basis, represented by Herbert
Spencer; second, idealistic, represented by the Neo-Hege lians, Caird and Green, with whom are connected, finally, the
living representatives of speculative theism.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was a true representative of Romanticism with all its bright and dark sides. He was a man of wide culture, of fine sensibility, of vivid imagination, of ready intellect ; but as a thinker his efforts were spasmodic
and fragmentary, lacking steadiness, consistency, and thorough ness ; and he displayed a surprising want of moral strength. As a young man he was an enthusiastic worshipper of Nature and Freedom ; afterwards, when sobered down under the in
fluence of personal and historical experiences, he sought in German philosophy consolation for the shipwreck of the ideals of his youth. He studied Lessing and Kant, Jacobi and Schelling ; and by the aid of philosophical idealism he recon ciled himself to the faith of the Church, from which he had been totally estranged. Yet the reconciliation was in such a form that he no longer based his faith upon supernatural au thority, but upon the ideal constitution of the human mind itself, regarding Christianity as the perfection of human rea son. With Herder and Schleiermacher, Coleridge maintained that Christianity is not a theory or speculation, but a life and a living process, that the proof of it therefore must consist in the inner personal experience of that life. While he thus related himself to the supernaturalism of the orthodox party of that time by going over to the side of the Evangelicals (the Pietists
of England), on the other hand he departed from the latter
in that he regarded Christianity not as something absolutely supernatural in antithesis to the human, as the germs of it lie in the nature of man himself and are brought to their
perfection by Christianity ; for which reason the truth of Chris
theology.
? ? ? ? Ch. PHILOSOPHY IN RELATION TO THEOLOGY.
309
tianity can never contradict reason when properly understood. Coleridge expounded these views in his Aids to Reflection (1825), not, true, in a systematic form, but in suggestive aphorisms and explanatory examples, which should serve to arouse independent reflection the direction indicated.
Coleridge attached the greatest importance to the distinc tion, taken from Kant's Critique, between the " understand ing," as " the faculty judging according to sense," and the " reason," as the faculty of " universal and necessary truths. "
He further distinguishes the speculative from the practical reason, the former as applied to formal or abstract truth, the latter as applied to actual or moral truth, as the fountain of ideas and the light of the conscience. While he thus far apparently quite in agreement with Kant, Coleridge ascribes nevertheless to the practical reason a meaning which passes beyond the moral sphere like Jacobi he describes as the feeling or instinct of supersensible truths, or, with Schelling, as an intellectual intuition of spiritual objects. Whilst the
? confined to the world of the senses, and can
understanding
accordingly pronounce only conditional judgments, the reason
the source of unconditional and necessary judgments, the intelligible spiritual nature of man, which one with the Divine Spirit. From overlooking this distinction and from the illegitimate application of the understanding to supersen sible objects, arises "unbelief or misbelief. " "Wherever the forms of reasoning appropriate only to the natural world are applied to spiritual realities, the more strictly logical the reasoning in all its parts, the more irrational as a whole" -- Propositions such as these, to which the parallels may be found here and there German Romanticism and speculative philosophy, have a certain meaning as a protest against a shallow and negative Rationalism, but they betray none the less a questionable inclination to suppress intelligent criticism religious questions. Nor did Coleridge altogether escape this danger, although he had the good sense to acknow ledge the logical understanding as a negative canon in re ligious questions, since absolutely inconceivable propositions cannot be true. only the positive proof of the truths of
faith which must not be derived from theoretical argumentation, but from the moral and spiritual nature of man.
as Coleridge well observes, the peculiarity of Chris tianity that, unlike philosophy, does not seek by workings
religious
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upon the intellect to elevate the character, but its first step is to cleanse the heart and afterwards to restore the intellect like wise to its natural clearness. If the effects were not propor tionate to the Divine wisdom of the method, it was because " the doctors of the Church forgot that the heart, the moral na ture, was the beginning and the end. " " This was the true and first apostasy, when in council and synod the Divine Humani ties of the Gospel gave way to speculative systems, and religion became a science of shadows under the name of theology, or at best a bare skeleton of truth, without life or interest, alike inaccessible and unintelligible to the majority of Christians. "
Coleridge illustrated his view of Christianity in its applica tion to selected doctrines --original sin, redemption, baptism,
inspiration. In doing this he everywhere seeks so far to rationalise the dogma as to surrender its scholastic husk while preserving its religious and moral kernel. The affinity of his theology with Schleiermacher's, especially as represented by the conservative wing of Schleiermacher's school, strikes the student at once. The dogma of " original sin " is made to mean that sin as spiritual evil is a condition of the will, which is the ground and cause of all sins, that it was not inherited from without, but is the act of the will itself, and so " self- originated. " This is certainly much more a Kantian than Biblical or ecclesiastical doctrine. I n complete agreement with Kant, Coleridge says "that in respect of original sin, every
man is the adequate representative of all men," and that the first man in time, the Adam of Genesis, is only the type of t he race. Hence all statements as to the perfection of man in Paradise must be cast aside as phantastic and valueless. With regard to the doctrine of redemption, according to Coleridge, the cause of redemption is not so much the death
of Christ as the incarnation of the Creative Word in the per son of Christ. This manifestation of the Divine in the human life, labours, and death of the Saviour produces, as its effect, our transformation from fleshly to spiritual men, and, as further consequences, our progressive sanctification by the Word and the Spirit. But the various forms of expression which are used by the apostles to set forth the actual consequences of the act of redemption show by their diversity that they ought to be taken as metaphors only, borrowed in part from Jewish theology and in part from the opinions prevalent amongst
the readers and opponents of the apostles.
