II.

Between the two groups of modern humanity, of which the one seeks to retain the Christian religion in its historical form as the precious, heritage of the past, and the other to supplant it by a new Idealism formed in harmony with the spirit of science, a third class stands, which plays the part of a mediator. This class concedes that the traditional forms of religion are in great part unadapted to the modern mind, and that historical Christianity is in need of improvement, but contends that religion is an ineradicable constituent of all higher civilisation, and must remain so, and, particularly, that Christianity is the absolute religion, that is to say, that in Christianity as rightly understood and naturally developed all the necessary elements of the true religion of the future are contained.

I should like, in the following pages, to subject the contentions of this mediatory group to a critical examination, and to discuss the question whether it is at all possible for one who resolutely takes his stand on the ground of modern scientific thought, logically to have religion in the historical sense at all.

In effecting a mediation between the religious and scientific views of the world,—views which appear to be separated from each other by a profound intellectual abyss,—two ways may, generally speaking, be pursued. Both have been frequently trodden since the days of rationalism. I shall discuss each separately.

The attempt may be made to resume, in a form more adapted to modern times, the work of the reformers of the sixteenth century; to go back even more thoroughly than they did to the original and simplest forms of Christianity, to remove _in toto_ the superstructure which has been reared upon it in the course of time, and to exhibit to humanity “the pure doctrine of Christ” as the source from which to-day, as a thousand years ago, true comfort may proceed, as the simplest, purest, and most exalted expression of the divine and human that has ever yet been discovered. Many of the most erudite workers in the field of critical theology which this century can show have placed themselves in the service of this idea, which is preached with particular enthusiasm by the so-called “free-religious” and Unitarian confessions, and which at times has also exhibited a noble and conciliatory activity in the homiletical work of some mild-minded and liberal clergymen in the evangelical churches. But our special inquiry here must be concerning the logical and scientific foundation of this modernised primitive Christianity, and on this point it must be frankly stated that the more faithfully such a Christianity reflects the biblical character, the remoter it is from our modern thought, and the more it is dominated by modern ways of thinking, the more unhistorical and hence the more unchristian it becomes.

The “pure doctrine of Christ,” the genuine, primitive form of Christianity, is a Utopia of biblical criticism. What we actually possess, in the form of historical documents, is that conception of the doctrines and life of Christ which was put in writing several generations after his death, and which, from amid a much greater number of contemporaneous attempts, met by preference with the approbation of the church. It is a hopeless task to attempt from these late records, which betray the most various intellectual influences, to derive the authentic doctrines of the oldest form of Christianity. No method, subjective prepossession only, can here render a verdict. The things that appear especially consistent and homogeneous to individual theologians and critics are stamped as the genuine utterances of the Master. As every time has done, so ours also constructs its picture of Christ to conform with its wishes and wants.

But granting even that there is nothing objectionable in this, and that this procedure is perfectly justified, a number of difficulties still stand in the way of this movement which have stamped the procedure of even the most ingenious of its representatives as the outcome of pure subjective caprice. All the written sources which we possess of the life and teachings of Christ contain much that is in the highest degree repugnant to the modern mind. I refer particularly to the miracles. The difficulties which they present may be disposed of in various ways; as, to give an example, by the method of the early rationalistic thinkers, who accepted the miracles as facts, but sought to give them a rational explanation, or by that of Strauss, who held that they were the mythical and poetical raiment of religious ideas and sentiments. Yet no art of interpretation will banish from the world that fact which the poet expressed in the words:

“_Das Wunder ist des Glaubens liebstes Kind._”

The fact that the entire cast of thought and sentiment of early Christianity is saturated with the belief in the marvellous, and with the expectations, nay, with the actual need of miracles, and that this is not an adscititious ornament which can be doffed at pleasure, like a dress which we have outgrown, but is of the very essence of Christianity. Here is rooted that childlike and simple belief in the limitless and God-coercing power of prayer, for which no natural laws nor force of necessity exists, which is omnipotent as the Godhead itself, and as all-powerful as desire. Here is rooted that ardent conviction of the near collapse of the entire world, of the coming kingdom of perfection which shall proceed, not from deeds and thought, but from faith and grace, and shall crown all human desires with glory. And intimately connected with all this stands the idea, visible in the background of all the moral prescripts of the gospels, and painted in the strongest colors, of a system of punishments and rewards in the world beyond; which makes of a God of love, a pitiless, infuriate God of vengeance.

