No More Learning

Ch. II. ] THE THEOLOGY OF SCHLEIERMACHER. I 23
theology " {positive Vermittlungstheologie) rendered the ser vice to Church life of softening the old antitheses, of bringing parties nearer to each other, and, in opposition to the narrow ness of strict confessionalism, of giving effect in the Church to a certain breadth of religious views, together with warmth of devout feeling. But as regards scientific theology, it marks, in general, not so much an advance beyond as a falling back behind Schleiermacher, even though we must admit that in some points its divergence from him was justified.
In the System der christlichen Lehre, by Carl Immanuel Nitzsch, in the Dogmatik (left unfinished) of Twesten, in Ull-
mann's works on the Sinlessness of Christ and the Nature of Christianity, in Julius Muller's book on Sin, and in other representatives of this school, the prevailing aim is to save as much as possible of the traditional matter of the ecclesiastical dogmas, while softening down their offensive features by forms \ . of expression borrowed from Schleiermacher's theology. Nor
in this effort was there wanting, on the part of the above- named theologians, either learning or dialectical ingenuity : what they lacked was critical power and simple thoroughness and consistency of logical thought. The one amongst them who possessed most independence of thought was Nitzsch ; but his desire to be profound caused him to sacrifice clearness, and his affected brevity often issued in oracular ambiguity.
He took as his starting-point the fundamental thought of Schleiermacher, that religion is not doctrine but life, direct consciousness, feeling. At the same time he sought to bring religious feeling into closer connexion with knowledge and volition than Schleiermacher had done ; he laid special stress --and justly--on the recognition of a necessary and radical union of religion with morality, treating both dogmatics and ethics together accordingly in his System der christlichen Lehre. In his exposition of the idea of revelation, the origi nality, the new beginning of a religious phenomenon in the life of humanity, is made the prime feature, and then follows what
new paths of the master. It is true this "positive mediating
? to be an extension of the idea so as to embrace heathen religions, as far as they can be conceived as an education for Christianity ; but, after all, this preparation for Christianity was only negative and ideal, while the positive and real preparation is to be found only in the facts and events
of Old Testament history. With the supranaturalists, Nitzsch
promises
? ? ? 124 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Blc II.
places miracles and prophecies principally amongst the specific facts of revelation. Miracles are to be regarded as super natural, creative acts ; yet not as unnatural or contrary to law, but only as a higher nature in the lower one. Indeed, he does not hesitate to say, " Miracles and nature, though distinct, cannot be separated ; for the complete idea of nature involves that of miracle, and the true idea of miracle that of nature. "
Irreconcilable conceptions are to be reconciled by thus playing fast and loose with words ! So with reference to prophecy, at first the rational point of view is presented, that prophecy has essentially to do with the divine in history and relates to the
of God as a whole, not to the details of outward events. Nevertheless, prediction of single events of the future, though only to a "moderate" extent, must not be excluded from prophecy. The fulfilment of prophecy, how ever, must not be conceived as a complete "consequence," but as an analogical or typical correspondence, which admit also of a repeated and gradual fulfilment. That we have the confusion of two totally opposite points of view on the one hand, development in accordance with law, and on the other, a supernatural prediction of accidental details. For Scripture, too, Nitzsch demands "completely unique union of the divine word with the human, a quite peculiar economy," by which the miraculous character of an infallible authority
secured to the Bible. Thus in his Prolegomena, to go no further, the standpoint of Schleiermacher absolutely put back to that of the supranaturalists and the same thing occurs in the body of the work, especially in his Christology. Twesten, true, excels Nitzsch in the formal clearness of his reasoning, though the material weakness of his incon gruous principles thereby made only the more obvious. His Dogmatik der Evangelise h-Lutherisc hen Kirche, of which, however, only the first part, as far as the doctrine of the angels, has appeared, surprising attempt to deduce the ideas of the orthodoxy of the seventeenth century from the
kingdom
? of the modern consciousness, in which attempt not all the arts of a sophistic scholasticism avail to bridge the wide chasm which parts the two points of view.
In Julius Muller the scholasticism was carried so far as to revive the ancient Gnostic theory of the fall of man before all time, a theory which found no favour amongst his theo logical friends. Other representatives of this supranaturalistic
religious feelings
? ? is a
is
it is
;
is
is
a
is, :
? Ch. II. ] THE THEOLOGY OF SCHLEIERMACHER. (25
Mediating Theology will come before us subsequently, either amongst the apologists in opposition to Strauss, or amongst the speculative eclectics.
The only theologian among the immediate pupils of Schleiermacher who has taken up his ideas in their purity and
developed them with independence, is Alexander Schweizer. j | The significance which he ascribes to his master's Glaubenslehre, and the direction in which he seeks to further develop he has clearly stated the introductory paragraph of his own Christliche Glaubenslehre nach protestantisc hen Grundsatzen
"The distinctive nature of Schleiermacher's theological system subjectivity open and free towards the true objectivity, or an objectivity such as can really live the devout subject and make itself felt as the truth. That which marks the present stage of our development in the Church, which has been far more widely reached than openly confessed, not Schleiermacher's person and his dogmatic labours, but the freedom in appropriating traditional dogmas which was evinced by him as an obligation upon our time
and which has since Schleiermacher been still more urgently imposed upon us as duty. Unmistakably our age needs and demands free development of theology as well as of piety, of congregations as well as of the Church, a free, independent sphere for the religious life, system of religious belief which represents the faith that really believed and believable, a conscious advance beyond dogmatism and dogmatics. " Theology must not take its matter merely from
the Scriptures, nor merely from the ecclesiastical creeds, nor again merely from the reason, in so far as has not been brought under the influence of Christian experience but from
the faith itself of the Protestant Church, that the devout consciousness, as far as has been brought under the influence of the general experience of the Protestant Church its
historical development. The common Christian life of the churches the sphere which alone Christian experiences can adequately arise. Our faith based upon Christian experi
ence. accordingly never merely feeling, but always like wise thought and impulse, i. e. , tends to pass into doctrine and action, especially as the feeling itself arises consequence of doctrine and action, or produced and determined in us as Christian feeling. Although religious feeling the primary and original element of subjective piety, on the other
(1863-73).
