No More Learning

But this proposition
with Schleiermacher's doctrine of salvation) receives forthwith in Ritschl an important modification. He maintains (though on the basis of very arbitrary exegesis) that it is historically certain that Christ conceived not individuals but the society to be founded by him and represented in the twelve apostles, as the direct object of the forgiveness of sins which he was to grant. Hence he pronounces Schleiermacher's formula wrong, that in Protestantism the relation of the individual to the Church depends on his relation to Christ, while in Catholic ism the converse holds good ; for in the case of Protestant Christians also the right relation to Christ is conditioned, not only historically (which is self-evident) but ideally, by the fellowship of believers, since no action of Christ upon men is conceivable except in accordance with the antecedent purpose of Christ to found a society. Schleiermacher's formula is only the reflection of the pietistical disintegration of the idea of a church, which dated from the individualistic theory of salvation in the Lutheran theology, but was not in harmony with Luther's own view (according to his Short Catechism). As in the pur pose of Christ the guarantee of a universal forgiveness of sins and the foundation of his Church were equivalent ideas, so in
the result of his work it is the same thing to be certain ot having one's sins forgiven and to belong to Christ's commu nity. The forgiveness of sins or reconciliation is possessed by the individual only as a member of the religious society ot Christ, in consequence of the immeasurable interaction of his own personal freedom and the determining influence of the
society. It is not by an individual imitation of Christ that we become assured of salvation, as pietists and mystics held, including Schleiermacher and his followers, for all
imitation of Christ in the proper sense is rendered impos sible by the difference of the special conditions of his life from those of the members of his Church ; but we are warranted
in the assurance of being children of God by belonging to the society founded by Christ. Moreover, love to God and Christ is not an apt description of the religious function of the individual, for we might understand by it " an imagi nary private relation to God and Christ," bearing the char acter of indifference to the world or of fleeing from In
these statements Ritschl's social positivism and his dislike of the mystical element religion carried to such extremes
(which
agrees
1 93
? o. t.
? ? in
is
o
it.
? 194 DEVELOPMENT OK DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. II.
as plainly to do violence to essential interests of Christian
piety.
The justification possessed by the Christian as a member of
Christ's community is attested practically by his freedom or dominion over the world. This is not to be understood in the empirical sense but ideally, though not therefore any the
less a reality. It in general, faith in God's providence that the religious dominion over the world exercised for in the view of the world as a unity, under the idea of God as our Father, and in the corresponding estimate of ourselves, all things and events are regarded as means to our good. Under this Christian belief in" providence Ritschl appears to include also the hypothesis of miracles. " He puts both in contrast, as the general teleological and the miraculous view of the uni verse, with the scientific view, and he seeks to deprive the oppo sition of the latter (which however not directed against the teleological, but only against the miraculous view) of its force by reference to the incompleteness of our scientific knowledge
of the world and to the immediate certainty of the feeling personal worth expressing itself in the belief in providence.
He warmly opposes the view of the theology of the Aufkl'dr- ung, that the belief in providence a part of natural religion
? or of general scientific culture.
trary, confident trust in God
the Christian religion, since
Christ's Church of our reconciliation to God a statement which, considering the innumerable expressions of trust God in non-Christian religions, particularly the Old Testa ment, requires considerable modification related to the statement above considered, that God has revealed himself as love only in Christ this case, as in others, a difference
made an exclusive peculiarity, which simply un- historical dogmatism. There are however several good points in Ritschl's detailed account of the Christian belief provi dence as that must approve itself in patience and humility amid all the vicissitudes of life, and that shown Chris tian prayer, which chiefly thanksgiving or humble recogni tion of the divine rule. Finally, the moral perfection of the community of the kingdom of God deduced from its re ligious view of the world, and shown that manifests itself
degree
in the faithfulness of the individual to his calling, since moral action in a calling the form of each man's total
primarily
He holds that, on the con exclusively the contribution rests upon the assurance
? ? is it is
it is
it
it in is
is
is
it is
;
:
is
it
is ; in
is,
is in
;
in
of inofof of
is
in
is
;
? Ch. IV. ] ECLECTIC MEDIATING THEOLOGIANS. 1 95
contribution to the kingdom of God. In this way freedom
is realised in law. But freedom is identical in kind with the
religious functions of belief in providence, patience, humility, and prayer, in which, in consequence of the Reconciliation, the individual becomes assured of his value as part of a whole in comparison with the world. The two spheres of morals and religion are so connected that neither can exist without the other. In the religious dominion over this world lies the present blessednesss of eternal life. But the moral formation of character also has eternal life for its object, since the certainty to the person of the indestructibility of spiritual existence is always connected with the experience of the
