An Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant

here are three possible relations of reason to this doctrine. First, it may be affirmed that the content of religion and theology is matter communicated to man in extraordinary fashion, truth othe

ing some reason that man is the subject of revelation. He is continually asked to exercise his reason upon certain parts of the revelation, even by those who maintain that he must do so only within limits. It is only because there in a certain reasonableness in the conceptions of revealed religion that man has ever been able to make them his own or to find in them meaning and edification.

ringle-Pattison, The Philo

rything. The explanation of the rise of positive religion and of the claim of revelation is sought in the hypothesis of deceit, of ambitious priestcraft and incurable credulity. The religion of those who thus argue, in so far as they claim any religion, is merely the current morality. Their explanation of the religion of others is that it is merely the current moral

on of an indwelling divine force, then revelation denotes no longer an interference with that evolution. It is a factor in that evolution. It is but the normal relation of the immanent spirit of God to the children of men at the crises of their fate. Then revelation is an experience of men precisely in the line and according to the method of all their nobler experiences. It is itself reasonable and moral. Inspiration is the normal and continuous effect of the contact of the God who is spirit with man who is spirit too. The relation is never broken. But there are times in which it has been more particularly felt. There have been personalities to whom in eminent degree this depth of communion with God has been vouchsafed. To such persons and eras the religious sense of mankind, by a true instinct, has tended to restrict the words 'revelation' and 'inspiration.' This restriction, however, signifies the separation of the grand experience from the ordinary, only in de

ion that the Scripture does not possess those qualities which men had long assigned to it. It was to prove that, as a matter of fact, the literature does possess the qualities which the philosophic forecast, above hinted, required. It was thus actually to restore the Bible to an age in which many reasonable men had lost their faith in it. It was to give a genetic reconstruction of the literature and show the progress of the history which the Scripture enshrines. After a contest in which the very foundations of faith seemed to be removed, it was to afford a basis for a belief in Sc

he greatest difficulties. The old rationalistic interpretation had started from the assumption that what we have in the gospel narrative is fact. Yet, of course, for the rationalists, the facts must be natural. They had the appearance of being supernatural only through the erroneous judgment of the narrators. It was for the interpreter to reduce everything which is related to its simple, natural cause. The water at Cana was certainly not turned into wine. It must have been brought by Jesus as a pre

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that the narrators testify sometimes, not to outward facts, but to ideas, often most poetical and beautiful ideas, constructions which even eye-witnesses had unconsciously put upon facts, imagination concerning them, reflexions upon them, reflexions and imaginings such as were natural to the time and at the author's level of culture. What we have here is not falsehood, not misrepresentation of the truth. It is a plastic, na?ve, and, at the same time, often most profound apprehension of truth, within the area of religious feeling and poetic insight. It results in narrative, legendary, mythical in nature, illustrative often of spiritual truth in a manner more perfect than any hard, prosaic statement could achieve.' Before Strauss men had appreciated that particular episodes, like the virgin

ts which have found place in the written Gospels which we have. Ideas entertained by primitive Christians relative to their lost Master, have been, all unwittingly, transformed into facts and woven into the tale of his career. The legends of a people are in their basal elements never the work of a single individual. They are never intentionally produced. The imperceptible growth of a joint creative work of this kind was possible, however, only on the supposition that oral tradition was, for a time, the means of transmission of the reminiscences of Jesus. Strauss' explanation of his theory has been given above, to s

his critics, written in 1837, was in bitter tone. More conciliatory was his book, über Verg?ngliches und Bleibendes im Christenthum, published in 1839. Indeed there were some concessions in the third edition of his Leben Jesu in 1838, but these were all repudiated in 1840. His Leben Jesu für das deutsche Volk, published in 1866 was the effo

is looking for those religious truths which are thus symbolised, outside of religion itself, in adventurous metaphysical speculations. He did not seek them in the facts of the devout heart and moral will, as these are illustrated in the actual life of Jesus.' If Strauss, after the disintegration in criticism of certain elements in the biography of Jesus, had given us a posit

wer is, says Ullmann, that the ethical personality of Jesus created the Church. This ethical personality is thus a supreme historic fact and a sublime historic cause, to which we must endeavour to penetrate, if need be through the veil of legend. The old rationalists had made themselves ridiculous by their effort to explain everything in some natural way. Strauss and his followers often appeared frivolous, since, according to them, there was little left to be explained. If a portion of the narrative presented a difficulty, it was declared mythical. What was needed was such a discrimination between the legendary and historical elements in the Gospels as could be reached only by patient, painstaking study of the actual historical quality and standing of the documents. No adequate