? generally,
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it is,
It is
is
is
it in
is a is
;
is isin in
it,
is a
a
is in a
? 126 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. II.
hand it is neither an isolated thing, inasmuch as it can only be
made intelligible by its expression in doctrine and practice, nor is it what it is save through the influence of the religious practices and teaching by which we are surrounded. As little as the non-ego can be construed from the pure ego can a definite, clear, and complete system of faith be deduced from the devout ego, that from the emotions of the ego which we call feelings, without the incorporation, consciously or unconsciously, of the objective experiences of the Church which are represented in its doctrines. true that Schleiermacher desired this, but he identified his own devout
too much with those of the Church. an excellence of Schweizer's Glaubenslehre that a definite dis tinction drawn in between subjective and objective faith, and a mutual interaction and regulation of both maintained. Connected with this a further difference by which Schweizer gave fuller development to the theology of Schleiermacher on the speculative side. If devout feeling the source from which doctrines are derived, cannot be also the canon by which these doctrinal statements are to be judged. For this purpose devout feeling an element too indefinite, variable, purely subjective, with regard to which impossible to be sufficiently certain either as to the measure of its agreement with the feeling of the Church or as to its intrinsic truth.
Not only must its place in the development of Christian piety be in each case proved, a condition which Schleiermacher did not sufficiently observe, but must also be determined from another side than the historical one--by the ideal of religion itself, since we are by Christian experience placed in a position to find and recognise that ideal. The moral and religious perfection of man an ideal which lives within our souls, having been aroused and fostered by Christian experience especially, and taking definite shape in our conceptions, helps to determine our religious feelings also. Whatever contradicts this ideal our traditionary religion cannot be to us the truth Christianity, whatever impure and perishable accretions may have sometimes accidently adhered to essentially one with the ideal of perfect religion, and must therefore take the form called for by this ideal as well as by Christian experience. As objective knowledge generally,
I the truth established by the agreement of empirical observation with the idea obtained by the speculative method,
feelings
? ? ? is
;
in
it
is
it
it, is
It is
in
is,
it
is
is it
it is
is
is
It is
is
? Ch. II. ] THE THEOLOGY OF SCHLEIERMACHER. 12J
so in religion certain truth is reached by the agreement of experience with the religious idea. The excellence of Christianity, which guarantees for it imperishable duration, is that in its essential matter it coincides with the idea of perfect
religion, and simply seeks to realise Christianity comes to its true self, not in the reason of rationalism, but in the ideal of perfect piety. The one proper canon of truth, to be followed by theology in its criticism of traditionary matter,
to compare the historical form with the idea, and to require the approximation of the former to the latter. precisely the excellence of this canon of truth that not one so definitely formulated as, for instance, the Apostles' Creed for no period in a position to produce an infallible formula to serve as the canon of truth for all the future. This canon must be itself subject to improvement, advancing with universal and Christian knowledge. The ideal of perfect
godliness will be perceived more purely and fully in proportion as Christian experience advances, since our ideals are brought to life and full consciousness by means of the experience that answers to them. Guidance into more truth takes place in the interaction of progressive Christian experience and of the ideal of absolute religion and morality, rendered growingly
? that experience, so that whatever does not satisfy that ideal cannot be genuinely Christian, however long
may have dogmatic currency.
These are the principles of genuine Protestantism, and at
the same time of genuine modern scientific theology. The ideal factor, the idea which lives within us of the perfect
religion, recognised, together with the factor of experience in the consciousness of the Church, as the canon of truth in the construction of theological doctrines, and at the same time acknowledged that this religious ideal not always the same, or to be put into an exact formula for all time, but develops, advances, and deepens. Such principles cut the ground from under dogmatism every form, not only the dogmatism of orthodoxy, but also of rationalism and specula tion, while they clear the way for a treatment of theological doctrines which both conservative and free, in which the valuable elements of past development are preserved and the course opened and the direction shown for progressive development in the future. Schweizer accordingly declines to place dogmatic theology (as Schleiermacher desired) in
perfect through
? ? is
it is
is
in
is it is
it
is
is It is
; is
it.
? 128 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. II.
the division of ecclesiastical statistics, as a historical science,
but assigns to no less than to ethics, as essential the duty
of preparing for and directing the future development of faith. In accordance with these principles, Schweizer puts the
various doctrines in a form which not
productive than rational. The dignity of Scripture, he
religiously
maintains, must be asserted in opposition to ecclesiastical tradition, to fanatical claimants of special illumination, and to abstract reason uninfluenced Christianity. But this authority carried to excess and urged against reason generally, even when brought under the influence of Christian experience or applied to scientific matters, whether the department of historical criticism or of the physical world,
must cease to serve the truth, and could only give rise to error by presenting non-religious matters as religious, and thereby promoting superstition. The Scriptures supply what
necessary for salvation, a form abundantly recognis able by the Christian community in its free development,
precisely when exegesis acknowledges no binding canon tradition. Nor the authority of the Scriptures based upon
mechanical, or any other supernatural inspiration of their contents, but simply upon their recognisable value and the historical position of their authors.