These things are so intimately interwoven with the modes of thought of the synoptic writers that it is impossible to separate them therefrom without doing violence to the internal connection of their doctrines. They who seek after a more spiritual conception may, it is true, find it in the gospel of John. But this book is so completely dominated by the metaphysical-religious speculation of the second century, and by the effort to bring the history of the life and doctrines of the Nazarene in the service of the Logos idea, that the modern mind can only with great difficulty find a common ground of understanding with it.

The task of the modern reformers is, for these reasons, a very difficult one. They cannot but concede that Christianity, even in its purely evangelical form, contains much that is foreign to us, and that the elements of which it is composed must in part be excised and in part improved by criticism and interpretation.

But the more the critical sense which is brought to bear upon this task is developed in the spirit of modern scientific thought, the more will historical Christianity shrink to the form of a mere colorless abstraction, and ultimately nothing remains of its exuberant yet visionary mental world but the picture of a philanthropic life joined to a strongly developed consciousness of God, which proclaims a popular morality in commandments and parables. But even this latter is inevitably exposed to the same fate as the other ideas. It is dominated throughout by the extremest notions of rewards and punishments, which the expectation of the doom of the world places in the very immediate future. It is impossible to take the system as a whole, and it must be made the subject of violent interpretation to acquire any fitness for the needs of modern life. Its principles are systematically turned and twisted till they have acquired in some direction practical utility. And who at this day can forget, that this system of morality, wherever and whenever attempts have been made literally and faithfully to imitate it in practical life, has led only to wretched caricatures? Moreover, it is again and again freely remodelled in the spirit of modern ethics, its offensive elements charitably cloaked, its useful ones developed to the utmost, and finally here too a complete set of wholly modern ideas consecrated by the borrowed authority of a venerable antiquity.

And therefore I repeat my contention, that the modern reformation, this modern, pure, and scriptural Christianity, will, the honester it is, all the more surely lead its adherents away from Scripture and from Christianity and ultimately bring them to the adoption of a popularly expounded, but philosophically established, ethical system.

I shall now take up the second of the two methods above mentioned. That which we have just considered was known and affected even by the eighteenth century. The discovery of the second is a merit of the present time. The honor belongs in a pre-eminent degree to the speculative philosophy of Germany, and to the intimate relations with theology which this philosophy, especially in the school of Hegel and Schleiermacher, entered into in the first half of the century. (Kant’s philosophy was not put to similar use until later.) All these movements, whose rich literary ramifications and development may be followed to the present day in Otto Pfleiderer’s excellent and erudite work, “The History of Protestant Theology in Germany Since Kant,”[60] have also begun in recent times, through Green, Caird, A. Seth, J. Martineau, R. Flint, and F. Robertson, to exert an influence on Anglo-American intellectual life.

The common fundamental feature of this second movement is, that it proposes to accept as pure Christianity, not only the most ancient forms of Christian doctrine accessible to us, but also the entire system of dogmatic thoughts which in the course of the centuries primitive Christianity has produced. Christianity, these men say, has historically existed and acted in these maturer notions. It is not permissible arbitrarily to separate them from it, and to reverse by any authoritative edicts the real historical development. On the contrary, we now may and must continue the process which, by the tenor of dogmatic history, is the process which has continued for centuries, and give to the dogmas the form which best accords with modern spiritual needs. To-day as in the days of incipient Christianity, we see by the side of the naïve literal belief, which takes no offence at incomprehensible things if they only suit the needs of its heart, a gnosis arise which strives to reconcile faith and knowledge, religion and intellectual culture; a gnosis which to the unbelieving sceptic quotes the words of the poet:

“_Die Geisterwelt ist nicht verschlossen;_ _Dein Sinn ist zu; dein Herz ist todt!_ _Auf! bade, Schüler, unverdrossen_ _Die ird’sche Brust im Morgenroth!_”

It is perhaps even more difficult to give a succinct and comprehensive notion of the ideas of this speculative theology, than of the results of the New Testament exegesis of which we spoke above. All gradations are here represented, from tender, conservative regard for the traditional beliefs of the sects and the needs of the pious heart to the boldest speculative interpretations and critical restrictions of dogma, which utterly discard the historical form and hold fast only to a central germinal truth. The present inquiry will restrict itself to those representatives of this gnosis, who as a matter of principle grant the greatest field of action to the rational development of dogma, and represent its philosophical elaboration in its finest and most complicated form. I shall attempt to signalise the ideas which may to-day be designated as the most spiritualised expression of the Christian view of the world.