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nce was to be made beyond Strauss' negative results, the criticism of the gospel history must wait upon an adequate criticism of the documents which are our sources for that history. Strauss' failure had brought home to the minds of men the fact that there were certain preliminary studies which must needs be tak

ently to apply this principle to the gospel narratives. Before we can penetrate deeply into the meaning of an author we must know, if we may, his purpose in writing. Every author belongs to the time in which he lives. The greater the importance of his subject for the parties and struggles of his day, the safer is the assumption that both he and his work will bear the impress of these struggles. He will represent the interests of one or another of the parties. His work will have a tendency of some kind. This was one of Baur's oft-used words-the tendency of a writer and of his work. We must ascertain that tendency. The explanation of many things both in the form and substance of a writing would be given could we but know that

the Gospels, as Strauss had done, but at the easiest point, the Epistles of Paul. As early as 1831 he had published a tractate, Die Christus-Partei in der Corinthischen Gemeinde. In that book he had delineated the bitter contest between Paul and the Judaising element in the Apostolic Church which opposed Paul whithersoever he went. In 1835 his disquisition, Die sogenannten Pastoral-Briefe, appeared. In the teachings of these letters he discovered the antithesis to the gnostic heresies of the second century. He thought also that the stage of organisation of the Church which they imply, accorded better with this supposition than with that of their apostolic authorship. The same general theme is treated in a much larger way in Baur's Paulus, der Apostel Jesu Christi, in 1845. Here the results of his study of the book of the Acts

munities into an organised Church. The Fourth Gospel contains, according to Baur, a Christian gnosis parallel to the gnosis which was more and more repudiated by the Church as heresy. The Logos, the divine principle of life and light, appears bodily in the phenomenal world in the person of Jesus. It enters into conflict with the darkness and evil of the world. This speculation is but thinly clothed in the form of a biography of Jesus. That an account completely dominated by speculative motives gives but slight guarantee of historical truth, was for Baur self-evident. The author remains unknown, the age uncertain. The book, however, can har

kritik had its own tendencies. The chief was to exaggeration and one-sidedness. Baur had the kind of ear which hears grass grow. There is much overstrained acumen. Many radically false conclusions are reached by prejudiced operation with an historical formula, which in the last analysis is that of Hegel. Everything is to be explained on the principle of antithesis. Again, the assumption of conscious purpose in ev

in motion. When one thinks of the labour and patience which have been expended, for example, upon the problem of the Gospels in the past seventy years, those truths come home to us. When one reminds himself of the hypotheses which have been made but to be abandoned, which have yet had the value that they at least indicated the area within which solutions do not lie,-when one thinks of the wellnigh immeasurable toil by which we have been led to large results which now seem secure, one is made to realise that the conditions of the advance of science are, for

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Old Testament, which last they had taken over from the synagogue? How did they choose the writings which were to belong to this new collection? Why did they reject books which we know were read for edification in the early churches? Deeper even than the question of the growth of the collection is that of the growth of the apprehension concerning it. This apprehension of these twenty-seven different writings as constituting the sole document of Christian revelation, given by the Holy Spirit, the identical holy book of the Christian Church, gave to the book a significance altogether different from that which its constituent elements mu

the large and in varying degrees, an inward and spiritual unity. There was an inspiration of the main body of these writings, the outward condition of which, at all events, was the nearness of their writers to Jesus or to his eye-witnesses, and the consequence of which was the unique relation which the more important of these documents historically bore to the formation of the Christian Church. There was a heaven which lay about the infancy of Christianity which only slowly faded into the common light of day. That heaven was the spirit of the Master himself. The chief of these writings do centrally enshrine the first pure illumination of that spirit. But the churchmen who made the canon and the Fathers who argued about it very often gave mistaken reasons for facts in respect of which they nevertheless were right. They gave what they considered sound external reasons. They alleged apostolic authorship. They should have been content with internal evidence and spiritual e

creed. So there were first dearly loved memorials of Jesus and letters of apostolic men. Only by and by was there a New Testament. The first gain is the recognition of this state of things. The second follows. It is the recognition that, despite a sense in which this literature is unique, there is also a sense in which it is but a part of the whole body of early Christian literature. From the exact and exhaustive study of the early Christian literature as a whole, we are to expect a clearer understanding and a juster estimate of the canonical part of it. It is not easy to say to whom we have to ascribe the discovery and elaboration of these truths. The historians of dogma have done much for this body of opinion. The historians of Christian literature have perhaps done more. Students of institutions and of the canon law have had their share. Baur had more than an inkling of the true state of things. But by far the most conspicuous teacher of our generation,