value of the ethical and religious character. Thus it is equally important to assert that the eternal life is given by God in the reconciliation through Christ, and that the completion of our salvation is attained by the development of the ethico- religious character and by the perfection in its kind of our life- work in our vocation. In spite of all this the moral and the religious sides of Christianity are not brought into a perfectly harmonious unity by Ritschl, as is seen in the remarkable statement that we must take both points of view alternately (viz. that of moral freedom and that of dependence upon God), an evident admission that the two are mutually exclusive. This is the inevitable consequence of his conception of re ligion as supplementing our freedom. The external dualism between moral freedom and the religious feeling of depen dence thus introduced from the first runs like a red thread through the whole of his theology, and is in particular the real cause of his dislike of religious mysticism, in which
freedom is felt in experience to be realised not along with but in dependence, the difference of the two being thus brought
he shares Ritschl's epistemological principles. He maintains with Kant the limitation of our knowledge to the realm of experience, to our external and internal perceptions and their logical combination so as to form regular relations of natural and spiritual existence ; and he denies the possibility of a metaphysical knowledge of the transcendental, which, he
holds, inevitably involves contradictions. But while Ritschl's school constructs an insurmountable barrier between our
? into a harmonious unity. Lipsius Among the opponents of Ritschl's theology,
oc cupies a prominent place, and all the more that, to a certain
extent,
? ? ? I96 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. II.
theoretical knowledge of the universe and our ethico-religious certainty, Lipsius demands a connected and consistent theory of the universe, which shall comprehend the entire realm of our experience as a whole. He rejects the doctrine of dualism in a truth, one division of which would be confined to "judg ments of value," and be unconnected with our theoretical knowledge of the external world. The possibility and neces sity of combining the results of our scientific knowledge with the declarations of our ethico-religious experience, so as to form a consistent philosophy, is based, according to Lipsius, upon the unity of the personal ego, which on the one hand knows the world scientifically, and on the other regards it as the means of realising the ethico-religious object of its life. The former is effected by the study of the causal connection of external and internal events, and the latter by referring them teleologically to the ethical subject and its vocation. Neither of these modes of looking at things can be reduced to the
other, neither employed indifferently to supplement the de ficiencies of the other ; only in their mutual relation do they yield the whole of reality for us. Moreover, they must not be placed externally side by side in such a way that the one would be limited to the life of nature, and the other to that of history, but the sphere of teleology extends likewise into nature, and that of causality into history. Nevertheless, it is the sphere of the historical and ethical life of humanity which first elevates the teleology imperfectly traced in nature to the position of a prime factor in the construction of our philosophy of things. No one can be compelled by the method of scien tific proof to recognise the teleological unity of the world ; it is the personal feeling of moral obligation which leads to the belief in a moral order of the world superior to the order of nature. But this ethical certainty must not be allowed to make us indifferent to the natural conditions of the moral life, which can only fulfil its vocation by their means. This justifies the rule as to method, as rigidly keeping the causal, or empirical, and the teleological, or ideal, view of the world clearly distinct, as, again, of connecting them as the two sides of the same thing. By the application of this method by Lipsius to dogmatic theo
logy, it assumed in his hands the form of an ethico-religious phi losophy of life and the world, which as such is throughout teleo logical, but which must also remain in thorough harmony with the empirical or causal point of view of theoretical science.
? ? ? ? Ch. IV. ] ECLECTIC MEDIATING THEOLOGIANS. 197
Lipsius defines religion as the solution of the riddle pre sented by the contradiction of our empirical determination by nature to our ethical vocation. Religion does not primarily concern society, but the individual, though the individual only in virtue of his necessarily seeking religious fellowship ; it is thus the most individual and at the same time the most uni versal of man's concerns. Its empirical motive lies in man's instinct of self-preservation, which seeks help from a super natural power, and for this purpose enters into a personal relation with ranging upwards from reverent dread to child like trust and thankful love. But the ultimate source even of the elementary form of the feeling, as well as of its advance from natural"to ethical religion, the supersensible nature of man, or his transcendental freedom," which both determines the entire course of his ethical development, and also leads him to enter into religious relations. For this freedom can only be realised in transcendental dependence upon a free Will, such as contains both the creative source of man's capacity for transcendental freedom and the power to realise
above the determination by nature. Inasmuch as the religious man, by rising to a Will above nature, becomes conscious of the action of this same Will in his own spirit, we have here the root of all belief revelation. On its meta physical side, therefore, religion a real mutual relation between God and man, the home of which the personal spiritual life of the latter revelation and religion are therefore convertible terms. The reality of this mutual relation consists in a personal fellowship of faith, experienced in the intercourse of prayer its manner lies beyond the analysis of the under standing, and constitutes the mystery of religion. As stages of religion, Lipsius distinguishes natural religion, ethical re ligion its legal form, and the religion of salvation, which the divine Will revealed not merely as an imperious law, but as love delivering from sin and evil. This highest stage
realised in Christianity.
