Protestantism has two principles: a “formal principle,” the authority of Scripture, and a "material principle," the doctrine of justification by faith. We have already indicated that some such pair of principles was prominent when historic Protestantism pulled itself together for defence during its scholastic age. But surely serious thought cannot acquiesce in a dual control. While the double authority continues or is believed to continue in power, there seems no hope of making theology a living unity, which will claim respect from the modern age.
One great attempt at unifying Christian theology came from the side of philosophy. Kant s scheme, which in religious theory as well as in chronology may be regarded as a link between the 18th and loth centuries, led on to the very different scheme of Hegel; and the latter system began almost at once to influence Church doctrine. Influence of Hegelianism. D. F. Strauss (q.v.) applied it with explosive effect to the study of the life of Jesus. F. C. Baur, assisted by abk colleagues, if hardly less revolutionary, was much more in touch [with theology than Strauss had been. The Hegelian threefold rhythm was to run through all history, especially for Baur through the history of the Christian Church and of its doctrine. Baur maintained a thorough-going evolutionary optimism. “The real was the rational” from first to last. However biassed, this a priori study had its merits. It unified history with a mighty sweep, and revealed through all the ages one evolving process. But we have still to ask whether the doctrines it made prominent are really those which are vital to the Christian Church. And we have to look into Baur’s esoteric interpretation of the doctrinal development. For him, as for Strauss, the unity of God and man is the central truth, of which Christ’s atoning death is a sort of pictorial symbol. This implies that the whole of Western theology has been an aberration or an exoteric veiling of the truth.[1] In Dogmatic the school is represented by A. E. Biedermann, and with variations by O. Pfleiderer. A more orthodox reading of Hegel’s thought, which brings it into line with some Christological developments already described, is found in J. E. Erdmann and the theologians P. K. Marheineke and Karl Daub. Influences from Hegel are Influence in England. also to be traced in Richard Rothe, I. A. Dorner, A. M. Fairbairn ; and through the mediation of British philosophers Hegelianism has widely affected British theology. The orthodox wing of idealists take as their watchword Incarnation; Christianity is “the religion of the Incarnation” (sub-title of Lux Mundi; see B. F. Westcott, passim). The rationalist wing resolve Incarnation and still more Atonement into symbols of philosophical truth. Of the two parties, the latter appears the more successful in accomplishing the task of unifying theology, although at the cost of subordinating both theology and religion to philosophy. The strength of all the idealists consists in their appeal to reason.
Schleiermacher set himself to explain what is distinctive in religion. He distinguishes religion from philosophy as feeling in contrast with thought; but when he has done that (Reden über die Religion, 1799) he has little to add. Any type of highly wrought feeling may make a man religious, whether it be theistic or pantheistic ; indeed, as a child Schleier-macher. of Romanticism, Schleiermacher puts a peculiarly high estimate upon the pantheistic type. What else can we expect from a thinker who is interested simply in feeling as feeling? When he wrote his Glaubenslehre (1821) Schleiermacher had become much more of a Christian churchman. “Christianity is one of the teleological pieties,” and has as its peculiarity that “in it everything is referred to the redemption accomplished through Jesus of Nazareth.” But it is doubtful whether the elements of his final synthesis really interpenetrate. He tells us (Kurze Darstellung des theologischen Studiums, 1811) that the theologian, while himself loyal to his Church, must expound, as a historian, the beliefs actually held in the branch of the Church which he represents. Oil and water do not mix. Do the unchecked individual enthusiasm of the Reden, and the loyalty to established beliefs required in the later writings, combine to form a living theology? It is little wonder if Schleiermacher attains a compromise rather than a unity. He has been one of the great ferments in modern Protestant doctrine both of the Right and of the Left. Alex. Schweizer[2] maintained his general positions more nearly than any other. But there is no Schleiermacher school. W. Herrmann, from his own point of view, has quoted J. C. K. Hofmann and F. R. Frank as making important modifications and sometimes corrections of the lines laid down by Schleiermacher, while J. S. Candlish, representing a moderate Scottish Calvinism, was half inclined to welcome the reduced form of Schleiermacher’s basis found in H. L. Martensen (a Dane), J. T. Beck, and the Dutchman, J. J. van Oosterzee, i.e. Scripture the true source of doctrine, but the religious consciousness its ordering principle.