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To the same year belonged Schenkel's Charakterbild Jesu. In the years from 1867-1872 appeared Keim's Geschichte Jesu von Nazara. There is something very striking in this recurrence to the topic. After ail, this was the point for the sake of which those laborious investigations had been undertaken. This was and is the theme of undying religious interest, the character and career of the Nazarene. Renan's philosophical studies had been mainly in English, studies of Locke and Hume. But Herder also had been his beloved guide. For his biblical and oriental studies he had turned almost exclusively to the Germans. There is a deep religious spirit in the work of the period of his conflict with the Church. The enthusiasm for Christ sustained him in his struggle. Of the days before he withdrew from the Church he wrote: 'For two months I was a Protestant like a professor in Hall

Academy. His diction is unsurpassed. He died in 1894. In his own phrase, he sought to bring Jesus forth from the darkness of dogma into the midst of the life of his people. He paints him first as an idyllic national leader, then as a struggling and erring hero, always aiming at the highest, but doomed to tragic failure through the resistance offered by reality to his ideal. He calls the traditional Christ an abstract being who never was alive. He would bring t

critical material. They do not for a moment face the question of the person of Christ. The same remark might be made, almost without exception, as to those lives of Jesus which have appeared in numbers in England and America. The best books of recent years are Albert Reville's Jesus de Nazareth, 1897, and Oscar Holtzmann's Leben Jesu, 1901. So great are the difficulties and in such disheartening fashion are they urged from all sides, that one cannot withhold enthusiastic recognition of the service which Holtzmann particularly has here rendered, in a calm, objective, and withal deeply devout handling of his theme. Meantime new questions have arise

d. One may say with all simplicity, that the question has, of course, as much rightfulness as has any other question any man could raise. The somewhat extended discussion has, however, done nothing to make evident how it could arise, save in minds unfamiliar with the materials and unskilled in historical research. The conditions which beset us when we ask for a biography of Jesus that shall answer scientific requirement are not essentially different from those which meet us in the case of any other personage equally remote in po

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ritings had been obscured. Men forgot the evolution through which the writings had passed. The same thing had happened for the Old Testament in the Jewish synagogues and for the rabbis before the Christian movement. When the Christians took over the Old Testament they took it over in this sense. It was a closed book wherein all appreciation of the long road which the religion of Israel had traversed in its evolution had been lost. The relation of the old covenant to the new was obscured. The Old Testament

ry of inspiration had less significance than for Protestants, had set forth views which showed an awakening to the real condition. Yet, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, no one would have forecast a revolution in opinion which would recognise the legendary quality of considerable portions of the Pentateuch and historical bo

Berlin in 1830, was professor extraordinarius there in 1837 and died in 1882, not yet holding a full professorship. His book was obscurely written and scholastic. Public attenti

ess marked than that which characterised the case of the New Testament. It is not necessary to describe the earlier stages of the discussion in Vatke's own terms. To his honour be it said that the views which he thus early enunc

s elements of which many of the books in this ancient literature are made up. Certain books of the New Testament also present the problem of the discrimination of elements of different ages, which have been wrought together into the documents as we now have them, in a way that almost defies our skill to disengage. The synoptic Gospels are, of course, the great example. The book of the Acts presents a problem of the same kind. But the Pentateuch, or rather Hexateuch, the historical books in less degree, the writings even of some of the prophets, the codes which formulate the law and ritual, are composites which have been whole centuries in the making and remaking. There was no such thing as right of authorship in ancient Israel, little of it in the ancient world at all. What was once written was popu

thing new, thus far unknown, and yet as ruling the religious life of the people from that day forth? It seems impossible to escape the conclusion that only after Josiah's reformation, more completely after the restoration under Ezra, did the religion of the law exist. The centralisation of worship at one point, such as the book of Deuteronomy demands, seems to have been the thing achieved by the reform under Josiah. The establishment of the priestly hierarchy such as the code ordains was the issue of the religious revolution wrought in Ezra's time. To put it differently, the so-called Book of the Covenant, the nucleus of the law-giving, itself implies the multiplicity of the places of worship. Deuteronomy demands the centralisation of the worship as something which is yet to take place. The priestly Code declares that the limitation of worship to one place was a fact already in the time of the journeys of Israel in the wilderness. It