And first let us hear a greater mind speak. In Ludwig Feuerbach’s essays on the nature of religion and Christianity the following sentences occur:

“The Christian religion is the revealed inwardness, the objectively expressed self of man; the contents of his highest aspirations; the essence of man purified and freed from the limitations of individuality; yet all subjectivised, that is intuited, known, and worshipped as a separate, independent entity, wholly distinct from himself. Religion is essentially dramatical. God himself is a dramatical creation, that is to say, a personal being opposed to man. He who takes from religion this idea, takes from it the gist of its being, and holds but the _caput mortuum_ in his hands.”

These sentences of Feuerbach express with the greatest generality and precision the innermost nature of the Christian view of the world. They characterise excellently the point that cannot be given up without destroying the religious view as such. What I refer to is dualism, the dualism of the divine and the human, of the world beyond, and the world that is, of holiness and sin; dualism conceived not merely as a mode of view and of conceptual distinction, as a working contrariety in things that by their nature are one, but as a metaphysical difference, an actual contraposition of two worlds, of two kingdoms of existence, which are totally separate, no matter how extensive the relations of the one to the other may be. Only on such a supposition is that possible which Feuerbach, with inimitable aptness, called “the dramatic element” of religion. The history of humanity, the history of its religious life particularly, is no monologue of humanity with itself into which life and advancement enter solely through the multitude of the ideas created by individuals within the race itself. It is an action or process in a higher sense, an interactivity between two worlds, in which, it is true, humanity, to a certain extent, shapes its own fortunes and destiny, but at the same time is also constantly exposed to the interferences of a power which stands beyond and above it and to which it has to accommodate itself. And whatever artifices and care many of the representatives of the modern gnosis may employ to conceal this fundamental assumption, and to substitute for it the point of view of the immanence of this power in the world, still any radical breach with it is impossible without endangering the very foundations of the religious sense of humanity itself.

The indispensability of this dualistic opposition and separation is equally well exhibited whether we take as our starting-point the existence of the world at large or the individual consciousness of man. The religious mode of view knows of no other way of asserting the rights and activity of the mind in the All than by making all existence assume a personal life in an infinite, self-conscious, and ethically perfect being. The emotions and experiences of one’s heart, its vacillations between humility and exaltation, remorse at the consciousness of one’s own imperfections, the inspired flight of the soul to higher realms of existence, appear as the intercourse of man with some extraneous power, allied to man and yet above him, in which the sum of all excellence to which thought and experience have ever led man, has its eternal source.

These ideas constitute the point of view which is decisive of the history of humanity, particularly in what concerns religion. The history of religion is, in accordance with these ideas, conceived as a continuous self-revelation of God in the world of man. True, this view seems to be contradicted by the fact that the self-revelation of this infinitely good power is effected in the case of by far the greater part of mankind in a very insufficient manner—in the form, namely, of crude and superstitious notions which stand in need of constant purification by reason. But the explanation of this fact is sought in the idea of a divine pedagogical training of the human race, and in the theory that religion is not an immediate self-revelation of the absolute, but passes through the medium of the human mind and consequently must be conditioned by its character.

Christianity, now, especially appears as the highest form of this self-revelation of God in humanity, that is to say as the absolute religion, which, in its historical forms, it is true, is as little free from adscititious ornaments and transient obscurations as other religions, yet in its essence can be as little improved as it can be discarded. This innermost essence of Christianity the majority of the representatives of this modern gnosis declare to be the conviction that all men are from the beginning children of God. In this idea two things are contained: submission to the will of God who is conceived as a kind parent and who in pity and love does everything for the best; and the imitation in our own thought and conduct of the ethical perfection conceived incarnate in God. The entering of man into this relation is designated the kingdom of God—a notion which constitutes the ideal goal of history. The condition of mind on which the kingdom of God rests is prefigured in a typical manner in the founder of the Christian religion. His person and his life are a guarantee of the possibility of this ideal, and exhibit at the same time the means of its accomplishment: namely, the helping love of God, which has infused into this one individual the whole plenitude of its being, so far as this is at all possible with human capacities, that humanity may have in it a direct living picture of the highest fulfilment of its religious and moral destiny. The historical Christ is the ideal of humanity, supported and ensouled by the spirit of God.

The modern gnosis here goes back to the Paulinian interpretation of the Christ-idea. The consideration of the speculative difficulties of the idea of the Trinity is thus rendered superfluous for it. This notion is treated by the majority of its representatives simply as a dogmatic antiquity; its place is taken by the modern ideas of a distinction between the person of Jesus and the principle or spirit of Christianity, which is synonymous with the contrast of the idea and its revelation, the eternal and the temporal, of the inward essence and its historical realisation. That it employs the notions of idea, principle, and essence wholly in a Platonic sense, as the highest metaphysical realities, is self-evident.