A bolder and more original attempt to restate Protestantism as a systematic unity is found in the work of A. Ritschl, with H. Schultz and W. Herrmann as independent allies and colleagues, and with J. Kaftan, A. Harnack and many others as younger representatives on divergent lines. Reaction against the philosophy of Hegel and the criticism of Baur is common Ritschl. to all the school, though Ritschl went further back than the younger men towards critical tradition and further in some points towards orthodox dogma. Positively, the school build upon foundations laid in ethics by Kant and in philosophy of religion by Schleiermacher; so also R. A. Lipsius, and yet his dogmatic results coincide more nearly with Biedermann’s or Pfleiderer’s than with the “intermediate though not mediating” position taken up by the Ritschlians. Not even the acceptance of forgiveness as the central religious blessing is exclusively Ritschlian, still, it is a challenge alike to the 18th century, to the Church of Rome and to the modern mind. Ritschl and his friends forfeit that unifying of life and duty which is gained by making the moral or perhaps rather legal point of view supreme. As they deny the natural religion of the 18th century—the religion which works its way into harmony with God by virtue—so, still more emphatically, they refuse to bid the sinner merit forgiveness. Thus they constitute one more revival of Paulinism or Augustinianism, though with qualifications.
Their effort is to expound Christianity, not from the point of view of philosophy like the Hegelians, nor from that of an abstract conception of religion, tempered by regard for historical precedents, like Schleiermacher, but from its own, from the Christian point of view. Ritschl has several dogmatic peculiarities, intenser in him than in his fellow-workers and followers. A notable instance is his doctrine of the Church—the community (Gemeinde); the sole object of God’s electing love, according to Ritschl’s interpretation of St Paul. Hence theology is not to be the utterance of individual Christianity merely, but of the Church’s faith, embodied in its classical literature, the New Testament, and (subordinately) in the Old. The finality of the New Testament is partly due to its being the work of minds—including St Paul—who knew the Old Testament from the inside', and did not misconstrue its religious terminology as Greek converts almost inevitably did (cf. Harnack or E. Hatch). Upon the Church, Ritschl, who very much disliked and distrusted mysticism, poured out the same wealth of emotion which the Christian mystic pours out upon his dimly visualized God or Christ. Again, Ritschl divides all theology into two compartments, morality and religion; service of men in the Kingdom of God, direct relation to God in the Church by faith. Though he later declared that “Kingdom of God” was the paramount category of Christian thought, it does not appear that he substantially recast his theology. Here then his strong desire for unity is cut across by his own action. There may well be room for relative distinctions in any system of thought, however coherent ; but it looks as if Ritschl’s distinction hardened into absolute dualism.
Again Ritschl modifies the doctrine of sin. Like Schleiermacher he substitutes collective guilt for original sin; and he attaches great dogmatic value to the assertion that sin has two stages — ignorance, in which it is pardonable, and obduracy, when it is ripe for final sentence (probably annihilation). Here then Ritschl swerves from Paulinism; it is in other Scriptures[3] that he finds his guarantees for the position just stated. The result is to eliminate everything remedial from the Christian gospel. Yet Ritschl claims that his doctrine of Christ as Head of the Church combines the lines of thought found separately in Anselm and Abelard, while Schleiermacher is said to have been one-sidedly Abelardian. Ritschl denies natural theology[4] as well as natural religion, denies dogma outright in its Greek forms—Trinitarian and Christological ; and seeks to transpose the doctrine of Atonement—Christ’s Person “or” Works as he puts it—from the legal to the ethical. The Pauline touch shows itself plainly here. Justification by faith is a “synthetic” judgment — the sinner is righteous; it is not an “analytic” judgment—the believer is righteous. God “justifieth the ungodly.” Sacraments are a republication of the “Word” of the Gospel; we have to content ourselves with this rather evasive formula, so often employed by the Reformers.
The highly academic Ritschlian movement has had wide practical influence in many lands. Here English and American thought strikes in sympathetically, offering moral theories of Atonement, though not looking so exclusively towards forgiveness. Horace Bushnell’s last theory declared that in forgiving sin God “borecost,” as even a good man must do. John M‘Leod Campbell—with a strong desire for unity in thought, “the simplicity that is in Christ”—caught most attention by the suggestion of a vicarious repentance in Jesus Christ. With R. C. Moberly this becomes an assertion that Christ has initiated a redemptive process of self-humiliation, which we can prolong in ourselves by the help of sacraments if we choose; while W. Porcher du Bose (like E. Irving early in the 19th century) holds the Adoptianist theory styled by
A. B. Bruce “redemption by sample”—the divine Christ has- ↑ Hence R. B. Haldane, in the Scottish Church lawsuit of 1904, is found telling the House of Lords that Justin Martyr had a grasp of speculative truth which was impossible to St Augustine.
- ↑ Or the Dutchman, J. H. Scholten.
- ↑ Unless 1 Tim. i. 13 ; but is that epistle Paul’s?
- ↑ The doctrine of “value judgments” which he substitutes for Schleiermacher’s appeal to feeling, belongs to philosophy of religion and is thus analogous to natural theology.