began now to be written, primitive historical works, such as those of the Jahvist and Elohist, of the narrators of the deeds of the judges and of David and of Saul. Perhaps at this point belong the earliest attempts at fixing the tradition of family and clan rights, and of the regulation of personal conduct, as in the Book of the Covenant. Then comes the great outburst of the prophetic spirit, the preaching of an age of great religious revival. Then follows the law, with its minute regu

tical worth. This earliest period constitutes a problem, the solution of which, so far as any solution is possible, can be hoped for only through approach from the side of ascertained facts. We must start from a period which is historically known. For the history of the Hebrews, this is the time of the first prophets of whom we have written records, or from whom we have written prophecies. We get from these, as also from the earliest direct attempts at history writing, only that conception of Israel's pre-historic life which was ent

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imagination to find out what their inherent reason was. One other thing distinguishes Baur as church historian from his predecessors. He realised that before one can delineate one must investigate. One must go to the sources. One must estimate the value of those sources. One must have ground in the sources for every judgment. Baur was himself a great investigator. Yet the movement for the investigation of the sources of biblical and ecclesiastical history which his generation initialed has gone on to such achievements that, in some respects, we can but view the foundations of Baur's own work as precarious, the results at which he arrived as unwarranted. New documents have come to light since his day. Forgeries have been proved to be such, The whole state of learning as to the literature of the Christian origins has been vastly cha

at trait was his insight into personality. He wrote history with the biographical interest. He almost resolves history into a series of biographical types. He has too little sense for the connexion of things, for the laws of the evolution of the religious spirit. The great dramatic elements tend to disappear behind the emotions of individuals. The old delineators were before the age of investigation. Since that impulse became masterful, some h

lation of statements in the Pauline letters to data in the book of the Acts was one of the earliest problems which the Tübingen school set itself. An attempt to write the biography of Paul reminds us sharply of our limitations. We know almost nothing of Paul prior to his conversion, or subsequent to the enigmatical breaking off of the account of the beginnings of his work at Rome. Harnack's Mission und Ausbreitung des Christenthums, 1902 (translated, Moffatt, 1908), takes up the work of Paul's successors in that cardinal activity. It offers, strange as it may seem, the first discussion of the dissemination of Christianity which has dealt adequately with the sources. It gives also a picture of the world into which the Christian movement went. It emphasises anew the truth which has for a generation past grown in men's apprehe

for almost two millenniums unchallenged under the Christian name, men about us are now asking: But how much of it is Christian? In what measure have we to think of it as derived from some other source, and representing the accommodation and assimilation of Christianity to its environment in process of its work? What is Christianity? Not unnaturally the ancient Church looked with satisfaction upon the great change which passed over Christianity when Constantine suddenly made that which had been the faith of a despised and persecuted sect, the religion of the world. The Fathers can have thought thus only because

gue. Ritschl in his Entstehung der alt-catholischen Kirche, 1857, had seen that Baur's theory could not be true. Christianity did not fall back into Judaism. It went forward to embrace the Hellenic and Roman world. The institutions, dogmas, practices of that which, after A.D. 200, may with propriety be called the Catholic Church, are the fruit of that embrace. There was here a falling off from primitive and spiritual Christianity. But it was not a falling back into Judaism. There were priests and scribes and Pharisees with o

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a way only a forecast of the great collection, Texte und Untersuchungen zur Geschickte der alt-christlichen Literatur, begun in 1882, upon which numbers of scholars have worked together with him. The collection has already more than thirty-five volumes. In his own two works, Die Geschichte der alt-christlichen Literatur bis Eusebius, 1893, and Die Chronologie der alt-christlichen Literatur bis Eusebius, 1897, are deposited the results of his reflexion on the mass of this material. His Beitrage zur Einleitung in das Neue Testament, 1906, etc., should not be overlooked. He has had the good fortune to be among those who have discovered manuscripts of importance. He has had to do w

chanism which had made the old treatises upon the history of doctrine formal and lifeless. Harnack realised to the full how many influences other than theological had had part in the development of doctrine. He recognised the reaction of modes of life and practice, and of external circumstances on the histor

had been appropriated by the world in far greater measure than its adherents knew. It had taken up its mission to change the world. It had dreamed that while changing the world it had itself remained unchanged. The world was changed, the world of life, of feeling and of thought. But Christianity was also changed. It had conquered the world. It had no perception of the fact that it illustrated the old law that the conquered give laws to the conquerors. It had fused the ancient culture with the flame of its inspiration. It did not appreciate the degree in which the elements of that ancient culture now coloured its far-shining flame. It had been a maker of history. Meantime it had been unmade and remade by its own history. It confidently c

