RATIONALISM 438 RATIONALISM a small minority have been regarded as distinctly rationalistic. Thus, till lately it was alarming rationalism to dispute the Mosaic authorship of Genesis, the Solomonic authorship of the Song of Songs, and the Davidic authorship of any of the Psalms, now the newer view is assumed by many orthodox teachers. And in the last quarter of the 19th cen- tury scholars earnestly supported views which they themselves treated as highly dangerous 20 or 30 years earlier. Rationalism of this kind is a transition stage, but not necessarily a transition to unbelief. The rationalistic temper may be traced in almost every age of the Church's his- tory; no doubt the extremer representa- tives of the Petrine party in sub-apos- tolic times regarded Paul's views as lax and rationalistic. If the Reformation was not rooted in rationalism (as to Catholics it seems to have been) , many of the contentions of the reformers were su(5h as all rationalists accept and sym- pathize with. Zwingli was a rationalist to Luther and the Lutherans; Socinus was of course a rationalist of an extreme type. The dry and barren dogmatic or- thodoxy of Germany in the 17th century fostered a rationalism as cold and un- spiritual. In the England of the 18th century, during the deistic controversies, the Evangelicals of Germany thought, not altogether unjustly, that some of the most conspicuous opponents of the deists were not themselves free from the charge of rationalism; and the Evangeli- cals of Scotland regarded the "mod- erates" of the 18th century, however orthodox in dogma, as thoroughly ration- alistic in spirit. Rationalism is not so much opposed to orthodoxy as to the mysticism, and what was called vari- ously fanaticism, enthusiasm, "high-fly- ing," and methodism. A soulless ortho- doxy has not seldom been opposed by a fervent piety that by a not unnatural antithesis has tended to run into heret- ical extremes; while, on the other hand, actual rationalists have often been fore- most among the champions of religion, and of revealed religion, against radical fx'eethinking, deism, naturalism, and materialism. In Germany the term rationalism is more definite in its reference than in England, but is not always used in quite the same sense. The two defective and mutually opposed schools of thought that Kant sought to supersede by his critical philosophy were, on the one hand, a shal- low empiricism, and on the other, a baseless and overweening metaphysical dogmatism or rationalism. Bacon also contrasted empirical philosophers with rationalists who spin their systems as spiders do cobwebs, out of their own bowels. Wolff presents the most con- spicuous example of the philosophical rationalism which held that all that is in heaven above and earth beneath could be "proved" by pseudo-mathematical methods; and as God, responsibility, and immortality were among the things that could be proved at endless length and in various ways, this philosophical ration- alism led directly up to a rationalist the- ology, which consisted mainly in a series of dogmas to be demonstrated from the philosophical axioms, including some at least of the doctrines of revealed reli- gion. What in revelation could not be demonstrated according to this scheme was disallowed or explained away. Practical religion became, in the Auf- kldnmg, a system of mere utilitarian morals. Kant prepared the way for a deeper view of man, history, and the universe; but his own explicit statements on posi- tive religion were pronouncedly ration- alistic; and the negative side of his phil- osophy was well calculated to lay the foundations of another school of theo- logical rationalists (often called vulgar rationalism), of whom Tieftrunk (died 1837), Bretschneider (1776-1848), and Wegscheider (1771-1849) may be taken as representatives. De Wette (1780- 1849) shows the transition to Schleier- macher, who (though in the English sense of the word he was an outspoken rationalist) combined what was best in the opposing schools of rationalists and supernaturalists, founded a higher and truer religious philosophy, and heralded even the "pectoral theology" of the medi- ^ ation school. ,[ But it was not in the sphere of specu- lation and dogma, but in that of Biblical criticism, that German rationalism ac- complished its main work, and left its deepest mark on subsequent theological development. In the early 18th century the "Germans in Greek were sadly to seek," as English scholars thought ; Ger- mans themselves admitted that in study- ing the Scriptures they failed to escape from dogmatic presuppositions, and that it was the English divines who approach- ed the New Testament in a historical spirit, which in the Germany of that day caused misgivings. It is noteworthy that Semler (1725-1791), "the father of ra- tionalism," obtained the doctorate for a thesis virritten against Whiston, Bentley, and other English scholars in defense of the "three heavenly witnesses" of I John, v: 7. Semler in the schools, supported by Lessing and Herder in literature, was soon teaching that the books of the Bible must be studied as human produc- tions: Eichhorn (1752-1827) thoroughly