In Schweizer's hands the doctrine of God likewise takes more satisfactory form than in Schleiermacher's system. Instead of going back, as his master had done, to the philo sophy of Spinoza, Schweizer recurs to the theology of the Calvinistic Church, which the unconditioned and universal causality of God, as the basis of the certainty of salvation, made the centre point of the theological system. Schweizer had previously traced minutely the historical development the central doctrines of the Reformed Church, and makes use his historical and critical inquiries his Glaubenslehre. He defines God as the living cause whose operation the founda tion of the world as one of law and order. The world of nature and the world of moral order, with the life of salvation in the kingdom of God, are absolutely dependent on God and they are thus dependent as ordered worlds, so that their order never interrupted by their dependence on him, but
caused and preserved thereby. In the order of nature, God's omnipotence and omniscience, eternity and omni
presence,
are manifested the order of the moral world his
less
? ? ? ; in
in
is
a is it
is
is
in
by
is
in
if ; ofofis a in in
is
if it is
it,
;
is
? Ch. II. ] THE THEOLOGY OF SCHLEIERMACHER. 120,
holiness, truth, and righteousness ; in the life of salvation in the kingdom of God, his paternal love and wisdom, which called into existence by Christ the religion of salvation, prepared for by the religion of nature and the religion of law, and which guide and consummate its course in conformity with a necessary historical order. The truth of the doctrine of predestination is found in the unconditional dependence upon divine grace of the entire course amongst men of the Christian life of salvation ; but the Augustinian and Calvinistic doctrine of the divine decrees, with its particularism and definitive dualism, must be given up. For the grace of the
of salvation is in its object and effect designed for all mankind, though it is made particular in its historical realisation, not producing effect all at once upon all, and the same effect upon all, since, as its operations are spiritual, it exerts no compulsion, but allows of resistance. But notwith
this particularism in its historical operation, the divine grace, which is in itself universal, cannot suffer a final dualism of the saved and the unsaved. This Judaistic con ception must not interfere with the Christian hope of the perfect consummation of the appropriated salvation in eternity.
In this monistic consummation of the divine work of salvation, Schweizer recognises the true logical consequence of the
position taken by Zwingli as to the preordination of sin in the eternal purposes of God, in view of salvation, in support of which Romans ix. -xi. may be quoted.
religion
? standing
Schleiermacher's, based upon the Christian consciousness, but with much more cautious use of the historical documents. He starts from the position, that according to the supposition underlying our
Christian consciousness, Christianity that historical religion which the idea of religion presented and realised, so that that idea nothing contained which could not be realised
Schweizer's Christology like
Thence he infers that the idea of man as one with God must be embodied in Christ, must shine unchecked through his whole manifestation, so that with and in Christ
the ideal of religion brought home to our consciousness. " We behold in him the pure image of the divine life in human form, without going so far as to identify absolutely the ideal and the historical Christ. " For the Hellenistic concep tions of a divine and human nature, and of three persons the Godhead, must be substituted those of our modern
Christianity.
c. T. K
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is
is
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is
is,
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a
? DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. II.
130
thinkers --idea and manifestation, eternal and temporal, being and historical realisation. If we apply these ideas to Christ- ology and Pneumatology, our definitions will become much more intelligible, harmonising both sides of the relation with out the surrender of the one or the other, or the confounding of both. Not until dogmatic Christology and Pneumatology have passed in our belief into an ethical and religious Christ ology and Pneumatology, will this problem, proposed from the very first by the Reformation, find its solution. A special point on which Schweizer worked out more definitely sugges tions of Schleiermacher's is the parallel between Christology and Pneumatology, the Holy Spirit bearing just the same relation to the Church as in Christ the idea to its manifesta tion. The Church then appears as the Christ widened into the historical life of the community, Christ as the original representation of the common spirit of the Church, or of the ideal religion. When it is added that this religion was founded and historically prepared for in mankind from the
beginning, it follows that in Christ the ideal destination of humanity first reached full realisation, and that Christianity is therefore essentially one with the ideal of human nature ; a view to which Zwingli had already prophetically pointed, and in which the thought of Protestant philosophers and theo logians is found in full accord.
? ? ? ? CHAPTER III.
SPECULATIVE THEOLOGY.
Hegel's religious philosophy was from the first a/anus St/rons, from which accordingly the theology to which it gave birth
was developed in two contrary directions. The assumption of the identity of religious and philosophical truth produced a strongly conservative attitude towards ecclesiastical dogma ; while if stress was laid on the distinction between them--that religion gives us truth only in the imperfect form of intuitions
? or percepts, but philosophy in the perfect form of concepts,-- the obvious inference was that religion, as the lower stage, must be resolved into and replaced by the higher stage of phi
The conservative attitude was exclusively taken by Hegel's school during the master's lifetime, and was predomi nant for long afterwards. " This school," according to Baur's
losophy.
admirable critique,1 " was enamoured of the opinion, which it either entertained itself, or wished others at all events to enter tain of that between its philosophy and Christianity there was an affinity and harmony such as no other philosophy had
been able to boast of. If this philosophy had its Trinity, why should not likewise have its Incarnate God, its Reconciliation, and similar dogmas To speak of an Incarnate God sounded to the Hegelian school speculatively as profound as was edifying to the Christian while Schleiermacher had spoken only of a "Saviour," now the Hegelian school, as conscious of certain priestly dignity, put its profoundest significance
into the doctrine of a " God-man. " But how little the chasm
the God-man of philosophy from the God-man of the Church was realised, may be best seen in the theology of Marheineke. After speaking philosophically of the unity of
the divine and human nature, of the former as the truth and the latter as the reality, he makes the transition to the his torical personage perfect good faith, simply saying that
separating
Kirchengeschichie, vol v. '3v
378.