More distant still is the attitude which this speculative theology assumes towards another idea which proceeded from the Rabbinical school of thought of Paul: the notion of salvation or redemption in its connection with the expiatory death of Christ. From these conceptions of punitive suffering, of a vicarious atonement of God in his own person—conceptions of such juristical refinement as to be wholly unacceptable to modern modes of thought—the modern gnosis has upon the whole resolutely turned away and taken refuge in that more spiritual and more profound idea which in early Christian times the author of the gospel of St. John promulgated. The death of Christ is redemptive only in the sense in which Christ’s total history is redemptive, as the direct and prefigurative incarnation of the true religious relation between God and man. This is, it is true, applicable in a quite special sense to the Death; for it was by this that the eternal truth was manifested, that not only does all salvation accrue to man from the sacrifice of his own self in duteous and patient love, but that all the life of God is an emanation of this self-surrendering excellence, of this bliss of self-sacrifice. Still, there is one thing that is common to all the representatives of this movement as distinguished from the former, and that is this: they do not content themselves with picturing the activity of Jesus Christ in general outlines solely as one which is blessed and significant by example and doctrine for humanity, but they assume a continuous and active presence of the Christian principle in humanity, by means of which the moral discord in individuals is overcome, and in the personal spiritual life of individuals divine and human nature are united. This is the most speculative interpretation we have of the old dogmatic notion of redemption, which from its original character as a single isolated phenomenon of history has here become the constant activity of a Christian principle, and an ever-living precedent of Christian life.

It would be a prolix and wearisome task to go through in this way the whole dogmatism of this speculative theology. The fundamental ideas which we have discussed will suffice to show the manner in which, on the one hand, it spiritualised the allegorical notions of popular Christianity, but on the other left untouched the gist of the religious view and the dramatical or dualistic opposition of the divine and human. The notions of grace and sanctification, the notion of the church as a living, organised instrument of salvation, spring directly and logically from these fundamental ideas.

In the province of ethics this movement has a much easier task than the churches based on the New Testament. As it seeks to establish, not a primitive Christianity, but a modernised Christianity developed in the spirit of recent times, there is no necessity of its being incommoded by the ethical crudenesses of early Christianity, but it is in the same position to work these crudenesses over critically as it did the asperities of the old dogmas. It can assimilate most of what it needs from modern philosophical ethics, and content itself with giving to what it has thus borrowed a metaphysically religious background derived from dogmatic traditions.

That this modern gnosis is in a constant state of vacillation with respect to the practical things of life, is a necessary consequence of its fundamental assumptions and of its position towards the doctrines of the church. Its foremost representatives acknowledge without any reserve that the true source from which religious emotions and sentiments flow is the symbolic or imaginative faculty of man. The grandly simple pictures in which the ancient Christian faith found satisfaction are now in the course of time inevitably disintegrated by the critical reason. The speculative theology itself proclaims that its vocation is one of coöperation towards this end. But it maintains nevertheless that the fruits of this work, the speculative interpretation of the dogmas, their exaltation into the sphere of the Idea, are fit only for initiated minds, and are caviare for the general. The general, the people, want and will use religion in the form which its fancy has created, and it cannot be revealed to it in any other. Progressive in its theories, this gnosis is in its ecclesiastical practice thoroughly conservative. It thinks two kinds of thought, and speaks two kinds of languages, according as it finds itself in the pulpit or in the professorial chair. And it is in just this procedure that it assumes a position which it is very difficult to attack. He, who working for a sound and progressive popular enlightenment on the ground of a unitary view of the world, opposes the further use of the antiquated and effete allegories of the old religions, is told that he is behind the times, and that religion, nurtured by the spirit of modern science, has become something different from what it formerly was. In very strict ecclesiastical quarters this gnosis is looked at askance, and accused of insincerity, nay, of secret alliance with unbelief; but the movement never allowed itself to be led astray by these accusations, and has never failed to assert its right of coöperation in the common work of the Christian church. For though it pretends to be in the hands of the thinking theologian a means of bringing into harmony the faith which he must confess and the thought which he cannot abandon, it yet admits, that with the majority of mankind the allegory will always remain an essential element of religion, and that therefore the task of scientific theology can never be to destroy these vessels of religion, but only to exercise a watchful care, that with the form the spirit also may not be lost.