said in his brilliant book, The Influence of Greek Ideas and Usages upon the Christian Church, 1891, that the domestication of Greek philosophy in the Church signified a defection from the Sermon on the Mount. The centre of gravity of the Gospel was changed from life to doctrine, from morals to metaphysics, from goodness to orthodoxy. The change was portentous. The aspect of pessimism is, however, removed when one recognises the inevitableness of some such process, if Chri

of the sacred phrases. But we acknowledge that the central inspiration was the personality of Jesus. The books possess this inspiration in varying degree. Certain of the books have distinctly begun the fusion of Christian with other elements. They themselves represent the first stages of the history of doctrine. We acknowledge that those utterances of Jesus which have been preserved for us, shaped themselves by the antitheses in which Jesus stood. There is much about them that is palpably incidental, practically relevant and unquestionably only relati

hended better than did the evangelists themselves. In truth, in Harnack's own delineation of the teaching of Jesus, those elements of it which found their way to expression in Paul, or again in the fourth Gospel, are rather underrated than overstated, in the author's anxiety to exclude elements which are acknowledged to be interpretative in their nature. We are driven, in some measure, to seek to find out what the gospel was from the way in which the earliest Christians took it up. We return ever afresh to questions nearly unanswerable from the materials at hand. What was the central principle in the shaping of the earliest stages of the new community, both as to its thought and life? Was it the longing for the coming of the Kingdom of God, the striving after the righteousness of the Sermon on the Mount? Or was it the fai

Christianity into cosmology and formal ethics. It would have destroyed it as religion. Yet the perverse situation into which the long and fierce controversy had drifted cannot be better illustrated than by one undisputed fact. Athanasius, who assured for Christianity its character as a religion of the living communion of God with man, is yet the theologian in whose Christology almost every possible trace of the recollection of the historic Jesus has disappeared. The purpose of the redemption is to bring men into community of life with God. But Athanasius apprehended this redemption as a conferment, from without and from above, of a divine nature. He subordinated everything to this idea. The whole narrative concerning Jesus falls under the interpretation that the only quality requisite for the Redeemer in his work was the possession in all fulness of the divine nature. His incarnation, his manifestation in real human life, held fast to in word, is reduced to a mere semblance. Salvation is not an ethical process, but a miraculous endowment. The Christ, who was God, lifts men up to godhood

on of the Christ which he was fighting for was congruous with the conception of religion which he had, or felt that he must have. It is this religious issue, everywhere present, which gives dignity to a struggle which otherwise does often sadly lack it. There are two religious views of the person of Christ which have stood, from the beginning, the one over against the other.5 The one saw in Jesus of Nazareth a man, distinguished by his special calling as the Messianic King, endued with special powers, lifted above all men ever known, yet a man, completely subject to God in faith

Einfzhrung in das Theologi

Gentile Churches founded by Paul, at all events, had no such simple trust. Equally, the second form of faith seems never to have been able to stand alone in its peculiar quality. Some of the gnostic sects had it. Marcion again is our example. The new God Jesus had nothing to do with the cruel God of the Old Testament. He supplanted the old God and became the only God. In the Church the new God, come down from heaven, must be set in relation with the long-known God of Israel. No less, must he stand in relation to the simple hero of the Gospels with his human traits. The problem of theological reflexion was to find the right middle course, to keep

t the inference is precisely the contrary of that which defenders of the dogma would formerly have drawn from this concession. The same kind of mind, or rather the same two kinds of mind, are at work in the New Testament. Both of the religious elements above suggested are in the Gospels and Epistles. The New Testament presents attempts at their combination. Either form may be found in the literature of the later age. If we ask ourselves, What is that in Jesus which gives us the sense of redemption, surely we should answer, It is his glad and confident resting in the love of God the Father. It is his courage, his faith in men, which becomes our faith in ourselves. It is his wonderful mingling of purity and love of r

It would be preposterous to allege that it had. Yet this sense has been overlaid and underrun and shot through with that other and disparate idea of salvation, as of a pure bestowment, something achieved apart from us, or, if one may so say, some alteration of ourselves upon other than moral and spiritual terms. The conception of the person Christ shows the same uncertainty. Or rather, with a given view of the nature of religion and salvation, the corresponding view of Christ is certain. In the age-long and world-wide contest over the trinitarian formula, with all that is saddening in the struggle and all that was misleadi