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p.
by
a
;
if
it
?
it
it,
? DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Blc II.
I32
" the unity of God and man was historically realised in the person of Jesus Christ. " So too in Daub's Theologumena, the incarnation of God and the redemption of the world is in the first place deduced as an eternal truth from the idea of God in the following manner : God's eternal self-contemplation must be identical with human reason, and God's eternal activity consists in bringing back the world from its finiteness, the result of its apostasy, to the unity of his infinite Being, -- the world of nature by the natural method of the death of the individual, but mankind by the spiritual method of religion, as exaltation above the emptiness of the finite to the infinite. The importance of Christ, Daub considered to be that he exhibited this eternal incarnation of God and redemption of the world in his own person, as an historical fact, on which account he was himself the God-man in a unique sense, his death the sacrifice redeeming the world, his life a continual miracle and full of miracles. It was quite after the style of this romantic and uncritical speculative method to connect the metaphysical ideas, which had been arrived at by means of philosophical dialectic, directly with the persons and events of the Gospel narratives, thus raising these above the region of ordinary experience into that of the supernatural, and regard ing the most absurd assertions as philosophically justified. Daub had become so hopelessly addicted to this perverse prin ciple that he deduced not only Jesus as the embodiment of the philosophical idea of the union of God and man, but also Judas Iscariot as the embodiment of the idea of a rival god, or Satan. We of this generation find the confusion of ideas underlying such deductions so incomprehensible that it is hard to avoid unfairness in our estimate of the individual theologians of this class, especially when they carry their disdain of the sound human understanding so far as to ascribe with Daub, in the very title of his last book (1833), rational doubts respecting the dogmas and legends of the Church simply to criminal self-seeking.
The credit of having chased away the mists and clouds of
dogmatic illusions such as these, and of restoring to the critical
understanding its rights, belongs to the Swabian theologian, David Friedrich Strauss. Two previous works upon Im mortality, the authors of which, Richter and Feuerbach, were reckoned among the Hegelian school, had indeed, by the radically negative conclusions therein reached by the appli
? ? ? ? Ch. III. ] SPECULATIVE THEOLOGY. 133
cation of this philosophy, shaken the confidence generally felt in Hegelian orthodoxy ; but since the other adherents of the school were active in protesting against these negative infer ences, such isolated efforts produced no very important effect. When, however, Strauss brought the heavy artillery of his
criticism, distinguished equally by learning and penetration, to bear first on the historical foundations of dogma and then on dogma itself, the unsubstantial fabric of Hegelian dogmatism was within a few years completely destroyed. The first and greatest shock was given by Strauss's work on the life of
Jesus, which will occupy us in the next book. As the polemi
cal literature which his Life of Jesus provoked was chiefly
occupied with dogmatical reflections and speculation, rather than with historical criticism, Strauss was induced to supple ment it by a further critical work on the history of Christian dogmas, bearing the title, Die christliche Glaubenslehre in ihrer geschichtlichen Entwickelung und im Kampf mit der modernen Wis sensc haft" (1840-41). The strong point of the book is its acute and ingenious application of the principle that the history of dogma is its destruction and the story of the process of its dissolution. Strauss himself, in his preface, characterises his method in the forcible words : " Individual subjective criticism is a water-pipe which any boy may close for a time ; objective criticism, as it is accomplished in the course of centuries, advances like a foaming torrent against which all sluices and dams are powerless. " In " the same pre face he thus describes the object of his work : Its purpose is --if the profane figure is allowable --to do for the science of dogmatics what the balance-sheet does for a commercial house. If the firm is not made directly the richer by learns exactly what its resources are and that often as valuable as an actual increase of them. Such survey of our dogmatic property in our days rendered the more urgently necessary
proportion as the majority of theologians entertain the greatest illusions on the subject. The depreciation of the old theological stock-in-trade made by the criticism and polemics of the last two centuries greatly underrated and on the other hand, the doubtful assistance supposed to be derived from the emotional theology and mystical philosophy of the present century much over-estimated. generally imagined that the greater part of the lawsuits which are pending with regard to those depreciations have been won, and that there
? ? ? is
is
It is
a
is
is
;
in
:
it, it
? 134 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. II.
is certainty of the greatest profits from these newly opened resources. But it is not impossible that these suits should all be lost in a single day, and if then these new mines should also disappoint expectations, failure would be inevitable.
Reason enough, surely, to know in time, after careful calcu lation, the relation of the credit to the debit side of the
was only possible in the case of a man in whose nature religious feeling was much weaker than critical intellect, and who had besides grown accustomed in the Hegelian school to that intellectualism which makes knowledge everything and all other vital functions nothing, and in which particularly religion was regarded only as theoretical and bound to stand or fall with a particular theory. Strauss's study of Schleiermacher might have preserved him from this gross error ; but great as was his acumen in descrying Schleiermacher's dogmatic weaknesses, he was quite unable to understand the importance of Schleiermacher's theory of religion, and the justice of the distinction between religion and theology. In general, the overweening self-confidence of "absolute knowledge" fostered in Hegel's school had materially tended to accentuate the negative radicalism of Strauss's criticism. Whoever imagines himself to possess the key to all the riddles of the world in the formulae of his philosophical school, will very naturally pass a much more negative sentence upon all attempts to form a con ception of the world from a religious point of view, than the man who humbly recognises the relativity of all our knowledge and is under no illusion with regard to the value of the for mulae of all systems. The absolute and irreconcilable an tagonism between philosophy and theology which Strauss
tries to show, in the case of each dogma, is the final result of the historical process, arises unavoidably then only when both the philosopher and the theologian make the same mistake of embracing a dogmatism which propounds its formula; as infallible truths. This is indisputably the case to a marked degree with the Hegelian-Straussian philosophy of " absolute knowledge. " But since this dogmatism is the opposite of
account !