? ? ? ? Ch. PHILOSOPHY IN RELATION TO THEOLOGY.
Specially interesting and instructive Coleridge's essay, entitled, Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit, published after his death (1840), which he assails the dogmatic theory of the inspiration of the Scriptures with very rational arguments, while adhering tenaciously to his conviction of their incom parable religious and moral value. He shows admirably that the Biblical writers themselves lay no claim to the verbal in spiration of their writings, and that this doctrine, really bor rowed from the Jewish Rabbis, must therefore be regarded as an unscriptural superstition. He goes further, and asks, " How can infallible truth be infallibly conveyed in defective and fallible expressions," such as all human words and sen tences must be Moreover, we should gain nothing by such an unnatural supposition, but on the contrary be simply losers.
For all the heart-awakening utterances of human hearts, such as we find in the Bible, were nothing more than " a Divina Commedia of superhuman ventriloquist"; the
? sweet Psalmist of Israel were himself as mere an instrument of the inspiring Spirit as his harp, an automaton poet, all sym pathy and all example would be gone, and we could listen to his words only fear and perplexity. The Bible undeni ably " the appointed conservatory, an indispensable criterion, and continual source and support of true belief; but we must not confound this with the statements--that the Bible the sole source, and that not only contains but constitutes the Christian religion, that in short creed consisting wholly of articles of faith and that consequently we need no rule, help, or guide, spiritual or historical, to teach us what parts are and what are not articles of faith. " As the Church herself has admitted as a canon--that each part of Scrip ture must be interpreted by the spirit of the whole, has thereby practically granted " that the spirit of the Bible, and not the detached words and sentences, that infallible and absolute. " We see that the view of the Bible -- at once free and reverent -- of Lessing, Herder, and Schleier- macher, which Coleridge commends to his countrymen. We shall find in the next chapter, the case of the representa tives of the Broad Church party, that though this view has met with opposition in the English Church,
its way there to considerable extent. Thomas Carlyle spent his early youth
simplest conditions of country life, as the eldest son of
has gradually made
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? 312 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1 825. [Bk. IV.
Scotch mason, in a family in which a plain and serious Puri tanical piety held sway. These impressions of his childhood engraved themselves so deeply on his heart that they con tinued powerfully to influence him after he had given up the dogmas of the Church. From the bright inquisitive intellect of the youth, who sought for truth at any price, the defects of the traditional arguments in support of orthodox dogmas could not long remain concealed, and an eager study of the works of Gibbon and Hume, to which he devoted himself during his university course in Edinburgh, added all that was needed to make him a decided sceptic. But he could not rest satisfied in mere negation. He was profoundly unhappy when, under the influence of Hume's philosophy, the God of the orthodox faith could no longer be believed in, or had be come the unconcerned absentee spectator of a mechanically rotating universe, and when the idea of duty had also seemed to change from a Divine messenger and guide to a false earthly phantasm, made up of desire and fear. But his profound love of truth and sense of duty formed the rock on which the waves of doubt broke. Whilst his intellect, beclouded with sceptical and pessimistic horrors, pictured to him the world as the sport of chance and the work of the devil, his moral con sciousness attained to the certainty of the indestructible freedom of the soul as the lord of the world. With this the " Everlasting Yea " obtained the conquest over the "Ever
lasting No. " It was the repetition in an individual of the same process as had been passed through in German philo sophy a generation earlier ; when the world of orthodox be lief, destroyed by the criticism of the understanding, was reconstructed from the subjective resources of man as a moral and rational being ; when the moral self-consciousness ex panded into the ideal world of the great German thinkers and poets.
And it was not in Carlyle's case merely a similar process
of development, but it took place in direct dependence on German thought. In the critical period of his life he occu pied himself closely with the writings of Goethe and Schiller,
Paul and Novalis ; translations from their works were
his earliest literary efforts.