In Christianity we must distinguish between the character istic fundamental religious relation and the fundamental his torical fact the former made actual by the latter, -- that
in the historical person of Christ but the value of the latter to us lies its being the vehicle of that fundamental relation, --that the sonship of man to God, which as such involves his participation the kingdom of God as God's final purpose
? by rising
? ? in
is
is,
in
in
;
;
in is
is
;
is
;
is,
is
it
in
is
a
it,
? I98 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. II.
for the world. His sonship to God is subjectively conditioned by penitence and faith, and is objectively based upon God's reconciling and redeeming grace. This therefore, the specifically religious good, to the acquirement of which Chris tianity the vehicle, and primarily the highest good for the individual. The ethical association of men under the idea of the kingdom of God, which the ethical and social side of Christianity, subordinate to its religious and individual side. The Christian's religious experience of his sonship to God the subject-matter of the Christian faith with regard to God, man, and the world this contains no theoretical truths as to the objective nature of God and the world, but primarily only descriptions of the experienced relations of God to the religious man and to his world, though including declarations as to the supersensible realities of which faith assured. This faith, with its declarations, derived from the teleological contem plation, peculiar to the Christian, of the divine action in nature and history, and the course of his own life, a way of regarding the divine activity which, though does not rest on speculative (causal) knowledge, must not be inconsistent with it. Theo logical doctrines are therefore not mere descriptions of sub
jective devout states of consciousness, nor mere judgments of
value,
are descriptions of objective relations between God, man, and
the world, based upon subjective religious experiences, which are
? with no corresponding judgments of being but they
associated with the feeling of their being of the highest value for the subject.
All the declarations of the Christian faith have their objec tive foundation the revelation of God in Christ, of which the New Testament writings are the documentary authorities.
Revelation God's manifestation of himself for man. takes place by various stages --in the order of nature, in the moral order of the world, and in the order of salvation, which stages must be conceived as included in God's eternal plan of the world. The subject-matter of the highest, or Christian revela tion, not the kingdom of God, the announcement of which was not brought by Christ as something new, but God's saving and reconciling designs towards man, including the ethical idea of the kingdom of God as the necessary conse quence of the fellowship of love between God and his children. Nor does the guarantee of the truth of the Christian revelation consist the individual being a member of the community
? ? in
it is
;
is
is is
is
in
It
it
is
is
;
is
is is
it
is,
? Ch. IV. ] ECLECTIC MEDIATING THEOLOGIANS. 1 99
which possesses reconciliation and redemption, but in his per
sonally appropriating by faith these saving blessings revealed in the Gospel, and thus obtaining the immediate personal ex perience of his reconciliation to God. This immediate personal certainty of salvation, in virtue of its resting upon the witness of the spirit, is the true centre and heart of Christian piety, its mystery not to be theoretically proved, but practically ex perienced, like the experience of the moral law, which is equally undemonstrable empirically, and yet is the foundation of the whole moral life. Still, the individual certainty of sal vation is preserved from the suspicion of being subjective self- deception by its known agreement with the similar experience of the whole Christian society.
These are the fundamental principles of Lipsius' theology, as expounded in his Abhandlungen zur Dogmatik, and in his work. Philosophie und Religion. From his more special trea tise (Lehrbuch der cvang. prot. Dogmatik, 1876 ; 2nd ed. , 1879) we may here notice his treatment of the dogmas l of God, Christ, Justification, and the Church.
The divine Trias of revelation must have its foundation in the divine nature. But our thought has no possible means of arriving at any logically tenable conclusion as to internal distinctions in the transcendental divine nature, much less as to personal distinctions in the Trinity. All such attempts lead to mythological conceptions. Similar difficulties arise from the application of the idea of the Absolute to the Christian idea of God. It 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.
? ? I'
;
is, it is
is
is
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
? ? ? is
is
in
it,
? 204
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
? ? ? ;
;
is
is
is
is
in
in
it
is,
? 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
? g. t.
? >>
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
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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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215
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.