"
The result of this
of accounts, Strauss declares to be the complete bankruptcy of the Christian faith ; neither is it merely the dogmatic formulae of the theology of the Church that are subject to this process of dissolution, but, Strauss holds, that with them the Christian religion must pass away, and even religion in general. This marked precipitation
balancing
? ? ? ? Ch. III. ] SPECULATIVE THEOLOGY. ' 1 35
scientific, the radicalism of Strauss's History of Dogmatics evidently cannot decide the general question of the relation of religion and science.
The final consequences of Strauss's position were inferred
by Feuerbach. Strauss did not go beyond an idealistic pantheism, which, while it gave up the God of religion, at least assumed a universal spiritual principle, an " idea" which realises itself in the finite, evolves nature from itself, and becomes conscious of itself in man ; and in this Feuerbach recognised a remnant of mysticism which must be got rid of ;
the Absolute above man he declared to be an empty abstrac tion, the really Absolute or Divine is man himself. All and every system of theology, not excepting speculative theology, ' 1
must therefore be superseded by anthropology. But if man alone is divine, how can he come to believe in and worship a God ? Feuerbach answers that the conception of God is an illusion, formed of the wishes of the heart and of the poetic imagination. The gods are Wunschwesen, i. e. , the wishes and ideals of the human heart objectified by the imagination.
In them man contemplates his own nature, not as it really held by the limitation of the world, but as he wishes to be, as the unlimited omnipotence of feeling. Religious faith
the self-assurance of the heart demanding the satisfaction of its desires. A miracle the realisation (of course the imagined realisation) of a supernatural wish. Christ the
omnipotence of subjectivity, the reality of all the wishes of the heart the conception of an incarnate God the disclosure of the truth, that the nature of God simply man. So also the Christian heaven means, just like the Christian God, the fulfilment of all wishes. Immortality the testament of
? in which makes its last will as heaven the unfolded nature of the Deity, also the frankest declara tion of the inmost thoughts of religion.
Feuerbach stands at the head of those who hold religion to be an idealistic fiction without actual truth, viz. , the modern Positivists and Agnostics. But while the latter with cautious scepticism decline to deal with the metaphysical questions as to the origin of the world and of man, Feuerbach only aban doned the idealistic dogmatism of his Hegelian school to adopt that of materialism. He held that only what cognis able by the senses, what material, real even in man the spiritual only an effect of the sensible, the sole reality
religion,
? ? is
;
;
is,
is
is ;
;
is is
is
it is
it
is
is
it
is
is
is
in
? 136 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. II.
" der Mensch ist, was er isst" man is what he eats, was
Feuerbach's watchword. It follows of course that
finally
from this cynical point of view religion can only be regarded as a foolish aberration, a kind of mental disorder ; but since
by the same hypothesis the other objects of man's spiritual endeavour, morality, art and science, must lose all their mean ing and value, this position is really self-destructive. For if man is only a material product of nature, like a plant or an animal, it is inconceivable why he should come to form moral ideas of any kind, or to propose scientific views on any ques tion. The naturalistic point of view adopted by Feuerbach could logically lead only to the rejection of all ideas and
ideals, or to pure nihilism and solipsism, as is clearly shown in Max Stirner's notorious book, Der Einzige und sein Eigen- thum. The same holds good of the last book in which Strauss laid before the world his final confession of faith, Der alte und der neue Glaube, 1872. Like Feuerbach, he abandoned the dogmatism of idealism for that of naturalism, undeterred by the logical inconsistencies of naturalism and the difficulties of Feuerbach's theory of knowledge. On the principles of modern natural science, he now believed himself able to
? explain the world as a mechanism of blind material
forces, without any final cause, and hence without any spiritual prin
ciple ; nevertheless he sought to acknowledge reason and
in the universe, and honour them with a certain piety. Man he considered a part of nature, developed from the ape by Darwinian selection ; nevertheless he required him never to forget that he was man, and not merely a part of nature, that in him nature had not merely striven upwards, but even to surpass herself; he must therefore be guided in his action by the idea of the race, and by the consciousness of mutual obligation seek to mitigate the cruel struggle for exist ence, although as a part of nature he cannot wholly avoid
comes to this then, man a part and again not a part nature the product of an aimless mechanical natural process, and yet a product in which nature has striven to surpass her self! The struggle for existence, the right of the stronger, the only law ruling the world, and yet man bound to be guided the altruistic principle of the idea of the race The new creed which includes such gross contradictions, without even attemping their solution, can hardly claim more scientific importance than any one of the old confessions of faith. In
goodness
? ? ; by
!
is
is
of it.
It
is
? Ch. III. ] SPECULATIVE THEOLOGY. 1 37
point of fact, both philosophy and theology soon passed from Strauss's last book to the order of the day. His earlier con tributions to historical criticism ought not however to be forgotten. We shall speak of them in the next book.
But neither the right nor the left wing of the Hegelian
school permanently enriched dogmatic theology, owing to the weakness of the former in historical criticism, and of the latter in the appreciation of religious facts. On the other hand, we have to mention a number of men who, avoiding these two extremes, tried to gain by the aid of speculative philosophy a profounder conception of the Christian faith. The most im
works in this connexion are three : Biedermann s Christliche Dogmatik, Weisses Philosophische Dogmatik, and Rothes Theologische Ethik. Their common feature is a
speculative theism and a theistic and theological view of history, in which the facts as well as the ideas and ideals of Christianity find a place.
At the time of Alois Emanuel Biedermann's youth scien tific and ecclesiastical circles had been deeply stirred by the Hegelian philosophy and Straussian criticism. Both pro foundly affected him and greatly enriched his thought, without robbing him of his freedom and individuality. He never was an Hegelian in the strict sense of the school, but from the first regarded Hegel's characteristic method of a priori dialectic as an error and as the untenable weakness of the system, and tried to correct it by a less ambitious departure from experi ence. Still, he saw profound truth in the fundamental principle of the Hegelian philosophy, that reason is in everything which exists and occurs, and must, as the creative nature of things, be comprehended by our own rational thought. He likewise recognised the great importance of Strauss's critical labours, although he early perceived that the limitation of Strauss's powers lay in the fact that he could not rise above the critical dissolution of the conceptions of ecclesiastical tradition
to the speculative recognition and presentation of the religious truth contained in them, Biedermann regarded criticism, in which he was equal to Strauss in point of rigour, as only one half of the problem to be solved ; the other, and certainly not less important half, being to formulate as conceptual know- 1 ledge the content of religious truth after it has been purified in the crucible of critical analysis. To make this positive addi tion to Strauss's negative results, he regarded as his own life-
portant
? ? ? ? I38 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. II.
work, to the accomplishment of which he devoted the labours of his best years. The result of these labours is contained in his chief work, Die Christliche Dogmatik, the first edition of which appeared in 1868, and the second in 1884-5, en" larged by a philosophical introduction in which is expounded the theory of knowledge underlying his metaphysics and theology.
This theory of knowledge occupies a peculiar position intermediary between Hegel's logical idealism and Spinoza's parallelism of extended and thinking Being as the two sides of the one substance. Biedermann holds firmly to the He gelian principle that the substance of spirit is logical Being, and hence can be wholly and entirely comprehended in logical categories, both in respect of the infinite spirit, or God, and of the finite spirit, or man. But he does not hold that the logical Being of spirit includes within it all Being, and that the world is only the development and manifestation of the absolute logical idea ; nor does he think that we can construct and logically deduce the world by means of an a priori dia lectic. On the contrary, he teaches that spiritual or ideal
Being is never given us other than with and in sensuous or material Being, and only in such a way that they are by nature antithetical--the one, logical Being, is outside space and time ; the other, material Being, spatial and temporal, but both are combined with and in each other to form the one whole reality. The problem of cognition accordingly in the case of any content of consciousness, so to distinguish the ideal
Being from the material Being, in combination with which exists, as to make clear both the antithesis of their respective natures, and at the same time the indivisible unity of their substance. This abstraction of logical Being from material
Being, and the comprehension of the former, as the ideal content of experience, " in purely logical categories, what Biedermann means by pure thought. " This theory of cog nition the foundation of his metaphysics from follow,
in his view, the answers to the most important questions re garding soul and body, God and world. On this very account we must not refrain from stating the grave objections to which the theory open. In the first place, we must observe that the conception " ideal Being " ambiguous, since denotes sometimes thinking Being (spirit, consciousness), sometimes
denkendes Sein.
? ? ? 1
1
is
it
it
is
is is
;
it
is,
? Ch. III. ] SPECULATIVE THEOLOGY. 1 39
ently expect that this thinking Being, or spirit, will be com prehended purely and entirely in logical categories. Neither can we assent to the proposition that ideal or spiritual Being is timeless, while temporal Being as such is physical or material ; Being thought, as the idea of a triangle, of spirit, or of history, is indeed timeless ; but thinking Being, or spirit itself, is never given us in experience as timeless Being, but always as the consciousness of our ego taking place in time. Whether this peculiarity of occurring in time, which always attaches to the Being of spirit in our experience, is accidental and can be dispensed with in thought, is a difficult question, and has been variously answered ; but whatever answer be
given, at any rate the identification of spiritual with timeless
Being can never be taken for granted as an unquestionable axiom. Further, with regard to the fundamental principle of
this theory of knowledge, viz. , the parallelism of ideal and material Being as the two inseparable sides of one substantial reality, I remark, firstly, that this view, derived from Spinoza, cannot be deduced from the analysis of our consciousness, since direct experience is always entirely a phenomenon of consciousness, and hence ideal Being, from which we after wards mediately infer the existence of an external material Being. Secondly, as a psychological hypothesis this theory is not calculated satisfactorily to explain the relation of body and soul without doing violence to the facts of experience. Thirdly, as a metaphysical hypothesis it is equally unfitted to
the relation of the world to God ; for if the world is both spiritual and material Being, we cannot see how it should have its foundation in a purely spiritual God ; vice versa, if with Biedermann we accept the latter hypothesis, we should expect the reduction of material Being in some way to spiritual Being, and not the co-ordination of the two as from the first opposite in nature. Hegel's monism of absolute Spirit, and Spinoza's dualism of Thought and Extension, are theories too contradictory to admit of combination in a single system. Biedermann most likely recognised the one-sided
1 gedachtes Sein.
relation, law). Now it is cer
Being thought1 (conception,
tainly wrong to say that thinking Being, i. e. , being which thinks, is merely logical Being, since the same Being which thinks also wills and feels ; for this reason we cannot anteced
? explain
? ? ? 140 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. II.
character of absolute logical idealism, and its need of amend ment from the side of actual experience ; but in having recourse, with this object in view, to Spinoza's dualism of thinking and corporeal Being, he grafted a foreign and an tagonistic shoot upon the trunk of idealism, and left unremoved Hegel's fundamental defect, his abstract logical formalism. Still, by this alteration Biedermann attained one object--a more definite distinction between God and the world, thus the substitution of theism for pantheism, though still in too abstract a form ; and to do this was an essential condition for a right view of religion.
The investigation of the nature of religion was improved in the second edition of Biedermann's work by the psycho
logical description of it being placed before the inquiry into its metaphysical basis. Biedermann defines Religion as the endeavour of the human ego to rise above the limiting nega tions of the world as the scene of its natural life by appealing to a Power raised above such limitation, in order by its help to obtain deliverance ; it is produced by anything which discloses the opposition between man's demands of life and the limita tion he experiences. The psychical form of this endeavour is
Faith, in which all the elementary functions of the personal
spirit are harmoniously combined : a feeling of dependence and mundane limitation as the point of departure, and of freedom as the goal of the act of appeal, a conception of an infinite Power above man, a desire to rise to this Power, with a longing for deliverance from the cramping limitations of the world. This whole act of the man, theoretical and practical in one, constitutes real "religious faith "; while "faith" in the sense of mere theoretical belief is not a religious act at all. Precisely because religious faith is something other than a mere form of secondary knowledge, it can never be rendered obsolete and replaced by any higher kind of knowledge, such as philosophy.
Philosophy can exercise a purifying influence upon the theo retical side of religion, --on the various modes of conceiving the contents of faith, --but can never replace the distinctly reli gious act of faith itself -- the practical elevation of the man to God. By this means Biedermann secured himself against the Hegelian confusion of religion and philosophy, which had led Strauss to the fatal step of annulling the former by means of the latter, and strictly guarded the indefeasible rights of the reli gious life against all encroachments on the part of knowledge.
? ? ? ? Ch. III. ] SPECULATIVE THEOLOGY. 141
But Biedermann does not end with the psychological de scription of religion. Though this has its proximate source in the nature of man himself, as finite spirit, the appeal of his
soul to God is incomprehensible without the metaphysical supposition of relations on God's part with man ; the fact of religion presupposes the existence and self-revelation of God. The legitimacy of this presupposition, of which the religious consciousness has an immediate certainty, is shown by the reasoning intellect in the "proofs of the existence of God"; and then the idea of God is put into a " pure "--i. e. , abstractly logical -- formula, as follows: "The absoluteness of the spirit ual Being of God consists therein, that the actus purus of his self-sufficient existence within himself is the non-temporal and non-spatial condition, i. e. , the eternal and omnipresent source, of the temporal and spatial process of the finite world. " God is the source of the world, not by temporal act of creation out of nothing, but in that by a non-temporal method he produces from himself the material being of the world, and makes it external to himself. The latter expression is intended defi
nitely to provide against any pantheistic confusion of God and world ; but, it must be confessed, the conception of the abso lute Spirit producing from himself, and making external to himself, a material world, the nature of which is antithetical to his own spirituality, is as unrealisable in thought as the Church's idea of creation, which lays no claim to logical truth.
Moreover, in Biedermann's case this claim rests upon a de lusion ; the categories of (Insichseins) existence within self,
and making external to self (Aussersichsetzens), evidently be long to the intuition of space, and are therefore by no means
purely logical, but figurative expressions, which are not purer but only much less significant than the expressions usually borrowed from the analogy of the human spirit. Biedermann's rejection of this one possible way of arriving at positive (though, of course, always relative) statements about God, ostensibly in the interests of " pure thought," which, it is said, can lay claim to absolute appropriateness, was not the strength but the weakness of his theology, betraying his bondage to the logical formalism and dogmatism of the Hegelian school.
Biedermann discusses at length the nature of divine revela tion. It is a process within the human spirit, effected by God, in which man's spiritual activities are not set aside but raised above their finite limitation, so as to experience the divine.
? ? ? ? I42 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. II.
More particularly, we may distinguish three elements in the
divine revelation : it appears as the basis of man's spiritual life
in his bent to rationality (Vernunftrieb), as the law of his spiritual life in his conscience, and as the force securing its normal realisation in his religious and moral freedom. This latter is the properly religious revelation, which takes place in the faith of the religious man as illumination, blessedness, and sanctification. These inward experiences of the religious spirit are the effect therefore of direct divine action or revelation, and in this consists the only revelation properly so called ; on the other hand, things lying behind or outside them, whether external events or history or sacred scriptures or ceremonial observances, are in themselves only phenomena of mans life of faith ; though a natural confusion of the external and de rived with the inward and primary causes them to be looked upon as direct divine revelations, and gives them in the faith of the Church a position of unchangeable divine authority given once for all. Hence we have the principle of super natural authority common to all positive religions, and their tendency to strictly preserve anything traditional as having ostensibly come directly from God. This failure of super- naturalism to recognise the natural side of historical religion is corrected by Rationalism, which calls attention to the natural historical conditions of all religious phenomena, but on the other hand exaggerates the truth of this observation by treat ing everything in religion as a merely natural product of the human mind, and quite dispensing with the divine factor. The problem of critical and speculative theology Biedermann con siders to be to preserve such a mean between the two ex tremes that the supernatural or divine, and the natural or human come to be recognised as the two inseparably united sides of every revelation and throughout the whole history of religion. Biedermann has also applied this principle to the Christian tradition and to the solution of the great questions of Christology, of the nature and value of the Bible, and of the creeds of the Church.
The Christian religion, he teaches, had its historical source in the person"of Jesus, while its essential nature or principle is to be found in the religious relation as it is presented to us in the religious consciousness of Jesus as a new fact of revela tion determining his whole personality and at the same time creating faith in that personality. " We can therefore call the
? ? ? ? Ch. III. ] SPECULATIVE THEOLOGY. I43
religious personality of Jesus the essential principle of Chris tianity, meaning by this that the new saving influence on man kind with this new object of faith, was simply the characteristic
religious consciousness of this person, which took the form of the consciousness of sonship to the heavenly Father. Un doubtedly this personal consciousness of Jesus points to a divine revelation, and so far was miraculous, but only in the relative sense, not as something transcending the constitution of humanity, but as itself the highest fulfilment of the religious and moral destiny of the race ; in Jesus the religious truth that we are all called to be sons of God became, with immediate freshness and force, the content of our knowledge and feeling and a motive-power in our will ; in this sense he is the Son of
God and the Saviour /car e^p-xfiv. But when the Church con verted this relative miracle of the original religious personality
? of Jesus into a miracle pure and simple, the superhuman person of the God-man from heaven, it did so in consequence of the above-mentioned psychological " law of identification," ac cording to which the divine source of revelation gets directly
identified with the human means of its manifestation. Bieder- mann considers it to be the business of dogmatic Christology to correct this optical illusion from which all its difficulties spring, to discriminate between the person of Jesus and the Christian principle, the spirit or the ideal of life, the idea of Christianity, and to do this in such a way as neither to con
found the two nor to abstractly separate them, but rather to
present the person as the historical embodiment of the prin
ciple, and the principle as the ideal significance of the person. In this idea of the business of Christology, Biedermann is in
substantial accord with the theory of Alexander Schweizer above noticed, though the theories are somewhat differently formulated.
Our theologian adopts a similar course in describing the Reformation. Here too he distinguishes the principle from its historical manifestation in the formation of the Reformed
churches. The former consists in a fundamental tendency of the Christian spirit, which always exists in the Church, be cause belonging to the essence of Christianity -- the tendency to react against its own misrepresentation in the Church, and to maintain its peculiar truth in contradistinction to the lower stages represented by the religions of nature and of law. The
Reformation gave dogmatic expression to this tendency in the
? ? ? 144 DEVELOPMENT OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. [Bk. II.
" formal principle" of the sole authority of the word of God,
and in the "material principle" of justification from grace alone and through faith. But when the Churches of the Pro testant confessions were formed, it was only the practical religious importance of this principle that was recognised, and the consequences involved in it were not worked out. It was indeed historically unavoidable and justifiable in itself to go back for a knowledge of Christian truth behind the tradition of the Church to the Scriptures as historically the original source of this knowledge. But this historical appreciation of the Scriptures did not suffice ; they were regarded as " the word of God" absolutely, and infallible divine authority was
consequently
ascribed to them. Thereby the traditional
Catholic theory of authority was in principle still adhered to,
and only the form of the authority changed, though in a way
which might be regarded as an advance. But there was only a relative difference between the Protestant's principle of Scripture and the Catholic's principle of tradition. Equally opposed to the essence of Protestantism was the elevation of ecclesiastical forms of doctrine of historic growth to the posi tion of symbolic statements of unconditional authority. What is really Protestant is simply the continual regeneration of doctrinal theology out of the living principle of Christianity by means of the scientific criticism of the previous development of dogma.
This is the task of theological science which must not be hindered by any theory of inspiration. On the contrary, theo logy has to distinguish in the Scriptures, no less than in the creeds, between the ideal truth as the lasting kernel and the historically conditioned wrappings in which it appears in the
Biblical and ecclesiastical forms of doctrine. Biedermann has sought to do this. He gives an account first of the whole system of Biblical theology, and next of the theology of the Church with its central christological dogmas ; he then pro ceeds to critically analyse these dogmas, and finally presents their pure ideal content in a systematic form. This mode of treatment has the advantage of furnishing a strictly objective account of the Biblical and ecclesiastical doctrines, the histori cal account being kept separate from the theologian's own critical and speculative estimate of it ; but it combines the double disadvantage, that each individual doctrine is treated of in various parts of the book, thus rendering a connected view
? ? ? ? Ch. III. ] SPECULATIVE THEOLOGY. 145
less easy, and that the positive result, the pure logical essence of the historical subject-matter and its critical analysis, proves to be very much too meagre and vague to help the
Church of the present day to understand its faith. It is true that this defect is the consequence, not only of the form of treatment, but also of the theory of knowledge before con sidered. The metaphysics and psychology based upon this theory exercise also an influence for evil upon the matter of his eschatology : a consequence of it is the denial of the immor tality of the soul, since according to this theory the soul must be conceived only as the ideal side of the body and together with but not as an independent entity. clear that the Christian Church cannot accept this theory without cutting
? itself off from its whole past history
be the more readily rejected scientifically inadmissible, --for
and such a demand may proportion as also
depends upon the unde- monstrable assumptions of a philosophical dogmatism. This
the weak side of Biedermann's work, which in other respects contains so much that excellent.
Christian Hermann Weisse also belonged at first to Hegel's school, but probably perceived the error of logical idealism, and tried to correct a manner which bears close resemblance in many respects to the theosophy of Schelling's later years and of Baader, while his system not without the originality of genius, and contains an abundance of profound and fertile
dependence
The fact that his Philosophische Dogmatik oder Philosophic des Christenthums has notwithstanding had no important influence upon theology, maybe explained partly by Weisse's heavy style, partly by the little sympathy his purely deductive method meets with in the bent of our time towards
thoughts.
induction. To do Weisse justice, must not be forgotten that his speculative reasoning, in all departments, cluding religion, commands wide knowledge of the empirical subject-matter, and that he succeeds in working up this into his deductive statement in a most suggestive manner.